Stalling for Time is an Introcomp 2011 game about a cross-country trip with your uncle Ted and his Japanese friend Kenji. Brief, not especially spoilery thoughts follow the break.
Here is a piece with a voice. The narrator is irreverent, slightly flip, detached, distinctly not the same identity as the protagonist. At times, he is clever and coy to the point of being annoying. I am not sure I like this narrator. It is not clear that the narrator likes the protagonist. The protagonist definitely does not like humanity. There are footnotes, which in IF (as in any fiction) are a reminder of the artificial construction of the narrative. Alienation abounds.
All the same, confident narration in IF is one of the rarest and most necessary of virtues, so I welcome the alienating narrator, despite the sensation that I’ve just started a road trip with a precocious freshman that I will want to sock in the jaw round about Boise. There isn’t enough of this intro game to tell me whether the effect is going to get wearing in the end, or whether it will prove itself.
It’s good that the voice is strong, because there is little else on offer here. The implementation is mostly solid, with the exception of a “too many rulebooks in use” programming error when I tried to talk to Kenji. But what is it in aid of? The premise of the game is sketched in very vaguely; though the narrative voice is confident, it’s also not terribly concerned with telling the player exactly what is going on, and it’s only from the synopsis in the game’s metadata that I understand the scenario. We don’t really have a goal. We’re drifting. Our character wants nothing, or else doesn’t know what he wants. The player doesn’t know what he’s allowed to want from this story. There are conversational prompts, but it doesn’t feel like it matters very much which option we pick. There are no puzzles. Setting is stark to the verge of nonexistence. Here’s the entire description of one location:
UW parking lot
Well, it ain’t[3] much. It’s one of the university’s smaller parking lots, and it’s next to vacant. The exit lies east.
It’s not evocative; one might almost say it’s anti-evocative. I’ve actually been to a few UW parking lots, but this game was not at all interested in conveying the like of that experience to me, or even in reminding me of the experience I’ve already had. The focus is self-absorbed, inward. Notice that footnote, the one placed three words into the sentence so that the reader trips over it before he’s had a chance to get any flow.
>note 3
Lately, you’ve been adopting certain southernisms, including ain’t and y’all. Irregardless, however, is not yet in your vocabulary.
Our narrator is more into himself, more intrigued by his own tricks of wording, than he is interested in anything that’s happening outside his own head. That’s not the only example, either: the description of a scenic beauty spot tells you nothing about what the scenic beauty is. And maybe IF is a good medium for that — better than most — but it’s not an easy thing to engage with.
Meanwhile the game also spends a lot of energy on fiddly detritus. The protagonist possesses a cell phone that doesn’t work, money he never needs to spend, a driver’s license that never comes into play, a car key in service of automobile simulationism that adds nothing to the story. And this combined with the blinkered narration produces a sense of deep depression, of weary occupation with the small functional details of one’s life because the entire point is just to get through the day, just to do what’s absolutely necessary, without ever lifting one’s head to look around.
Do I want to play more of this? I really don’t know. It is, on one level, very competent. But it totally fails at the job of making the player want something from it. There’s no mystery, no conflict, no challenge, nothing to win or discover; only, perhaps, dimly, the vague hope that the protagonist might at some point become less miserable. But I didn’t see anything in this intro that made me think that might one day happen.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 