ralph, >INVENTORY

Coloratura by Lynnea Glasser [XYZZY]

[I was invited to review the games nominated for Best Individual PC in the 2013 XYZZY Awards. As it turned out, there was only one game nominated.]

Lynnea Glasser’s Coloratura has made XYZZY Award history. It is the first nominee ever to win its category before the second round of voting, by being the sole nominee in its category, Best Individual PC. Mind you, it isn’t the sole 2013 game that qualified for the category — obviously, the other games had player characters. It’s just that Coloratura‘s PC is so good that no other game from the year could muster more than a single vote to compete with it. It was the overwhelming choice, and for good reason. It’s great.

So what’s so great about it? Well, for one thing, the Aqueosity has an unusual point of view, as you might guess from its name. It is essentially an alien life form, and the game does a wonderful job of making it clear just how alien indeed. Now, non-human PCs are nothing new in IF. The trick goes back at least to Miron Schmidt’s 1996 game Ralph (in which the PC is a dog), and probably earlier than that. You can find a whole list of such games at IFDB.

What’s special about the Aqueosity is that not only is it non-human, it is wholly original to this game. In games where you play something like a dog, or a vampire, or an elf, sure the POV is inhuman, but it is still familiar — we’ve got a pre-existing rubric within which to understand it. The Aqueosity is a monster (though of course it doesn’t see itself as such), but it’s like no monster we’ve ever seen before — its closest archetype I can think of is The Blob, and even that isn’t very close at all. So from the first moment of the game, we must struggle to understand just what it is we’re dealing with on a fundamental level. That’s a time-honored tradition in written SF, but it’s used to particularly powerful effect here in the interactive context, where we must not only learn to understand the Aqueosity, we must learn to be the Aqueosity.

This process involves figuring out just what the creature can do, and here we come to another of Coloratura‘s strengths: the expanded capabilities of its PC. It’s always fun to play a character who can influence the world in unusual ways, whether by magic or gizmos or superpowers or whatever, and even more fun when those abilities unlock gradually over the course of the game. Coloratura does a masterful job of uniting character discovery with power discovery, so that learning more about the Aqueosity’s skills and traits lets us comprehend the character better, and vice versa.

The fact that the game curtails some very standard IF tropes (“INVENTORY” gets the response, “This body cannot carry things.”) forces players almost immediately to begin trying to explore more unfamiliar concepts for affecting the environment. Doing so starts uncovering some capacities we’re not used to having in IF, the first of which is probably the most shocking: the PC can kill with a thought. (If in fact “thought” is the right word for whatever goes on when the Aqueosity severs a human’s ties with “the physical.”) As Glasser points out in her author’s notes, having this mass murder occur at the beginning of the game, as a necessary component of progressing, highlights not only the PC’s inhuman capabilities but also its utter remove from human concepts of morality.

The gelatinous PC can also travel through very small spaces, which opens up travel capabilities beyond those of the humans inhabiting the ship. It seems to be highly acidic as well, at least in reaction with some substances… including human flesh. I could never quite suss out what things it would melt and what things it wouldn’t, but in any case its Aqueous acidity is crucial not only to certain puzzle solutions but also to the sense of horror in the story, as the Aqueosity physically disfigures objects and people.

The creep factor increases further when we find that the PC is capable not just of physical influence, but mental influence as well. The game does a lovely job of introducing the “COLOR” verb at an opportune time, and in doing so unfolds the PC in a whole new dimension. At the same time, the power is so perfectly in tune with the game’s theme and milieu (not to mention its title, which gave a very satisfying click at this disclosure) that it feels completely natural and inevitable. Of course the Aqueosity can not only hear the colors of emotion, it can sing them too, and of course that singing would influence the beings nearby. Glasser wisely (and unavoidably) prevents this power from working in most instances, but seeing the list of colors made me feel possibilities gleefully expanding, and I loved solving the puzzles that hinge on this ability.

I can’t speak of puzzles without mentioning the meat monster, which won another of Coloratura‘s bouquet of awards, for Best Individual Puzzle. This is a beautiful puzzle in lots of ways, but I’ll try to confine myself to those relating to my category. First, the cueing is just fantastic, introducing the PC’s penultimate superpower ever so smoothly:

Colder Room The madness in this room is soul-wrenching. How the Blind Ones could live with this atrocity is unfathomable. Fleshy chunks of the formerly-alive sit in frozen stacks, trapped in disunity. Your own situation is frustrating, but this is a true, horrific travesty. You need to help this, heal this, fix this: you can't idle while such suffering exists.

>COLOR CHUNKS WHITE The meat is too disjointed to color. It needs to be combined first.

>COMBINE CHUNKS You smooth your body over the meat packages, physically and metaphysically conducting unity and understanding and cohesion. As you weave together the previously disparate notes, the black gives way to confusion, then curiosity, and then slowly to joy and happiness at its newfound Song. The Newsong greenly bubbles into gleeful thankfulness.

This is a textbook example of how to introduce new verbs without putting the player through a single moment of guess-the-verb frustration. I’d gotten here by exploiting a power I knew — crawling through small spaces — and when I then tried to use another power, the game gave me a stepladder to try something new, and rewarded me generously when I did so.

Even better, when I did struggle, the game was there to catch me. The meat monster puzzle introduces the PC’s final power, that of controlling other beings. This power is crucial for the final act of the game, and the logic that invokes it here is flawless. However, although the game tried to give me a similar cue (“…it only continues to beg you for help. It striates insitence [sic] that you take control, that you fix everything.”), I failed to catch on. Rather than letting me flounder for too long, the game finally just taught me what it wanted me to do:

In a desperate act of submission, the Newsong binds its aura to yours, giving you complete control of its mind and body. You surprise at the bond: your bodies remain divorced, but your minds move in perfect synch. You tug curiously at its simplistic flesh-structures, feeling the creature’s immense weight. You can make it do whatever you want.

As it had done many times before, Coloratura gave me a thrill by opening yet another capability of the PC, and it did so without a trace of contrivance, as the act of a newborn fighting for its life.

A newborn. The Aqueosity’s utter horror and revulsion at the concept of a freezer full of meat, and the way it experiences that environment (“Fleshy chunks of the formerly-alive sit in frozen stacks, trapped in disunity”) brilliantly puts our sympathies on its side, and against our own kind. The joy and gratitude it hears in the Newsong’s voice put the monstrous PC into the role of loving mother, and yet we can also understand perfectly, superimposed upon this picture, the utter shock and horror of the humans aboard the ship, as an inexplicably animate mass of meat suddenly bursts out of the freezer and into the kitchen.

Coloratura makes that kind of move over and over, to enormous effect. It’s my favorite aspect of the game, and it couldn’t be done without the finely crafted PC. See, there are some things IF is great at conveying — special perspectives and special powers are among those. You know what IF is not very good at conveying, though? Dramatic irony. When the audience controls the character, it’s very difficult to pull off an effect where the character knows less than the audience. When we watch Hamlet stab the arras behind which Polonius is hiding, we too feel the stab of tragedy at his unwitting accident. But if Hamlet were an IF PC, how would the author achieve this effect? She could hide the knowledge of Polonius’ location from the PC, but doing so would drain Hamlet’s action of dramatic irony. She could allow the stabbing not to occur, but that would derail the entire plot. Or she could eliminate interactivity around that moment, in which case we’re pretty much back to watching a play.

I’ve never seen a game solve this puzzle, but Coloratura takes an ingenious route to get there. By creating a character which is both horrifying and sympathetic, and making that character our viewpoint onto an otherwise stock and familiar human environment, the game manages to give us more knowledge than the PC, so that we can understand its actions, necessary for its own survival, in the context of the deaths, maimings, and mind control it inflicts on the human crew. That crew is shown to be scientists, not villains of any kind, and so they have our sympathy too, not to mention the built-in sympathy they get by sharing our DNA. Thus we can feel the full tragedy of unwitting destruction as the story unfolds. That is the most impressive artistry of all in this very, very impressive game.

The Djinni Chronicles by J.D. Berry [Comp00]

IFDB page: The Djinni Chronicles
Final placement: 14th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

A favorite trick in Interactive Fiction, especially short works like those that appear in the comp, is to make the PC some kind of unusual or non-human creature. We’ve seen it with animals, as in Ralph and A Day For Soft Food. We’ve seen it with monsters, as in Strangers In The Night or Only After Dark. We’ve seen it with children, as in The Arrival and On The Farm. A Bear’s Night Out did it with a plush toy. In the freaky realms of Rybread, we’ve even seen it with things like car dashboards.

When the game is written competently and sufficiently debugged, this trick often works remarkably well, even better than its static fiction equivalent might. Why is that? I think it’s because IF has an advantage over static fiction in the area of character identification. When you’re reading a book, you may read third-, first-, or even second-person accounts of a particular entity’s exploits, and with sufficiently effective writing and characterization, you may even identify with that entity quite strongly despite its non-human traits, but no matter what you are still watching that entity from a distance. IF, however, literalizes the process of identification one step further. Not only does the prose put you in someone else’s head, you actually have to guide the choices of that someone.

I’d submit that when a reader is compelled to guide a character’s actions, especially if there are puzzles involved, that reader will try to think like that character would think. When this happens, the identification process has reached a place where static fiction can rarely take it.

It is exactly this place that The Djinni Chronicles limns with skill and imagination. The game puts the player in charge of a succession of spirits, each of whom has a unique method of interacting with humans and the physical world. These spirits perceive reality quite differently from corporeal beings like ourselves, and the game leaves it to the player to figure out just what those differences are. Luckily, it provides enough clues (and sometimes even outright explanations) that if you’re paying attention, you should be able to get the basic gist of how the system of djinni magic works.

This system is ingenious in several ways. First, it is quite alien from conventional portraits, which only makes sense, since those portraits have always been from the point of view of the summoner rather than the summoned. Second, despite its unfamiliarity, it makes perfect sense, or at least it did to me, as a plausible explanation for spirit magic. It uses the logic of “undercurrents”, in the game’s terminology, to explain things like why a djinn’s blessing can so often be accompanied by a curse — humans always ascribe a malevolent motive to such curses, but the game suggests that this may be just because we’ve never known the djinn’s side of the story. Finally, the system works well on a gaming level — Djinni Chronicles tells an interesting story that fits many folktale motifs, but doesn’t forget to be a computer game at the same time.

If it sounds like I was impressed by the game’s magic system, that’s because I was. To my mind, it did an excellent job of combining story and game into a seamless unit, providing fertile ground for puzzles that always made sense within the context of the story. Best of all, the system really made me feel like I understood what it was like to be a magically summoned spirit, and also why it is so difficult for humans to understand why such spirits so often bring more misery than happiness to their human summoners. The writing helped further this character identification, such as in this passage:

Vault Entry Room The location of my summoner was a room between the surface of the world [physically west] and a complex of vaults [physically east].

The room was a trap for physical beings. On one side of the room, a portcullis barred the way to the outside. To the other were the vaults for storage. A patterned stone wall blocked their unauthorized access.

This description does a lovely job of tracing the outlines of a location, because the spirit wouldn’t care about the details, while still giving its human reader a fair impression of the location’s real purpose. The game also indulges in judicious use of made-up synonyms for familiar concepts, thereby deepening our sense that the djinn population sees what we see, but through very different eyes.

I mentioned that the puzzles are integrated well into the story — they are also pitched at just the right difficulty level, or at least they were for me. I often found I had to think carefully, to think like the djinn I was directing, and that when I did so, I was properly rewarded. This experience added further to my sense of immersion in the PCs, since I never had to break the spell by consulting the walkthrough.

The game wasn’t perfect — a few typos lurk here and there, a section of verse has badly broken meter that jars against the elegance of the spirit world, and the routine that causes death when a certain point score drops too low is always one turn behind. Overall though, Djinni Chronicles puts a new spin on a well-loved IF gimmick, and makes it work like a charm.

Rating: 9.4

A Day For Soft Food by Tod Levi [Comp99]

IFDB page: A Day for Soft Food
Final placement: 4th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Well, I suppose it was inevitable. Ever since the 1996 competition entry Ralph, which was narrated from the point of view of a family dog, the idea has been just sitting out there, waiting to be used. Actually, I’m surprised it took this long. But it’s finally here: a game written from the point of view of a family cat. As far as the writing goes, Soft Food actually does its job rather well. Its mood is quite different from that of Ralph — there is no jokey blundering about, no excretion gags. Instead, the tone is serious, even formal, as befits the dignified feline. Descriptions are well-turned; your owner is “the Provider”, the sofa is a “lumpy mountain”, cars are “glinting beasts.” The game also provides responses to most logical kitty verbs like “meow”, “purr”, and “jump on “. Unfortunately, the response to “purr” is “You’re not especially happy” — the game’s protagonist is not a contented cat. Its owner is suffering from an illness, and has been surly and unhelpful. The food bowl is empty, and the world outside deadly with oncoming traffic and a powerful Rival. Sickness, injury, and even death have roles in this game. The writing does a fairly good job of conveying the seriousness of this cat’s world, and the starkness of the dilemmas it faces.

I’m sorry to say that the coding is not quite so strong. I stumbled across a number of outright bugs in my two hours with the game. For example, you can get inside an open cupboard, and when you try to close it, the game responds “You lack the dexterity.” Fair enough, but when you try to leave, the game protests “You can’t get out of the closed cupboard.” Look around, and the room description has somehow evaporated, leaving just “The cupboard.” Another problem occurs with a pile of similar objects, from which you may take one and drop it anywhere in the game. However, if you return to the pile and take another, you’ll find that the one you dropped has disappeared, which stretches the bounds of plausibility. Moreover, there are a number of commands in the game (for example, “examine me”) to which the parser does not respond at all.

These are all fairly basic errors, nothing fatal, and I expect that they will be cleaned up in the next release of Soft Food. However, the problem that will be more difficult to fix is that of the puzzles. My Lord, these puzzles are difficult. They’re not so much “guess-the-verb” — I rarely found myself in a situation where I knew what to do but just couldn’t figure out how to phrase it. Instead, I found that most of the time I hadn’t the faintest idea of what to do, and the game kept ending in unpleasant ways as I stumbled about trying to figure out the solution. One puzzle in particular rivaled the Babel fish in complexity, but where the latter puzzle was enjoyable because of the absurdity of necessary actions piling atop one another, this game’s equivalent seemed frustratingly arbitrary, and the game’s serious tone did little to make the puzzle’s fiendishness more bearable. A disturbingly high percentage of the puzzles felt like members of the “guess-what-I’m-thinking” genre. I’m willing to concede that perhaps I wasn’t in a properly feline state of mind for them, and certainly I’ll admit that I’m not the world’s greatest puzzle solver, but I don’t think that’s sufficient to explain the problem. I think they’re just way too hard, and that the writing isn’t specific enough to give the player all the nudges necessary to solve them. It’s a good lesson in puzzle design though — if lots of players experience the same frustration I did, Soft Food will give designers an example of what to avoid in gonzo puzzle-crafting. I may even be able to use the lesson myself. See, I have a great idea for the 2000 comp: you play this pet goldfish…

Rating: 6.4

Ralph by Miron Schmidt [Comp96]

IFDB page: Ralph
Final placement: 12th place (of 26) in the 1996 Interactive Fiction Competition

The concept of Ralph is great fun — the idea of nosing around as a dog gives the author the ability to take advantage of some of the most fun aspects of the text-based interface, putting the player into the canine mindset with dog’s-eye-view room and object descriptions and action responses. Consequently, Ralph gives a hilarious rendition of the canine experience, and the little moments this provides (for example, the reactions to “examine me”, “bite blamant”, and “dig hole”) are the best parts of the game. On the negative side, however, the game’s puzzles are fairly illogical (perhaps I would understand them better if I were a dog, but I don’t think so), and one particular problem was poorly coded enough to give it a real “guess-the-verb” feeling. Ralph was fun for the first hour I played it, but I was frustrated with having to turn to the walkthrough and find that I had already thought of the solution to the problem that was stumping me, but hadn’t phrased it in exactly the way the author demanded.

Prose: The prose in Ralph is unquestionably its best feature. Lots of really clever, funny touches make the game a real joy to read, and I found myself trying all kinds of things because I knew that I would more often than not get a chuckle out of the answer. Of particular note are the reactions to “dog-specific” verbs like “scratch”, “bark”, and “wag”, which give great context-specific responses.

Difficulty: Unfortunately, I found it impossible to progress beyond 0 points without the help of the walkthrough. Even more unfortunately, this was because I had chosen the syntax “put sheet in hole” rather than “block hole with sheet” — this is the type of difficulty I don’t enjoy.

Technical (coding): Apart from the above-mentioned problem, I found the coding quite competent. Especially noteworthy was the simulated dynamic creation of objects (when holes are dug). The author smoothly created the impression of being able to dig an infinite number of holes by a combination of smart coding and a cleverly worded cap on the number of holes dug.

Technical (writing): The prose was technically very strong. I found no errors in grammar or spelling.

Plot: While the plot was quite simple, I didn’t find this to be a problem, since the viewpoint character was a very simple creature himself. The experience of commanding a dog to do random things provided a very funny perspective on animal behavior.

Puzzles: This was the weakest part of Ralph. I found the puzzles quite baffling, especially the “guess-the-verb” one but the others as well. For example, why would a human scrabbling in the ground for ten seconds be able to find a bone which had already eluded a more efficient canine nose?

OVERALL — An 8.4