IFDB page: The Trip
Final placement: 33rd place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition
The Trip is a rather clever title, for a few reasons. Of course, there’s the obvious double-entendre: not only does the main character go on a vacation-kind-of-trip (to Utah or Arizona, the game can’t seem to make up its mind which), he also indulges in several drug trips, courtesy of the marijuana and peyote found in his inventory at various points. However, beyond that simple pun, there’s also the fact that while the character is taking these trips, he is at the same time going nowhere. He’s graduated college, but hasn’t obtained gainful employment (one gets the impression he hasn’t looked very hard), and is sinking further into depression. In fact, both kinds of trip serve to underscore how stuck the character is; the trip he takes is to just hang out with his buddy (who the game describes as “just your average happy-go-lucky stoner”) and smoke a lot of dope, which doesn’t exactly seem like a promising route to get his life on track.
Even beyond this more subtle resonance, another trip occurs in this story, one that actually does get the character unstuck — it’s a spiritual journey, and one that couldn’t have happened without the other trips. The neatest thing about this last trip is the fact that the game sets it up so that it actually happens through traversal of the landscape. The source of spiritual enlightenment is physically moving from one location to the next, and the PC has to follow it from place to place in order for the spiritual journey to happen properly. This is a lovely example of how powerful it can be to map abstract or emotional concepts onto IF conventions.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the game doesn’t live up to the promise of its artful title. Spelling and grammar mistakes are strewn throughout it, and coding errors aren’t terribly uncommon either. I’d like to be really charitable about it, and suggest that the writing errors are simply the reflection of a character who isn’t very literate, sort of a very mild example of what Adam Cadre did in his Flowers For Algernon Textfire demo. However, if this is the intention, the style isn’t strong enough to put it over, and besides, some of the errors just aren’t in line with the way people talk. For example, when examining a lighter, we are told, “You once knew a guy who insisted that white lighters were bad luck, because something bad always happened to him when he was carrying him, but this theory holds no sway with you. You’ve never been a particularly superstition person.” “Carrying him”? “Superstition person”? These come across less as mannerisms of a subliterate stoner than as grammatical slips from a non-native English speaker. Mostly, they just come across as basic proofreading errors, and the presence of bugs in the code tends to confirm this theory. In addition to these cosmetic problems, there’s the fact that the spiritual stuff in the endgame just really isn’t all that weighty. To me, it came off as sort of a weak rehash of the Simpsons episode “El Viaje Misterioso De Nuestro Homer.” In your face, space coyote!
On the plus side, however, The Trip does contain what is by far the most realistic depiction of four guys sitting around getting baked ever to appear in the history of interactive fiction. This wasn’t the most exciting moment of computer gaming I’ve ever had, but it did have its own Bill-And-Ted-ish charm. That scene, along with several choice touches like the way the stoners react to Arches National Park (“That’s a big-ass rock, dude”) had me laughing quite a lot. Not quite as much as the characters in the scene, mind you, but laughing nonetheless. In the end, this game feels a lot like some trips can be: long stretches of mild enjoyment, boredom, or even disappointment and annoyance, punctuated by flashes of beauty and brilliance. Or at least, that’s what it felt like at the time.
Rating: 6.3