Tag: disney

The PK Girl by Robert Goodwin [Comp02]

IFDB page: The PK Girl
Final placement: 6th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

I like comics, and I like animation, but I’ve never really read much manga or watched much anime. It’s not that I’ve been avoiding these forms, but rather that I haven’t happened to explore them yet. I’m a little bit familiar with the concept of hentai, because of the subculture of hentai IF that seems to be out there, which was brought to the attention of the newsgroups a few years ago, primarily by the efforts of a reviewer named Craxton.

Because of my unfamiliarity with Japanese comics and animation, I think I lack some context for evaluating The PK Girl, a text adventure with a deep manga influence. First and foremost, I’m not sure what to make of the game’s extreme, almost comical insistence on rigid and stereotyped gender roles. Whether this is a convention of manga, something particular to this game, or even just a quirk of the PC I don’t know, but while I found it at first just distracting and silly, it quickly graduated to annoying and even offensive. The game puts you in the role of a male PC, and quickly demonstrates that you have some pretty sweeping assumptions about femininity, and a fair amount of anxiety about maintaining the image of your own masculinity. The former becomes apparent in the description of the first female NPC you encounter:

The girl is clothed in a silky blue dress. Long vibrant hair cascades
over her shoulders and down her back. Her countenance seems to
reflect all feminine virtue, inclusive of kindness, submissiveness,
empathy, and consciousness of time and place.

So “submissiveness” is a feminine trait, in fact a feminine virtue? And kindness and empathy are outside the male domain? Certainly the female characters don’t have a lock on self-consciousness, as evidenced by the PC’s reaction to entering a women’s clothing store:

Why did you come in here? There is nothing terribly exciting here by
any male’s estimations. To a female, this could well be a lesser
incarnation of paradise. A wealth of clothing is available on
circular racks situated in aisles throughout the store, for trying on
and for purchase. The exit is west.

Yes, we know that all women love clothes-shopping. And men have no interest whatsoever in women’s fashion, which is why all fashion designers are women. Oh, wait. At its worst moments, the game spits out statements that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Victorian behavior manual:

GET PLATE
You don't need to take the plate; There are females here to clean up
after you.

Give me a break! If this is a manga thing, I don’t think I’ll be reading manga anytime soon.

On the technical (and more positive) side, The PK Girl is the long-awaited game that rises above ADRIFT‘s initial limitations to take a place among games created by the top-tier development systems. An unbelievable amount of care has gone into crafting this game. First of all, it addresses all the flaws in the ADRIFT parser that I’ve railed about in previous reviews. The game handles conversation very smoothly indeed, blending the ASK ABOUT approach with a menu-based approach in a somewhat similar fashion to my Earth And Sky games. On the rare occasions when the parser asks a question, it’s almost always prepared to handle the answer. SEARCH works, and in fact it works better than in most games, because the game explicitly assumes that it includes looking under and looking behind an object, and says so. Best of all, I never encountered the generic “Nothing special” message for an unrecognized noun, partly because the game changed the default message to be more Inform-like, but mostly because nouns are implemented in exquisite depth.

For that matter, not only are almost all nouns described, but a prodigious number are included in the first place. I didn’t come close to finishing this game in the two hours allotted, but I must confess that may be my own fault, because I frequently deserted the plot in order to wander around the game and marvel at the level of detail included. For this virtue alone, The PK Girl is one of the most immersive games in this year’s comp. In addition to its significant improvement on the standard ADRIFT parser, the game also includes professional-looking illustrations and an enjoyable MIDI soundtrack. This latter can get a little grating after a while, and I sometimes wished that a piece of music would play once and stop rather than continuously looping (or that I at least had the option of making the game behave that way), but it did enhance the scenes’ mood quite effectively.

As for the story itself, I found it pretty entertaining. After a fairly tranquil opening, the plot kicks into high gear with a dramatic incident, and events follow sensibly upon each other from there on. NPCs help propel the story forward by sometimes continuing about their business without waiting for the PC, thus forcing the player to keep up or lose the plot entirely. As I said, I didn’t get all the way through the story, but the portion I saw delivered excitement and fun, even if the writing sometimes had an oddly elevated tone which worked counter to the brisk pace. There were some problem spots in the writing, phrases that didn’t make much sense or that suggested with their awkwardness a few lapses in English skill. Still, for the most part they didn’t get in the way of the game’s ability to tell a good story.

Because its story is fun and quite chaste, The PK Girl might make a nice IF selection for kids, though perhaps it ought to be counterpointed by something rather less sexist. In fact, although I’m clueless about anime, the game reminded me distinctly of another branch of animation, the Disney feature film: technically impressive and proficient while remaining on the political level utterly, utterly reactionary.

Rating: 8.4

Triune by Papillon [Comp01]

IFDB page: Triune
Final placement: 9th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

The more years I write reviews for comp games, the more convinced I feel that my reaction to a game is strongly influenced by where it happens to fall in the random lineup chosen for me by CompXX.z5. I still remember how it felt in 1998 when I opened up Little Blue Men right after finishing Human Resources Stories — I suddenly had this horrible vision of legions of IF authors sitting in dark, cramped basements, writing little opuses that allowed them to spew hatred at their day jobs. Similarly, as soon as I was a little ways into Triune, I thought to myself, “Oh dear, another dream game.” This most likely wouldn’t have happened had I not just finished The Cave of Morpheus, whose hallucinatory qualities covered over a multitude of design and implementation sins.

The dreamlike sequences in Triune are much more powerful than those in TCOM, because Triune borrows liberally from fairy tale elements, squeezing all the Jungian, archetypal, collective-unconscious juice from them that it possibly can. On the one hand, the inclusion of these elements makes for potent storytelling, but on the other, it calls for a degree of control that the game doesn’t always display — sometimes the power of the symbols isn’t harnessed as well as it could be, and they end up working at cross purposes. The effect, at the end of the game, is of an experience that offers some very strong moments, but doesn’t quite all hang together.

The narrative frame of Triune gives us a teenage girl in an unbelievably abusive household, who escapes (perhaps literally — the game leaves it unclear) into a fairy-tale world; that is, fairy-tale in the bloody, brutal Brothers Grimm sense, not the bowdlerized sweetness of a Disney flick. I’m not using that word “unbelievably” as a casual intensifier; the father comes across as such a caricature of an abusive alcoholic that it’s difficult to believe in him as a real person. (The fact that some people no doubt act exactly as this father does, while a sad reality, does nothing to make him a stronger character, since stories are more about what feels real than what actually is real.) In fact, the whole thing feels a bit over-the-top: in the flashbacks and non-dream bits, there tends to be some adult who is being either amazingly wonderful or amazingly awful.

The fairy-tale bits can tend towards the ham-handed: there’s a serpent, a Tree of Knowledge, a character named Lilith, etc. Now, arguably, I’ve been guilty of this sort of excess myself, so I can understand how it gets into a game, but I still found it a little grating. It’s true, though, that the circumstances of the narrative frame — the fact that it’s seen through a teenager’s eyes, the fact that the archetypal forest invites archetypal dwellers, and the general sense of unreality about the whole thing — mitigate these problems to a significant degree.

From an IF standpoint, Triune is a mixed bag. There’s some fairly rich plot-branching — the fact that I played through a session with the game that differed wildly from the walkthrough but still felt satisfying indicates how much the story space has to offer. On the other hand, while the implementation is generous in some places, it’s quite sparse in others. It’s fine that the game more or less only implements what it’s interested in, but there needs to be some minimum degree of coding polish to avoid exchanges like this:

>NE
The door is locked.

>OPEN DOOR
I don't see any door here.

In addition, there were some definite lexical problems, such as the books who displayed their contents when EXAMINEd, but were stubbornly unavailable to READ. The jpeg image feelies provided with the game are excellent, again dipping into the well of ancient patterns, along with evocations of childhood, to set a dramatic scene. As an examination of femininity and how it works in culture, Triune is partially successful, offering some moments that are quite moving indeed, and bringing mythical elements into some interesting collisions, though not always as coherently as might be hoped. As a game, it’s got some serious flaws, but is still worth exploring.

Rating: 7.7