Right! Time to do some IF Comp reviews. As usual, I am not reviewing parser games that list no beta-testers. (I’m a little more flexible with Twine pieces because there’s not really an obvious place to put that list.)
Further is a parser-based, lightly puzzly surreal story about a ghost negotiating its passage to the afterlife. Play time, roughly 10 minutes. Review after the jump, light spoilers in the sense that I describe what the gameplay is like.
My Father’s Long, Long Legs is a deeply creepy Twine game, a horror story centered on an unusual and startling premise. The structure seems linear at first: often in the early stages there is only one link forward, or there are multiple links but they control only the order in which you will read the same text. Later, things branch more, but in a way that still never gives the player a sense of strong agency. The experience is instead always of being drawn onward to explore even though there’s the strongest sense that you won’t like what you’re going to find. There’s no chance that you’re going to be able to control what that something is.
Sometimes text appears only after a delay — sometimes after so long a delay that you just start to feel that the story might be broken. Sometimes it becomes invisible except in a small, flashlight-illuminated circle around the mouse, forcing the player to move the cursor just to read what’s there. I tend to consider this kind of effect a gimmick, but in this particular case it works, keeping the reader constantly off balance. The text is brief enough, and comes in small enough snippets, that the need to scan past it doesn’t dramatically slow things up.
All this technical variety and aesthetic finesse is in service of a narrative that I found genuinely horrific. I am not, as a rule, a great fan of horror. But the horror of this particular story does not depend on exaggerated gore and never descends into a pornography of disgust.
It reads to me as a story of mental illness, of what mental illness is like to observe in one’s own family, of the effects it has on oneself and those one loves. The story is carefully observed and occasionally funny, and most of the really terrible things in it could actually happen, or be understood as a metaphor for things that actually happen.
Which is much, much creepier than zombies.
One of Ryan Veeder’s particular strengths is a gift for manipulating player expectations and guiding player behavior for humorous effect.
In You’ve Got a Stew Going, he steers the player into a bunch of weird, rat-protagonist behavior, and at one point breaks the fourth wall to tell the player directly that something is going to be a dead end. In Taco Fiction, he gives the player so explicit a set of instructions about how to carry off an “easy” armed robbery that we know something’s got to go wrong, but we trundle along into it anyway. In Nautilisia, he breaks the fourth wall hard, helpfully explaining all the symbolism as the player encounters it in a quick riff on surreal IF.
This willingness to drop immersion and plausibility in favor of something else — typically a punch line — makes Veeder’s games(*) feel less like stories or living worlds than like exceptionally high-quality knock knock jokes.
That sounds like a slam, but I say it with the deepest respect. There are lots of interactive stories that have non-interactive jokes written in, but Veeder’s funniest bits require the player to help make the comedy happen. This is much harder to achieve and much funnier when it works. Paul O’Brian has just recently written about a similar effect in Dinner Bell, and long ago Adam Cadre wrote about participatory comedy in Fine-Tuned, but it’s not a common effect. The key to all this is that Veeder is able to conduct the player’s behavior accurately enough to get us right where he wants us, when he wants us there: pacing is one of the hardest things to get right in interactive narrative and one of the most necessary to humor.
There’s more to it even than that, though. There’s some participatory comedy in IF that works with the grain of role-playing. A lot of the jokes in Lost Pig are rewards for thinking like Grunk and giving a Grunk-appropriate order like BURN PANTS or BURP. Tale of the Kissing Bandit rewards the player for thinking of commands like TWIRL MUSTACHE. Those are bits that reward the player for playing along with the narrative.
A lot of Veeder’s pieces, by contrast, make the following pitch to the player: Look, you and I both know that what the game is asking you to to do is disgusting (eating things only a rat would eat), pointless (exploring this surreal dreamscape filled with unsubtle metaphors), or just flatly a terrible idea (robbing a restaurant that probably doesn’t have a large cash stock anyway, armed only with a nonfunctional gun), but aren’t you curious what will happen if you do? Come on. I just need one volunteer from the audience.
It’s the joke that plays out because you’re tempted into doing something against your better judgment, or at least against your sense of what is going to work out well for the PC. I trust Veeder isn’t like this in real life, because people who in real life constantly test to see whether they can make you do things you don’t want to do aren’t comedians, they’re jerks. But this strategy works pretty well, and is often very funny, within the safe space afforded by a game. It doesn’t even necessarily feel that antagonistic. Instead it feels as though the player and the author are communicating on some plane distinct from the lower plane where that poor sap the player character hangs out.
The Statue Got Me High demonstrates the same aptitude for player direction, misdirection, and subversion, though this time with less fourth-wall breaking and more reliance on the player’s IF-based expectations. Veeder gets the player to scurry around trying to solve puzzles that seem to matter, then changing up the situation every time one gets close, in a tight, ingenious sequence that doesn’t outstay its welcome.
I’d like to get spoilery about this and narrate my own play-through experience, but I am going to do so after the jump, for the sake of those who might not have played yet.
No-one Has to Die is a fairly easy puzzle game, framed with a textual story about time travel, secrets, revenge, and family loyalties. To my taste the puzzles are a little too easy — there weren’t that many serious “aha” moments for me — but the structure is clever, as puzzle solutions require you to experiment with which characters you’re willing to sacrifice, and understanding the story fully requires working through several variant possibilities. As to the writing, it could have been both briefer and more effective; character dialogue is very on-the-nose, and they argue exhaustively about who should be saved next and why. (Contrast all the long-winded, sterile argumentation about who should be saved here with the sparer and much more moving writing in Hide&Seek’s James Bond game.)
What’s most interesting about No-one Has to Die is the structure: puzzles used to represent significant and morally charged decisions, inventive reuse of the same puzzle levels with slightly different parameters depending on the time-travel, etc.
Alan DeNiro’s Corvidia is a brief, surreal piece in Twine, more interactive poetry than story. A man looks at a tree and sees… well, it’s hard to explain, really. Due to some CSS work, the linked words appear first, and boldest; the rest of the words, the sentences that give the links context, fade in slowly. It’s a fitting effect given that “Corvidia” seems to be describing someone fixated on a few particular images or ideas (the words linked), with only a vague and fantastical notion of what’s going on in the rest of the world. Or maybe what he imagines is true, but in that case, he lives in a universe very unlike our own.
Star Wench
How does the story end? Only YOU can find out! Your one choice: which page to open up to. Keep reading until you’ve suffered not one but MANY terrible fates.
The genre is lurid pulp SF, the same sort of thing parodied in Leather Goddesses of Phobos and in Anthropy’s Twine adventure The Hunt for the Gay Planet. The endings conform to genre expectations: you spend a lot of your time being tied up, or sacrificed, or eaten, or made the slave and plaything of the sinister Queen of Space. Endings are no more than a page long, in large type, though a few are doubled up with line-drawings by guest artists. Many of the endings are solid ultra-short stories in themselves. Others imply things about the story that must have led up to this point, or play on CYOA or genre expectations. (If you read ending 1, you get a stern telling-off about reading non-linear narrative in a linear way.) There’s no narratively meaningful agency, since you’re really only picking an ending by number — it’s not like you get to make in-context choices for your protagonist — but that fits as well, celebrating the arbitrary nature of both pulp fiction and old-school CYOA books.
Entertaining, if not especially work-safe.
Castle of the Red Prince is parser-based gothic horror IF by CEJ Pacian. Lots of Pacian’s past work in some way sets aside a standard aspect of the IF world model: Gun Mute puts the player on a linear forward/back movement track, Walker & Silhouette can be driven largely by keyword, Rogue of the Multiverse uses auto-generated grids of space for its exploration sequences. “Castle of the Red Prince” participates in that tradition by eradicating the usual distinctions of IF space. Everything in the game can be interacted with at any time; if you try to put an object in a container many rooms away, you will move there automatically. You can look at any place on the map, any room, at any time. If you’ve ever seen something, it remains in scope for you to refer to.
The protagonist is a student of arcane arts who is able to gain new knowledge in sleep and who first came to know of this place through dreams. There are some characters, but we so easily move in and out of their space that it’s hard to feel they are equals of the protagonist, or that we’re really in any kind of ongoing social context with them. Because there’s no need to remember directions, I didn’t build up a strong sense of relative space, of where things were in comparison with other things. I also found that the lack of local description unmoored me a little, because I’m so used to moving through rooms and LOOKing if I think I might have missed something. That’s probably just my IF-playing habit fighting against the new mechanisms, though.
Narratively, the surface story is fairly trivial — collect needed objects, solve a couple of puzzles, have minimal personal investment — while the backstory remains complex and largely mysterious. There are hints of significant past battles, of entities both evil and Faery, of generations of heroes trying to put things right, but only a few outlines of their struggle become clear in the course of the game.
The whole game, therefore, feels a bit gauzy and distant, reminiscent of Ebb and Flow of the Tide or The Guardian. There’s something intriguing and pleasurable about it, and I enjoyed seeing the experiment in IF world model, but it wasn’t a very intense or compelling experience. I am likely to remember Pacian’s other work longer.
The Pulse Pounding, Heart Stopping Game Jam was a weekend-long game jam for dating sims, producing over 80 works, many in Twine, about dating or relationship situations.
Among the entries (and obviously, with 80+, I didn’t get to try nearly all of them):
Porpentine’s “UNTIL OUR ALIEN HEARTS BEAT AS ONE” is a two-player Twine game about communicating through symbol and image.
Christine Love’s “Magical Maiden Madison” (shown) is an interactive texting conversation about a Magical Maiden’s evening adventures (which I know maybe just barely enough tropes to understand).
Mattie Brice’s “Blink” tells the story of dates that go wrong, over and over, in several different ways. If there’s a way to make things go right, I never found it. Possibly that’s the point. Possibly I’m just bad at these sorts of dates.
Joseph Miller’s “Dating Folksims” is a series of rules for live-action games to be played around the idea of dating faux pas and successes.
Mike Joffe’s “Benthic Love” explores the dating options of a young male anglerfish. It is surprisingly touching and also contains a surprising number of biology facts.
Elizabeth Sampat and Loren Hernandez’s “How to Be Happy” is a rather grim metaphorical puzzle game in which you can try to find other blocks to fit with your own, but are likely to fail, sooner or later, in keeping them with you.
Leon Arnott’s “Dining Table” is a creepy story about the dating lives of dolls. The end is, I think, a little overexplained, but the premise is genuinely disturbing; my main complaint is that I might have liked to see more of the story told interactively rather than through straight exposition.
Valentine’s “Greek Mythology PPHSJam game” is a Ren’Py piece that lets you cavort with various gods, though I’ve yet to find an outcome that was really positive for me. Hermes became my dating wingman, though, which has got to be worth something.
wattomatic’s “Life on Hold” is a Depression-Quest-like exploration of a relationship in a messed up holding pattern, where the more options you get, the less you seem to be able to change anything really important about the protagonist’s lifestyle.
Leigh Alexander has also written about the PPHSJAM here, with notes about some of the games that I didn’t cover myself.
Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings” (IFDB page) is a new claymation musical adventure by Deirdra Kiai. It’s compact (1-2 hours, rather than 12+) and the puzzles are on the easy side. Some people might find these features to be drawbacks, but considering the limits on my gaming time these days, I appreciated getting my story delivered at a good clip. And it’s a pretty entertaining mystery, with enough twists for a noir short story; people aren’t exactly what they seem, a point that starts with the gender-ambiguous protagonist but eventually comes to apply to just about everyone you meet.
I was also fine with the fact that the puzzles mostly made sense and weren’t too maddening to work out. Many of them boil down to legwork — get a lead, figure out where to go next in order to pursue it — with just a handful of more complex or physical interactions, most pretty clearly clued.
A few slightly-more-spoilery thoughts follow the break.
Continue reading “Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings””
A Roiling Original is a wordplay game by Andrew Schultz, a sequel to 2012’s Shuffling Around (my review). It uses a similar mechanic of changing one object into another via anagrams, and is an entrant in Spring Thing 2013.
More detailed thoughts after the break. If you’re planning to play and vote on Spring Thing games yourself, you may want to wait before reading this.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 