Text Adventure

Bonehead is the story of Fred Merkle, a player from the early days of baseball whose small mistake cost him a key game and haunted him the rest of his life.

It's one of those rare games that tells you up front you're headed for disaster. Interspersed passages from an unidentified narrator sketch in poor Fred's later life and all the humiliations that lie ahead of him, while you the player just try to get him through the day.

I was raised on graphic adventure games --they were the first videogames I ever played and have profoundly influenced my approach to games ever since. I was also raised on The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, so naturally I jumped at the chance to write about the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy Remake, or H2G2 Remake for short. Unfortunately, it seems you can't turn back the clock.

The Warbler's Nest is an interactive fiction about perception: what seems to be going on may or may not be what is actually going on.

This isn't the first IF game to pull that trick. It's not even the only contender in this most recent IF Comp.

But many of the other games that explore the same territory do so in order to talk about the nature of mental illness, self-deception, or confusion about one's own identity: that is, they're presenting the crisis as one that occurs within the protagonist.

In The Warbler's Nest, the double vision is about what the protagonist knows vs. what the player knows. The game reports something in the protagonist's voice, but there are enough signals to the player to encourage him to at least consider the situation based on a 21st-century understanding of reality.

Having the player understand more than the protagonist has been used for humorous effect a few times: Grunk in Lost Pig reports experiences that the player is better able to interpret than the protagonist, and one of my favorite moments in Treasures of A Slaver's Kingdom involves intentionally letting the protagonist fall into a trap he's too dumb to notice.

But this time around, the dissonance isn't a joke, and the point isn't about people being slow-witted. Instead, it's about the importance of the world views we apply to everything we see, and how much tragedy may be in the mind of the onlooker.

The Warbler's Nest also uses the textual nature of the medium to full advantage. Every description, every atmospheric detail deepens the ambiguity of the protagonist's situation. The protagonist's own thoughts become a source of subtle menace. What's more, the words you choose to talk about the things in your environment affect how the game plays, because they express what you think is going on.

Choose wisely.

[If you've never played any interactive fiction before, you may like this condensed guide for help with command types.]

'Mid the Sagebrush and the Cactus is the latest IF game by Victor Gijsbers, author of The Baron and Fate. Gijsbers is interested in the problem of violence -- when and how it might be justified, and how games can explore what a player is willing to have a character do.

Sagebrush is about a situation where the violence has already begun: your character has killed a man, and his son David has come around for revenge. You can fight the son, or explain yourself to him, and you will need to do some of each if you want to survive.

The structure, unusually for IF, is built around a partially randomized combat system. These have gotten a pretty poor reputation: IF players tend to be frustrated by situations where randomness rather than clever thinking determines outcome, and in any case a turn-based engine where it's possible to undo a move means that it's easy to step back any time a roll comes out badly. Authors have the option of turning off the UNDO command (which only works on some interpreters anyway) and frustrating their players, or else coming up with non-random, puzzle-like ways to present combat. There have been some cool experiments in the latter mode -- C. E. J. Pacian's Gun Mute is an excellent example, and Øyvind Thorsby's Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies also has many things to recommend it. (Seriousness of premise is not one of the things.)

Gijsbers, however, trained on RPGs and intensely interested in more quantitative presentations of combat, has created a whole new library for IF combat, called ATTACK. While it includes a random component, ATTACK also tracks weapons statistics, attack and defense advantages, distinct ACT and REACT stages, and an ongoing tension level, which helps to guarantee that something dramatic will happen sooner or later. (The longer the tension has been allowed to build, the more likely that an attack attempt will succeed, as I understand it.) ATTACK also implements some AI for non-player characters to help them choose sensible behaviors.

ATTACK is different enough from conventional IF combat that players will require some new vocabulary. Gijsbers makes it a bit easier to get into, however, by listing all the possible combat actions in the status bar each turn. This is a good decision, and one I'd encourage other authors to consider if they use the ATTACK library; in the past when I've tried demos using it, I've found the learning curve for the system a bit overwhelming, and had a hard time seeing the effects of my tactical choices. Good feedback is extremely important. With the status line to help, even players who are unfamiliar with IF should find they don't get stuck for things to do next.

Gijsbers does shut off the ability to UNDO turns in this game, but because the game is short, there's very little progress to lose; besides, each thing that happens feels like the result of the whole series of choices up to that point, not just a bad move at the wrong moment. Because the sense of losing arbitrarily is gone, it's less frustrating to be unable to UNDO a step.

The resulting gameplay feels more tactical than almost any other IF combat I've encountered. Because it matters not only what you do but when you do it, there are often times where it's a good idea to stall -- and this dovetails with the game's conversation system, so that there are times when it's a good idea to explain yourself to David, and times when it's best to arm yourself instead. During the first playthrough, I found myself alert to nuances of David's behavior and to the clues in the status line, trying to work out whether I could afford to put him off a moment longer or whether he had become truly dangerous. This is an experience I've not exactly had before in IF, and I found it compelling.

I'm less persuaded by Sagebrush as a story. To discuss this fully, I'll need to include some spoilers, so be warned; you may want to stop reading here until you've tried the game.

The goal of Hummingbird Mind, from the outset, is fairly vague. The player begins by settling down somewhere inside the introspective mind of a person sitting at their desk. A subtle clue gives the player a starting point, and then multiple options open up to allow exploration of the situation at hand. Multiple paths of sub-narrative branching from these initial options extend and intertwine, forcing the player to traverse them in a cyclic manner as new clues are discovered.

Fragile Shells is an escape-the-room IF game written for Jay Is Games's Escape competition. (Yes, I'm mentioning it months after the fact. It still deserves the attention.)

Like many another escape game, it has a single room full of objects to manipulate before you get to get away: codes, batteries, light sources, things that have to be used on other things. Unlike most, though, Fragile Shells has a coherent story and an effective setting: you're the lone survivor in a very damaged space module, and you need to get into the escape pod before your oxygen runs out or your environment otherwise betrays you. The writing makes it clear just how urgent that problem is, without the need for annoying or unfair time limits on the gameplay.

Like many of Andrew Plotkin's games, Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home is beautiful because so alien.

The protagonist is very unlike ourselves; his (or her, or its) culture and technology are advanced beyond imagining, and we get only hints. Bored with a life of technological ease, he (or she, or it) sets off across lightyears of space, alone, to look for whatever secrets that bit of the universe might have to offer.

Walker and Silhouette used to be antagonists. He's a police detective; she's a criminal of sorts, though it seems that most of her crimes were expressions of social subversiveness, rather than anything too hard-core. Now, of course, they solve crimes.

Walker & Silhouette is designed to be friendly to novice players, and in particular to get around some of the challenges of parser-based IF: instead of requiring the player to type full commands, it provides keywords that can be typed in or (on interpreters that support hyperlinks) just clicked on. Selecting a keyword means having the protagonist do whatever he (or she -- you play both characters during the game) thinks is the most reasonable action applying to that object at the moment.

Most objects don't get picked up, either, which means that the player has a fairly static inventory. And movement is limited to using the leave keyword when it becomes available -- which means that there's no map to keep track of and no compass directions to memorize. There are even some achievements to unlock, which is cute, a borrowing of game tropes decidedly alien to standard IF.

As one might expect, the keyword-dependency narrows the puzzle range of Walker & Silhouette: any given thing is only useful in one way at one time. It's not completely without challenge, though. It soon becomes evident that puzzle solutions are about interacting with objects in the right order, or timed to coincide right with external events.

I'm describing this keyword-based IF as though it were a novelty. It isn't: people have been playing with variations on this idea for a long time, because it offers obvious advantages to players who find the regular IF parser too frustrating or challenging to learn. Adventures of Helpfulman used clickable keyword-driven conversation back in 1999; in 2007, Ferrous Ring explored the possibility of giving the player multiple modes of play, ranging from the standard parser through keyword play to a system that would more or less play the game for you, so you could read it like a book. There are others. But unless you've followed the IF community and its competitions very closely, you probably haven't heard of those games, and that's largely because they didn't entirely work. Some of that has to do with writing (Ferrous Ring was deeply surreal, so it was hard to figure out what was going on), but some of it was because the authors hadn't given enough thought to how a keyword-based system might be fundamentally different to interact with from a parsed-command system.

More recently, Blue Lacuna offered a partially keyword-based system: it was possible to play quite a lot of the game typing only one-word commands to examine things or move from place to place, resorting to the fuller commands at the parser only for extraordinary actions. But it tended more or less to fall back on the parser when puzzle content was needed; whereas Walker & Silhouette really commits to the idea that the keywords are going to suffice for all gameplay. And they do.

In spite of that, W&S is not quite the same as a hypertext story, and not just because the world model has more state than the average hypertext story tracks. There is still a command prompt, and if you want to, you can type commands in classic IF style. It's not necessary to do that in order to win, and most of the time it won't be productive of anything important, but there are occasionally moments when I wanted to toy with the characters by suggesting actions that they aren't consciously considering. And this paid off: the game responded as though the protagonist was surprised by an unanticipated nudge from the id, often with rather entertaining text.

All this about interface and I haven't talked about the content. Walker & Silhouette is pleasing for some of the same reasons that Gun Mute is pleasing. Pacian likes to take a setting that you think you understand (the old west, early 20th-century England) and then add layers of worldbuilding that make that setting strange and new again. Each new scene brings twists not only for the mystery in the foreground, the one the protagonists are trying to solve, but for the mystery in the background about what kind of a world this is.

I am not describing the setting at all, because one of the constant pleasures of the game, for me, was in discovering that this world contained Surprising Element X... and that Walker and Silhouette considered Element X commonplace. The keyword system helps out with that effect, too, because it allows the protagonists to act on their world knowledge in situations where the player might not completely understand what's going on. If that sounds like a demerit, trust me: in this game it generally works.

Add to that a light romance and a theme about promoting gender equality, and you have a distinctively Pacian-esque piece. It's fun, adventurous, and not too hard; it feels like enjoyable fluff while you're playing, but after you're done you may find it leaves more of an impression than you expected.

The Shadow in the Cathedral is a member of a supposedly extinct species, the commercial interactive fiction game. It's the second work out by Textfyre, and was designed by Ian Finley and written by Jon Ingold -- both well-known in the hobbyist community for diverse, gripping, and sometimes disturbing work, though Finley's last notable game came out back in 2000.

The Gostak is a game partly, but not entirely, in English. The usual word order words apply. Most pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions are unchanged ("you", "and", "on", etc.), and some modal verbs ("can", "could"), as well as a few other words somewhat arbitrarily ("five"). But most of the adjectives, nouns, and non-modal verbs have been swapped for their own new vocabulary.