Comp05, >INVENTORY, Page 3

Off the Trolley by Krisztian Kaldi [Comp05]

IFDB page: Off the Trolley
Final placement: 20th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Off the Trolley has a pretty arresting premise. You play a 65-year-old trolley driver on his last day at work. It’s your last day because your trolley line is going to be closed tomorrow, and no wonder — the line just goes back and forth between a grassy hill that used to be a movie theater and a cafe that seems to serve mainly trolley staff. But you’re obsessed with a mirror-windowed building just beyond the cinema stop, convinced that they’re building something in there “against humanity, morality, and
you.” The puzzles are all about figuring out how to crash the trolley into the building, and the game even makes a point of noting that in the last movie you saw at the now-gone theater, “Robert De Niro was acting great driving that taxi, solving all those matters so frankly.” So basically, you’re pensioner Travis Bickle in Trolley Driver.

Or at least, maybe you would be if the game hung together better. Unfortunately, it undermines its own effectiveness through a combination of awkward language, muddled tone, broken implementation, and a baffling, inconclusive ending. As you might have divined from the De Niro sentence, there are some significant problems with the English in the game. It’s not that it’s entirely broken all the time, though there are certainly plenty of broken moments. It’s more that the writing lacks grace and ease, using words in not-quite-right ways and making infelicitous diction choices throughout. For instance, here’s a sentence you’re likely to see often in the game: “Looking out, the trolley strolls steadily on its level route.” I believe what’s intended here is that you can see the landscape going by through the window, and you know that the trolley is moving at a steady pace. But “looking out” seems to apply to the trolley in the sentence, and by itself (without the addition of “the window”) it means scanning for danger. Not only that, “strolling” is not something that wheeled vehicles do — it’s a synonym for walking, with a connotation of casualness. It’s certainly possible to understand what the sentence wants to mean, but taking the journey from what it says to what it intends kicks you right out of the story.

The puzzles are enjoyable despite the language issues — well-cued and logical. However, I turned to the walkthrough after the game started spitting “[TADS-1010: object value required]” at me every turn. After that, things got stranger than I expected. Throughout the game, it’s unclear whether Off The Trolley wants to be a gentler version of Taxi Driver, revealing the psychosis of its protagonist, or whether in fact we would find something horrible within the mirrored building. But after I followed the walkthrough to avoid the TADS errors, I reached the ending, which resolves into… neither option? Instead, it suddenly shifts point-of-view for an Aisle-ish one-move experience, leading to various endings that ignore the protagonist’s arc altogether, stepping outside it to resolve absolutely nothing. These endings are all pretty much variations on a theme, and none of them are satisfying at all, instead leaving us hanging… sometimes literally.

Rating: 6.4

Mix Tape by Brett Witty [Comp05]

IFDB page: Mix Tape
Final placement: 18th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

The blurb for this game brought a big smile to my face:

For those with a love of music, creating a mixtape can be a genuine form of poetry. When someone cannot create the right words to express their love, rejection, loss or hope, they may find them in their favourite artists. This is my Mix Tape.

“Yeah,” I thought, “I’m part of the target audience.” As an 80’s kid, mix tapes were right in my wheelhouse. Nick Hornby is less so, but the game still endeared itself to me by starting off with two Hornby homages in rapid sequence — a quote from High Fidelity (albeit the movie, not the book), and a shout-out to Ben Folds Five’s “Smoke”, a Hornby favorite highlighted in Songbook, from an artist with whom Hornby would later have a Taupin/John style collaboration. The game’s writing is good, not just free of errors but evoking a strong mood and involving the senses. “Oh yeah,” I think, “I’m going to love this.”

Cut to 30 minutes later, and I cannot wait to break up with this game. Basically, the honeymoon ended the moment I tried to do anything outside the exact path the game was expecting. Twentysomething drama spins up almost immediately around the mix tape concept, which is fine — I have experienced my fair share of mix tapes, twentysomething drama, and mix tapes about twentysomething drama — but it turns out the drama is very fragile. My overwrought boyfriend has brought me up to a mountaintop so we can ceremoniously tear out and burn pages from our relationship scrapbook (ugh), but because I didn’t follow the path dictated by the walkthrough, the game and I are at an impasse. Behold:

>talk to peter “Um, Peter?” you ask.

He quietly turns to face you, and nods, letting you speak further.

(You could ask him why you are here.)

>peter, why am I here The story doesn’t understand that command.

>ask peter about why I am here Peter interrupts you. “Valentine, we have to concentrate on this. On our relationship. Do you understand what we need to do?”

>no Peter does not respond.

>peter, no Peter does not respond.

Turns out the game was waiting for the bizarre command “ask him why you are here”, which feels very confused — who’s the “you” in that scenario, when the game itself addresses the player/character as you? Surely that’s not how the player/character would refer to herself? But it got worse. He asked if I was ready to burn the book, and I said no. From there, it appears I entered an unwinnable state, though the game’s obtuseness disguised that for a while.

>s You haven’t finished what you’ve come to do yet.

>x fire A timid campfire whips its small fingers of flame about, sheltering as much as it can from the wind.

>put out fire Done.

>x fire A timid campfire whips its small fingers of flame about, sheltering as much as it can from the wind.

>ask peter about me You mumble about me, but Peter doesn’t hear you. Or chooses not to respond.

>give scrapbook to peter Peter does not appear interested.

>put scrapbook in fire Peter stops you. “No wait... We should do this, you know, ceremoniously. Tear out a page at a time.”

>tear page You don’t want to damage the book just yet.

>get page You can’t have that; it’s part of your scrapbook.

>burn scrapbook What do you want to light it with?

>fire (first trying to light the campfire) What do you want to light it with?

>tear out a page at a time The story doesn’t understand that command.

>tear out a page (the page) You don’t want to damage the book just yet.

Not only did I absolutely want to damage the book, I wanted to damage the game. Instead, in an ironic twist, it was burning me instead, one move at a time.

Mix Tape is structured as a series of scenes, each of which is associated with a song. It’s a great structure for the concept, but it becomes maddening when you get trapped in a scene, because there’s nowhere else to go. On this count, the second scene was no better than the first. I’m going to go ahead and spoil the magic command that’s needed, which is “serve dinner”. Showing the dinner to Peter doesn’t work. Telling Peter about the dinner doesn’t work. And so on. Plus, Peter is a total jerk about the whole thing anyway, and Valentine is rock-stupid, like “can’t unlock a door from the inside” stupid.

The last several scenes go by much more smoothly, because they are mostly non-interactive — the kind of thing that propels itself forward no matter what you do. Normally I find that kind of thing irritating, but this time it really felt like a relief. Once I wasn’t stuck in guess-the-command hell, I was able to enjoy the writing, characterization, and scene-setting a little more. By this point, I didn’t find either of the characters sympathetic, but I could at least appreciate how lovingly the game portrays their dysfunction.

Moments like that make me sad about saying this, but Mix Tape, it’s just not going to work out between us. And it’s not me, it’s you.

Rating: 5.2

History Repeating by Mark & Renee Choba [Comp05]

IFDB page: History Repeating
Final placement: 13th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’m writing this in 2021, having been in a kind of Comp coma since 2004. Oh there was occasional dip into a comp game or two — perhaps a solicited XYZZY review, or an overview of an acclaimed author, or an attempt at grabbing and rating a handful of games from 2015 — but those were flickers of consciousness, nothing like the focused attention I used to give the IF competition. That focused attention probably isn’t coming back anytime soon. Parenting doesn’t demand the kind of time it used to, but it still takes up a whole lot of my world, and other hobbies have grown into my life too — trivia and writing about Watchmen come to mind.

Nevertheless, freshening up all my comp reviews for this blog has given me the itch to play more, so I’ve decided to give the Comp05 games a whirl. As before, I downloaded the whole package from the IF Archive, fired up Comp05.z5, and pressed the “Big Red Button Which, If You Push It, Will Make You Do Everything You Really Need To Do Automatically.” That generated a randomly ordered list of games to play, and in one of the purest examples of beauty arising from chaos, the first game on that list was called History Repeating. Let the repetition begin!

Of course, it can’t be a literal repetition. I’m a different person than I was in 2005, and these reviews are written under decidedly different circumstances. My old comp reviews were written during the judging period, and the point of them was to explain my ratings and give useful feedback to authors. Now the results are long established, and most of the authors have likely moved on from writing IF altogether. The scene is completely different too, and I’m pretty completely out of touch with it. Consequently, there isn’t the old sense of urgency nor the sense of community accompanying these reviews. They’re more for me than for the authors, though of course I hope some others still find them interesting or useful. So while history is repeating in a certain way, an another way it really can’t repeat at all — it’s a river, and you can’t step in the same one twice.

That’s part of the point of this game, too. The premise is that you lose consciousness in your office job, and suddenly wake up back in high school. Turns out a Doc Brown-like figure has dragged you back into the past as a way of testing his hypothesis that we can change the future. Your way of doing this apparently will be to turn in a history report that you blew off, which seems to have derailed your life into the unsatisfying doldrums we’re told it’s in. However, as you might expect, changing the past isn’t so easy.

That isn’t just because of the timestream protecting itself or whatever. It’s also rather challenging because it turns out this game’s version of the past is pretty thinly implemented, and its puzzles require a fair amount of authorial telepathy. Having just read through many years of my own comp reviews, I know that the points here are ones I’ve visited many times, so I’ll skip teacher mode and just say that when a game doesn’t offer a rich implementation, it had better be very well cued, or else you end up like me, checking the walkthrough because many logical actions get no useful response, which makes it very difficult to guess the one reasonable action that the authors intend as a solution.

Outside of its thinness and its rather improbable puzzle solutions, History Repeating hangs together pretty well. It’s got a fun premise, solid coding, and error-free writing. It’s reasonably sized, and reasonably enjoyable, thanks to the walkthrough. It feels like the work of beginners, but beginners who are dedicated to creating a quality game. Overall I think it could have used a round or two of testing and then implementing better feedback to what the testers try, but the nature of the comp deadline tends to preclude that sort of thing all too often. If I saw another entry by these authors, I’d be interested to play it, and hope that they’d learned from history rather than just repeating it.

Rating: 7.7