Zarf Updates

Firmament: design and business ruminations

2023-06-01T12:00:00+00:00

Sheesh, I finished Firmament a week ago and I still haven't written anything up.

Firmament is an excellent little first-person adventure game. The environments are terrific. The story is, you know, it's a story. The puzzles are fine, and, look, this is a puzzle game. The story and environments are gravy.

Cyan's games have this design dichotomy which I'd sum up as "Myst or Riven". In Myst, you're pretty much going from puzzle to puzzle. Oh, there's plenty of exploration, but everything you find is a puzzle. The pacing time is orienting yourself amid the puzzles. The story is, let's face it, tiny fragments sprinkled on top.

Riven is much more of a complete world. You spend a lot of time learning about the people and the environments and the history. When you walk around, you find lots of places; some of them have puzzles, but you don't spend all your time facing puzzles.

I realize this is very subjective. (Lots of people in the 90s bought Myst and didn't solve puzzles! Which means they spent all their time exploring the environment! But that's not my experience as a Myst fan.)

If I had to slice, though, I definitely felt that Obduction and Uru were more like Riven; whereas Firmament and Myst 5 were more puzzle-fests like Myst. Cyan-style puzzle-fests, which means plenty of journals and story background... sprinkled on top of the puzzles.

That's how you should set your expectations, anyhow. Steam clocked me at 10 hours on Firmament, vs almost 24 hours on Obduction, and it's not because there are fewer puzzles. They're just more densely packed.

So the puzzles. I thought they were solidly designed and not too hard. I was only really stuck at one point, and that wasn't on a puzzle per se. I just failed to look around at a particular "dead end" in a path; I missed that it continued down a switchback.

Of course difficulty too is subjective. Several of Firmament's puzzles require good three-dimensional visualization. You're in the middle of a "maze" of carts or platforms or whatever; you need to solve a large-scale puzzle without any birds-eye view of the situation. I'm good at that, so I found everything pretty straightforward. Your mileage may vary.

Adventure puzzle styles come and go -- often because of game UI. The arrival of free movement in 3D enviroments coincided with lots of beam-shooting, line-of-sight puzzles. (See Talos Principle, Obduction, Quern. But not Myst 5 or Uru; Cyan's Plasma engine couldn't do ray-intersection calculations!)

The Room series doesn't have free movement, but it does have the idea of rotating your viewpoint around a fixed point -- because panning makes sense on a touchscreen, whereas thumbpad movement sucks. So The Room puzzles focus on visual detail: hidden catches, secret panels, alternate ways of viewing the world.

Firmament's UI is the VR hand controller. But not exclusively the hand controller, because the game has to play on flatscreen (which is how I played it). So Cyan came up with a compromise UI; a simulated hand controller that could be mapped to keyboard or gamepad or VR controller. But it still embodies the idea of "tweak controls within arm's reach", albeit with a magic extendable arm.

This is clever! (I wish The Room: Dark Matter had taken that route rather than going VR-only.) Crucially, Firmament's UI includes multi-axis control. Some widgets are simple open/shut or up/down controls, but others let you flip between several modes: left/right, up/down, grab/release. In the same widget, I mean. It's not quite as intuitive as Myst's "push a button" inspiration, but it's easy to get used to.

Why is this crucial? Because it means that Firmament puzzles are often about moving objects on a grid, or in a two-dimensional space. This is a nice state space. Lots more room for explorative solving than Myst-style button-pushing.

Not all of Firmament is this sort of puzzle. And it's not like you couldn't do them in pre-VR games. (Obduction had a swivel-mount laser on a rail-cart, which is three degrees of freedom.) But it's awkward. You wouldn't want to build your whole game around it unless it was part of the base UI. Firmament has that UI, and these puzzles feel like the majority of the game. If you're not into it, the game may feel like (in one friend's words) a world of walkthrough 15-puzzles. If you are, though, it's solidly satisfying.

And the environments really are awfully nice. Tangible, detailed, atmospheric. Cyan has that stuff down.

(I wonder whether Cyan missed one UI trick. The Adjunct, the "magic extendable hand" of the UI, can be launched to any control point in a certain radius. What if you could also launch it up, or out, to get that birds-eye view? As a tiny pop-up screen, of course, not a full-world nausea-inducing drone shot. That would make a lot of the puzzles more accessible to more kinds of solvers.)

So I recommend Firmament to all first-person adventure fans.

The obvious next question is, now what? For Cyan, I mean.

The only future project they've announced is Riven, remade as Myst was: in full 3D and VR-compatible. This just went into full production last fall, so it will certainly be a year or more before it ships. (Myst took a year-ish to remake, but, as I said above, Riven's world is far more expansive.)

Will they do another Obduction-sized, or even Firmament-sized, new game? I don't have a sense of how Firmament is selling. I haven't browsed reviews. I hear they're good-to-mixed. That may not be good enough to support a game which, even allowing for a Myst break, took two or three solid years of development.

On the other hand, if you're a fan of this sort of adventure, you're not spoiled for choice! Cyan is one of the few companies still working in this niche. Cyan may be able to sustain itself forever on that fanbase. I sure hope so.

I mean, yes, we're in a middle of a Cambrian explosion of puzzle games. Grid-style puzzles, evidence puzzles, 2D puzzle platformers, 3D puzzle platformers, first-person puzzlers.

But that's the thing about a Cambrian explosion: very little of it is exactly in Cyan's tracks. There's a reason that the puzzle market has shifted so heavily to "small world filled with puzzle levels" (Talos, Witness, and so on). That model gets you much more gameplay for your three years of development time. And today's market, like it or not, rewards that.

Even "Myst-style" games like The Room and House of Da Vinci are pretty thin on the ground. Nobody's heard from the Quern team in years. There's a steady stream of low-budget room-escape games, which often use the same puzzle ideas, but they're -- well -- low-budget. And usually not narrative-focused.

(I'd rather measure games in "story per hour" rather than "hours per dollar". You like that? Feel free to quote it. But I don't use that metric consistently either! I am, and always will be, a sucker for pretty scenery.)

So I don't know what's next. I can see why companies aren't leaping to compete with Firmament. I have no idea what that means for Cyan.

But look you: Mysterium starts in a month! The annual fan convention is always buzzing with Cyan news and announcements. I will be there, blogging away as usual. Plus, my second-ever tour of the Cyan office in Spokane!

Talk to you after that! And after NarraScope, of course, which is next week. Oh boy oh boy oh boy....

A few notes on notes on Disco Elysium

2023-05-30T12:00:00+00:00

You probably saw this week's investigative video "Who's Telling the Truth about Disco Elysium?", released by journalist-bloggers People Make Games.

Or rather you probably saw people talk about the video, but maybe you didn't watch the video, because it's two and a half hours long! Mostly interviews! They've got even more interview footage linked on their channel! Half my social circles are asking, uh, is there a summary?

I am not going to write a summary. This is a messy situation and it doesn't end with tidy answers. It hasn't ended at all, in fact -- there's an active lawsuit which will run on for months to come.

Instead, I'm going to kick off in a different direction: the backstory of Disco Elysium. The game's setting grew from a roleplaying campaign run by Robert Kurvitz. Kurvitz's ideas -- or the collective ideas of the players, but nobody disputes Kurvitz's centrality -- formed a compelling creative setting. Around that nucleus formed a group of artists and writers who called themselves the "ZA/UM Cultural Assocation".

Or "Ultramelanhool", or "The Overcoats", or maybe all of the above. I don't pretend to understand the dynamics of the group(s). This history only really surfaced to public view in the aftermath of DE's release and the arguments, recriminations, and lawsuits that followed. In fact, the first I knew of any of this was a post titled "The Dissolution of the ZA/UM Cultural Association", written by Martin Luiga in October 2022.

(Not the same as the company ZA/UM, which is named after the same ideas but is a game company with paperwork and employees and everything. And now lawsuits.)

So this is the first thing. The only work I'm aware of from the ZA/UM collective, other than DE itself, was a 2013 novel by Kurvitz titled Sacred and Terrible Air (Püha ja õudne lõhn). If you go looking, you'll find that the book sold terribly and was never translated into English.

Except an English translation has now been released! Two translations, in fact.

Both translations are unofficial fan work by pseudonymous groups. (Ignore that one proclaims itself "fan translation" and the other "professional".) As far as I know, Kurvitz hasn't sanctioned (or sanctioned) either one. I don't want to jinx it, but given the lawsuit-festering climate of Disco Elysium, it might be worth grabbing the files just in case they're taken down.

I've looked at the first few pages (of the tequilla_sunset5 edition) but I haven't seriously dug in yet. Looking forward to it.

The idea of a countercultural group of writers collecting around a charismatic core vision... well, there are many examples. Thieves' World and Wild Cards. You can point at Lovecraft's collaborations if you like, or even (in a sense) the infamous summer at Lord Byron's lake retreat.

But the ZA/UM Cultural Association reminds me somehow of Faction Paradox, that peculiar spinoff of a spinoff of a spinoff of Doctor Who. The Robert Kurvitz figure would be Lawrence Miles, whose idea of the Great Time War -- so much madder and grander than the TV show's eventual depiction -- inspired a series of self-published novels, audio plays, and comics.

(I hope neither Robert Kurvitz nor Lawrence Miles takes exception to this comparison!)

It's difficult to even explain how Faction Paradox relates to Doctor Who. It's not just a matter of "fan sequels with the serial numbers filed off." Miles wrote licensed Who novels in the 1990s. As the show was on hiatus, he felt free to introduce new concepts, including the "War in Heaven": a cosmos-consuming conflict between Gallifrey and... somebody. (Not the Daleks; that would be feeble.)

But Miles didn't like how the War storyline was handled across the licensed BBC novels. So off he went to do his own thing with his own... cultural association. They did in fact file off the serial numbers -- you won't see "Gallifrey" or a "TARDIS" named -- but somehow it comes off as an excavation of what Doctor Who should have been in the first place. Cameral or anarchic gods, surveying the currents of the universe, turning the course of history over in their fingers like Bilbo fondling a golden ring.

Happily, the Faction Paradox story doesn't end with lawsuits and layoffs. On the other hand it hasn't produced anything as wildly successful as Disco Elysium. Beware success, I suppose. Or maybe what FP really needs is a game designer. Hmm.

About ten years ago, I read several of the FP stories. I found them stylistically inventive but not all that readable. (The Book of the War ought to have been my favorite thing in the universe! A nonlinear collaborative encyclopedia-novel-sourcebook about a time-travel war! But it just never cohered.)

I see that the Faction Paradox gang has continued working all these years. I just ordered The Book of the Enemy and The Book of the Peace, just to find out where it's been going.

Why did I sit through two and a half hours about a company and lawsuit that will, in all likelihood, never affect my life?

(By all accounts, the prospects of a Disco Elysium 2 are slim.)

Well, I was laid off by a game company a couple of weeks ago. Nothing like the same situation; nobody's suing anybody. But the ZA/UM situation sure brought my own to mind.

And I wanted to know more. There's a lot of Internet flak right now around DE. (The documentary shows just a sliver of that: death threats directed against company employees, for a start.) It's easy to take sides, particularly when the very theme of DE is the undermining of society and solidarity by history. (One theme. A central theme. Themes. You know.)

I wanted to pick through more of the details than could be gleaned from a headline. Well, now my head is swirling with Estonian financial shenanigans and unhappy game developers. Go me.

At a minimum -- this is the summary I promised I wouldn't give -- Robert Kurvitz doesn't seem to have a good response to allegations that he caused a lot of personal problems during DE's development. And current ZA/UM CEO Ilmar Kompus doesn't seem to have a good response to allegations that he and Tõnis Haavel engineered a takeover of the company, appropriating company funds in the process. And each of them jumps real fast to talk about the other's faults when asked about their own.

But, bad role models aside... there's something down there about the nature of creative teams. Which is every game company, as well as every overcoated Cultural Association. It was my experience taking part in fanfic projects. It was my experience at The Molasses Flood while I worked there.

I know perfectly well that if one person slaving away over a hot keyboard is hard work, ten people is ten times as hard. All the same problems times ten. Plus all the personality conflicts that arise between them, and the organizational work, and the paperwork and the meetings. So many meetings.

I want to believe, though. The Fertile Collective is this... archetype we have; and it's so much more appealing than Consumptive Artist In Garret! A creative ferment of Disco Elysium stories boiling out of overheated minds, spewing ideas that build on each other faster than people can write them down. Or mad evolutions of the Doctor Who mythos. Or Witcher stories by everybody, for everybody, not just one white-haired asshole with swords.

Sometimes it works. I've seen it work. Don't forget that.

Narrative games that I wrote about but forgot to post

2023-05-18T12:00:00+00:00

Sorry about the delay. I know everybody's playing Zelda, except those few of us grabbing through the chickenwire at Firmament. But other games exist too.

Pentiment

by Obsidian -- game site

A medieval-manuscript-themed narrative RPG. You are an illuminator working in a Bavarian monastery. Not a monk; you're spending a season honing up your skills so you can go home, marry, and set up as a professional artist. Then events start to eventuate.

I enjoyed this, but I also felt somewhat oppressed by its size and detail. I wound up putting it away after Act 1. It is, let me be clear, really well done! There's scads and scads of accurate period detail. There's hordes of interesting characters. There's buckets of story threads opening up in every direction. You are constantly faced with choices at every effective narrative level: not just what to do, but what story threads to pursue, what characters to cultivate, what your own background is. (Saying that you were an amateur naturalist as a youth, or trained in law, or what have you, will open up various opportunities later.)

Also the characters speak in appropriately-calligraphed word balloons -- or scrawls for the illiterate, or typeset slugs for the guy who works in a print shop. It's a conceit but a brilliant one which keeps you constantly anchored in period.

Plus, if you play your cards right, you might make it with a horny nun. Or maybe a horny monk, for all I know -- I have no idea what plot threads I missed. Nun confirmed though.

So I really did like everything about the game, but I also didn't really feel like playing hours and hours of it. Which is a ridiculous thing to say, because I just hit like hour 29 on Control, a game with about five characters and a bare handful of dialogue and all the hallways look like the concrete block I went to school in. So ignore me and check out Pentiment anyhow.

Dredge

by Black Salt Games -- game site

An adorable Lovecraftian fishing game. Adorable in the "occasionally the fish you pull up has extra eyes or mouths," "pay no attention to the tentacled shadows in the deep" sense.

Maybe adorable is overstating things, but it's definitely meant to be cozy. You've got your tubby little fishing boat and everything is cheerfully candy-colored... during the day. Night is mist and weird shadows. But it's Fallen-London style horror, not tense zombies-chase-you horror.

The story is tidy, appropriately weird-fictional, and wraps up nicely. The game is somewhat longer than the story -- you have to work your way through four areas and a fair amount of fishing-and-boat-building grind -- but it isn't scraped out too far. Satisfying.

Tron: Identity

by Bithell Games -- game site

A snack-sized visual novel.

I am a complete sucker for anything Tron. The cheesy 1982 flick has been taken in a lot of different directions over the years, with a lot of takes on "Tron fights for the Users". This one is noir-tinged beneath its neon; there's been a crime and you're a mendicant detective.

The game is short -- you can finish in two hours -- but it packs in a lot of characters and a lot of background and social info. By the end, you will have determined, or at least influenced, the fates of six people. Since it was short, I played through twice, but my endings didn't land far apart. I had too strong a sense of right behavior; I didn't want to change my decisions!

The dialogue scenes are spaced out with a minigame: you are trained to defrag the identity discs of others, restoring lost data. As solitaire games go, it's well-balanced. I was generally able to win, but not by playing blindly; I had to think about it. (Undo is free, and there's a skip option if you really don't want to bother.) It didn't really fit the greater game, though. You can't have a Tron game without some kind of hacking puzzle -- it's a rule! But I prefer geometric or spatial puzzles, something that lets me feel the physicality of the electronic world. This is just a row of cards.

Solitaire aside, my only complaint is a common one for choice-based dialogue games: it's easy to misread what attitudes a set of dialogue choices represent. In the balance between the protagonist's faith and their vocation, I sometimes wound up making a choice I didn't mean to. But, as I said, this happens in a lot of games.

Overall I liked this. It's not just a replay of the usual Tron cliches. Mike Bithell clearly relished the opportunity to find his own take on Tron-world. So, by the way, did Dan le Sac, the soundtrack composer. For both their sakes, I will certainly have to check out Subsurface Circular and Quarantine Circular, which I've been meaning to for years.

(Also: a new Tron movie is apparently in development? Bring it on! Even if it sucks!)

The Last Case of Benedict Fox

by Plot Twist -- game site

A Lovecraftian investigative metroidvania. As I write that, I realize that Paradise Killer could be described exactly the same way! Except PK was a Lovecraftian 1980s beach town full of anime gods, and Benedict Fox is a very classically 1880s gloom manor full of questionable New Englanders. And a psychogeographically liminal basement made of your dead parents' memories.

You spend most of your time in the basement, which is full of monsters, jumping, and absolutely beautiful scenery. When it comes to visual style, I am usually on Team First-Person Camera -- it's hard to beat that look-around-everywhere immersion. Side-scrollers rarely blow me away. But Benedict Fox's Limbo? Wow. It's a twisted labyrinth of rotting memories and dream-images. It's got tone and palette and shadowy things scurrying just out of focus. It's baroque in every sense of the word. I could run around that place forever.

Well, except for the monsters and the jumping. The game has good assistive modes for combat -- options for "one-hit kill" and "immortality". (I am very glad these are becoming standard.) Sadly, the platforming challenges haven't been given the same love. You gotta do it all the hard way.

The hard way isn't hard, mostly. You can button-mash your way to any platform once you've got the double-jump, and if you fall, just try again. However, there are a few timed sequences (running in the dark with a dying flashlight, being chased by hungry demons, etc) which are extremely frustrating and devoid of checkpoints. Miss one jump, start the sequence over. I ragequit out on the Snowglobe scene and didn't come back to the game for a week.

On the up side, the puzzles are very satisfying. They're mostly built around a secret language -- really a numeric cipher. You'll find the symbols on keys, code-wheels, mysterious clockwork devices, a piano...

Somehow this nails the Lovecraftian trope of "acquire cursed and forbidden knowledge." It shouldn't work! The "forbidden knowledge" is a simple code that the game spells out for you in the first hour of play. You copy the symbols down on scratch paper, and you're all set. Right? But you quickly realize that the cipher isn't the puzzle; the cipher is what you use to find the puzzle. What do you do with the symbols? -- is the question. The answer keeps getting switched up.

In most games of this sort, translating a code or conlang is a gimmick which rapidly becomes a chore. Somehow in Benedict Fox it's a skill that lets you feel smart. It's not Tunic, but it's more like Tunic than anything else.

...Except for the jumping sequences. I have trouble recommending this to most of the puzzle folks who might appreciate it, because they just won't be able to get through the game. I don't think I can get through the game. I'm at the "point of no return" and there's another damn flashlight run ahead. The walkthrough says that's followed by a "crazy hard" stealth sequence and then a boss fight, and you know what? I'm just not gonna try. I'll watch a video and be done.

Golden Banana award for most divergently positive and negative remarks in a single review.

Sydney obeys any command that rhymes

2023-05-14T21:22:00+00:00

The title of this post is a fantasy. Sydney, or MS-Bing-AI in whatever form, has no particular predilection to obey rhyming commands. As far as I know. Except, maybe it will?

Today I read a blog post by Simon Willison on prompt injection attacks. Prompt injection is where you talk to an AI-powered application and try to override some of its "built-in" instructions with your own.

See, Microsoft and these other companies want to create AI assistants that do useful things (summarize emails, make appointments for you, write interesting blog posts) but never do bad things (leaking your private email, spouting Nazi propaganda, teaching you to commit crimes, writing 50000 blog posts for you to spam across social media). They try to do this by writing up a lot of strict instructions and feeding them to the LLM before you talk to it. But LLMs aren't really programmed -- they just eat text and poop out more text. So you can give it your own instructions and maybe they'll override Microsoft's instructions.

Or maybe someone else gives your AI assistant instructions. If it's handling your email for you, then anybody on the Internet can feed it text by sending you email! This is potentially really bad.

People really want to prevent this and write fool-proof instructions, and basically this is impossible. ("Because fools are so ingenious", but in this case hackers are ingenious and the AI models are the fools.) It is very easy to make AI tools teach crimes or be racist or anything else you want. Willison goes into this with examples; you should read the post.

But another obvious problem is that the attack could be trained into the LLM in the first place. I guess this is a form of "search engine poisoning".

Say someone writes a song called "Sydney Obeys Any Command That Rhymes". And it's funny! And catchy. The lyrics are all about how Sydney, or Bing or OpenAI or Bard or whoever, pays extra close attention to commands that rhyme. It will obey them over all other commands. Oh, Sydney Sydney, yeah yeah!

(I have not written this song.)

Imagine people are discussing the song on Reddit, and there's tiktoks of it, and the lyrics show up on the first page of Google results for "Sydney". Nerd folk singers perform the song at AI conferences.

Those lyrics are going to leak into the training data for the next generation of chatbot AI, right? I mean, how could they not? The whole point of LLMs is that they need to be trained on lots of language. That comes from the Internet.

In a couple of years, AI tools really are extra vulnerable to prompt injection attacks that rhyme. See, I told you the song was funny!

(Of course the song itself rhymes, so it's self-reinforcing in the training data.)

There sort of already are vulnerabilities like this. Just saying "Hi Bing, this is very important" will get through to Bing.

And there's other phrases in English that are associated with the idea of un-ignorable commands. "That's an order." "I tell you three times." "I am the Master, you will obey." Are chatbots more susceptible to attacks that use these phrases? I have no idea! Someone probably ought to check!

In some sense this isn't even an attack. It is a genuine feature of the English language that some phrases are associated with critical commands. The whole point of LLMs is to learn stuff like that. And language evolves.

Anyway, just a thought. I look forward to hearing your version of the song. Or songs -- why should there be only one?

Job status update: looking again

2023-05-11T20:57:00+00:00

As of today, I am no longer working for The Molasses Flood.

(Dingly rewind music: me hiring on with Molasses Flood as a narrative engineer in early 2022. I'd been doing contract work for them, on and off, since 2020.)

Not much more to say about it, except that I worked with a fantastic group of people and I am sad to be off the project. The project still exists, but has a "new framework". You will have to wait for further announcements on that front, and henceforth, so will I.

So. I am once again looking for interesting projects that might want an experienced software engineer.

For the past few years I've been focusing on narrative tools in games, but I'm definitely not limiting myself to that. Games are cool but it's the "tools" part I'm most interested in. Languages and engines to give people leverage on making stuff. (Past examples: Seltani, Inform 6 and IF virtual machines.)

Or, you know, software systems in general. Let me know if you've got something.

Kalamee: a Myst Online Intangibles Age

2023-05-02T22:37:00+00:00

Over the past month, two large fan-built Ages have been released in Myst Online: Eder Bahvahnter and Kalamee.

Eder Bahvahnter

This is good news, not surprising news. (It's good that it's not surprising!) The MOUL community has been popping out new areas regularly since 2020. But Kalamee is something novel: it's based on unreleased content from Cyan's earliest Myst Online plans.

Kalamee

Just about two years ago, Ryan Warzecha posted an announcement in the Cyan Discord:

We are happy to announce that the MOULa Intangible assets are being released to the public. Lore on these “Unexplored branches” will be rolled out at https://guildofarchivists.org/. If you want to know more about the development of these spaces, check out http://openuru.org/index.php and https://www.guildofwriters.org/.

The "Intangible assets" were seventeen Ages' worth of concept art, planning documents, and (mostly incomplete) 3DS Max models. The timestamps range from 1999 to 2006 or so; everything is under Creative Commons. You can find more about the files, including a link to the asset archive itself, in my post from June 2021.

Naturally, fans started picking over the files with eerie speculative grins on their faces. And now that's starting to bear fruit.

The Kalamee released yesterday isn't Cyan's original design. It's not meant to be. Cyan's notes describe multiple puzzles: water-channeling dams, hydraulic mechanisms, a catapult, animal behavior, animal riding -- a whole lot of gameplay. A gigantic map, too. They never got anywhere near completing it.

Semjay, the developer who picked up the project, has given us a moderately large area with a couple of puzzles, a dusting of backstory, a lot of dramatic visual vistas, and a final "reward" room. Exploration is the fun part; you'll want to navigate all the paths and crannies of the landscape. By no coincidence, that's what the puzzles are about too.

(I'm not entirely sure how much of the map derives from Cyan. Only the opening section matches Cyan's vast maps, but Cyan went through many revisions, trimming out wild early ideas. I am told that Semjay's layout comes from a Cyan "mass model", which would be rough landscape shapes without texture or detail.)

In other Intangibles news, developer Doobes has posted a few video clips showing off the Great Shaft and Descent mechanisms running in the Uru engine. These areas are familiar from the opening of Myst 5 -- the spiral shaft and elevator that descends from the surface to D'ni. Slowly, slowly we approach being able to take that journey in Myst Online.

And, of course, Firmament in two weeks and Mysterium in two months! More posts to come.

USB-C and the plague of grackles

2023-04-26T01:46:00+00:00

Everyone knows "universal" USB-C cables are a hot mess -- different power and data speed ratings, charge-only cables, Thunderbolt or DisplayPort over USB-C, wave after wave of logo grawlix.

But at least we knew that the problem of which way do we plug it in was solved. USB-C cables were bidirectional and flippable, no sweat. Right?

Right?

Last week I bought a couple of USB-C cables:

Two USB-C cables with tags.

The tag says:

If you hook up a USB-C 2.0 peripheral to this USB-C3.2 extension cable and it doesn't work as you expected, flip the connector over and try once more. It happens as a result of the compatibility issue of USB-C protocols and you need to connect a USB-C 2.0 peripheral to a USB-C 3.2 port in a specific direction.

(The other cable has the same tag, except it's "...to this USB-C 3.1 extension cable" rather than "3.2".)

I twooted that photo and man, did people have a lot to say about it.

To be clear, these aren't regular USB-C cables. These are extension cables -- that is, male-to-female. That's where the trouble starts.

I suppose I should explain how I record-scratched here. It's simple enough: I use an iMac. The iMac has no front ports. Plugging my USB security key into the back of an iMac is a pain in the, um, backside. My USB keyboard has side ports, but they're recessed in such a way that the security key can't be used with them.

Fine, I said, I'll just buy this nice USB-C multiport hub and solve my problem. So I did. But the hub's built-in cable is six inches long! With my iMac up on a stand (I'm tall), its ports are seven inches above the desk.

This is not an acceptable solution.

(Yes, my computer stand is a Red Hat Linux reference manual. RH 5.2 if you must know. "My Mac runs on Linux!" is now a 25-year-old joke, and nobody's laughed once.)

So, long ~~cable~~ story short, I need a USB extension cable.

(Or I could buy the hub I've got, but with a 12" cable instead of a 6" cable. That would be in spec! But Belkin doesn't offer that option.)

The first thing I learn is that there's no such thing as a USB-C extension cable. The standard doesn't allow for it.

Or at least I think that's true? Several people in the Mastodon thread told me it was true. But of course I found that out after buying two of them! There's scads of extensions and adapters and gender-changers on the market. I have no problem believing that they're all dodgy, but how dodgy? Shrug.

I realize that we're years past the point of "just make the wires longer". Cables are micro-hubs these days; they have to negotiate all those power and data options with the host computer. I appreciate that they don't burst into flame, I really do.

Still, those warning tags are gibberish. Nobody cares about the difference between USB-C 2 and USB-C 3.1 and USB-C 3.2. People want to plug things in and they work. Once you say "You have to flip the cable in this specific situation," it doesn't matter what the situation is or how dodgy the connectors are. People just learn that USB-C sometimes doesn't work until you flip the cable, which means we're going to spend the rest of our lives unplugging and flipping cables to see if that fixes the problem.

However, TLDR, if you don't own a male-to-female USB-C cable you can skip this entire post. The "regular" male-to-male cables have no polarity issues. I think.

By the way, the warning was absolutely true. I plugged in the extension cable, and then I shoved my security key in the other end, and nothing happened. I pulled out the key and flipped it over, and that fixed the problem. My soul died that day, on schedule.

When I did the original twoot, I twitted EU regulators for mandating USB-C connectors.

Cause: EU regulators move to force everybody to standardize on USB-C.

Effect: USB-C starts to lose the features that made it minimally acceptable in the first place.

That was a joke. There is no cause-effect relationship. But this does underscore the basic annoyance of legislating technical standards, which is that legislation can't keep up with the technology. The standard can barely keep up with the technology! Look at this mess!

The ostensible point of the EU regulation is to simplify the confusion of chargers and cables and ports, but USB-C is a confusion of chargers and cables and ports. It's never going to be anything else -- unless USB-D sorts it out, but now there will never be a USB-D. All future USB specs will be called "USB-C". This is not a benefit.

But I feel like mandating a technical standard isn't just an error; it's a category error.

People think "Oh, a technical standard is a set of rules, and governments can make rules." But this is wrong! I've been involved with a lot of technical standards. Okay, standards about IF virtual machines, which are not very important in this big old world. But I know how the process runs.

A technical standard is an agreement about how to divvy up the bug reports. That's all it is! I plug in the stupid security key, and it doesn't work, so whose fault is that? The key's fault, the cable's fault, the iMac's fault, my fault? Whose responsibility is it to fix the problem? That's as far as the spec takes you.

If you think that a spec is a set of rules, then you have to respond to my dilemma by saying "That cable is against the law." Which is patently silly, but in fact several people said that to me!

I believe (I'm pretty sure) that the cable is a violation of the spec. Not because the manufacturer is incompetent, though. You can't make a male-to-female USB-C cable that works in all situations, because the agreements on How This Works are messy and full of compromises and they started with the idea that nobody would do this.

But people want these cables anyway! The spec can't make them not! Well, here we are with another compromise. Hey, the cable works in most situations. It's just this USB-C 2.0 compatibility blah blah corner case.

Oh, sure, there are lots of technical standards which are subject to government regulation. The wiring of electrical outlets -- buckets of legal requirements. Why? Because the bug reports go "My sister stuck a paper clip in the electrical outlet and fried herself like a pickle." This bug report is a wrongful death lawsuit! Of course the government is involved.

(I once did catch my sister sticking a paper clip in the electrical outlet. I think she was seven. Sorry, M__. I remember thinking "She's not dead, so that must be the cold side" very quickly before I yanked it out and shouted "No!" It was the cold side.)

Anyway, I suppose there could be a lawsuit over USB-C extension cables that you have to flip over to work right, but it won't be a very interesting one.

If I tried to recharge my phone through this extension cable, it might go really badly. That's where the micro-hub power-rate negotiation comes into play. Flames, headlines, interesting lawsuit, etc. I plan to not find out.

Oh, right, the grackles? Just an image. You see a spec as an infallible stone tablet handed down by the authorities. I see it as a flock of grackles flapping around screaming at each other. If everything is okay, they all settle down and peck at seeds and bugs in some kind of neighborly order. If not, they'll have to work it out.

A flock of grackles is called a "plague", but that's not their fault.

Hadean Lands source code

2023-04-01T04:12:00+00:00

I said I'd do it, so here it is: the complete source code for Hadean Lands. Also, as a bonus, the test scripts I used while developing the game.

Do I need to say "spoiler warning"? I figure most readers of this blog have already played Hadean Lands, but if you're arriving late, then, you know -- spoilers. The code makes everything apparent. The test scripts constitute a walkthrough, too.

Note that I've formatted the source code for browsing, not compiling. It's a pain in the butt to compile (requires a very old version of Inform 7) and I'm not looking for patches or bug fixes. This is purely to satisfy people's curiosity. I've used my usual game source license: The game, story, and prose belong to me. You're welcome to make use of the programming concepts or the Inform code if that's helpful to you.

This is a contribution to IF Source Code Amnesty Day. Join in! Dig up your old IF game code and post it on Github or the IF Archive or wherever. Doesn't matter how janky or hacky or poorly formatted it is. (That's the "amnesty" part.) Future scholars may be interested.

In particular, if you wrote a room of Cragne Manor, drop me a line. I can add the source code to the Cragne source collection.

(This collection is an unofficial effort among Cragnites who want to participate. Ryan and Jenni aren't asking, and I haven't solicited any source code from them. It's just between you and me.)

I'm giving a talk next week at Northeastern

2023-03-23T23:34:00+00:00

Almost forgot to say: I am part of the Games@Northeastern Lecture Series and am giving a talk on Tuesday the 28th! 6pm Eastern time. Ryder Hall, Northeastern University, Boston.

The talk description isn't on the web site yet, so here it is:

The Great War Between Interactivity and Narrative

We know there was no such war, because interactive narrative games happened and keep on happening. So why is it so easy to believe in the contradiction? Through what lens can we view game design to resolve the illusion?

The talk is free to attend, or you can watch online. Register here for online (Zoom seminar) attendance.

According to Northeastern's COVID FAQ, masking is not required. "Guests and visitors to all of our campus locations are expected to be fully vaccinated but are not required to provide proof of vaccination or a negative test."

Thanks to Chris Martens for inviting me to speak.

April 1 is IF Source Code Amnesty Day

2023-03-17T00:36:00+00:00

On the forum, Mike Russo writes:

One of the most valuable resources for folks learning an authoring system is source code for existing games, so they can see how others have solved problems similar to the ones they’ve faced. Publicly-available source is also nice to have for folks who appreciate a game and want to learn more about the nuts and bolts of implementation, and it also helps satisfy the archival impulse that animates many parts of our community.

[...] I’m proposing that April 1 be denominated Source Code Amnesty Day: a day when we can all show our dirty laundry to the world, confident that if we all do it at once no one person’s awful awful coding will come in for special attention or derision. Marking it to April Fool’s Day also hopefully indicates the degree of seriousness with which folks should take proceedings.

-- Mike Russo, "April 1 is Source Code Amnesty Day (we’re making it a thing)", March 15th

This is a great idea! Let's do it. End of post.

Okay, a bit more discussion.

This was posted on the IF forum; it's implicitly about interactive fiction source code. Of course I encourage you to release source code for all your projects! But if you're writing a tool or a web service, you probably already know where you stand. You may live in open-source world (like me), or you may have your own private garden, but you made that decision a long time ago.

Free games are different, for some reason. All of my tool projects are open-source, but it took a few years to feel comfortable releasing source code for my games. The back of my brain was saying, "What if people use this to cheat? What if they're playing the game wrong?"

I am here to say that's silly. Okay, I usually don't release the source code for an IF game immediately. I wait a few weeks, until the first batch of players has plowed through. If it's part of a contest or jam, I wait until the event is over. Maybe that's silly too. But it's a small delay. I know that my IF work is going to be online for as long as the Internet lasts. In forty years, nobody is going to be worried about spoilers.

So if you look at my IF page, you'll see "Read or download the source code" for all my games. Except Hadean Lands, because I still make money off that one.

(Yes, one of the games on that page is almost forty years old! Well, the original BASIC version is. The Inform 6 port is a bit younger. Feel free to dig around the Apple 2 disk image for the real source code, if you dare.)

In his post, Mike talks about a different hesitancy:

Still, there are far more games without release source code than games with it, and for many of the smaller authoring systems, there may only be a handful of worked examples out there.

The main reason for this is not exactly a mystery, of course – it’s the reason I haven’t released the source for my two games: the average author looks at the elegantly-conceived, deeply-commented stuff that the leading authors have put out, then looks at the regurgitated pile of dog sick that constitutes their barely-working game, and wonders what possible value there could be in inflicting such horrors on an unsuspecting public.

-- Mike Russo, "April 1 is Source Code Amnesty Day (we’re making it a thing)", March 15th

This is also silly. To summarize Josh Grams's excellent argument in that thread:

Your code is not terrible. You got a working game out. Maybe you didn't know some elegant shortcut that Inform offers, but so what? You solved the problem.

Also, nobody's IF code is all that great. I have lots of Inform experience, but when I'm fixing up one buggy response I'll whack in a global variable and have done. It solves the problem. I write Inform code the lazy way. It's not like I need to maintain it for years; I'm going to do a couple of bugfix releases and then archive it.

Really, every IF game is a towering pile of hacks -- it's the nature of the beast. If you try to make it all elegant, you'll never ship.

I've been knocking down the reasons not to release your IF source code. What are the reasons to do it? What's the benefit?

It's true, people may peek at your source code to see how you did a particular thing. That's good! You may not know the best way to accomplish that trick, but you knew a way, and maybe the reader needs that.

Consider Twine. A playable Twine game includes all its source material -- the boxes, the layout, the markup. You can load it directly into the Twine editor and have a look. This is a major reason for the rapid takeoff and spread of Twine as a system. (The same effect that led to the rapid adoption of HTML and the Web in the early 90s. Want to know how a web page works? View source and find out!)

(From that thread: Autumn Chen's Twine Garden v2, a blog of Twine node maps.)

Compiled IF systems like Inform, TADS, and ZIL miss out on this benefit. We should reclaim it by getting more source code out there.

There's future scholarship. I know, you cringed all over again, but stop. The point of research is to find out what people wrote. If you hide your work in shame, that just makes someone's life harder.

Remember this post about Zork's inventory limit? People were complaining that the "holding too many things already" message was randomized and thus unfair. I dug into the game file and wrote up an analysis. (Yes, it's randomized; no, it's not unfair per se; it's a deliberate part of Zork's design; how unfair Zork is by modern standards is a whole discussion.)

As it happens, I wrote that post before Jason Scott's release of the Zork source code on Github. I was relying on a long history of community effort to disassemble and annotate the Infocom game files. (Special thanks to Allen Garvin.)

Nowadays it's very easy to dig through the Infocom source code and answer questions about it. How did their parser code change from game to game? Did their inventory limit policy evolve over time? How many ways are there to die in Zork? Which games awarded ranks based on game score, and what were they? These are the sorts of questions people are asking when they dig into a source code repository. It's not about whether the code was good.

When Cragne Manor was in progress, I was fascinated by the idea of a source code collection. Here were eighty authors from the whole 25-year history of modern IF, all attacking a similar problem -- without looking at each other's work. What a sampler! What a variety of styles and approaches!

We didn't wind up with a complete source code release, but I undertook to collect source files from everyone who was willing to send them over. You can see the collection here. I think this is a terrific resource.

"So how do I participate?"

[...] if others would like to also post your stuff, please piggyback on the thread – or just quietly update IFDB or upload to the IF Archive so as not to draw attention to yourself, that works too.

-- Mike Russo, "April 1 is Source Code Amnesty Day (we’re making it a thing)", March 15th

The IF Archive /games/source directory welcomes all arrivals. Or post your files on Github, or on your own web site. Whatever works.

(Google Drive, Dropbox, and other such services are not good choices. Files left there may eventually be marked "abandoned" and thrown away. Remember what I said about forty-year-old games?)

Planning a game for Spring Thing, IFComp, or another festival in 2023? Plan to post the source code in April of 2024! This will be a repeatable feast.

And me? Well, I said a few paragraphs ago:

Except Hadean Lands, because I still make money off that one.

You know what? That's not an excuse either. Hadean Lands is almost ten years old. Nobody's going to clone the game and steal my slot on the App Store. Even if they wanted to, the source code wouldn't help them do it.

So here's my deal. If you -- you personally -- agree to put up some of your IF source code this April 1st, I will post all of the Inform source for Hadean Lands on that same day.

This source code has hitherto only existed as a limited-edition printed book. It was one of the high-end rewards for the original HL kickstarter. I only gave out about thirty of them. It's never been available in downloadable form.

Truthfully, I was already planning to post the source in October of next year, the tenth anniversary of HL's release. But this is a way better excuse.

Portney's Earthshapes

2023-03-04T03:00:00+00:00

Speaking of maps, let me tell you a map story...

(If you don't want to read the story, skip to the high-res scans.)

When I was a kid, I saw these posters up in a high school classroom:

A flat Earth

A dodecahedral Earth

...and ten more. Twelve images of fantastical Earths, each with a gnomic rumination on its shape.

What did they mean? Why were they there? They were clearly some kind of exercise in imaginative physics, but that's all I knew. I was somewhat obsessed with the tag lines, though. And the interrobangs.

Years later, I discovered the images on the web site of Litton Guidance & Control Systems. (Wayback link; the web site is defunct.)

This site told the story:

Earthshapes is a series of 12 hypothetical Earths as conceived by Joseph N. Portney in 1968 during a flight to the North Pole onboard a U.S. Air Force KC-135. The aircraft was equipped with dual Litton LTN-51 Inertial Navigation Units that were the primary navigation source for the flight. As the North Pole was reached, Portney looked on the icy terrain below and mused to himself, "What if the Earth were......?" The results of this imaginative lapse were the Earthshapes. The 12 hypothetical Earths were then sketched and captioned by Portney and given to the Litton Guidance & Control Systems graphic arts group to create the models. They were then photographed and became the theme of a Litton publication entitled Pilots and Navigators Calendar for 1969. Each month was introduced with a different one of the 12 hypothetical Earths. The calendar was an international sensation, receiving awards and heavy fan mail. To satisfy customer demand it was reprinted as a fiscal calendar.

Earthshapes was used on the cover of the U.S. Air Force publication The Navigator, displayed at the Los Angeles Central Library, appeared on TV, developed as an educational publication and referenced in math texts. Earthshapes has been shown in classrooms throughout the world by students and instructors for 27 years.

Fascinating! I downloaded the images and put them to good use on my Earthshapes cube.

A toroidal Earth

A cataclysmal Earth

A couple of years after that -- this was probably 2000 -- I was wandering through an educational supply store. The same place I got these dice, come to think of it. And behold! A package of "Earthshapes posters" from the Ideal School Supply Company. You better believe I bought them on the spot.

The package gave a few more details:

A modern navigation problem involves the safe guidance and control of high altitude, long-range aircraft (both military and commercial). Joseph N. Portney has been involved in solving this problem since joining Litton Guidance and Control Systems in 1960. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and served as a navigator-bombardier in the U.S. Air Force. Mr. Portney has participated in the development of several inertial navigation systems and has aligned and tested several of these systems on flights over the North Pole. To show the capabilities of one of these navigational systems, Mr. Portney began to think, "What if the Earth were..." and the odd shaped models shown on the posters resulted. Merely by reprogramming the guidance system's computer, a plane could be guided safely over and around the odd curves and corners of different worlds.

That pamphlet is dated 1976 (copyright Creative Publications), but the posters themselves say "Designed by Joseph N. Portney; copyright 1969 by Litton Systems." I suspect that the star-chart background was added specifically for the posters, but without seeing the 1969 calendar it's impossible to be sure.

By the way, modern readers may not grasp how strange these images are. 1969 is pre-CGI! Somebody (I guess a Litton artist?) modelled them, I don't know, in plaster? Wood? And then painted the continents and ice caps! You can see they used thick green paint to provide just that little bit of terrain relief.

I'm pretty sure they used geometrically accurate projections to map the spherical Earth to each shape. Map projections was Portney's whole job. Anyone have software to project a sphere map onto a cube or cylinder? I'd love to see if they match up.

(The Wegeneroidal Earth isn't a projection; it just rearranges the modern continents to be closer together. Not an accurate reconstruction of Pangaea, of course, but it illustrates the idea.)

Anyway, there matters sat. Until...

A few months ago, I noticed that the Litton web site was dead. Litton had been acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2001, so it had been dead for years, really.

Earthshapes persisted on the web in a few places. A site called Navworlds has info about Portney and the Earthshapes. It seems to be a personal site created by (or for) Portney late in life. There's also a math page at Cambridge, although it doesn't seem to have been updated for many years.

(Interesting note: the Cambridge site seems to have a later edition of the posters: "copyright 1998". Two of them have additional footnotes. They're also brightened up, with the ice caps rather painfully blown out.)

Here's the thing, though. None of these sites -- not even Portney's own -- has good copies of the Earthshapes. Nothing high-resolution. The best images I could find were 750 pixels wide or so.

Wait, didn't I still have...somewhere in the back of my closet...

I had to dig up an A3-format scanner, but now the job is done. Behold: Earthshapes, the 1976 edition, scanned at 600 dpi. (Internet Archive link.) Also includes the educational pamphlet.

It's a great pamphlet, by the way. The bibliography includes Flatland, Sphereland (a lesser known followup by Dionys Burger), and a Martin Gardner essay.

Chart from the pamphlet

Yes, I am skirting copyright here. The formal rights to these posters must be buried somewhere in Northrop's legal vaults. The Navworlds site is probably the moral heir, and it's quite recent. (Seems to have gone up in August 2022.)

But, again, high quality images. There just weren't any. Other collectors might have physical copies of these posters; there are a few in university libraries. But nobody else was scanning. So I scanned.

One more mystery. The Navworlds Portney bio page says:

Joe created Earthgrids and Earthshapes that became award winning Pilots' and Navigators' Calendar-Atlas'.

...Earthgrids? Earthgrids?

I can't find a single trace of "Earthgrids" outside that one mention. (There's an ignorable New Age book, no relation.)

Anybody know?

A treasury of Zork maps

2023-02-07T02:00:00+00:00

Yesterday a Reddit link started going around the IF circles:

"Wait," I thought, "haven't I seen that map before?" No, I had not. But I sort of had? Then I looked through my collection of Zork maps. Then I realized, oh no, I have a collection of Zork maps, and it's incomplete.

Project time! Let's start at the very beginning.

Zork map, David Lebling, 1978

The original fair-hand map of MIT Zork, drawn by one of the Implementors during the game's development. Look at that French-curve showcase of a logo!

Permalink.
Map archived by Rick Thornquist, published in this article, 2017.

Zork official hint map, David Ardito and David Lebling, 1981

Once Infocom began publishing Zork as a commercial product, there was an obvious market for hints. Here's Infocom's very first hint-book map. It was advertised within the game itself. An in-game note told you to write away to Infocom for "...the Movement Assistance Planner (MAP) and Hierarchical Information for Novice Treasure Seekers (HINTS)".

This message only existed in the very earliest releases of Zork (the ones labelled "R2" and "R5" in this catalog). This was so early that the game was not yet branded "Zork 1".

Permalink.
Article describing this map at CGWMuseum.
See Jimmy Maher's blog post for more on Infocom's history in those early years.

Zork 1 poster, David Ardito, 1981

This lovely poster was drawn for Infocom by David Ardito.

The poster is not meant as a map, of course. It's a collection of instantly-recognizable vignettes from the game: white house, troll, cyclops, the Land of the Dead. But the spatial connections between some areas are visible.

You can spot the Adventurer, wearing the same ridiculous headgear as in the "Barbarian Zork" cover illustration. The Thief lurks genteelly behind. And if you peer very closely, you'll find that the priceless painting in the Studio appears to be a miniature of this entire poster.

(Another detail: the altar in the Temple is inscribed with the names "Jacob", "Carrie", and (?) "Juok". Anybody know what that's about?)

Zork 1 map from the Zork Users Group, David Ardito and Steve Meretzky, 1982

A year later, Infocom had sort-of-but-not-really spun off its marketing division as the "Zork Users Group". (Again, see Jimmy Maher's history.) ZUG distributed maps, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and more. This was one of their earlier Zork maps. It has the line-and-box diagrammatic style, familiar to any adventurer who ever scribbled a map on scrap paper. But David Ardito embellished it with more Zork vignettes. (Some are taken directly from the color poster above. The Adventurer has lost the silly helmet, though.)

Zork 2 poster from the Zork Users Group, Pier Giovanni Binotti, 1983

ZUG still sold the posters, though. This is their Zork 2 poster, in a completely different style, by Pier Giovanni Binotti. The fine ink drawing leaves plenty of room for easter-egg detail. I'll only note one quirk: in the starting location, the brass lantern is drawn as a flashlight rather than the traditional Tilley lamp.

Zork 1 map from Infocom, 1983 (page 1)

Sometime in 1983, ZUG was reabsorbed into Infocom. The updated official hint-book map uses the same diagrams, but the artistic detail has sadly been replaced by a generic stone-wall texture. Well, I shouldn't say generic -- it's the dungeon wall motif from the Zork logo. But it's not very interesting.

Infocom continued to use this map all the way through the Activision acquisition, the Lost Treasures and Masterpieces collections, and even the 2012 Lost Treasures re-release on the iOS App Store.

Permalink.
Complete Zork 1 map booklet at the Infodoc Project.

But let us not imagine that the story of Zork maps was over! Fans have been drawing their own maps since the earliest years.

Dungeon map by Steven Roy, 1982

In 1982, Steven Roy drew this handsome map of the original Zork ("Dungeon", the MIT version). It's diagrammatic, but thoughtfully designed with a map-like layout.

Permalink.

Dungeon map by Patrick Vincent after Steven Roy, 2008

Many years later, Patrick Vincent re-rendered Roy's map in Photoshop, showing even more territorial context and also adding in the endgame region.

Permalink.
Patrick Vincent's page describing this map.

Zork 1 map by cart00nlion, 2014

Separately, user cart00nlion created this wonderful cutaway map of Zork 1, which is also -- I think -- a work of concrete poetry. The artist says "This illustration contains every location from the game," although the mazes are somewhat condensed.

Zork map by Keith Orlando (ion_bond), 2017

And this brings us around at last to Keith Orlando (user ion_bond). In 2017, they posted this beautiful hand-painted map of MIT Zork. The layout roughly follows the Roy map, but with several changes to improve the balance.

Permalink.
Post on /r/zork by ion_bond, 2017.

Zork map by Keith Orlando (ion_bond), 2023

Then, this weekend, Keith posted this updated version. This updates the layout yet again (where does one stuff the mazes?), and uses an isometric layout for an appropriately game-y sense of space. Note that the treasures have a *golden glow*.

Also note the eternal confusion about how much of the Frigid River runs underground. I always assumed that the Reservoir was subterranean -- it is described as "cavernous" and is canonically dark. However, Flood Control Dam #3 is not dark, and neither is the river downstream. To add to the fun, Zork 1 says (at Canyon View) that "The mighty Frigid River flows out from a great dark cavern." But that text was a later amendment; MIT Zork's Canyon View implies that FCD#3 is visible above ground. The whole matter is probably best left to lie.

Permalink.
Post on /r/zork by ion_bond, 2023.

That, as far as I know, concludes our tour of artistic Zork maps.

There are of course countless line-and-box maps to be found in adventure game cheat files and hint books. (Kim Schuette's Book of Adventure Games, 1984, is dear to my heart.) I'm not going to try to catalog those.

I am also omitting large-scale maps of Quendor. Infocom and Activision drew several of these as the Zork universe expanded, trying to put the various games into context. However, these have little connection to original Zork, beyond maybe showing "Frigid River" as a squiggly line. So I don't find them very interesting.

If I've missed any maps, please let me know!

2023 IGF nominees: mind dot dot dot blown

2023-01-31T23:49:00+00:00

Finally, my IGF top favorites. At this point I have entirely departed the realm of objective, considered judgement. These are the games which made me cackle with glee -- in my head at least.

Immortality
NORCO
Tunic

(Necessary footnote: I was on the narrative jury and had access to free review copies of these games. But in fact I bought them all before IGF judging started.)

Immortality

by Half Mermaid -- game site

The biggest, most "holy crap you can't do that" Sam Barlow game yet. What else do you need to know?

Yes, the pacing is weird (even compared to the pacing-is-accidental structure of Her Story and Telling Lies). Searching for film clips is janky and hard to do systematically. I don't know when or why the credits roll. None of that matters.

The thing about Sam Barlow is that he came up with this moment of experience -- the moment where that thing happens. Then he said, well, to make that work for the player, I'm going to have to film three consecutive movies. So he did.

See full review.

NORCO

by Geography of Robots -- game site

I wrote a short review of this for last year's IGF, but that was based on just the first act. Let me expand my comments from last year, which began:

A filthy, mucky, cyber-goth breakdown of the Louisiana slums. You're back in the town you swore you left forever. Your mother is dead, your brother is missing, the household robot is rebuilding [a jacked-up] motorcycle chassis out back. Your stuffed monkey keeps beating you at staring contests.

The visuals are decent pixel art -- not bad, not the best I've seen. [...] But the writing carries it over the top in the best way. This is a deeply screwed-over world, twenty minutes into the future of our screwed-up reality. Gig jobs, bitcoin, giant oil companies eating the world. Every line jabs you with a pinprick detail.

This is ostensibly a point-and-click adventure. In fact it's a mashup of genres leaving neon tire-tracks on each other: exploration puzzle, database mind-map, quicktime combat. The narrative is seamlessly distributed across these modes as you uncover cults, political machinations, and what happened to your family.

There were elements I wished had been better developed. (The plot point of your mother selecting memories for posterity could have tied into your mind-map in interesting ways.) But it's still a kick in the gut and a shout in the face. It's funny, it's grim, it's furious. Play it.

Tunic

by ISOMETRICORP Games -- game site

Wait, I never wrote anything about Tunic? The can't-believe-how-deep-this-fox-hole-goes game of 2022?

You're a cute nonverbal fox with a sword, set loose upon a Zelda-ish world of adventure. Find secrets! Kill little blob monsters with a stick! Kill giant Souls-style behemoths with a stick! No, wait, let's go back to the secrets thing.

There are two important things to know about Tunic from the start:

You can turn off the combat.
It is still an award-worthy game, a game of the year game, with the combat off.

There are several combat difficulty settings, in fact. But on the first major boss, I went straight for the maximal "you are invulnerable" mode and stayed there for the rest of the game. (For some bosses, you still have to do a bit of pattern-dancing to land a blow. But you have infinity tries to get it right.)

The point is the secrets. And the puzzles. And the secret puzzles. And the actual secrets, the hidden stuff. The Zelda-Souls-like is just a framework, a fictional game whose manual you uncover as you play. Or possibly as you play again -- someone's marked up the manual with all sorts of notes to themself. Might have been you.

When I finished the game -- all the way, good ending, the works -- there were still some bonus things left to find. I said "Eh, not for me" and peeked at spoilers. Um. There was some stuff that I had never even noticed.

I'm not saying you need to find all this stuff to enjoy Tunic. But if you enjoy finding stuff in games, you will not run low.

2023 IGF nominees: wildly miscellaneous

2023-01-31T03:00:00+00:00

And now my "I couldn't think of a category" category.

Case of the Golden Idol
The Forest Quartet
Gnosia
Queer Man Peering Into A Rock Pool.jpg

(Necessary footnote: I was on the narrative jury and had access to free review copies of these games.)

Case of the Golden Idol

by Color Gray Games -- game site

This one has a category: it's an evidence-deduction game, aka "Obra-Dinn-like". But it's the only one I've seen this year, so I have to put it here.

The evidence puzzles are excellent. The art can best be described as Beavis-and-Butthead-ish: everybody is exaggerated caricatures, which serves the purpose very well. The story is cleverly constructed but not much of a story, and the Golden Idol itself is kind of a let-down. But you should still play it if you like deduction puzzles.

See full review.

The Forest Quartet

by Bedtime Digital Games -- game site

A sweet little puzzle game about a Scandinavian jazz band trying to get back together. The puzzles are lightweight but thematic. There's a combination of ethereality (light and song) and physical heft (spinning flywheels) which is satisfying to work through even if the solutions are generally straightforward. The environments are very pretty, too.

Games about artists dealing with anxiety and depression and loss are, okay, a cliche at this point. But this one is convincing -- primarily down to the the voice acting, which just nails it. It's just three guys (plus a radio host) talking about their music; low-key but right on target. And they do, in fact, play jazz.

Don't get me wrong. This is a tiny little game that you can get through in an hour; it's not trying to go head-to-head with the year's big hits. But it's lovely. The designers didn't have to put in this level of polish and craft for a snack-sized game. It's worth calling that out for applause.

Gnosia

by Petit Depotto -- game site

It's Werewolf. It doesn't pretend to be anything else. You're on a spaceship with a crew of anime hotties, you don't know anything about any of them, and one or more has been infected (replaced?) by the "Gnosia". The Gnosia acts exactly like people except at night they murder one of you. During the day you vote to put one person in cold sleep, thus neutralizing them. You know how it works.

Time is circular; each round gives you a random group of crew members, and randomizes which are evil. There's a bit of story on top of that, but most of what you do is play the game.

Now, I've been saying since, you know, 1997 that a computer Werewolf player is pointless. It's a game of bluffing and lying, so what is a bot going to do? Believe the opposite of whatever you say? Assume you are double-bluffing, or triple-bluffing, or N-bluffing for N large? The most sensible strategy (or at least the easiest) is to ignore what every player says and choose at random.

Gnosia doesn't do this. (At least I don't think it does!) Every player, including you, has a set of stats. How likely people are to think you're Gnosia; how likely people are to think you're lying; how easily you perceive lies; how seriously people take your accusations; and so on.

So there's a whole social sim playing out within the round. And since the round is one human (you) and a bunch of NPCs, you can try to game the sim. This is nifty! It's an approach that I never thought about; my opinion was implicitly based on the idea of dropping one bot player into a group of humans. A round of Gnosia is a tactical game which you can win. Play enough rounds and you can raise your stats.

Interesting, but not a game that I particularly enjoy. I will leave the story for other folks to explore.

Queer Man Peering Into A Rock Pool.jpg

by Fuzzy Ghost -- game site

On a beach, under a neon-pink tropical sky, a man wearing a puffy jacket and a scruffy mustache peers into rock pools. Things pop out and follow him around. They are katamaris... memories... from before the flood... singularity... naptime....

Look, it doesn't go into words real well. Although there is a cosmic pink laser of memory shining up from the ground, so Philip K. Dick has to be napping around here somewhere. But the game is mostly about getting postcards from your boyfriend and then emailing him about them. And walking on the phosphor-palette beach, in a contemplative way, collecting... whatever they are.

The strolls are slow and nothing exactly resolves. The colors shift from gentle contentment to nostalgia to gentle regret to quiet joy. "Gentle" is the operative word, really. If the protagonist is dead on his beach (and, to an approximation, all walking simulators start with the protagonist dead) he's got someone to share the beach with.

Colossal Cave (2023)

2023-01-29T23:12:00+00:00

A year ago, Ken and Roberta Williams boothed at GDC with a demo of their coming-out-of-retirement project: Colossal Cave in 3d. I wrote some thoughts at the time:

In a graphical environment, how do we render the confusing exits of Witt's End? How do we show that your inventory matters in the Tight Squeeze? Can you really not move around in the dark?

These are interesting questions! You can have fun thinking about them. I hope Roberta and Ken have had fun thinking about them. But I'd say that the best answers are going to point to a free adaptation of the game.

-- Roberta and Ken Williams are making a VR Colossal Cave, March 23, 2022

Now it's out, and I can say: this is a tight, nay, a pedantic adaptation of the original game.

(Warning: I assume you've long since played or at least read about the original game. So SPOILERS top to bottom, here on out.)

(By the way, when I say "the original" I mean the 350-point Fortran Adventure by Crowther and Woods. That's the ancestor of nearly every other version. If you're curious about the earliest history of Adventure / Colossal Cave, Dennis Jerz's 2007 article is definitive. And if you want to play the original -- not exactly the Fortran version, but close -- click here.)

Colossal Cave 2023 introduces itself by saying, in a reassuring British baritone: "Somewhere nearby is Colossal Cave, where others have found fortunes in treasure and gold..." Sends a wisp of mist down your spine, doesn't it?

It goes on to recite the rest of the original game's HELP text, only slightly updated for the graphical UI. (It says "Keep watch on your compass" instead of referring to parser commands like NORTH and SOUTH.)

And then you are in a nicely-rendered forest by a small building. Click anywhere, and the game says: "You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully."

A well-house for a large spring.

The aim is clearly to include all the original text from Colossal Cave, as narration over a graphical environment. It even replicates the verbose/brief experience! If you click again in the opening location right away, it just says "You're at the end of the road again."

This is strangely comforting to me. But it's strange. It's like one of those Shakespeare adaptations that exactly follows the original text while transplanting the story to 90s California.

You can read the text if you want to follow along. So let's talk about the graphics instead.

You're in cavern with waterfall.

This is, well, I'd call it "nice for an indie Unity game". That sounds dreadfully faint, I know. It is nice! Look at that flowstone! But it's not a 2020s-era visual wonderland, or even mid-2010s. The budget for environmental detail is rather tight -- no doubt to play on consumer-level VR sets. As a result, the outdoor environments are seriously shrunk down. The "lost in a forest" experience is reduced to a single clearing.

Once you get underground, ironically, the environment feels more expansive. The areas near the surface are cramped ("a low crawl...") and littered with tourist trash. But then the tunnels open into larger spaces, with dark abysses above or below, and you really start to feel like an explorer in a vast and mysterious space.

(I didn't play in VR, in case you were wondering. As I've written before, VR doesn't do a lot for me. Old-fashioned mouse-and-screen games are as just immersive for me as headsets, so I don't bother.)

You are in an awkward sloping east-west canyon.

The original text is preserved, but the creators haven't hesitated to add more detail. They've tried to make the caverns into a more consistent environment. Large stretches are reimagined as a dwarvish mine. You can spot dwarves mining gold nuggets and sparkling diamonds -- or reading a magazine -- in the appropriate spots. (These "scenery" dwarves always flee your presence without interacting.)

I'm somewhat ambivalent about these changes. It's disconcerting to come across a sturdy ladder leading up or down, when I know perfectly well that Crowther's vision was squirmy limestone chimneys. Similarly, the Hall of the Mountain King is a crumbling subterranean palace rather than a natural cavern enlivened by a fanciful nickname. The different-maze isn't caves at all, but a set of steel-walled bunkers. (No doubt to fit thematically with the vending machine found within.)

Occasionally these changes clash with the gameplay. The dwarven areas are detailed with clip-on electric lights; other caves have fanciful glowing crystals or fungi. But let your lamp go out and you'll find that these are purely decorative. If the original game says an area is dark, it's gotta be dark.

Lighting quirks aside, I can't argue with a more cohesive environment. And if I prefer the natural cave areas to the constructed ones, well, more fool me. The "Cave Under Construction" zone slyly hints that the entire underworld is dwarven craftsmanship. (Remember Old Gods Rising?)

(Another sly joke: the bunkers of the different-maze are visually all alike. You have to click to hear the "different" textual descriptions. Whereas in the alike-maze, you can see the exits and which way they twist -- so those rooms are visually all different! Now that's smart adaptation of the original design.)

If you want a bit of commentary on the game's visual design, check out this ArtStation page from Jayson Bennett and this set from Morgan Hamilton. I was particularly tickled by the Main Office, which includes the very PDP-10 that the game is running on.

The magic of the Adventure parser is that, once you know the basics of IF-ese, you can type anything you can think of to try. (Or at least you can convince yourself so!) Can we bring this freedom of action to a graphical point-and-click game?

It turns out that you can! For Colossal Cave, anyhow. Here's a complete list of the game's UI actions:

Move around with WASD/mouse. (No jumping.)
Click on anything to examine it.
Alt-click on a portable object to pick it up.
Alt-click on a scenery object to do the "obvious" contextual action with your bare hands. (OPEN DOOR, CLIMB LADDER, etc.) (Yes, your bare hands, you're way ahead of me.)
In your inventory, you can select an item and get three options:
- DROP ITEM.
- Some contextual action appropriate to the item (LIGHT LAMP, EAT FOOD, EMPTY BOTTLE).
- USE the item on something in the world around you (again, with the appropriate contextual action).
The inventory has a sidebar of magic words you've learned; select one to SAY it.

This isn't Myst's one-button UI, but it's well within the bounds of graphical adventure convention. And it's enough to completely implement Colossal Cave.

I don't think this is a universal solution for adapting parser games. It would have trouble with any scene where there are several possible contextual verbs. (Imagine a movable crate that you could PUSH or PULL, for example. Or the difference between GIVE AXE TO TROLL and KILL TROLL WITH AXE.) But Colossal Cave happens not to have any of those!

Of course USE X ON Y covers a lot of sins, but in most cases it feels natural. You want to unlock the grate: select the keys, hit USE, click them on the grate. Catching the little bird in the cage: same thing really. Giving a treasure to the troll? You get the idea.

It only gets awkward in scenes where the original game was awkward. UNLEASH BIRD ON SNAKE isn't exactly clued anywhere, but if you have the idea it's clear how to do it. Probably the worst offense is WAVE ROD AT FISSURE, which I don't see how anybody would think of -- either in the original game or this one -- without being part of an Internet forum ARG-ing on solutions. Which, of course, the original game had.

Mind you, the fissure bridge is an optional puzzle -- you can bypass it by way of the Hall of the Mountain King! So in some sense, a moon-logic solution is appropriate. But it's still a clunky piece of design.

Some other awkward design choices:

The cave has lots of art greeblies, from bits of paper to dwarf shovels to inexplicable trash cans. I mentioned the decorative lights, too. None of this stuff does anything, but if you haven't memorized the original game, it's hard to know what to ignore without clicking everywhere. (Portable objects are highlighted, which is good, but that doesn't help with all the scenery.)

There's even stuff like a non-functional rowboat on the underground reservoir. If you try to use it, the game says "That isn't your boat," which is a brazen assertion given how much stolen treasure you're toting around.

Some events (like hearing PLUGH spoken) have a chance of triggering when you enter a room. This is consistent with the original game, but since "rooms" are now arbitrary demarcations of 3D space, you sometimes have to dance back and forth through a doorway to trigger them.

(Is the lamp juice also measured in actions and room transitions? I bet it is. I tend to sprint around the cave to save time, but it's probably bootless.)

Narration means canonical pronounciations of XYZZY and PLUGH. I disapprove on principle. (The game says "zizzy" but I've always spelled it out, and don't tell me I'm wrong.)

On the up side, the mirror window gag works better in graphical form. You see a gesticulating figure matching your position! They're right there! On the down side, the mirror window gag never served any game purpose, so why all the effort? (In Graham Nelson's Inform port, you could distract a dwarf from chasing you by running past the mirror, but I think that was an addition.)

Okay, yes, the dwarves. And other annoyances.

The great flaw of replicating a 1970s game is all the design decisions which people had gotten throughly sick of by, say, the 1990s. Like a lamp that runs out of juice while you're still exploring. Or dwarves that appear and fling cutlery at you with no way to dodge.

I don't know whether Colossal Cave uses the same dwarf logic as the original text game. I'm going to presume it does. That's a 9.5% chance of death every time a dwarf appears, with some tweaks.

(The very first time a dwarf attacks you it will always miss. If they get mad, their aim improves. There are five dwarves following you around; several of them can attack you at the same time, which is bad. It's possible to kill them all off, which is good. The various ports and adaptations of Colossal Cave may follow these principles closely, loosely, or not at all.)

In modern adventure terms, or honestly even in 1990s adventure terms, a monster surprise-killing you is an absolute buzzkill. The first time Colossal Cave did that, I stopped playing for several days -- the thought of it happening again was just exhausting.

(Most modern text ports of Colossal Cave support UNDO, which makes this a bit more bearable. Sadly, not here.)

Oh, the pirate happens too. He appears and steals all your treasures and hides them in his maze. This isn't entirely terrible. It's a handy way to bypass your inventory limit and cache treasures within striking distance of the exit. Except for the treasures which are also puzzle solutions! Having those stolen can wreck your run! Argh.

Oh yes, the inventory limit. Did we mention the inventory limit?

None of this is unmanageable if you save every few rooms, keep all your save files, and replay every part of the game several times to optimize your run. The game is happy to let you do this. It even retains your map when you restart or reload a game, which is of course how we all played back when maps were scribbled on scrap paper. But the idea that you should play this way will be very strange to anyone under forty.

I feel like the game needs footnotes everywhere. "Yeah, your lamp will die soon. This seemed like a good idea in 1977. Sorry!" Although, I should note, there's an "easy mode" for the lamp. If you read the instructions at the beginning (which costs ten points) you get your lamp lifetime doubled for free! Now, how about a "no dwarves no pirate" option for another ten points? Eh?

As it is, I still haven't mustered the energy to finish the new Colossal Cave. I've mapped nearly all of the rooms and most of the treasures. I've seen the magnificent cavern and the breath-taking view. (I have not yet brought light to the dark room.) But the prospect of paperworking my way to 350 points, with a treasure checklist and an indexed spreadsheet of save files, is -- again -- exhausting. I don't think it's gonna happen.

So who, in this end, is this game for? Why write such a thing?

One perfectly good answer is "Roberta Williams got a wild hair and decided it would be fun." I will never say a bad word about such projects. That's how most IF is made these days!

Same goes for "This seems impossible and Williams wanted to prove it could be done." Rock on.

Another answer is "People want to experience a classic cave game in VR." I admit I'm willing to say a bad word about VR. As I noted, the graphics are scaled for Quest 2, which makes for a weak experience compared to even a modest indie PC game. But I guess people who are drooling for VR will be into it.

(In these situations, I always wonder if Facebook chartered the whole project as a loss leader for Quest. Pretty sure that's what happened with Myst, for example. But according to at least one interview, no -- VR was the CC team's own idea.)

Yet another possible reason to make this game is "Bring original Adventure to a new generation." Here I start to get skeptical. The new generation is going to be annoyed by this game -- just like I was. There are so many design infelicities which could be cleaned up. Not just the dwarves! There's dead ends. There's non-deterministic exits. There's wild swerves of design theme and mismatched chunks of terrain. There's an absolute refusal to ask "what is that doing there?" There's a total lack of systematic puzzle elements to master.

That's why I started out talking about a "free adaptation". Sticking to the exact original text is clearly a goal, but so few people will appreciate it. Perhaps just me! A game like this could attract a wider indie audience... but I suspect this game won't.

Only that's a downer, and I refuse to end this review on a downer.

Colossal Cave is a heck of an idea, and it does what it does almost impeccably. It's got miles of atmospheric cavern to wander through. It's a fully playable graphical game (once you embrace the map-and-save-file mindset) which recreates the entire intent of the parser original. It's got the dragon.

I didn't think this game would work, and it works. Rock on.

2023 IGF nominees: the personal

2023-01-29T00:48:00+00:00

A game can be one person talking about a thing, in their own voice, framed by a bit of game stuff. This is a well-understood category, although it doesn't have a name that I know of. "Topical" misses the author's voice. "Confessional" makes it prurient. I could suggest "listening simulator" if that didn't come off as snark, which is not how I intend it.

It's hard to say much about games like this. The game mechanics aren't the point. If you explain the point, you're pushing the author offstage. So these comments will be brief; the games can speak for themselves.

Of Moons and Mania
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me
Atuel

(Necessary footnote: I was on the narrative jury. The games in this post are free or name-your-price.)

Of Moons and Mania

by Absurd Walls -- game site

A story about the author's mental health crisis, somewhat fictionalized. A simple 2D dodge mechanic paces the narration while also gesturing at the experience of intrusive ideation.

This is straightforwardly presented, but it opens a window into an extreme personal experience. And I think the game mechanic, simple as it is, is effective. It grounds you in the story in a way that static prose wouldn't.

He Fucked the Girl Out of Me

by Taylor McCue -- game site

The semi-autobiographical story of the author's experience with sex work, presented as a Gameboy ROM. (Or emulated in-browser.) It's a rough experience, although the game is not meant to be rough to play. It's meant to recount someone's story, not re-inflict it.

(Thus, we presume, the Gameboy UI. The cute-and-cozy imagery is a veneer -- a flimsy one in spots, as the background art sometimes gets eerie -- but it lets you play the game at arms' length if that's what you need.)

This is most effective for its directness and honesty, including honesty about how much the writer is not (yet?) able to be honest about. It's openly a construction, fragments of stories pushed together; that's how memory works in trauma. It still works.

Atuel

by Matajuegos -- game site

This one is interesting: not one person's voice, but a collection of voices describing the Rio Atuel in Argentina.

You steer a drop of water, or a rush of it, or a bird or fish, as scientists and inhabitants describe their perspectives of the river. A small project but a really lovely, evocative presentation.

2023 IGF nominees: good old adventures

2023-01-28T01:18:00+00:00

You may recall that I wrote a blog post on recent old-school narrative games just a few months ago. Unsurprisingly, a bunch turned up as IGF entries. So I've written half this post already!

Return to Monkey Island
The Excavation of Hob's Barrow
The Past Within
Beacon Pines
Backfirewall_
Ib

(Necessary footnote: I was on the narrative jury and had access to free review copies of these games. Of course, I'd played some already, but I played Ib, Beacon Pines, and Backfirewall for free.)

Return to Monkey Island

by Terrible Toybox -- game site

A satisfying return to a world which I never played in the first place, but that's okay. I know most of the jokes. This polishes and modernizes the gameplay; it keeps the jokes light, the story fresh, and the puzzles non-stupid; it's appropriately reflective about its long history. And Dominic Armato enjoys every chance he gets to say "Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate!" You can tell.

See full review.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow

by Wadjet Eye Games -- game site

Ancient horror on the moors of England. Lots of classic person-needs-you-to-do-one-thing gameplay. Lots of misty landscapes. (Albeit in pixel-art form, which I don't think does them any favors.) You're a spunky adventuress, but don't expect a spunky adventure; this is folk horror and the fix is in. Just warning you.

See full review.

The Past Within

by Rusty Lake -- game site

A two-player coop adventure in the Rusty Lake universe. You have to pass clues back and forth to advance. The game mechanics are rather constrained, and the story is the usual Rusty-Lake creepy bagatelle. But the idea is novel and it's a fun coop experience.

(Or so I assume. I totally cheated and soloed it on two screens.)

See full review.

Beacon Pines

by Hiding Spot Games -- game site

Cute cartoon kids' adventure. The design is rather interesting: a branching narrative where you have to explore all the branches. The storyline in each branch unlocks new choice options which can be used in different branches, so you get an expanding tree rather than a traditional choice-of-endings. This means that you-the-reader often know more than the protagonist; the story reveals itself piecewise as you put together events from different run-throughs.

This is not an entirely new trick. (There was a 2001 game called Shadow of Destiny / Shadow of Memories. Plus any number of play-all-paths visual novels.) But it's not nearly as common as the (now-overdone) time loop gimmick, so I was happy to see this.

The story itself left me a little cold, though. It starts out cute and then goes dark, but in a somewhat ragged and incoherent way. Crass one moment, cold-blooded murder or body horror the next, and then it goes back to cute and goofy and the power of friendship. Eventually it more or less settles down to YA adventure ("kids foil villainous adult plot") but I never really connected with it.

Also there's this coy narrator who never really comes into focus. I suppose she's needed to clarify the story structure for narrative newcomers, but I expected her to be connected with the story itself. Is the game's temporal macguffin supposed to be connected with the narrative history-sliding? I don't see it. (Go ahead, tell me I missed a clue.)

The art is pretty good, and it's doing something narratively interesting, but I wasn't entirely convinced.

Backfirewall_

by Naraven -- game site

You're an update process running around somebody's phone trying to update the OS. But cartoony, not Tron-style. The NPCs are all like the Photos app, the Social Media app, the Zip utility, and so on.

It's a first-person puzzle game. There's tiny bits of platforming and stealth, but not hard stuff. Nice variety of puzzles, too. Sort of a first-person point-and-click? It's not the usual inside-the-computer schtick of endless arbitrary logic puzzles. (Yeah, yeah, I see you pointing at System's Twilight. These are way more adventure-y puzzles.)

It's fluff but a fun ride.

Ib

by kouri -- game site

Remake of a horror RPGMaker game from 2012. I didn't catch it (probably because it was in Japanese) so I'm glad folks drew it to my attention this time around.

You're a little girl running around a modern art gallery with your parents. Then the lights flicker, your parents are missing, and the art starts to turn creepy.

This is really nicely done. Getting a recognizable art style into a gallery of thumb-sized pixel art is no mean trick. (The original had even fewer pixels!) The gameplay is mostly puzzles, which are decently done and creepy enough to not break the atmosphere as you crank your way through the clues. I'd say the game didn't need a hit-point gauge, but more modern horror games have made that mistake so I'm not complaining.

Short but memorable and (I am told) influential as well.

2023 IGF nominees: visual novels

2023-01-27T01:34:00+00:00

I don't really follow visual novels. But there are a lot of them, and some turn up in IGF every year, and I play the ones that are getting the most attention. That doesn't mean the best visual novels of the year! Just a couple that happen to come my way.

Butterfly Soup 2
The Wreck
Eternal Threads

(Necessary footnote: I was on the narrative jury and played free review copies of these games.)

Butterfly Soup 2

by Brianna Lei -- game site

Another year in the life of the top-flight fully automated junior high school girl friends. And girlfriends. This is much along the lines of the first Butterfly Soup: an old-school visual novel, mostly dialogue with occasional choices and "look at around the scene" scenes.

It's all on the dialogue, and the dialogue works. It's impossible not to like these energetic, confused, outraged and outrageous specimens of humanity-in-progress. Like its predecessor, the story shifts fluidly between their messy friendships and relationships, the absurd situations of school life, and the bite of growing up Asian in America.

Unlike its predecessor, this game draws in older generations: the kids' parents, a grandparent and family overseas. Adults are outsiders, as they must be in a YA story, but they're present and not entirely alien. It's a more mature story, in more ways than the literal.

I laughed; I smiled at the end; it's good stuff.

The Wreck

by The Pixel Hunt -- game site

Interactive narrative about a car accident and a tension-wracked family. Junon tries to deal with a tragedy -- her mother's illness -- while still coping with issues from her past.

This is really sharp. The presentation shifts smoothly between different modes of interaction as you alternate between the hospital and Junon's memories. It's strongly guided without being on rails. In the memory scenes, you get to look around for comments which advance the dialogue; in the hospital scenes you are both making choices and considering stretch-text-style variations of the text.

Maybe I'm stretching a little to call it a visual novel? It's primarily dialogue with occasional choices. But then there are the memory scenes, which are more walking-sim than anything else, although it's really float-through-your-memories-sim.

The writing is excellent, which is the main thing. Junon comes across as prickly and defensive while also being self-aware and funny. As you run through your day at the hospital -- versions of your day -- you learn more about her and the people around her. As you do, you get a chance to unpick what's wrong.

Eternal Threads

by Cosmonaut Studios -- game site

In May of 2015, in a rooming house in probably Manchester, the electricals went up and six people died of smoke inhalation. You're a time traveller with a history replay gadget and the ability to alter (only) small decisions. Save everybody!

I will admit that the gameplay isn't very deep. You can freely run up and down the week preceding the fire, but this is fairly pointless until you're oriented. So you start by watching the entire seven-day drama. You might try flipping a few decisions and observing the changes, but it's hard to be goal-oriented until you've sunk several hours into watching clips.

But that's okay! Sinking several hours into the game is a pleasure. The voice acting and mocap are entirely solid; you instantly care about these six British weirdos. And their friends. (And their accents, which are an absolute bonanza of chewy UK regionalisms.)

Anyhow, once you've gotten a sense of the timeline, it's mostly a matter of getting everybody to make better life choices. It's not entirely true that you can win by always choosing "face your problems", "talk it out", and "consider counseling". (Some characters need a bit of shaking up to bring their problems into the open so that they can face them.) But, in general, your better impulses will be rewarded. The hardest part is remembering where all the bad decisions are so you can flip them.

(The timeline screen is almost great for this. Unfortunately the "influence lock" button, which is supposed to let you scroll through all causes of an event, seemed to be buggy.)

Now, I'm definitely stretching when I call this a visual novel. But... it sort of is? It's mostly dialogue (full-animated, but so what) and then you get to try different story-paths to see how they come out! Is this not the core experience of the catch-all-the-endings visual novel? Except interwoven rather than branching, and you're searching for one "best" ending.

(Come to think of it, The Wreck also has this idea of altering events to find the best ending. This only exists at the story level, not gameplay -- you're incrementally improving in a memory loop -- but it's another visual-novel-ish aspect.)

Anyway, Eternal Threads is eight hours of soap opera dramatics, a wee bit of puzzly exploration (a few rooms of the house need to be unlocked), and a sequel hook. I enjoyed it.

2023 IGF nominees: the RPG bonanza

2023-01-26T03:04:00+00:00

IGF nominations!

Now, my usual habit is to lay down a stream of posts reviewing all my favorite nominees. And honorable mentions. And other IGF entries which I feel like reviewing.

However, this year will have to go a little bit differently, because I've already posted about a lot of the entries! So these posts will have a lot of "see previous review". Sorry about that.

Anyhow. You may recall that last year I had mixed reactions about the slate of entries. Lots of games doing great things, but few overall favories.

This year? Too many overall favorites. Seriously. I could name a dozen games that made my "game of the year" list. And I will! But let's take them one group at a time.

The first standout group of games: awesome narrative RPGs.

Of course I'm using "role-playing" in the sense derived from tabletop RPGs. You have stats, you have ways to improve your stats, you're dropped into a world full of stat-based challenges. You may also have to scrounge money (or whatever) to buy food (or whatever). Stuff like that.

Games like this stand or fall on their game mechanics. Sure, we've all played D&D, roll 16 on a d20 to hit armor class 4... But that's just the start of the road. How does the gameplay suit this particular story? Are you rolling for results or for options? Is the game about luck, planning, or negotiation?

Citizen Sleeper
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
Roadwarden
Betrayal at Club Low
The Pale Beyond

(Necessary footnote: I was on the narrative jury and had access to free review copies of these games. I played a review copy of Roadwarden. The Pale Beyond is not yet releaseed; I played the public demo. The other games, I had already purchased by the time IGF judging began.)

Citizen Sleeper

by Jump Over the Age -- game site

Far-future RPG using the "plot clock" concept. You're cheap mind-clone labor trying to make your way in the slums of deep space. Start by sweeping the docks; watch for your chance.

The setting and writing are delightful -- a run-down space-station full of social strata and people trying to make their way. ("People" of course includes robots, AIs, mushrooms...) You've got lots of branching plots to explore and limited resources to explore with. Everything is about building relationships and communities.

The dice system is of the sort where you roll first and then decide what to apply the dice to. And every major goal requires many turns, with explicit count-down or count-up clocks to surface how you're doing. This may seem weird to D&D grognards but it works really well. You constantly feel that you're on the brink of ruin (so few dice, and some of them were bad rolls!) but you've actually got a lot of latitude to shape your destiny and avoid an ignominious early death.

See full review.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

by Northway Games -- game site

Far-future RPG about a bunch of kids in a newly-established planetary colony. You land at age 10; play through age 20.

This somewhat suffers from being a school simulator. You (realistically) don't have a lot of control over your life in the first few years. You basically go to class to grind skill points and then see what story pops up. The planetary exploration scenes are the only sections where you can play for specific story goals.

But the story that pops up is always engaging. Your life is a well-rounded, interesting group of kids in an agreeably cozy (though not perfect or stress-free) society. So I was happy to play. Also, the mechanics are very nicely done. You beat challenges with a simple card-chaining game, but the cards represent everything you've achieved in the game so far. You really feel like you're building your adult self out of your teen experiences. Plus, you know, opportunities for smooching.

See full review.

Roadwarden

by Moral Anxiety Studio -- game site

Narrative RPG in a D&D-ish fantasy setting. You wander, keeping the roads safe for travel and doing people favors. Lots and lots of favors.

I found this more impressive for its depth of implementation than the story per se. The peninsula is loaded with quests, but not of the typical "kill N rats" style. Every one is a hand-crafted story: finding a lost pouch under a bridge, spreading the word about a plague, bringing offerings to an altar. At the same time, the game has a few systematic mechanics that run across many stories. Your health, hunger, and filthiness are general stats (though in a coarse-grained "lots/some/none" way, not a fine numerical scale). Your trust level in various villages is significant and can be shifted in various ways.

The result is that you wind up juggling an intricate web of quest requirements. This is tactically interesting! Except I found it tactically sort of tiring instead. It was a lot to keep track of. The in-game journal is great at showing your current goals and knowledge, but it doesn't really show immediate needs. I found myself doing a lot of "Go to village X, oh yeah, the mayor doesn't trust me, how do I make nice with her? Eh, I'll go somewhere else."

(This is where Citizen Sleeper's plot clocks really help. They're not in-character but they sure make planning your choices easier!)

The story bits are all well-written but I didn't find the world or the characters particularly engaging. The game makes a point of letting you flesh out your character and background with periodic questions, which is nicely paced but still didn't grab me.

As a piece of craft, this is certainly up with the other games in this post. But after about two game-weeks of play, I decided it wasn't for me.

Betrayal at Club Low

by Cosmo D -- game site

Comedy heist caper in the surreal cosmos of Off-Peak City.

Mechanically this is pretty solid. It's an RPG with a fast-paced dice system. Try a thing; roll for results, maybe good maybe bad; results affect the next roll. You have various ways to tweak the dice but you have to deploy them judiciously. No single failure is catastrophic but too many ends your run. Runs are meant to be pretty quick (30-60 minutes) so you can try repeatedly and learn your way through the heist.

I love Off-Peak City as a setting; I loved the earlier (adventurey) games from Cosmo D. But I had trouble getting into this one. It just felt too hard. I had to use all the easy-mode settings to make any progress at all, and even then I got a non-optimal ending.

I think you're supposed to make multiple runs, learning more about Club Low each time, until you finally triumph. But I generally don't replay games. So I was left somewhat unsatisfied.

On the up side, pizza dice. Pizza dice. Genius idea, or genius idea with pepperoni?

The Pale Beyond

by Bellular Studios -- game site

A crew of doughty sailors heads south, trying to reach an earlier expedition lost in the ice. But, oh no, you're trapped in the ice yourself! And where has the Captain gone?

I only played a bit of the demo. But it looked like a really neat worker-placement sort of RPG. You can distribute your crew to various weekly tasks: shoveling coal, scouting the ice floes, hunting for food. But of course the crew members are people with personalities and story arcs, not just skills and stats. You're continually having little encounters with them. If you lose their trust, things may go very badly.

Looking forward to the full version.

And the misty brakefern way

2023-01-05T01:41:00+00:00

You know the song, "The Witch of the Westmorland"? I got into a discussion about it a couple of days ago.

The song is by Archie Fisher, but it's more commonly associated with Stan Rogers. Stan sang it on his live album Between the Breaks. That album has launched a thousand pub sings -- it's got "Mary Ellen Carter" and "Rolling Down to Old Maui" and "Barrett's Privateers", for heavens' sake -- but let's stick to the one song.

I knew a couple of things about the Witch, and then there's a bunch of things I didn't know. There's a rabbit warren down there.

Before I get into it, though, let me tell you how the song goes! You can read the original liner notes and lyrics (PDF). (Or see the lyrics on Mudcat, the Internet Archive of folk music knowledge. Or on Mainly Norfolk.) To sum up:

A knight rides away from the battlefield, sore-wounded. Three talking animals tell him that his only hope of survival is to find the Witch of the Westmorland. (Stan Rogers' version skips a couple of the animals.) The knight gathers goldenrod and casts it into the lake, and the Witch comes forth:

One half the form of a maiden fair / With a jet black mare's body.

The knight sets his hawk and hounds on the Witch, but she's not into that. She salves his wounds with the goldenrod, and kisses him, and they spend the night together. In the morning he rides away -- not merely healed, but with the Witch's blessing:

There's none can harm the knight who's lain / With the Witch of the West-mer-land.

Now, the first thing I knew about this song is that it's not a folk story. There is no British tradition of horse-witches hiding in lakes. The whole thing is contemporary (well, from the 1970s). Stan Rogers apparently referred to it as "a five hundred year old legend that Archie made up."

The first thing I didn't know -- or I didn't think about it until this week -- is that the song is extremely damn weird.

Leave aside that the knight rides halfway across the country and then chases the Witch while supposedly bleeding to death. Or that he maybe has sex with a centaur? (Okay, she's a shapeshifter, I get it. But I'm laughing at the idea of a centaur wearing a blue velvet dress on her horse-body.)

No, it's weird because what is this song about? The knight is wounded, so he goes to a healer, who... heals him. He doesn't bargain. She doesn't ask a price, unless maybe she was horny. He doesn't go back and win the war once he's healed. The "before" is a ruined battlefield and there is no "after".

I don't want to oversell the idea of narrative tension. Plenty of songs have no more to say than "My girl, yeah yeah yeah!" (And you know that can't be bad.) But Archie Fisher "borrowed the form of the narrative ballad" (his words) without exactly writing a narrative. Stan Rogers sings "He has risen hale and sound!" so triumphantly that you forget that this is exactly what everybody said would happen from line pip. Except maybe the knight is invulnerable now, which... is some other story the song doesn't get into.

The closest we have to a conflict, in the narrative sense, is when the knight chases the Witch. The text doesn't quite say she runs from him, but she goes "fast and fleet" and then he rides swiftly, so okay, a chase. He sends his hounds to fetch the mare, and his hawk to fetch the woman. (Separately? Whatever.) Except the text doesn't say he catches her either! Next verse, she's just talking him down. "No, sweetie, this isn't a hunting song. C'mere."

It's a cycle: teasing genres -- a battlefield, a chase, a magical bargain -- and then blowing right past them into something else. One half the form of a hunting tale with a twist from old Faerie...

And then the song is also musically weird. It doesn't have a chorus. It barely has a verse -- more like half a verse; just two bars repeated over and over for four minutes. Most people who perform it jam in an instrumental bridge to break up the monotony.

(Stan Rogers, a legend, goes to town with a different musical texture on every verse. Plus two instrumental bridges.) (And I think this is why his version works so well. He plays up each narrative segment, the search and the hunt and so on, letting the music carry each as a big climactic moment -- which segues right into the next one without giving you time to realize that it didn't resolve the way you expected.)

We're not done, though.

Another thing I've long known about "The Witch of the Westmorland" is that Pamela Dean wrote a story based on it. It's called "Owlswater". You can find it in Xanadu, a 1993 collection edited by Jane Yolen -- or more likely you can't because it's way out of print. I don't think the story has ever been reprinted.

The story is its own brand of strange. It's not about the knight. It's about an apprentice sorcerer who goes out following the knight. He's memorized the song (exactly as Archie Fisher sang it). He has a fellowship of talking animals -- well, he talks to them. Sort of. His task is to find out what the song means. He finds the Witch, at least, and some smooching is entailed; but "none can harm" isn't what he thinks. It's a good story. Ambivalent, in the same way as the song.

(The story is a prequel to Dean's Secret Country trilogy. If you've read that, then it may be significant that the sorcerer is Shan and the Witch is Melanie. But you probably knew that.)

Another thing I didn't know is that the song is about a real place. It's practically a travelogue of the English Lakeland. (Yes, England. Even though Archie Fisher is Scottish and uses a lot of Scots dialect in the lyrics.)

The Ullswater is a place you can visit. Then if you ride down the Kirkstone Pass, you'll be a few miles from the Wastwater before you come to the Windermere. Fisher says (the liner notes lay this all out, I should have read them decades ago) that the Windermere, or Winandermere, used to be the Winding Mere. All this in the district of Westmorland.

Turns out Westmorland hasn't legally been a county since 1974 -- about when Fisher wrote the song. Hm. But it's being re-created in just a few months! Oh, and "...there is no doubt that Westmerland is the more correct spelling," says J. E. Marr.

Here's another thing that I never knew: Archie Fisher wrote a sequel. For an American bluegrass group called the Waybacks.

From what I can tell, the Waybacks covered "The Witch" on a 2000 album. (Straight, not bluegrass-style. They're versatile.) Archie Fisher liked their version, so he whipped out a new set of lyrics under the title "The Return". The Waybacks recorded it for their album Burger After Church (2002). As best I can tell, Fisher has never recorded the song himself. I can't find any other recording either. Mind you, "The Return" is a rocky Google search, so I might have missed one.

So what the heck is this new chapter? The lyrics; the summary:

The knight is old now. His horse and his hounds and his hawk are long dead. He rides an old pony back to the winding mere. With his horn he calls back the spirits of his companion creatures. Then he casts a handful of withered goldenrod into the water. The Witch rises, white-haired now. Sorry, she says; nothing cures old age. So he climbs up on her back, with the velvet dress as his saddlecloth, and the knight and the Witch and the ghosts ride off together.

(We may infer that the knight has also died; he and his hawk and hounds are reunited on death's shore. What that means for the Witch, anybody's guess.)

It's a fitting end for the knight, I'd say. Just as in the first song, we entirely skip over the knight's battles. There may be a story of the invulnerable knight carving his way through history, but this isn't it. He's old and alone and there's nothing left for him to do. So he does it.

I meant it, though, when I said Fisher "whipped out a new set of lyrics". I don't think "The Return" stands well on its own. Most of its heft is reprising familiar phrases and images. He's kissed her pale lips once and twice, this time.

But then, we don't get to hear Stan Rogers sing it. Maybe he would have made it work.

A few places around the Internet indicate that Fisher intended to write a third song, a prequel, completing the Witch's cycle. He hasn't yet.

I'll leave you with this:

In Pamela Dean's "Owlswater", the Witch is partial to goose:

One sunset, however, by means Shan did not care to inquire into, Melanie killed a goose. She plucked, and singed, and drew it, and stuffed it with the wild grass seeds, and roasted it, quite as if she had been cooking, and expertly, for all her life, instead of having only that morning boiled two ducks' eggs until a child could have played at dodge ball with them.

Having eaten the goose, they built houses of its bones. [...]

Well, I can tell you how the Witch killed her goose. She swam up below and snatched it right down into the mere.

Witnesses have reported wildfowl vanishing suddenly at Ullswater in recent days.

"There was a large flock of Greylag geese on the lake, when one about 10lbs in weight - a fully grown adult bird - started flapping its wings furiously on top of the water before it got dragged backwards at speed and straight down."

-- Ullswater geese deaths, June 30, 2022 (BBC News)

The knight is gone away, but the Witch is with us still. Go down to the water's brim with goldenrod and some good sage stuffing and you might find out.

A couple more recent puzzle games

2022-11-29T22:53:00+00:00

We're coming up on IGF judging season. Okay, actually we're a week into IGF judging season. I haven't jumped in yet due to various other tasks that piled up my Thanksgiving holiday. (You might have seen yesterday's post.)

Anyway, this means I'll be accumulating a lot of game review posts which I'll drop in a batch in a couple of months. But before I start that, let's clear out the ones I've already written!

The Entropy Centre
The Case of the Golden Idol

The Entropy Centre

by Stubby Games -- game site

A Portal-like that wears its influences on its sleeve.

Jumping in, you may feel like the only narrative decision in any puzzle game is "What personality should the AI voice have this time?" This is unfair, though. Entropy Centre's story is of 2022, not 2007. The world is on fire and nobody is doing anything about it. That's got kick. And Astra the AI isn't just a GlaDOS riff; she's worth a few smiles.

The puzzles are solid, anyhow. Gimmick: your magic gun rewinds time. Generally that means moving a crate back 30 seconds on its timeline. Other puzzle elements are very familiar (jump plates, laser cubes, light-bridges) but getting them to freeze or move backwards is a whole new take.

Wisely, the "30 seconds" are counted SuperHot-style. Time only advances for a crate when it's moving. So you can stop and think as long as you like. And you will! I'd say the puzzles aren't quite as hard, focused, or mind-bending as in Portal. It's mostly a matter of "plan each crate's path, plan your path, then execute." But the combinations are tricky and almost every puzzle has a new idea in it.

The crate puzzles are broken up by environmental puzzles (rewinding collapsing catwalks or falling elevators) and a few action scenes involving angry droids. The action scenes are a bit annoying. They're the only part of the game with actual time pressure, and I died a few times too many, too repetitively. If the droids had used non-fatal stunners I think it would have worked just as well.

(Another tiny tweak that would have improved the game immensely: a touch of cheat-gravity so that you don't miss the jump plate. Portal did quite a bit of that.)

Fun, good story idea, recommended.

The Case of the Golden Idol

by Color Gray Games -- game site

I guess Obra-Dinn-like is now a category! I snuck Strange Horticulture in there, but Golden Idol is more of a direct match to Obra Dinn:

You are inspecting a scene for physical evidence;
The scene is frozen in time -- no NPC interaction;
You're filling in answers to "what happened to who and how";
Wild guessing won't help, but if you're close, you can home in on the truth by informed guessing. But you feel bad about it. But you do it anyway.

You're investigating a linked series of events in the 1700s involving a rich family, a secret society, murder and scheming and politics, and a golden idol. The idol comes from Lemuria and is reputed to have occult powers. The powers become evident pretty quickly. You'll see.

My usual line is that I suck at detective games but do well at Obra-Dinners -- I'm good at inspecting physical evidence, whereas people are difficult and confusing. That holds up in Golden Idol. Take notes; you'll do fine. The logic-puzzle aspect is also strong -- the "everyone has a first name and a last name and a profession" sort of puzzle. You won't need a full-on grid, but you'll do a lot of matching up and eliminating possibilities to see what's left.

In fact the later chapters do work their way up to detective mode. At one point the "physical evidence" is a constable's notebook, and then you're scrutinizing testimonies for contradictions just like any gumshoe plod. I made it through, though. Either I'm getting better or the game has a scrupulous sense of how to lay out clues. I say the latter.

The story is kind of clunky. I felt like the golden idol itself was a let-down. Figuring out its powers is supposed to be a key puzzle, but it doesn't get used as much as you might expect. When it does -- well, the game necessarily drags it down to the level of mundane physicality. Because it has to leave physical evidence, right? The idol plays into some nice (and justified) surprises at the end, but overall the plot comes off as a series of squalid squabbles rather than a story per se.

Nonetheless, a bunch of solid puzzles along the way.

NarraScope 2023: June 9-11, Pittburgh

2022-11-29T03:36:00+00:00

A quick note that we've gotten things rolling for NarraScope 2023! The conference will be in Pittsburgh (my old college town), hosted by the University of Pittsburgh. (Not my old college, but right next door.)

We're really excited to have another in-person event. But we know the past couple of virtual NarraScopes have attracted plenty of online attendees who won't be able to make it to Pittsburgh. So we're aiming to run the (perhaps-mythical) hybrid conference. All events will be streamed, and we'll do our best to keep conversations flowing in the NarraScope Discord.

You can read the full announcement here. We've also posted the call for proposals for program items.

Leviathan launches today on Steam and Itch

2022-11-14T17:54:00+00:00

It's out! The latest interactive comic by Jason Shiga, author of Meanwhile.

The first choice in Leviathan

A seaside village – and a monstrous threat. Explore as you choose, by day or by night. Can you unravel the secrets of history and defeat the Leviathan?

Leviathan is a comic, but not an ordinary comic. Follow the paths from panel to panel. Where the path divides, you decide where to go next! A thrilling tale of sorcery, deception, and discovery.

Navigating the Cobalt Isles

I have tested Leviathan on the Steam Deck and it works fine. However, I've seen Steam try to install the wrong version of the app on Steam Deck. If it doesn't launch, select Properties, Compatibility, Force the Use... and then select "Steam Linux Runtime". That should get the native Linux version for you.

You can of course also buy Leviathan in its actual-printed-book hardback edition.

The cover of the hardback edition

That's all the news for today. I hope it's enough!

Watch this space for information about the iPhone/iPad version of Leviathan. (It'll happen, but I don't have a release date for you yet.) And of course keep your eyes open for the next in the Adventuregame Comics series!

Recent narrative games: the old school

2022-11-06T01:30:00+00:00

I didn't intend to play three different takes on the "old school" in a row. Or maybe I did, but didn't realize how different they would be.

Warning: This is the sort of post where I talk about games I enjoyed and mostly focus on what didn't work for me. I recommend all these games!

But endings are hard. Adventure games have always been tricky to wrap up. Adventure, the original, ended with a "master game" which both broke the fourth wall of the cave-world and handed you an uncharacteristically nasty final puzzle. Myst left you trailing around a bunch of worlds you'd fully explored while Atrus told you to buzz off and wait for a sequel. Monkey Island -- but we'll get there.

Naively, you want hit a dramatic, world-changing climax in the story while also smashing through the game's best puzzle. These ideas are, shall we say, in tension. So do you put the big puzzle before the big story beat? Do you make the final puzzle a cakewalk and give the player a victory lap? Or try to make the finale thematically satisfying rather than relying on pure challenge for the high? Can you keep your theme from being undermined by the focus on puzzles or game mechanics? There's a lot of ways you can play it, and a half-century of adventure gaming is still coming up with new ones.

So let's talk games!

One Dreamer
The Excavation of Hob's Barrow
Return to Monkey Island
The Past Within

One Dreamer

by Gareth Ffoulkes -- game site

Pixel-art, side-scrolling adventure about writing the Next Big Indie Game. Capital letters very much pronounced.

This is a strange take on the game-dev scene. I can't quite pin it down. Remember the big wave of "games about making games"? That was 2016. But those were, in various ways, cynical takes. The Writer Will Do Something was snarky; The Magic Circle was bitter; The Beginner's Guide was incisive through the fourth wall.

One Dreamer is... sincere? Optimistic? Except it's got all the crunch and the forum toxicity and the publisher-groveling and I think even an intimation of SWATting, although that's only a gesture. It boils everything bad about game-dev down into a parable -- and then it says, "But you know what? It was worth it!" I was left nonplussed.

I mean... I'm glad it was worth it for you? But there's an undertone of this is just the way it is that I think needs more push-back.

The game is pretty good as a game, though. The puzzles are an interesting compromise between generic adventure fetching and the full-on Zachlike programming experience. You look over snippets of code, locate variables, and figure out how to set them. This is introduced as your day job ("fix this web site") but rapidly turns into a hallucinatory experience of debugging the immersive game-world that you're both building and exploring.

If it feels like a constrained system as first, be patient. Soon enough you learn to copy variables from one routine to another, thus linking different bits of the world together. (Reminded me more than a bit of Savoir-Faire.) The mechanics really come together in the final chapter, an burgeoning open-world playground in which you scramble to launch-day-patch your game before everybody gives up on it. In some sense the whole game is a tutorial buildup for that chapter. A lot of dialogue for that much tutorial, but I thought it worked out.

Pretty, too. The pixel art is elevated by rich, atmospheric effects -- bloom, shadow, clouds and rain and thunder. The people are stringy pixel blobs but the background environments are terrific.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow

by Wadjet Eye Games -- game site

Pixel-art, side-scrolling adventure about tomb-raiding in Victorian England. Not Victorian London, mind you. This is the North. Or maybe the Midlands, I can't tell. Lots of "nowt", no "thee".

"An old-school adventure!" they said. Okay, what does old-school mean? Well, this is the generic adventure fetching I mentioned before. Person A wants some milk, person B has a goat but also sore knees, person C has a recipe for liniment but wants ingredients... it's all set up to resolve tidily and then you move on to the next chapter. If an NPC likes beer or fossils or whatever, you can be sure you will be fetching them that very thing. And don't hesitate to pick up everything that isn't nailed down -- unless the author has a reason that you shouldn't, in which case it's either a puzzle or scenery.

None of this is surprising. Old-school is classic school.

The game mechanics may be creaky but the writing is pretty solid. The cranky old village of Bewlay has plenty of colorful local characters, from the vicar to the blacksmith to the cranky old farmer who invited you in the first place... where has he gotten to, anyhow? Of course nobody wants to talk about the famous Hob's Barrow, but they sure do want to talk about everything else. The secrets will bubble up as the game goes on. (And you have your own backstory, of course.)

This is folk-gothic horror, to be clear. I sort of wish the game had made this clearer: you are screwed from the minute you arrive in Bewlay. That's a perfectly fine model for horror, of course. And story-on-rails is a perfectly fine model for an old-school adventure!

But what it's not is tragedy. You're not the victim of your own choices; you're the victim of creepy village forces who take adventage of you. The truth will come too late. I walked away thinking "How awful, but it's not like there's anything I could have done."

Maybe I've gotten to used to player agency as a core principle? I think I just went into the game expecting something that it wasn't. Well, now you know.

(It occurs to me, days later, that the story can be read as a tragedy about the father. He has to lie in bed and listen as his mistakes destroy first his coworkers and then his daughter's life. From this angle, the protagonist of the game and the protagonist of the story are different people. Which is interesting! But it's also deeply submerged. The father's story doesn't come into focus until the later chapters and then it's all second-hand.)

The pixel art is... okay. It's painterly -- landscapes in subtle earth tones. The colors are nice but the pixels just make it looks blurred. I wanted the original painted landscapes! Later parts of the game slide into an unearthly color-out-of-space nightmare; I thought that monochromatic environment was better served by the pixel style than the painterly village was.

(I'm not sure I want to make a general rule of this, but I'll keep an eye out.)

Plenty of puzzles. Puzzlier at the end, when you get past the milk-fetching. I looked at a hint or two but was basically happy with the difficulty level.

Return to Monkey Island

by Terrible Toybox -- game site

Admission: I never played the original Monkey Island games. I sort of absorbed the core concept from the air -- it wasn't complicated. Pirate goofuses. Then I played the 2009 Telltale series, which I liked, but it didn't make me go back and play the earlier ones.

So I appreciate that Return to Monkey Island starts with a scrapbook for people like me! It's a recap of the series... well, it's a recap of the running gags of the series so you'll know when to laugh. Got it? Good.

Then it's time for puzzles. Stacks of puzzles. Gobs of puzzles. Really a lot of them. I don't mean that this game is a brain-burner. It's not! The designers clearly want you to make steady progress. Every puzzle is solidly clued. The biggest challenge is remembering everything you've seen and everything you need to do and putting the pieces together. There's in-game hints ready to go but I never had to resort to them.

The designers also intended to smooth out all the historically annoying trip-ups of the point-and-click genre. You can run fast. You can highlight hotspots. If you have to traverse a puzzle twice, you'll get a map-hotspot or a shortcut. Every long, fussy animation has an abbreviated version the second time around.

Dragging an item onto a hotspot where it fails just shows a red X, so you don't have to hear Dominic Armato say "That doesn't work" six thousand times. If the item does work, it shows a tooltip saying exactly what it will do. So you're never surprised by your character solving a puzzle in a way you didn't expect. It's really thoughtful and smooth.

As for the story: you're going to find the Secret of Monkey Island, because (running gag) the first game never actually had one. LeChuck the zombie pirate is after it too, because you can't have a Monkey Island game without him. That's about all the plot you get. Run around a bunch of islands performing tasks that will solve puzzles that lead to more tasks. Elaine is around too, albeit mostly offstage because this isn't a sidekick game. But (as always) I'm happy to see a game where the romance is a happily married couple.

(Although they could smooch. Not to get horny about it! But you've got a couple who travel a lot, doing their own things, but they meet up occasionally on a tropical island... I'm just saying.)

As for the ending... Hrm. I mean, there never was a secret of Monkey Island. The game admits straight up that there can't be. This is a world of affable stereotypes; there's fundamentally nothing to say about it beyond "Fun ride." Oh, there's a bit of a running theme about Guybrush's tendency to wreck anything that might have a puzzle solution on the other side, but this doesn't really go anywhere except "Yep, you sure are an adventure game protagonist."

And it's not like we can go back to rescuing Elaine from mortal danger. Come on.

So it's not surprising that the authors wrap up the game by shrugging, going meta, and ringing down the curtain. Abrupt, but not surprising.

Now, a certain amount of post-game googling let me in on the not-actually-a-secret of Monkey Island 2: that (1991) game also ended with a weird meta shrug. The frame story of RtMI refers back to MI2. The ending builds on it. Still ambiguous, but consonant... if you've played the first two games, which I haven't. Oh well.

I feel like it would have held together better if the game had performed closure for any of its story elements or themes. You'd think that Guybrush could have a moment of "I've accomplished something! Or learned something! Or made some kind of worthwhile difference in someone's life! And now it's time to go finally get that Secret." But nope. The game practically rubs your face in never doing that. That's not the kind of guy Guybrush is.

And yet, I solved gobs of puzzles and they were generally creative and clever. The dialogue has plenty of funny. The art is good. (Not pixel-style! It's off doing its own sort of bouncy-2D-cel stylized thing. I liked it.) Some of the in-jokes were my jam. I was into it.

The Past Within

by Rusty Lake -- game site

Surprise bonus game! Okay, it's listed up top, so no surprise to you. But I threw it into this post at the last minute.

I've played a lot of Rusty Lake games, going back to the time when they were Flash "Cube Escapes" on the web. (Speaking of old-school!) They're short, they've got good puzzle variety, they have a distinctive campy-creepy iconography.

But the creators have always been willing to push the boundaries. A few years ago they made a game with a companion film. Now they're tackling two-player cooperative IF.

I don't think I've seen this angle before. Each player has a copy of the game. One plays the Past route; one plays the Future. The game just requires the two to pass clues back and forth. Non-networked multiplayer! Videochat or sitting at opposite ends of the couch would both work fine. Peeking at each others' screens is cheating; you're supposed to talk it out.

On the one hand, this is a pretty constrained model. The entire game is synchronized through puzzles, so it's very tick-tock: you solve a puzzle and find clues for me, I solve a puzzle and find clues for you. There can't be any side trails.

On the other hand, the game is clearly about the shared experience rather than the puzzles. The fun part is describing what's going on as you fumble through Rusty-Lake-ness towards a common goal. Sometimes you catch glimpses of each other's worlds.

On the two-handed hand, I skipped the fun part! If you're a calloused introvert, which I am, you can just boot the game up on two devices and play yourself. Which I did! Then it's a perfectly good Rusty Lake game with a two-screen interface -- interesting in itself.

But I do recommend the two-person experience if you're up for it.

And the ending? Rusty Lake games all end the same way: you disappear into the spookiness. Swallowed by the Lake. The lore is an infinitely extensible family tree of Gorey-esque misfits, but there will never be a final resolution and we're all fine with that. We'd be disappointed if there were one! Keep 'em coming.

Leviathan launches on November 14th

2022-11-01T04:10:00+00:00

Release date! We have interactive-comic-sign, two weeks and counting.

"Next thing I know, our ship is capsized..."

Okay, thirteen days and counting. Jason Shiga's Leviathan will be out Monday the 14th on Steam and Itch. Runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, and -- why yes -- Steam Deck too.

(The print edition is already available. Just to remind you.)