Tag: jason devlin

Vespers by Jason Devlin [Comp05]

IFDB page: Vespers
Final placement: 1st place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

I came to this game knowing it had won the 2005 IF Competition. That couldn’t be helped. I was detaching from the IF community in that year, after my kid was born in June, but I was still dialed in enough to know the name of the winning game. It just took me almost twenty years to actually play the thing, that’s all. Because I just looked at its IFDB page, I also know that it won a bunch of XYZZY Awards, and that it has achieved lasting respect, still making it onto a list of Top 50 all-time IF games in 2023.

Starting with that knowledge gave me a rather unfair (albeit unavoidable) set of biases. Playing an acclaimed game, at least for me, comes with a higher initial bar of expectations, and maybe a little less tolerance for mistakes. Lucky for me, Vespers delivers on its promise, and earns its kudos. The religious subject matter is pretty alien to me, and religious games have been offputting to me in the past, so I appreciated the author’s note that Vespers “isn’t a religious game: at least not in the sense of trying to convert anyone”, and that he himself is “not Christian and wasn’t raised Christian”. Another unfair set of biases on my part, I suppose, but those upfront announcements helped me relax my guard and put my trust in the game.

Once I did that, I found it a rich and immersive experience, albeit in a disturbing way. I don’t think I’ve seen a better use of quotation boxes, with the possible exception of Trinity, which pioneered them after all. I hope it’s not too spoilery to say that Vespers uses quote boxes as a way to showcase the PC’s internal dialogue, an inner voice which becomes increasingly askew from its moorings, and which we learn later may have been leaking out for quite some time.

Yes, we have an unreliable narrator here, and maybe even an entire unreliable milieu, in a way that’s again hard to talk about without being too spoilery. And yeah, it’s a 20-year-old game (nearly), but I still strive to keep these comp reviews spoiler-free, as they’re about discovery after all. I’m making an exception, though. Fair warning: mild spoilers follow for both Vespers and Photopia, because I think there’s a fruitful comparison there.

There’s a moment in Photopia when what you’ve witnessed in the beginning comes back around, but this time with loads more meaning attached, and an oppressive sense of fait accompli. There’s nothing you can do to change what happens — after all, you already saw it happen — and indeed one of the knocks on Photopia was an alleged lack of interactivity, given the unchangeable nature of its central event. But I would argue that the very real interactivity of that game attaches the player to the event, and to the characters affected by it, with much greater ease than a similarly plotted short story could. You may not always be in the driver’s seat, but events witnessed from the passenger seat can still have a very powerful effect.

Vespers doesn’t hop perspectives the way Photopia does, but it does start with a decision already made by the PC, and everything else in the game flows from that decision. As the game goes on, the consequences of that decision become more and more clear, and it is the PC’s job to reckon with those consequences as best he can, within his declared moral framework.

And here’s where the Catholic setting becomes phenomenally useful to the game’s project, because it turns out we are dealing with an original sin. In Vespers, the sin was committed by the PC, but before he was being controlled by the player. We must inherit the consequences of that sin, and proceed as a flawed man moving through a flawed world. It’s as if the game begins with “*** You have lost ***”, and then asks, “Now what?” Nevertheless, and also true to its theme, Vespers does offer the possibility of redemption, at least on a personal level, even if a tsunami of suffering has overtaken the world. The path to get to that redemption is a very narrow one, but I think that also rings true in a Medieval setting.

I found this a brilliant use of interactive fiction, verging on profound. I have a fundamental quibble with the “good” path (albeit one that might be addressed if I understood Catholic theology better), and I did find a few places where the language or the coding fell down, but overall it’s clearly a well-tested and well-crafted game, which has absolutely earned its place among the all-time great works of interactive fiction.

Rating: 9.8

Sting of the Wasp by Jason Devlin [Comp04]

IFDB page: Sting of the Wasp
Final placement: 4th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Assuming that “Jason Devlin” isn’t a pseudonym for an experienced author, we have a very satisfactory debut on our hands. Sting Of The Wasp brings one of the year’s nastier PCs in the person of wealthy socialite Julia Hawthorne. In the grand tradition of Primo Varicella, Julia is a vain, preening snob who looks with utter disdain at almost everything around her, including the country club in which the game is set. However, unlike Primo, her schemes don’t run to power grabs — instead, she just wants to find out who took a photo of her in a compromising position with the local golf pro.

It seems that Julia’s wealth comes by virtue (a term probably misapplied here) of her marriage, and because wealth is the most important thing to her, she must guard that marriage zealously. Such guardianship doesn’t appear to include the actual avoidance of adultery, but it certainly encompasses heroic efforts to destroy any evidence of those indiscretions. SOTW is one of those games that let you gleefully and maliciously wreak havoc on a wide variety of places and characters, all in the service of advancing a thoroughly rotten character. As I said, the most prominent example of this sort of game is Varicella, but this game is Varicella played purely for laughs — very few darker undertones burden the spree of unrestrained villainy.

There are a few things that SOTW does particularly well. One is dialogue; the country club is populated with a wide variety of rivals who come in various shades of shrewish and desperate, and Julia’s exchanges with these characters often made me laugh out loud. Many of their remarks come at Julia’s expense — her affairs are an open secret at the club, and they provide the perfect fodder for nasty remarks, such as when Julia happens upon an NPC in the garden:

As she sees you enter, she looks up and grins impishly. “Oh, Julia,” she says, closing her book for a moment. “I’m surprised to see you here. I thought you preferred to do your hoeing in the basement.”

In addition, the NPCs have some great incidental business, and provide the game lots of opportunities to replace standard library responses with something more fun. One of my favorites was this replacement for “You can’t go that way.”:

“Oh dear,” Cissy says as you bump into a low wall. “Julia, you really should try some Ginkgo biloba. I’ve been taken it for months now and I hardly ever crash into walls anymore.”

Okay, so it has a pretty egregious grammar error. I still laughed. The parser, too, gets off plenty of zingers:

>search beverly
You're not a lady cop, and this isn't Cinemax After Dark.

Okay, enough quoting. My point is that SOTW is a funny game, and it’s worth playing just for the humor. Moreover, many of its puzzles are logical and seamlessly blended with the game-world, and its story moves smoothly and sensibly to a dynamic climax. The game makes especially good use of triggers to move the action along. Unfortunately, there are some flaws to contend with as well. For one thing, while the humor is marvelous, there are a number of places where the prose stumbles due to awkwardness or simple mechanical errors. For example:

>read board
Although seemingly impossible, somehow this cork bulletin board, with its oak border and brass inlay, manages to appear elegant. I guess all it takes to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear is money. A fact illustrated by many of Pine Meadows's patrons. On the bulletin board is an announcement.

First there’s a misplaced modifier, attaching impossibility to the cork bulletin board itself rather than its elegance. Next, there’s a voice mixup, as the parser suddenly takes on an identity and asserts itself with “I guess.” If Julia is “you”, who is the “I” speaking in this scenario? Finally, a sentence fragment brings up the rear. A significant number of these problems mark Sting Of The Wasp as the work of a beginning writer.

In addition, while the game is clearly tested and for the most part bug-free, there are still some glitches in implementation. A waiter hands you a glass that never appears. A description mentions exits southeast and south, when in fact they’re south and southwest, respectively. The game would benefit vastly from the attention of a skilled editor and from one more round of testing. These things aren’t too hard to do, and once they’re done, SOTW‘s nasty pleasures will be even sharper than they are now.

Rating: 8.5