The Stack

Not much progress in The Watchmker today. I keep exploring the castle and its grounds, and I keep on finding not much of importance or interest. It’s like the game doesn’t want me to play. Not that it’s hostile to the idea and puts up intractable obstacles, but that it’s totally indifferent to whether I play or not. It just gives us a large collection of rooms to explore, and no reason to explore any of them. The rooms are full of a vast array of furniture items with utterly generic descriptions. Occasionally there’s a locked door, or an NPC who won’t let us search their room, which provides some hope that there’s something interesting that the game isn’t letting me see yet. But I won’t be surprised if at some future point I manage to unlock a door and find it conceals just another roomful of generic furniture.

The NPC dialogue, too, is mostly fairly bland and uninformative. You can ask everyone about their relationships to each other, but you can’t ask them about the cultists or the doomsday machine you’re looking for. I suppose part of the problem here is that this is a mystery in which the crime hasn’t happened yet, giving you nothing in particular to interrogate people about. But also, part of the problem is just that the game is trying to take itself seriously. I’m thinking that there’s a reason that the best-beloved point-and-click adventures have been the ones built around wacky humor. If every line of dialogue is likely to produce a punch line, that in itself provides a motivation to ask everyone about everything.

Just one thing of real interest has happened: On first exiting to the castle’s grounds, a greenhouse vibrates oddly, then blows out two holes on opposite sides, as if shot through by an invisible cannonball. The player characters observe the direction that the glass fell on the side “towards the mausoleum”, which I suppose is a hint to explore the mausoleum, although left to myself I think I’d feel like checking out the direction the shot came from is more likely to yield answers about how it happened. At any rate, the mausoleum contains what appears to be a genuine adventure-game puzzle, involving a chessboard whose squares make clicking sound when pressed. Perhaps I’ll feel better about this game once I’ve solved that and been put on the track to more puzzles.

I thought I’d continue with the point-and-click adventures, but this time do one that’s on the Stack proper. My first attempt was Jazz and Faust, a game that I’ve heard nothing good about, but picked up anyway when it hit the bargain bins, because decent games of its type were still kind of sparse on the ground even in 2002. I played it a bit back then, but got very stuck early on. I’ll have more to say about it if I ever get it running properly, but for now, it’s going onto my expanding sub-stack of games to try again if and when I get a Windows 98 machine working.

Some notes about it for my future self: On my main gaming machine, it installed without problems, but the FMV video sequences played very badly, essentially alternating between playing a brief bit of video without sound and playing sound while the video was either frozen or playing very slowly. The video are right there in the install directory in .bik format, and played without any hitches under VLC. (A lot of the other game assets are simply installed uncompressed to the hard drive, too. All the character textures, for example. This game could be very easily modded if anyone wanted to.) From what I’ve peeked at, it looks like the videos may be an important part of the game, so I don’t want to just ignore the problem. So I tried installing the game on a cast-off Windows 10 laptop that I recently obtained from a neighbor for cheap, and it plays the videos in-game just fine. I don’t know what the relevant difference is between the two machines. However, on both, the framerate in the game proper is low enough to make it unplayable. How it manages to run slower on a modern machine than it did on 2002 hardware, I don’t know. This is after installing a patch, which was necessary to keep the game from crashing.

Also, Windows 10 puts a window border around the game, even though it’s playing full-screen. It did the same for Kao. I don’t know why. Both games run at a rather low resolution by today’s standards, of course, but I don’t remember this happening before.

Anyway, after abandoning that, I picked another game of similar stature from the Stack: The Watchmaker, a very cheesy mystery about searching an opulent Austrian castle for a device that some cultists are planning to use to end the world by overloading the ley lines. This game was made by the same people as Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy, although the passage of years between games means that they’re now working in fully 3D-modeled environments that don’t look nearly as good as Nightlong‘s pixel art. The English localization (from Italian) is awkward, and isn’t helped by the voice acting, which sounds not so much like acting as just reciting words off a page without regard to their meaning or context. Still, unlike Nightlong, it runs on modern hardware and Windows 10 without any problems at all. At this point, I’ll take it.

The story in Dropsy develops a split tone as it progresses. On the one hand, the clown is off having fanciful adventures with his animal friends, bringing happiness to every stranger he meets. But at the same time, his friend’s health just continues to deteriorate, and there isn’t much he can do about it. A miracle cure stolen from the laboratory of a wealthy corporation just ends up not doing anything, and possibly making things worse. For a time, it seemed possible that the game would actually let him die. It would certainly fit the work’s themes. Several of the NPCs you help are suffering from similar loss. The very first mission was to visit a grave. Ending the same way would be a neat little bit of design.

But that’s not the direction the author chose. Instead, he introduces a villain: the head of the aforementioned wealthy corporation.

Struggling against villainy is kind of against the ethos of the game so far, and so that isn’t what you do. This villain is a deceiver, and the clown is easily deceived. He approaches you with a deal: “I’ll take care of your friend, give him state-of-the-art medical care, if you come work for me. I’m setting up a circus of my own — a bigger, better one than the one you used to work for, and I’d really love for you to be our star attraction.” (I’m paraphrasing. Like everyone else in the game, he speaks entirely in images.) To the player, this is offer is immediately recognizable as mephistophelean. The mere fact that there’s no obvious downside is a clear indication that the downside is something he’s not telling us about.

I won’t go into detail about the ending, but I’ll note that it confirms some suspicions about the clown. Past a certain point, you’re basically guided through a linear series of rooms, with the “save game” functionality disabled so you can’t accidentally overwrite your last opportunity to complete side-quests. (And good thing, too. There are still a few citizens that I haven’t figured out how to make happy.) Most of these rooms are ones which you’ve seen before, but with some additional context that ties together things that didn’t seem important previously. As someone who comes from a text adventure background, I’m well aware of the things that text can do more easily than graphics, but it strikes me that the narrative techniques on display here, of environmental details that fade into the background when you don’t have the context to understand them but assume greater importance later, are a form of storytelling more easily done in graphics than in text, where it’s nearly impossible to show the reader something without drawing their attention to it.

But then, maybe I’m just obtuse. There are definitely things in this game that I didn’t understand when I was supposed to. Like what the hug icon was. Replaying the beginning a little, I found that the game attempted to tutorialize it by making you use it on the clown’s friend, but this wasn’t enough for me. Also, there were several puzzles where I didn’t understand what I was trying to accomplish (beyond just solving a puzzle for puzzle-solving’s sake) until afterward. On the story side, one thing I learned from the late-game revelations is that the character I’ve been calling the “friend” in fact raised the clown from when he was a little clown baby. Was I supposed to have been reading their relationship as father-son all along?

Then there’s the matter of the fire. This is part of the backstory established in the intro cutscene. The reason the clown is a free agent through most of the game is that there was a terrible fire in his circus, which killed several people. We see the fire start, and the clown’s dismayed and horrified reaction. Then, in the game, we find out that the clown was blamed for the fire, and demonized for it in the press. This is part of the reason he has to work so hard to get people to trust him. My assumption from the beginning, based partly on what I saw in the intro and partly on thematic resonance with Hypnospace Outlaw, is that he was blamed unfairly. But a dream sequence suggests that he feels real guilt over what happened. Was he in fact in some way responsible? I don’t believe for a minute that he set the fire deliberately, but it’s quite plausible that he could have started it through accident or negligence. The game, as far as I can tell, doesn’t provide a definitive answer. But I’m not sure if it’s being deliberately ambiguous or just failing to communicate clearly without words.

One last thing I’ll note: the name of the clown. The clown is named Dropsy, probably because of his distressingly swollen and squishy appearance. But I’ve been taking meticulous care not to refer to him by that name, because it didn’t seem to be established anywhere in the game — sure, it’s the game’s title, but what does that show? I remember once overhearing some people in an arcade arguing about whether the title of the classic Sega coin-op game Shinobi referred to the player character or the end boss. (In a sense they were both right: “shinobi” is just a synonym for “ninja”. But this was not common knowledge at the time.) But it turns out that the clown’s name is established in the descriptions of the Steam achievements, for example, “Furry Friend: Dropsy rescues a new friend from peril” or “Clownographer: Dropsy explores the whole entire world.” Now, I personally like to treat adventure games in particular as self-contained, and reject out-of-band information, at least while playing, because once you seek additional information online, you open yourself to puzzle spoilers. Do achievement descriptions count as out-of-band? I suppose they’re in the same nature as a printed manual: not part of the game per se, but canon nonetheless.

But now that I’ve finished the game (at least in the sense of reaching the ending, if not in the more important sense of befriending absolutely everyone in the world), I’ve looked at the guides a little, and learned that what I had dismissed as “meaningless squiggles” is actually a substitution cipher. So maybe the ambiguities and lacunae I’ve noted would be resolved for the meticulous player. It’s a little strange to me that I didn’t even think of trying to translate them myself, especially coming straight off Heaven’s Vault. Certainly I eagerly solved the ciphers in Fez and Gloomhaven. I suppose the difference is that those games seemed more challenge-oriented. When you come across runes there, it’s just another thing for you to overcome. Whereas in Dropsy, as I’ve noted, it seemed more like a way to establish your illiteracy. That makes the player’s attempts at deciphering it seem inappropriately out of character. It does explain why several scenes let you zoom into closeups of what I had taken to be unreadable text, but I had taken that to be a gag similar to what it does with telephones: when you try to press their buttons, your handless stubs of arms just mash random groups of buttons uselessly.

Now, I still haven’t finished Dropsy, so I could turn out to be wrong about this, but: It seems like most of the puzzles around befriending people are in the nature of optional side-quests. Advancing the story does require gaining cooperation from certain people, I think, but for the most part, you’re expected to simply want hugs for their own sake. Although if that’s not enough, the game does provide one other motivator for completists: there’s a record of everyone you’ve hugged, in the form of crayon drawings on a wall of the clown’s bedroom. This gives it a definite “Gotta hug ’em all!” aspect.

It also reminds me a little of The Witcher and its sexual conquest cards that drew so much attention. I was contemplating making that comparison into the basis for an entire blog post, exploring the question of what the difference is, but on reflection, it’s hardly even a question worth asking.

There are a few drawings already on the wall at the start of the game, of those that the clown has already had ample opportunity to hug: the clown’s green-haired colleague, their deceased friend, the dog. Yes, animals count. So does any sufficiently-huggable inanimate object, such as a statue or a tree. There’s one drawing that kind of puzzles me, though: it shows what looks like some kind of squidlike alien. ¹UPDATE: It turns out to actually be a rather impressionistic depiction of a security robot from the corporate HQ lobby. Now, there is definitely an alien presence in the game. Off in the desert, there’s a guy in a camper-converted-into-a-storefront trying to sell merchandise related to his personal alien encounter, while a beefy man in black hovers nearby. Elsewhere, in a mysterious cave, I can catch a few glimpses of the very same tentacled being as in the camper man’s pictures, lurking but not particularly trying to hide its presence. The thing is, though, I haven’t hugged the alien, or any other aliens — unless it’s an alien shapeshifter. Maybe I could figure out who’s secretly an alien by process of elimination: it would be the one person who I’ve hugged who isn’t in any of my drawings. But that would have a strange implication: that the clown, who’s presumably the one making the drawings (although goodness knows when he finds the opportunity) saw the shapeshifter’s true form while I, the player, saw only its disguise. So more likely it’s just a bug.

I’ve mentioned that Dropsy features a dog, which follows the clown around. Yes, you can pet it. You can also switch control to it, if you need to do something that the dog can do but the clown cannot, such as digging up some dirt or fitting through a doggie door. But it also functions as a hint device. The dog frequently leaves your side to go sniff something, and in so doing, draws attention to some of the game’s more difficult-to-notice clickables.

In my last post, I mentioned being stuck trying to deal with a man in a chicken costume. I’ve gotten through that part, and it’s all thanks to the dog. First, I noticed that the dog wasn’t just sniffing at this man, but enthusiastically barking at him. I had heard this barking before, but I didn’t notice it until I started paying more attention to the dog’s behavior in general. I was pretty sure that the chicken man was the key to my current mission, so hearing the dog bark made me realize that it was barking at him because he was important at that moment. This inspired me to take a walk through all the other rooms to see if there was anything else that the dog thought was important. And… there wasn’t. Which, as in The Adventure of Silver Blaze, was crucial to figuring things out! Knowing that there wasn’t anything directly relevant anywhere else, I focused my attention on the chicken man, and realized that I had been misinterpreting an ambiguous speech icon — I thought he had just been saying “I don’t like you”, but the clown icon wasn’t the one everyone else used to express similar sentiments. What he was really saying was specifically “Don’t hug me.”

Anyway, I’m significantly further along now. The clown’s partner has fallen ill, and lies on his cot, inert and miserable. Obtaining health care in the screwed-up corporatized system of this game is a big task for such a simple clown. But at the same time, I’ve befriended a mouse. Like the dog, the mouse follows me around and can be controlled directly to sneak through little holes. I have to say, the emphasis in this game is shifting more and more toward traditional adventurey mechanical puzzles instead of figure-out-what-will-make-people-happy puzzles. Obtaining the mouse required fiddling with a crane in a junkyard, and the puzzles requiring the mouse have mostly been about circumventing security systems. There are still a number of sad people who need cheering up, but they seem to be off the critical path.

Before I got the mouse, there was an empty slot for its icon in the verb menu, a silhouette of a mouse’s head right next to the icon for controlling the dog. There’s still one more empty slot next to that. I wonder what it is? A bird, maybe? That would solve some problems I have with objects too high to reach.

Not much progress in Dropsy today. I managed to befriend a couple more people, but I’m very stuck on my current mission.

Yeah, there are missions. I hadn’t mentioned that. They’re given to you by a green-haired friend/coworker of the clown who sleeps in the same circus tent. The first mission, which I barely understood, was to deliver a gift to a grave. The second is to recover a tire that the coworker had taken off his motorcycle, but which was stolen by a bird. That’s where I’m stuck. The bird is easy to find, but it’s fierce, and drives off any clowns that approach its nest. I’m pretty sure the solution involves enlisting the aid of a guy in a chicken costume in the town, but he doesn’t like the clown and I have no idea how to change that.

Now, the reason that it’s easy to find the bird is that your current mission is marked with an icon on the world map. Another icon indicates your current location. Other locations you’ve visited are marked with simple dots, which really makes it look like you should be able to click on them for fast travel, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Unexplored regions are shrouded by clouds. At the point I’m at, this just means places beyond locked gates or similar impasses, because obviously the first thing you do when you’re stuck is conduct a thorough exploration.

And even without solving any puzzles, it’s a fairly large and explorable environment, with a lot to see and do. Checking it all out is definitely what the game wants you to do. But to a certain extent, it feels like this clown just wandered off down a random road while his friend is waiting for that tire. It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d do in any adventure game, but it’s also in character.

My appetite for indie point-and-click adventures is not yet sated. Dropsy is a cartoony and low-res 2015 game by Jay Tholen, the less-familiar-to-me co-designer of Hypnospace Outlaw, in which you play as a clown. Not just a circus performer who takes off the greasepaint at the end of the performance, but a being that’s a clown around the clock, and has queasily non-human traits, like a rubbery flexibility and a never-changing gap-toothed rictus and an apparent complete lack of hands. Unpleasant enough to look at that I put off playing the game for four years. The sort of clown, then, that scares children — which is tragic, because, we learn, all he wants is hugs.

It’s worth noting how we learn this: from the UI. Most actions in the game are performed with a single click of a contextual cursor: look at, pick up, talk to, etc. A menu of icons lets you pick just a few other actions, such as picking an inventory item or switching control to your dog. One of these icons is the hug icon. It took me a while to figure out what it did, because it doesn’t work on most inanimate objects, but once you apply it successfully to a person you haven’t hugged before, you get a little fanfare and a special victory graphic. (The dog gets something similar for each fire hydrant it pees on. This game is not above that sort of humor.) So hugging is one of the game’s basic actions, and you’re rewarded for doing it. That means it fulfills the same role in the game as shooting in a typical action game. I have no idea how this game was thought up, but it seems like “hugs replace shooting as the main mechanic” is a prompt that could have produced it.

Not everyone is in the mood to be hugged when you first meet them, and attempting to hug someone prematurely will provoke negative reactions. The general solution to this seems to be simple acts of kindness. Ye gods this is a good-natured game. I’m starting to think that Tholen is the main source of the positive vibes I picked up from Hypnospace.

The thing that really impresses me from a design perspective, though, is that it’s all done completely wordlessly. The only legible word in the entire game seems to be the title. That’s unusual for the point-and-click adventure genre. The only other examples I can think of are the Amanita Design games like Samorost and Machinarium, which are set in strange and alien worlds, and use the lack of a common language to emphasize their unfamiliarity. Dropsy, exaggerated and cartoonish though it is, has a more mundane setting, centered around an ordinary American-looking city with a jazzy soundtrack, and the regions around it. But the absence of verbal communication still has an alienating effect. Characters speak in word balloons containing images, which are sometimes hard to understand — but this seems appropriate, because the clown seems like someone who would have difficulty understanding people. Text on things like signposts is replaced with a system of meaningless squiggles, suggesting that the clown is illiterate, on top of his other challenges.

It all makes him more childlike, his awkwardness in the world a matter for sympathy rather than fear or derision. Considering how horrifying he seemed on first impression, that’s a pretty powerful shift. It strikes me that the player character’s relationship to the player goes through more or less the same transformation as his relationship to most of the other characters in the game.

After Fran leaves Ithersta, things become weirdly normal for a while. Just for a while, before the final plunge into unreality. We’ve had disturbing visions of ghosts and demons, and we’ve had a full-on fantasy world, and now, at the end, we get Ditkoesque surrealism, with strangely-connected floating platforms hosting odd creatures with odd obsessions. Fran isn’t afraid of them; her capacity to feel fear has long since burnt out. Indeed, one of the more frightening beings from earlier, a very tall skeleton in a top hat, turns out to be a friend and ally. The game does an excellent job of keeping this ambiguous, too, making it seem like he’s betrayed us once we’ve come to trust him. But once Fran has been through that, she can even accept help from her doctor from the hospital. There’s a sudden emphasis on keys and unlocking in the final chapter, and it’s clearly a sign that Fran is making breakthroughs.

The thing is, though, a completely surreal environment isn’t nearly as jarring and uncanny as an only slightly weird one. And that’s what we get in the lead-up to the ending. Fran somehow makes it back to her house, as has been her goal for the last couple of chapters. It’s an ordinary house, on an ordinary street, and the break in the unreality makes us suddenly uneasy about her unrealistic expectations. Fran just escaped from a madhouse. Her parents are dead. Things aren’t going to go back to normal just because she’s in the right place, but Fran doesn’t seem to realize this.

And then… things start to get rather silly. There’s a conspiracy of sorts going on. We got some inkling of this back in the hospital, where you could find indications that the labels on the magic pills had been deliberately switched, but when we start to learn the details of what was going on, it just doesn’t seem plausible, even though five minutes ago a skeleton in a top hat threw us a birthday party. The doctor from the hospital caught wind of the truth, and is investigating, and as part of his investigation, he invites Fran to help him dig up her parents’ graves — not because there’s anything in particular that he’s looking for, but just because he feels that showing an insane little girl the corpses of her parents would be a good idea somehow. Later, Fran’s aunt matter-of-factly claims, to all appearances expecting to be believed, that Fran’s parents were murdered by the cat. (Even Fran isn’t crazy enough to buy that.) Probably none of this would bother me if the Great Wizard back in Ithersta was doing it, but in the mundane world, it stands out.

There’s a lot we have to accept by the end that we didn’t have to accept in the very beginning: that Fran is special, that her otherworlds are objectively real, that the grown-ups in her life are plotting against her. That returning to her fantasy world is a positive development, and not just a retreat from reality. But I’m here for that. I’m going to recommend this game. The puzzles are nothing to write home about, and I have some reservations about its depiction of mental illness, but it’s got style, and it’s got heart. If character motivations get weird towards the end, it’s because it’s not really trying to be realistic, even in the reality scenes. Rather, it’s trying to depict a feeling, or a series of feelings, a progression from helplessness and victimization to empowerment, from horror to peace.

I said that Fran Bow reminded me a little of Alice in Wonderland, but in chapter 3, it takes a sharp turn towards Oz. Fran has lost her horror pills, rendering the dark world inaccessible; instead, we find ourselves in the magical land of Ithersta, a brightly-lit, extremely whimsical fantasy world populated mainly by carrot people. Fran has been reunited with her cat by now, so, like Dorothy, her new goal is to return home. And to do this, she needs to enlist the aid of a Great Wizard.

Ithersta is a place of safety and healing. Fran reaches it simply by needing it to be there. When she arrives, she’s transformed into a tree, and unable to do anything for herself — you temporarily play as the cat until you can get tree-Fran to a healer, who at least restores her to humanoid shape, although she’s still made of wood and knows that this is a temporary form that she’ll have to abandon to become fully human again. This whole chapter is, to my mind, the most clearly metaphorical part of the game I’ve seen so far.

Since toggling between different worlds is a fundamental part of the game, we soon acquire a substitute for the pills: a clockwork device that lets us change the season. (“Time is just an infinite layered reality”, explain the locals.) Suddenly, we have four versions of every room instead of just two! There’s less of a contrast between them than there was with the pills, though, except perhaps in the Winter scenes, where snow covers the bright flowers and the rustic country market lies empty. This is the only time of year when the Great Wizard’s cave is accessible. It’s also the only time that the shadow creatures are seen in Ithersta.

So, for all the air of comfort, we’re not out of the woods yet. There’s still an edge to things, and it has a lot to do with forgetting. The Wizard himself has forgotten everything he knew, and needs you to fetch him things to help him remember. Elsewhere, an unreadable plaque is described as saying “what everyone learn[s] in the precise moment of birth. But we forget its meaning within the first seven minutes alive… So, we have to spend our entire life… trying to understand it.” And the theme of a great truth that needs to be discovered keeps coming up. The entire questionably-real, comparatively-paradisical environment is telling Fran that there’s something she’s forgotten, something important that she needs to know before she can wake up.

The keynote at Narrascope was delivered by Natalia Martinsson, who described how her point-and-click adventure Fran Bow was inspired by her own experiences with trauma. Fran Bow has been installed on my laptop for some time, but I never seemed to be in the mood for it. It’s a troubling game, grotesque and gruesome. But now, I’ve been inspired to make a go of it. I’m currently in the middle of the second chapter of five.

Fran Bow is a severely traumatized ten-year-old girl in a stereotypically awful mental hospital, which she spends the first chapter of the game escaping, with the aid of some magical pills. She’s first given the pills in the intro sequence, but they give her nightmarish hallucinations, so her doctor immediately orders that she never be given them again. However, in the hallucination, she hears her beloved cat, Mr. Midnight, telling her to seek the pills out again, and so she does. The hallucinations essentially form an alternate reality, Silent Hill-style: it’s the same rooms, but there’s blood and dead animals all over the place, and shadowy monsters roam about. Sometimes Fran is strangely oblivious about this given that it’s her hallucination, referring to clearly dead creatures as “asleep” and the like. Other times, she is not. Her manner is a little Alice-in-Wonderland-ish, a mixture of childish whimsy and insistent precision, which makes me think a little of American McGee’s Alice, which similarly had grotesque loony bin scenes. But those were constructed entirely out of trope. Fran Bow‘s treatment of the same theme is more heartfelt, I think, although I can’t know what I would have thought without having heard the author speak on the matter.

You can toggle between the two worlds at will, and sometimes the nightmare world has hints for real-world puzzles, usually scrawled on the wall in blood. I suppose it’s sort of shamanic, the use of hallucinogens to access the spirit realms and learn secrets of importance. In this realm, other patients at the hospital tend to have black shadow-creatures holding them, presumably manifestations of their mental illness. A couple of times, I’ve heard people say things like “You can see them, can’t you?”. The pills are, at the very least, enhancing your perceptions, showing you things that are in some sense objectively real. But more than that: there are puzzles based on bringing objects from the spirit world back to the real world with you. In the second chapter, the lines get blurred even more: there’s a couple of monstrous insects that really belong in the spirit world, but which you encounter in the real world. Maybe none of the adventure is real. Maybe Fran is still in her room in the hospital, tripping throughout.

At a different panel at Narrascope, it was pointed out how Black Mirror: Bandersnatch had a possible sub-plot about the main character going off his meds in order to regain control of himself. The consensus among the panelists was that this was a terrible lesson to teach people about psychiatric medications. Fran Bow leans in the opposite direction, but it’s still kind of the same: Fran doesn’t trust her doctor — in fact, she pretty much hates him — and so she enthusiastically takes pills that he doesn’t want her to have, and they turn out to be vitally important to her progress through the game, which I’m at the moment assuming is positive for her psychological recovery and growth. If “Go off your meds” is a bad message, surely “Take meds your doctor specifically forbids” is even worse? But I suppose it’s saved by its unrealism, as well as the sheer unpleasantness of Fran’s otherworld. Doing what Fran does outside of a game is such a clearly and obviously bad idea as to deter imitation in itself. At least, I hope so.