IFDB page: Mortality
Final placement: 12th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition
At its outset, Mortality makes a really big deal of how it isn’t for kids, indicating perhaps what its author expects the default IF game and audience to be, even in 2005. We are fairly warned that there won’t be “singing elves, saving the world and maybe a treasure hunt or two”. The help text describes it instead as “essentially an adult game”, and “more adult than not”. This feels like a strange bit of equivocation, as if it’s not confident in just outright labeling itself a game for adults, but as I played through, I found that the hedging was appropriate. While Mortality certainly has more than its share of (in the game’s words) “violence, bad language and scenes of a ‘questionable’ nature”, it’s not exactly aimed at adults either.
Rather, I’d associate it with the attitudes of a stereotypical teen boy, and kind of a gross one at that. There’s the protagonist who drives a Corvette, who “has slept with women of all colours, all nationalities, all races, from one side of the globe to the other”, who’s great with his fists and isn’t afraid to kill. There’s the love interest, who is always described as “ravishing”, or “the most stunning creature”, or “a truly radiant creature”, and so on. There’s rampant racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Every major character is thoroughly unlikeable, and the story itself is basically “noir with magic”, but minus any subtlety to the themes or development of the characters. There are numerous moments which adults (or at least this adult) would find eyerolling or outright offensive.
On top of this, the game is barely IF. There are bunches of cutscenes, or scenes where the interaction boils down to “press a key” or “do the only action we’ll let you do.” In the parts that are interactive, the implementation can be kind of screwy. For instance, you’re startled by a noise in the night, and jump up from bed to investigate. “X me” in this scene results in, “I am Steven Rogers, forty years of age. Ex-policeman, ex-SAS, ex-army. I am dressed in my usual clothes.” First, yeah, the PC inexplicably has the same name as Captain America, which I found pretty distracting. But also, he apparently sleeps in his “usual clothes”? There is a moment where the PC switches bodies with someone else, but “X me” spits back that same exact description. Come on.
My favorite wacky implementation moment was when the PC was hidden in a corner, waiting to ambush somebody. I took inventory and experienced this:
I am carrying a accident item and a blib.
X ACCIDENT ITEM
I see nothing special about the accident item.
X BLIB
I see nothing special about the blib.
An accident item (sorry, “A accident item”) and a blib? The scene is brief, those items never come into play (that I could tell), and they’re never mentioned again. Perhaps they were some kind of internal tracking mechanism that the game didn’t mean to reveal, but for some reason put into the PC’s inventory? My thought was, “This game has gone round the bend.”
My least favorite wacky implementation moment? The fact that the PC kept finding himself in chairs or beds, but Adrift cannot understand the command “get up”. I kept needing to stand, and the game and I kept doing this dance:
GET UP
Take what?
Grrrrr.
Finally, there is the ending. My playthrough ended with me in a dark void, the game repeating over and over again, “All about me is the endless darkness of death. I have failed. I am undone.” Mind you, it still offers a prompt and pretends to be interactive at that point, but unless I was missing something clever, this was just “*** You have died ***”, but without the resolution. I hit this ending after a loooong non-interactive “dialogue” scene in which there kept being only one dialogue choice at each “branch”. How could I have avoided the “endless darkness” ending? I had no idea, so I turned to the walkthrough.
Except, the walkthrough is just a game transcript from a particular playthrough, not all that different from my own. (Really, the game is so minimally interactive that it couldn’t be all that different from my own.) What actions make the difference between one ending and another? It was a mystery. So I turned to the PDF which comes with the game. It suggests, “if you’re not adverse to some serious spoilers that might otherwise ruin the game for you, type the word cheat and see what happens.” I think you mean “averse”, not “adverse”, but okay!
CHEAT
Try something else. That command is not one needed for this adventure.
Hey, thanks for that spoiler warning. It really preserved the surprise of that response. Later on, the PDF explains that Stephanie (the love interest NPC) is the key, and that there’s a hidden variable that tracks her state — keep that variable high enough for the better endings. Also, by default this variable is hidden, “but typing in the reveal command will display its current value.” Interesting!
So I typed “reveal”. I was not given the value of the variable! Instead, the game spit out the entire walkthrough, which, you’ll remember, is a full playthrough transcript. Or rather, it tried to do that, but seemingly ran out of gas about 90% of the way through. Until it did that, I thought I might mess around with different conversational choices and such to see what they did to the Stephanie state, but after that “hint” also failed, I decided I was done.
Mortality has some redeeming qualities. It’s an attempt at very story-heavy IF, and in some moments finds the balance between keeping the story on track and allowing the feeling of interactivity. The idea of choosing an ending based on how well you’ve kept a character happy is kind of cool (if a bit reminiscent of Galatea). The writing is, as the game might aver, “more error-free than not”, and does a good job of involving the senses, although a “smell” or “listen” command might not line up with what a description has said.
But overall, this is an unpleasant story populated with despicable characters, not really interactive enough to be interesting as a game, and burdened with an implementation that is not only shaky throughout, but doesn’t even fulfill the basic promises of its documentation. My experience with it went from annoying to puzzling to very annoying, and I’m glad to have it behind me.
Rating: 3.7