Pardon my dust

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I’m planning to do some work revamping this blog so that I can use it as a general website for the puzzles I’ve been posting on Twitter, as well as for my interactive fiction reviews and other stuff. If the website looks scrappy and half-finished, that’s because it is.

At some point, I plan to cross-post all my puzzles here. I intend to schedule them so that they’re drip-fed onto here and not just dumped all at once, but if you’re subscribed to this blog and you’re not here for puzzles, you can unsubscribe. It’s okay, I won’t be upset. I pay no attention whatsoever to my WordPress metrics.

(I’ve mentioned before that I want to build my own website. I still want to do that. I don’t like being reliant on WordPress or Twitter or some other big tech company who could just delete my web presence immediately for whatever reason. But, well, learning how to build websites is hard. And I think I want other websites to handle the database and security stuff for me until I’m sure I know what I’m doing.)

IFComp 2021 review: An Aside About Everything (Sasha)

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Played 6th November using Opera
Time played: 1hr 5mins, one full playthrough

Some vague and minor spoilers follow.

An Aside About Everything is an hour-long Twine game. You control a character referred to in the third person as “He” (with the capital letter), who is searching for a missing girl. In His search, He travels to different worlds and meets a recurring cast of female NPCs in each.

This is presented as a detective game, and some nice layout work with Twine supports this. The game is in noir colours, all grey and black, and we have a sidebar with an inventory and a Persons of Interest menu. It feels appropriately gritty, and it’s clear to navigate. Sound files are played at certain moments as an extra flourish, although not very often. The only negative I have about the presentation is that some typos and a couple of accidental tense changes distract the reader at key points.

The game functioned very well for me programming-wise, although other reviewers report getting stuck in loops and having to restore to earlier saves. I was impressed by the optional content tucked away, though. You can head back to the opening room at any point in the game and explore it a little more – you never have to do this, but it’s a nice way to give the player a little extra information about the main character. You can also choose to buy and take pills at certain points, if you solve a basic inventory puzzle (that is, you trade an item for it). From experimenting, I think some of these pills open up new options in the epilogue. I would guess that there are other consequences throughout the game, though I can’t say for sure. Despite the reported looping bug, there is some robust programming here which hides some interesting secrets!

I said earlier that An Aside About Everything is presented as a detective game. You start in a detective’s office with the classic corkboard-with-red-string, ready to work on your missing person case. But the capitalisation of “He” as your player character’s pronoun, and the office’s name – the Void – indicate that something else is going on. What that “something else” is, is not clear for a while. You find yourself drifting between apparently unconnected places – a mine, an airship – while a cast of characters makes aspersions about your character. It’s all very allegorical and metaphorical, and I found it difficult to grasp and to understand the consequences of what I was doing. I think that’s intentional, since it seems like the player character is not having the best mental health day of His life. You just have to let it flow.

It’s worth hanging in there even if you’re getting frustrated with the narrative, because the final major act of the game has a very, very strong start. A couple of classic Twine text tricks are used to great effect. If you haven’t twigged already, it suddenly becomes a lot clearer what’s really going on. I’m being vague about this to avoid spoiling the game completely, but I really liked this moment. I still like it. An Aside About Everything rewards thinking about it afterwards, as you reflect on earlier acts and think “oh, so that’s why…”

I have to say, I didn’t fully connect with this game, and I’m not sure why. That’s the most useless kind of feedback, because how is the author supposed to act on it? I think the problem I had is that some of the game’s narrative choices were deliberately alienating. The use of the third-person perspective places the player at a distance from the player character, and the allegorical-ness of it all made me unsure of what was going on and what was at stake. And although you have some choices along the way, there are no major opportunities to change the course of events as far as I am aware. You’ll get roughly the same ending every time, with no way to guide the player character. These narrative choices make sense for what I think they’re trying to achieve individually – in particular, I don’t think you could have multiple endings in this story without losing the point the game is trying to make – but the game as a whole feels like you’re watching things happen to other people rather than getting involved in the story.

All that said, An Aside About Everything is certainly not a bad game. It uses a surrealist story to make an interesting and valuable point, and it’s experimenting with the player character and the narrative in some cool and successful ways. It doesn’t all work, but when it does work, it packs a punch.

IFComp 2021 review: Infinite Adventure (A. Scotts)

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Played 5th November via DOSBox
Time played: 30mins, 13 playthroughs (it’s a short game)

(Full disclosure, I shifted this one forwards in my personal shuffle because of its connection to a game I reviewed earlier in the comp.)

Infinite Adventure is a parser game programmed for DOS. It generates a random adventure for the player. In each adventure, the player explores an abandoned building and must complete some simple task to win the game. The player can keep generating adventures, and the game will track their wins and losses.

It’s not obvious from the ballot, but Infinite Adventure is actually linked to another entry, And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One (which I already reviewed). In that entry, Infinite Adventure is a game-within-a-game which the protagonists play and discuss. This entry lets you play that game as a stand-alone game, without the story-advancing elements that And Then You Come To a House introduces. I’m giving this game a separate review instead of appending this to my review of And Then You Come To a House because each can be played and completed without knowledge of the other (as opposed to something like The Knot from last year’s IFComp, where three apparently separate games required you to feed information from one game into another to progress in all three). As such, I’ll try to take Infinite Adventure on its own merits for now.

Since this is a DOS game, I’m guessing this is using a custom engine. The parser is deliberately simple, and its major commands are set out in a help screen. This is good, because it sets out the possibility space clearly for the player. It’s clear what verbs are supported, and all those verbs worked perfectly as far as I saw, with a few non-essential commands thrown in for fun (I noticed that XYZZY gets a response). Special mention to the automap, which works perfectly and tracks the locations of items and NPCs – that’s a very nice feature to have.

Infinite Adventure is clearly playing on expectations of the classic text adventure. The decision to program this for an older operating system rather than for a modern format like Glulx gives the player something of the flavour of retrocomputing, of being huddled in front of an older machine tapping away at some obscure magazine type-in. (DOS has that flavour, while also being well-known and well-supported enough that it’s familiar to many players and relatively painless to emulate.) Plus, the pseudonym A. Scotts is a pretty clear reference.

But those old text adventures were very experimental, and very brutal in their puzzle design. Infinite Adventure’s adventures are a lot more straightforward. Too straightforward, perhaps. Adventures are built from a pool of items, NPCs, rooms and quests, but I very quickly noticed a lot of repeating objects. There’s very little variety in the quests themselves – you’re either fetching an item for an NPC or placing an item on or in an object, with no other puzzles between you and that goal. (There is, however, some effective spooky flavour text in the randomised descriptions the first few times you play – strange noises in the distance, strange gouges in the doorway, details like that. Paying attention to the descriptions livens the experience up.) It’s possible to lose by trying to complete the quest with the wrong item (and it’s very funny to do so), but you’re only going to lose experimentally or deliberately.

I don’t know if there are underlying memory limits to the DOS format that forced this simplicity, or if Infinite Adventure just has a limited scope. And I suppose that keeping the structure very simple helps to sidestep some pitfalls of random generation. You don’t have to worry about a key spawning behind the door it unlocks if you don’t have keys and locks. But it still gets very samey. Unless I was very unlucky with the random generator giving me the same results over and over again, there’s not enough variety to sustain thirty minutes of play.

But… that’s not really the point, right? I’ve said I’m taking Infinite Adventure on its own merits, but I can’t really do that, because it exists as a complement to And Then You Come To a House. The protagonists of that game get bored and restless and uncomfortable with Infinite Adventure for the same reasons I’ve just described. The uncanny blandness of this game supports the characters’ responses in that game. (And Then You Come To a House also explores the idea of some underlying secret in Infinite Adventure. There is a point in that game where the other shoe drops, but that point didn’t arrive in this game for me. Maybe there’s some secret in this version of Infinite Adventure as well, but I can only judge the game I played, not the game that I imagine could be hidden here.)

As its own entry, Infinite Adventure isn’t really worthwhile. It’s too repetitive and simplistic to work as a procedural adventure generator. It’s best treated as an elaborate feelie for And Then You Come To a House, played either before or after that game. In that respect, it’s one of the coolest feelies I’ve yet seen for an interactive fiction game. Infinite Adventure works best – arguably, it only works at all – when you let your understanding of And Then You Come To a House colour your perception of it.

A little epilogue paragraph, which I’m writing a day after drafting the above. I have since peeked at other people’s reviews of this game. There is, indeed, something very interesting to do in Infinite Adventure that I didn’t think to try. How embarrassing. Oh well, I don’t think it changes my fundamental review. Here’s a spoiler encoded in ROT13 for anyone else who’s looking for secrets: gel “gnyx gb evyrl”, naq gura gel fbzr bs gur bgure punenpgref.

IFComp 2021 review: Funicular Simulator 2021 (Mary Goodden and Tom Leather)

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Played 30th October using Opera
Time played: 55mins, two full playthroughs

Some minor spoilers follow, including some vague ending spoilers.

Funicular Simulator 2021 is a half-hour Twine game. You enter a funicular and chat to one of four fellow passengers as you climb the mountain to witness an aurora. Then you enter a funicular… Each playthrough of Funicular Simulator 2021 is actually the same ascent repeated four times, Groundhog Day-style. This lets you talk to all four passengers in one playthrough, or perhaps the same passenger four times if you like.

First, I want to say how pretty this game is. The styling is fairly straightforward, but it’s amazing how much a few background gradients, a nice font and a splash screen do for an apparently simple Twine game. These background gradients change as the funicular climbs the mountain, both demonstrating your progress and setting the scene. I’m trying not to pick on Twine games which don’t use much styling this year, but this game shows how far a little colour can go. As an IFComp judge, I also very much appreciate leaving the undo button present so I can click around the game easily. Playing this was mostly very fluid and fun.

Okay, on to the actual game. I think that title is a misstep, making you think of cheap games with wacky physics hijinks. Instead, Funicular Simulator 2021 is billed as a “dreamy mystery”, a game of conversations through which you piece together the story of the mountain, and the story of your fellow passengers. The “mystery” aspect is downplayed – I don’t know if there’s a concrete solution, and I think the different endings support multiple interpretations. There’s certainly no puzzly denouement where you solve the mountain. (There’s only one mild bit of puzzle-solving with the optional chronometer sequence, but I don’t like it much – the buttons you need to click to operate the machine are unresponsive and awkward, which is odd because all the other links in the game work exactly as you’d hope.) There are a few clues, however, and it’s satisfying to spot links between what different passengers tell you and craft your own theories.

It’s better to treat Funicular Simulator 2021 as a narrative game than a mystery game, I think. This narrative is carried by the four passengers, who you engage with in one-on-one conversation as the funicular makes its way up the mountainside. The back-and-forth is well-written, and the conversation feels largely natural. The writers did a good job of giving the player a variety of responses, I think – I rarely felt that I was missing a response that it would be natural to give. Replaying the same conversations demonstrates that some of the choices are false – that is, all options lead to the same reply from the NPC you’re talking to – but that’s okay, it’s a good trick for getting the conversation to flow in the right direction on a first playthrough.

The passengers themselves are largely likeable, apart from the guy who tries to flirt with you and then tries to get you to take mushrooms immediately afterwards, but that’s the risk you take when you sit next to a stranger on public transport, right? It’s not a fault of the game that I didn’t like that guy, because that’s just part of writing a variety of characters. But his flirting does touch on something I didn’t love: the game seems a little too eager to herd you towards romance with certain characters. You can unlock endings by choosing to accompany those characters at the top of the mountain, and some of those endings suggest a relationship, which is odd if you’ve done absolutely nothing to indicate an interest on the way up the mountain. (That is, just because I hang out with someone on the mountain summit doesn’t mean I want to kiss them at the end.)

In conversation, you learn why each character is climbing the mountain. A theme of escapism emerges, as characters use the mountain to work through their problems. For some, it’s spiritual or supernatural, literal escapism from the mundane world which has failed them; for others, it’s more practical. But although there is something supernatural going on with the mountain, the fact that you work through each passenger’s problems in collaboration with them, and that endings are unlocked by staying with them for the end of a Groundhog Day loop, suggests that solace is to be found in each other more than in the mountain. Indeed, choosing to stay alone at the very end leads to a vaguely ominous finale which implies (if I’m reading the situation right) that you’ll be there for the next passengers too. I think it’s a nice sentiment, and it’s thematically consistent throughout the game; again, though, it just gets a little muddied by the game seeming to conflate friendship and romance in places.

This has been a nitpicky review, but I do think Funicular Simulator 2021 gets it broadly right. The central mystery is fun to pick at, and interesting enough that I went back for a second playthrough to look for more clues. The central characters are interesting enough to spend time with, which is crucial for something like this. And again, I’m just delighted to play a Twine game that actually uses styling to enhance the experience instead of giving me serif text on a black background.

IFComp 2021 review: After-Words (fireisnormal)

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Played 29th October using Opera
Time played: 50mins, one full playthrough

Spoiler-free review, apart from some room, object and NPC names.

After-Words is a puzzle parser-like game using a custom system. The story is told vaguely: you are a Resolver in Skycity, and you must solve the city’s problems before you can go home.

The vagueness is because After-Words’ prose is almost entirely composed of sentences of two words or less, albeit with the occasional cheat (I object to the opening screen trying to pass “problemfilled” off as one word). The story and its title hints that language is at a premium in Skycity, so descriptions are clipped and characters speak tersely. This evokes the feel of classic text adventures in the 1980s, written to tight memory constraints. Indeed, After-Words is unashamedly a pure puzzle adventure, casting you as a Resolver whose job is to solve problems for no (immediately obvious) purpose.

The clipped descriptions mean that After-Words spends little time on detailed storytelling or worldbuilding. It gestures at its setting with location names and object descriptions that it cannot elaborate on. So you get locations like “Screaming Gunflowers” (described as “annoying”) and “Ship Graveyard” (described as “rest” and then “peaceful”). You only get an idea of what your fellow citizens look like by noticing that some are robotic and others are flying creatures like fireflies or gulls. It’s very evocative for its limited word count, and manages to paint some interesting characters (like the Flickerking, who seems like a cool guy to hang out with). I’m a sucker for this kind of worldbuilding, where you get just enough detail for the imagination to run wild. It might be too vague, in that I never had a clear idea of what the places actually look like or do, but it’s clear enough that you know what you’re supposed to be doing as you solve the puzzles.

The other major feature of After-Words is its custom interface, which is designed around simplified point-and-click gameplay. The left half of the screen shows your room descriptions and the two verbs available to you, Looking and Interacting. Click one of the verbs, then one of the underlined words in the description to do things in the room, or interact with your inventory in certain rooms to solve puzzles. The right half of the screen is the world map, which allows you to navigate the world by clicking on the room connections. It’s a lot like Robin Johnson’s Versificator / Gruescript engine with less focus on verbs and more focus on spatial navigation.

I’m in two minds about this interface. On the one hand, I love the use of the map, which automatically updates as you discover more rooms and which keeps track of locked doors. Clicking around the map is a very intuitive mode of navigation, and it’s worth a look for anyone who writes games with a world model and feels frustrated with the use of compass directions as the standard in interactive fiction. (I mean, After-Words uses compass directions as well, but the visual representation makes keeping your bearings a lot easier, and it’s interesting to think how this system could accommodate less conventional modes of movement.)

On the other hand, I didn’t enjoy the experience of clicking through the room descriptions. It feels awkward, because important objects and people are usually nested in room descriptions. That is, you can’t just see and talk to people – you need to click Looking, click the room description to show the person’s presence, click Interacting, then click on the person’s description. Only a couple of extra clicks, but still twice as many clicks as there need to be, especially since there’s usually enough room in the room description box to have shown the person’s description to begin with. In addition, updates to the room state are not automatically shown, so that if interacting with that person leads them to do something new, you won’t know until you Look at the room description again to refresh their description. It’s easy to miss puzzle progression until you catch on to this. It just doesn’t feel very smooth, and all those extra clicks add up.

I think that the simplicity hampers what the puzzles can do, too. With just one interaction command that applies the selected inventory object to the whole room, there’s only two types of puzzle the game can do: locked doors and keys, or trading items to NPCs for other items. That in itself is not a problem, and can make for a peacefully entertaining puzzle game. (Ever played that old Cartoon Network game where you’re stomping around a summer camp trading items with beloved cartoon characters? That’s what After-Words reminded me of, and I mean that as a compliment.) But there’s little room for variety within this, because the game is so simple in its other aspects. You can’t really obfuscate the purpose of items when you only have two-word sentences to play with. It just starts to feel samey after a while. But it’s saved from being boring by the evocative locations and characters, and by a surprising level of responsiveness: After-Words recognises good-but-wrong solutions and steers you towards the correct item to use, and it has a lot of funny responses hidden for people who, say, walk around the cyberpunk-y game world with a Rule Deleter.

I liked this game, and I’m excited by the custom engine. The way it obfuscates information and streamlines movement and verbs would be perfect for a horror game or something else which needs to keep the player off-kilter and uncertain. The automap is fantastic. But I wonder if the engine is at odds with the actual game and its puzzly structure. After-Words is a little rough to play, but worth the effort, I think.

IFComp 2021 review: My Gender Is a Fish (Carter Gwertzman)

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Played 27th October using Opera
Time played: 15mins, two playthroughs

Major spoilers for the whole game. Go play it, it only takes five minutes.

My Gender Is a Fish is a very short Twine game in which the player character’s gender is stolen by a magpie. The player character makes a series of choices between two objects as they explore the forest and try to recall what their gender is, and the player decides whether they think their gender is, for example, a fish or an eagle.

The game is structured very simply – each playthrough gives you five decisions in total, each between two options, and both options quickly reconnect to the same next choice (that is, it’s a braided structure rather than a branching structure). It’s short and tightly written, with good prose and no spelling errors that I encountered. The UI sidebar and multiple save files are unnecessary for such a small game, but still appreciated. (The sidebar introduces what I think is a bug, where your displayed choice of gender isn’t reset properly between the second and third choices, but that’s a small quibble.)

Okay, that’s the boring stuff about whether the game works properly or not out of the way – now we can talk about what the game actually says.

The trans pride flag displayed in My Gender Is a Fish’s cover art should tip you off that the game has a nuanced understanding of gender. It’s good that the flag is there, because the title had me worried that we were in for “I identify as an attack helicopter” jokes. Thank goodness, it’s not that. It’s a much kinder game than that.

On the surface, the choices of gender you are presented with are surrealist. But each choice is accompanied by a little bit of prose, and together they tell the game’s real story: the protagonist’s understanding of gender shifting and expanding. For example, choose a fish as your gender and you’ll read a passage detailing how you swim because that’s what you’re designed to do. That is, your body determines how you behave. But your character quickly realises that this is unsatisfying, and moves on to choices not restricted by biology. The metaphor here is pretty clear, I think.

The overall gender metaphor is painted in very broad strokes – that is, it never outright says “your character is a trans woman” or similar. I suppose it kind of has to be like that. Gender is such a personal thing, and there are so many personal ways of understanding and performing it, that focusing on one specific idea of it risks being exclusionary to somebody out there.

But I did appreciate one important bit of nuance in the metaphor. Something which occasionally goes missing from these kinds of discussions is an understanding that people may be not cis and also unable to express that in public yet. This is the scenario that My Gender Is a Fish appears to focus on. The opening passages imply a society with a conservative, binary view of gender, in which a woman who does a masculine-coded job and a man who can’t fulfil that job are ostracised. That is, the player character (probably) has no way of experimenting with gender outside of the forest. Indeed, neither of the final choices of gender have the player character coming out of the closet as trans or genderqueer. Both choices present gender as a work-in-progress, something to be nurtured and held close. (It’s not by accident that one of the final choices of gender is an egg, alluding to the term “egg” used in trans communities for a trans person who has yet to “hatch” and express themselves truly.)

Does the metaphor work, overall? I think so, yes. I recognised the sentiments behind it, and I think I understood and didn’t object to what it was getting at. But again, gender is so varied that I can only really talk about my own personal response to this game as a nonbinary person. My Gender Is a Fish worked for me on the whole and I liked it, but I did feel guarded towards it early on. At first blush, I was a little irritated with the purely binary choices, especially the opening choice of boy/girl. Having seen the whole game, in retrospect, it’s fine. The main character is positioned in a conservative society, so it makes sense that they start off with a binary understanding of gender. Using binary choices throughout the game with more and more abstract choices helps to structure the game and makes the shifting understanding of gender as clear as possible (and also made the game more manageable to write, I suspect). And the final choices are loaded with meaning and signifiers which are far more complex than “boy/girl”.

I think My Gender Is a Fish is a good game, and quite a sweet one. I’m not out to everyone in my family yet (Mum, Dad, please don’t read the previous paragraph), and it was personally meaningful to read a game that recognises that gender is fluid and valid even if you can’t fully realise it. In practical terms, it’s just very well constructed. Another game I’m glad to have played.

IFComp 2021 review: A Paradox Between Worlds (Autumn Chen)

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Played 13th October (last updated 1st October) using Opera
Time played: 2 hours, one ending reached

Some mid-game story spoilers follow. Short spoiler-free review: this game is very good.

A Paradox Between Worlds is a two-hour Choicescript game about fandom and queerness. You play as a blogger and fanfiction writer participating in the Nebulaverse fandom, which centres on a phenomenally successful franchise of sci-fi fantasy novels. The fandom seems pleasant enough at first, but when series author G.T. Macmillan says something she should not have said, tempers flare and the Discourse flows.

This is an ambitious game. Chen juggles three layers throughout. The foundational layer consists of excerpts from the Chronicles of the Shadow Nebula series, Macmillan’s work about a magical academy in which teenagers grow into their roles as guardians of the universe while battling dark forces. These sequences are fully linear – they’re already published (in-universe) and you can’t change them. But you can make choices for the second layer, the fanfiction you’re writing in which the cast of Shadow Nebula enter different fanfiction universes. These sequences alternate with the third layer, in which you read through messages and fandom blogs to see how your fanfic is being received and to check what else is new in the Nebulaverse.

The fandom part of the game will be instantly recognisable to anyone with a Tumblr account, not least because the background colour of these segments is tinted Tumblr-blue in a thoughtful presentation touch. Chen is clearly a veteran of the internet wars. This recreation and parody of Tumblr is pitch-perfect, from the ridiculous and occasionally foul usernames to the blogpost raising money for a project which is very clearly doomed to failure. ($16,000 to fund 120 minutes of animation? Good luck.) There are even special guest appearances from classic Tumblr shitposts like the tragically beautiful MRI scan. One of the best gags in the game is at the very beginning, where a quote from Aevee Bee about how stories can guide us and open new possibilities is immediately chased by the infamous “potterheads, grab your wands” post. (Thanks to Chen for providing sources in the walkthrough, by the way.) A Paradox Between Worlds is a deviously funny game, and it doesn’t even have to try very hard.

There’s another much more positive side to Tumblr that gets captured here. People rag on Tumblr for good reason, but for a long time it seemed to be the only major hub of online discussion of social justice and identity. Many gay and transgender teenagers made Tumblr blogs as a safe haven to talk, vent, and say things they could never say to their families for fear of the abuse they would receive. This is the beating heart of A Paradox Between Worlds. Its cast of blogs is operated by young LGBT people, especially transgender and non-binary people, and discussion of the Nebulaverse is tied up with exploration of their own identities. The very first fanfiction you read is one which suggests that the main character of the book series is a trans girl, and you may continue this theme in your own fanfiction if you so wish. Chen even gives you the option to decide whether your trans hero is closeted or not, which is a thoughtful touch.

All this makes it all the more tragic when G. T. Macmillan exposes her own transphobia. As you can guess, Macmillan is clearly based on J.K. Rowling, and many details in A Paradox Beyond Worlds exactly mirror Rowling’s transphobia and the utter failure of the larger media machine to take her to task for it. Suddenly, the fandom spaces become hostile. The vibes become “truly rancid”. Chen uses the Tumblr format to heartbreaking effect here, as you flick through posts in reverse chronological order so that angry and hurt posts about Macmillan are followed by cheerfully oblivious shipping discussion and theorycrafting, a snapshot of the fandom taken seconds before disaster. It is a perfect recreation of the shock and betrayal of learning that a creator you love hates you. (Possibly because it’s taken from real life.)

It’s probably worth mentioning how the Choicescript statistics get employed here. Your character stats in A Paradox Between Worlds represent your blog metrics and fandom interests. Your follower count is carefully tracked, and fluctuations are reported to you at the start of each browsing session. The types of post you reblog are also recorded – reblogging a GoFundMe post counts as Sympathy, for instance. This pushes you to think about what content you promote. One early choice I had to make in this game was whether to reblog the classic Colour of the Sky post, which comes with a warning that if you reblog it, “your followers will hate you”. (Of course I reblogged it.)

It’s all fun and games at first, but when the transphobia hits, I found myself thinking very hard about what to do. Reblog Nebulaverse posts at a time like this? I don’t think so. But what about my follower count? You can also make friends along the way with their own opinions and identities, and that influences what you might want to do. Reblogging a defense of Macmillan, for instance, is probably a bad idea when you’re comforting a transgender friend in the DMs.

I think what’s missing from this structure is the ability to assert yourself. You can interact meaningfully with NPCs in private conversations and you can make at least one powerful choice in the fanfiction segments, but the actual blogging part of the game is missing your own voice. You have options, but they’re usually a little passive: you can like, reblog, or ignore a post. “Reblog” is implicitly just a reblog without commentary. Yet there are different meanings to a reblog; the sassy and insulting reblog is an artform on Tumblr. It would be nice to distinguish between types of reblog: either reblog with a message of support or with a putdown, say. It would also be nice to assert yourself in your own posts, even if it’s just a button here and there that says “post something rude about Macmillan” or whatever. As it is, you feel like an observer of the fandom during some key moments rather than a participant in it. I was hesitant to reblog some things because I felt unable to explain myself, and so I did not trust that the NPCs of the game would recognise what I was trying to do.

But maybe that’s okay. Perhaps the trick here is that the blog metrics don’t matter. Whatever you do, Macmillan is going to wade in with her horrible opinions, and the fandom is going to catch fire. So I don’t think you ever have to worry about the stats beyond the personal warnings you get (i.e. saying a particular mutual will be upset if you reblog a post they’ve tagged “don’t reblog”). This is not a criticism of the game. I think realising that none of the blog metrics matter is a liberating moment. Who cares if you reblog the Colour of the Sky. No rules, just right.

I think that’s one of the key takeaways of this game: your metrics don’t matter, but your friends do. A Paradox Between Worlds features a cast of trans and genderqueer teenagers, and they put their trust in a story they have no control over, and they are betrayed badly, just as those trans teens who found solace in Harry Potter novels had that solace taken. And yet the Nebulaverse still connects them all. I found an ending in which you can be there for somebody in a terrible situation, and so have a real material effect on their life. Chen writes a biting satire of fandom discourse, but doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You can reach like-minded people through fandom, and then you can carve a space out and do some real good for you and your friends in there, whether the Macmillans and Rowlings of the world want you to or not.

My god, I could write and write about this game. I barely touched on the implementation (it’s good) or the fanfiction-writing parts of the game (these play out like a more traditional Choicescript game, and they’re also good) or the massive amounts of worldbuilding lore you can find in the stats (it’s incomprehensible, but deliberately so, I think). A Paradox Between Worlds is a very powerful and sympathetic piece of work, and worth anyone’s time.

IFComp 2021 review: Ghosts Within (Kyriakos Athanasopoulos)

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Played 8th October via Windows executable (last update 4th October)
Time played: 2 hours, no ending reached, 1/50 points (!)

Ghosts Within is a large, parser-based mystery game set in and around a coastal village. The player character wakes up in a dark forest, with no memory of how they got there. As they explore the nearby village looking for answers, they gradually learn about a tragic accident (or was it?) (an accident, I mean, not tragic) that took place there many years ago.

First, a caveat: this is a big game, and I am a slow player. I didn’t rush myself here, since I suspected that I wouldn’t reach the end of Ghosts Within anyway. As a result, most of my playtime was spent getting to grips with a very, very big map (and even then, I don’t think I saw half of the village). As for puzzle-solving, I only achieved 1 point out of 50. I didn’t find the light source you need for the dark rooms and passages until 1hr 50mins into my 2 hours. So… it is possible that I didn’t manage to see enough of Ghosts Within to judge it fairly. On the other hand, that’s the risk you take when you submit a slow-burning mystery set across a wide map to a competition which only lets judges assess 2 hours of play!

The big feature of this game is conversation. You are expected to talk to NPCs as much as possible to investigate the game’s many mysteries. For this, Ghosts Within uses an ASK/TELL system, with the extra wrinkle that asking about the same topic multiple times has the player character ask different questions. When a topic is exhausted, the ASK command will instead recap everything you’ve learned about that topic from that character. A TOPICS keyword suggests important subjects to ask about, but I found many topics that were not listed as a result of chasing subjects the NPCs mentioned while I asked about other things.

This works really well! It gives the player enough guidance to let them get a conversation going, but enough freedom to let them chase down clues and feel smart for spotting them. Adding to this, the NPCs all have connections and relations to each other. This means that asking a character about one topic may reveal something about another character, who you can then visit armed with this new information. The conversation system is Ghosts Within’s great strength as a mystery game, as you go down the list of suspects, gather information, and wheel back on older characters Columbo-style with just one more thing.

I do have one issue with the conversation, and that’s the dialogue itself. The character writing feels flat. The characterisation is very broad – you can tell someone loves the sea because he refers to every other character as “landlubbers,” and other examples. This makes characters appear one-dimensional at first glance. (I’m sure certain characters have a lot more to their personality than they let on, but I didn’t get that far into the mystery.) In addition, commas are overused during dialogue. This introduces many pauses, so that the conversation doesn’t feel like it flows naturally.

It’s a shame, because the writing outside of the dialogue is pretty neat. Environments are well-described and well-implemented. All scenery seems to be present and correct, and random environmental messages add a lot of atmosphere (especially the slightly sinister message in the village where you hear a loud sneeze from somewhere, even though there’s nobody about…). And although I didn’t see much of the plot, it was being spun out quite carefully, with a few interesting questions for the player to consider. Unfortunately, in the part of the game I saw, the plot never got around to properly addressing the protagonist’s memory loss. Although an early NPC hinted that their histories are intertwined, I wasn’t sure what motivated my character to investigate the game’s other mysteries.

I can’t comment on the puzzle design since I only solved one (finding a light source), but it was a reasonable solution and I’m pleased it was recognised. The puzzles and characters are scattered over an expansive map. I have no problem with this – it felt reasonable to have a big map for exploring a village and its landmarks, and the exits from each room are listed in the status bar to help you navigate. As slow as I went through the game, it was very smooth to play without any parser frustrations. I’m also impressed that Athanasopoulos added to the already-huge scope of the game by giving you three starting points to choose from. I think the intention is that you play the game multiple times, each time meeting a different character first (for me it was the enigmatic Silas Holt) and getting a different impression of what’s going on in the village. There must be some seriously impressive engineering behind the scenes to make this work.

Ghosts Within feels like a huge game, and it must have been a lot of bloody hard work to make. I regret that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I might have outside of IFComp, since I spent most of my time getting to grips with the map and barely scratched the surface of its mysteries. But I think this game is finding the audience it deserves, so I’m not too worried for it. (And if Athansopoulos is still doing diploma work, I wish them all the best!)

IFComp 2021 review: And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One (B.J. Best)

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Played 4th-5th October using Windows Git
Time played: 1hr 25mins, one good ending found

Some minor puzzle spoilers ahead.

And Then You Come to a House… is a parser-based adventure game for Glulx systems. In the late 80s, two friends, Emerson and Riley, meet up to play one last game together before Riley has to move cross-country. The game they play, Infinite Adventure, is a series of miniature text adventures which gradually get more bizarre and uncomfortable for both players. The game-within-a-game and the framing story are intertwined, and Emerson, controlled by the player (i.e. you, the real player) must hop between both to progress.

You know how sometimes a game feels like it was made just for you? Well, that’s what this felt like to me. I loved this game.

Let’s start with the game-within-a-game. Infinite Adventure is a series of very basic house-escape games, the sort you might make as an exercise when you’re learning to use Inform. The puzzle design is initially straightforward: an NPC wants an object which is lying two rooms away, that sort of thing. The games gradually evolve in scope and complexity as you progress. I think this is meant to evoke the evolution of early text adventure games, not that they were ever as simple as these. (There’s a cute in-game ABOUT command that attributes Infinite Adventure to “Adam Scotts”.)

But the deliberate simplicity belies a lot of sophistication in the technical details. Descriptions of objects and scenery are implemented thoroughly, with some randomisation. The author indicates that there are multiple solutions to puzzles, too, although I don’t think this is relevant until the late game. If it was just Infinite Adventure on its own, I think I would have enjoyed this entry.*

Sonner or later, though, the game fragments, gets a little weird, and Emerson and Riley find themselves stuck. Here, or at any time, the player can QUIT Infinite Adventure to hang out in Riley’s office and talk to her. They can even switch to playing something else on Riley’s computer, such as an RPG pastiche or a questionable beta of a medical education program that Riley’s mother is supposed to be testing. And Then You Come to a House opens up here. It feels exciting and uncontrolled and unpredictable, and it’s just plain fun to poke at these other programs. It’s implemented very smoothly, too. I didn’t encounter any bugs hopping between programs.

As well as talking to Riley, you can talk to NPCs within the computer programs. NPCs in this game (including Riley) are all rather basic, mostly staying in one room and acting as a vending machine for conversation or as an obstacle. So the dialogue writing has to do a lot of work to make these characters come alive. And it does! Conversation is a simple tree system which lets Emerson assert his own personality, and trees are wide and responsive enough to cover most things the player would like to explore. Riley in particular is a fun companion, teasing Emerson, venting about her family, and getting openly frustrated as Infinite Adventure kinda spins its wheels for a bit. I’m neglecting the framing story in my review here so as not to give too much away, but I buy into Riley and Emerson’s relationship and their own troubles enough for the framing story to hit home.

As the player talks to NPCs, they discover that the in-game NPCs are aware of their status as computer programs. Yet some of them also have lives outside of the program – they make observations about Riley, and they reminisce about past loves and losses. This demonstrates what I think is a major theme in And Then You Come to a House. Throughout the game, there is a slippage between the digital world of Infinite Adventure (and Riley’s other programs) and the physical “real” world of Riley’s office. In addition to the NPCs’ dual nature, the player finds that they can bring objects from one world to the next, and they must do so to solve some of the later challenges.

So what’s going on? Is this an imaginary retelling of the framing story? Is something supernatural going on? Are the NPCs real people in digitised forms, or digital people with fully-implemented backstories? The game offers no answers, and I think there’s evidence to support all of these theories. But the lack of answers is, of course, deliberate. Because the digital is real, at least to Emerson and Riley. They bond over a shared love (or, at least, tolerance) of text adventures, just as they bond over Journey albums and other multimedia. The ending I got suggests that the digital world will connect Riley and Emerson for many years to come. And Then You Come to a House is an interactive fiction about interactive fiction, but what at first looks like an examination of the evolution of text adventures quite seamlessly becomes a celebration of the text adventure as a shared experience, as part of the lives of players alongside the music they listen to and the films they watch and the books they read.

There’s lots to like that I haven’t managed to mention. The gags are good, the pacing is good, and the hints PDF is lovely just to look at, although I didn’t need it. Complaints? Maybe the cutscenes could each be a little shorter, though I don’t know what you’d cut. And maybe I’d have liked a little more puzzling within the game-within-a-game itself – I don’t quite buy Infinite Adventure’s early stages as a period piece of early text adventuring. Also, I don’t believe that two teenagers in the 1980s would listen to Journey and only Journey. (Not that they’re a bad band or anything.) But I can see how these might be compromises made to serve And Then You Come to a House as a whole. And as a whole, this is a very, very good work. I’m pleased to have played this.

* In fact, I couldn’t help but notice a certain other game on the IFComp ballot that might let me test the theory. It’s right at the end of my personal shuffle, but I may move it forward so I can review it sooner.

IFComp 2021 review: A Papal Summons, or The Church Cat (Bitter Karella)

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Played 3rd October using Opera
Time played: 1hr, two playthroughs

Some minor spoilers ahead, especially for the first half of the game.

A Papal Summons… is a short horror game programmed in Twine. You play a priest summoned by Pope Innocent VIII to the Vatican, bringing with you a miraculous cat who speaks Bible verses, especially the gory ones and the sexy ones. The game narrates your exploration of the Vatican to find His Holiness.

Early on in A Papal Summons, there is a scene that echoes Chandler Groover’s Taghairm, as you witness sacks full of cats being thrown onto bonfires. As the lead perpetrator explains, some cats are the familiars of witches, and witches depend on their familiars, so kill all the cats and you kill all the witches. I don’t know if this is a deliberate reference to Taghairm’s ritual or if it’s a side-effect of Bitter Karella and Groover drawing on the same historical material. Both games feature a similar cruel practice, but Taghairm‘s cruelty is being carried out by just two desperate people, whereas in A Papal Summons, cat-burning is being carried out on an industrial scale, and it is justified as being in the name of God.

I mention that because it’s quite a good distillation of the whole game, really. As the mention of Kafka in the blurb implies, A Papal Summons is (to me) about death and ruination as a function of bureaucracy – about how an institution with absolute power can easily, even willfully forget all ethics and morals and sense and destroy everything that can be othered. You don’t have to look very hard to find examples of that in 15th century Catholicism. It’s worth looking up some of the names you see in this game after playing, because a lot of them were real people – A Papal Summons is sort of a Kingdom Hearts for murderous Catholic shitheads. I don’t want to look up some of the nastier scenes in the game, because I’m worried they’ll turn out to be true as well.

So the game already has a lot – a LOT – of horror material to work with. But as the content warning might indicate, it chucks in a lot more horror on top – there’s supernatural horror, institutional racism and transphobia, sexual encounters, and a bit where you can eat some pasta. I’m not so sure it all works together. I think the pornography in particular doesn’t need to be there – you sort of stumble your way into it while exploring optional routes, and it feels like a hard left after the cat-burning bit. But hey, it is optional, and you can choose to run away from, or undo your way out of, the sexy bit before it gets going. So maybe it’s a bit harsh to complain about it.

In the second half of the game, as you move closer to your goal, the Twine format turns out to be perfect. A Papal Summons modulates its pacing carefully with single-sentence passages without much description and with just one link to the next passage. I usually complain when a Twine game doesn’t take advantage of CSS styling, but the default austere serif font on a black background is very effective here. It’s all about the text, and Karella is a very good writer – she doesn’t overwork the prose during the horror, she lets loose ends and little mysteries and dark implications fester in the player’s brain, and every so often she hits you with one beautiful paragraph. (I have the whole paragraph beginning “What is there to say about Parts Foreign?” saved in my notes.)

One complaint about the game mechanics. A Papal Summons does gesture to parser conventions with an inventory link that you can check during most passages. That’s odd to me, because this isn’t a puzzle game – the only items you use are ones you have no choice but to pick up. You can check on what the cat has to say, but it doesn’t have many different things to say, and it breaks the undo function (that is, you can’t undo past the last time you had the cat say something). And it’s a bit weird to be able to check the inventory during certain later scenes where Horrible Things are happening at a well-crafted pace which shouldn’t be broken. Again, it’s harsh to complain about something you can ignore, but I think the inventory does more harm than good to the horror.

My complaints are mostly about optional scenes and extras, but as for the core experience, I liked A Papal Summons a lot. It’s a very dark and grotesque game, and definitely not the kind of game I would choose to play if I were picking and choosing IFComp games, but it’s very effectively written and it uses its source material very well. If nothing else, I learned more about corruption within the 15th century Vatican than I ever wanted to know.