Month: Nov 2021

IFComp 2021 review: An Aside About Everything (Sasha)

~ wisprabbit ~ Leave a comment

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)

~ wisprabbit ~ Leave a comment

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.