Tag: beauty and the beast

Glass by Emily Short [misc]

[This review appeared in issue #45 of SPAG. The issue was published on July 17, 2006.]

I’ve barely begun to explore the capabilities of Inform 7 (I7), partly because its appearance has rekindled my interest in actually playing IF. In that vein, I continue to explore the games that were released with I7 as “Worked Examples”. Having made my way through Bronze, Emily Short’s adaptation of Beauty And The Beast, I came next to Glass, in which she similarly adapts Cinderella. Actually, perhaps “similarly” isn’t the right word here — where Bronze was all about landscape and puzzles, Glass resides on the other side of the spectrum, focusing entirely on character and conversation.

There are other differences, too. Although both works are meant primarily as example I7 code, Bronze feels like a full-fledged game, while Glass plays much more like a demo, or perhaps an experimental comp entry. That isn’t to say that there aren’t interesting ideas embedded in Glass — there are, and I plan to discuss them — but the experience of playing it feels altogether more slight than solving Bronze. Not only is it simply a smaller game, it also demands less interaction from the player; “Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z” is a valid walkthrough, though perhaps not to the best ending.

Those endings are important. Like some other short replay-cycle games, Glass layers on story elements by making less-than-optimal endings the most easily reachable. There aren’t a terribly large number of endings (another factor making the game feel a bit thin), but it’s unlikely that most players will reach the best ending first. Along the way, they’ll learn more about the motivations of each character, and in fact more about some hidden details of the game’s main scene.

This information in turn adds meaning to the rest of the paths to be found in the game. It’s a variation on the “accretive PC” model of knowledge I discussed in my review of Lock & Key on IF-Review. The difference is that the news gained through these sub-optimal endings doesn’t so much help the player better direct the PC or better solve the game, but it does lend additional drama to the other branches of the story. I suppose this game gives us accretive NPCs more than an accretive PC.

However, there are some tricks at work with PC knowledge, too. The player/PC knowledge divide is one of the thornier fundamental problems of IF — a player new to the game will almost inevitably know less about the character and game-world than the PC does, and both the game and the player often start out by scrambling to narrow the gap. There are some workarounds for this, amnesia being the more traditional and popular, while accretive PCs are a more recent innovation.

Glass has found another: base your game on a story with which the vast majority of your audience is already familiar. Bronze was an imaginative variation on Beauty and The Beast, but it neither shed a great deal of light on the original tale nor did it require much information about that tale from the player. Our familiarity with the base story helps us get up to speed on who the PC is, but it isn’t otherwise exploited. However, in Glass, the player must bring to bear knowledge from outside the game in order to reach the best ending. For anyone familiar with most any version the fairy tale, this gambit should work well, though perhaps not right away. Still, it’s an ingenious way of bridging the information gap between player and PC — I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of this strategy before. I suppose there are only a limited number of stories with which authors can assume widespread audience familiarity, and an even smaller number of those that aren’t still under copyright.

With this bridge in place, then, Glass is free to disconcert us a bit as well. For one thing, the player character has some rather surprising qualities (and that’s all I’ll say…), which are left for players to discover rather than being announced upfront. Not only that, the game’s take on the Cinderella tale is less than traditional. In keeping with many modern treatments of fairy tales, its approach to the story’s villains is a little more sympathetic, and its portrayal of the heroes is a little more ambivalent. I would have expected Emily Short to bring some subversive ideas to any fairy tale she touched, and she doesn’t disappoint here.

One more note: in the article I wrote for the long-awaited IF Theory book, I mentioned that it was hard for me to imagine how the basic component of landscape could be extracted from interactive fiction, since as soon as the first room description appears, the game introduces a concept of geographical location. Well, Glass is the game that breaks that model — it has no room descriptions whatsoever. That doesn’t mean it’s without a landscape, though. It’s just that instead of presenting a landscape of Place, Glass instead gives us a landscape of Concept. The NPCs traverse a conversational terrain with particular goals in mind, and at every prompt the PC can try to steer that travel to influence its destination. It’s a compact territory, but well worth exploring.

Bronze by Emily Short [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2006.]

IFDB Page: Bronze

Alloys and Allies

The unveiling of Inform 7 is hugely exciting for many reasons, not the least of which is a sudden bounty of new games by Graham Nelson and Emily Short. These example games are meant to show off various capabilities of the development system, but the designers being who they are, the games are likely to be eminently playworthy in their own right. This review begins what I hope will be a series [Welp, that didn’t happen. — 2021 PO] that illuminates the value of these example games to players, quite aside from what they demonstrate to authors.

First on the list is Bronze, an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast and an old-fashioned puzzlefest, though only old-fashioned in the good ways. There are no mazes, no hunger puzzles, no expiring light sources; for such favors I thank the author sincerely. What we have instead is a large landscape (in this case the Beast’s castle), a well-paced plot punctuated by clever puzzles, and a variety of endings that allow for varying interpretations of the main character. The PC herself goes unnamed, but she is clearly the Beauty of the story, known as Belle in many versions, including both the Disney and Cocteau films. The tone of this game is much closer to the latter, pleasantly. In fact, Bronze reminded me often of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête — its gloomy, echoing chambers, its magical aura, and of course the wounded, romantic figure at its center.

Bronze‘s castle is less wildly inventive and evocative than Cocteau’s, though of course this is a rather rarefied standard to apply. What it does have over any other adaptation I’ve seen, however, is dimensionality. This game cannily exploits the strengths of IF to use its landscape for multiple ends. At the most basic level, it arranges the map in three dimensions, and at several points forces us to think not only of what is around us but what is above and below. A further (and more interesting) depth accretes as the PC’s memories surface in connection with certain rooms and objects. This is not a new trick in IF, but it’s very well-wrought here. Later in the game, we are shown yet another dimension via a magical item that allows us to hear the memories that other characters attach to various places. In addition, the game lays in a great deal of history to the castle, the Beast, the Beast’s family, and so forth — indeed, learning this history is essential for completing the game. The historical information is nicely woven, mostly avoiding infodumps and cutscenes in favor of memory-freighted objects and consultable items.

On the down side, though, the need to CONSULT X ABOUT Y so often was perhaps Bronze‘s greatest weakness for me. I got rather impatient with having to plumb so many sources about so many topics, especially when only one of the sources was portable. No doubt I’m rather spoiled by small competition games. Perhaps more to the point, I squeeze IF into the corners of my life and thus am not only unable to remember many details from one play session to the next but also reluctant to take notes while playing. I’d imagine that someone in a different mindset would find all the research opportunities quite rewarding. I did not.

Another choice that stymied me was the structure of the endings. My first attempt at Bronze terminated rather abruptly, at a less-than-optimal ending, and it was not immediately apparent why I couldn’t keep proceeding to complete the other goals that would have led to a more satisfying conclusion. The answer had to do with my failure to consult a particular item about a particular topic before that item disappeared, but I did not put this together until after I had turned to the walkthrough. Even after I understood the problem, it still felt a little unfair to me — I wish there were a bit more space in the design to prevent such accidental losses. Finally, there were one or two aspects of the magic system that took me a long time to figure out. Some of this may have been due to haste on my part, but I think they were also a little underdescribed.

Enough whinging. An area where Bronze really shines (uh, no pun intended) is in its technical prowess. Its blurb text promises “a number of features to make navigating a large space more pleasant,” and those features are lovely. GO TO <location> navigates the best path from the player’s present location to the target room, a godsend for the many, many occasions when one has to trudge from one end of the castle to the other. Similarly, FIND <object> takes the PC directly to the target object’s location via the same pathfinding method. Bronze also implements LOOK <direction> to let the PC investigate adjacent rooms without traveling to them. Other great features include an adaptive hint system accessed via the THINK ABOUT verb, and a status bar that shows not only what exits are available but also color-codes those directions according to whether they have been explored or not. Finally, I must mention the very newbie-friendly, context-sensitive “novice mode” that gently injects instructions for how to deal with the IF interface throughout the game. In fact, Bronze is a game I’d recommend for newcomers to the form, since its story is a familiar one, its help system is extensive, and its writing is rich and enjoyable.

A few more words about that writing. Short’s style is a familiar one by now: elliptical but densely packed, full of arresting images and subtle wit. At times, devoting so few words of description to so large a map can make the game feel a bit sparse, but more often it achieves a lovely mystique, showing us just enough to intrigue and enchant. Many sentences are striking in both their economy and power, such as this description of a door:

The work of the hinges and handle, the color of the wood, the point of the arch: all malevolent.

In addition, the imagery of the castle’s fixtures is pure Short, such as the giant hourglass whose sands never stop pouring, or the cherry-wood floor in which is carved an expansive map of the Beast’s kingdom. Another authorial trademark that will be familiar to fans of Savoir-Faire is the game’s detailed working-out of a magic system and its implications not only for puzzles but for character and story as well. Bronze is no masterpiece, but it is a well-crafted, fun, and satisfying game. I recommend it not only to people wishing to learn Inform 7 but to all fans of quality puzzle-laden text adventures.