Damnatio Memoriae by Emily Short [misc]

[This review appeared in issue #47 of SPAG, in the “SPAG Specifics” sections. Note: that means there are SPOILERS AHEAD. The issue was published on January 16, 2007.]

Damnatio Memoriae is a tiny game, but it’s got plenty of quality. There are a few multiple-solution puzzles and the skeleton of a story built around an “accretive PC” model, where a winning playthrough only comes from the lessons taught by a few losing iterations. The writing is reasonably good, as one might expect from Emily Short, and the setting puts her considerable knowledge of ancient Rome to use. It takes hardly any time to play, and repays exploration with a surprising depth of implementation.

All that said, I think I made two mistakes in approaching DM. One was assuming that because it shares a universe with Savoir-Faire, the details of its magic system would be identical to that game. The other mistake was forgetting that this game’s raison d’etre is to be example code for Inform 7, not necessarily to be a complete and satisfying game in itself. Consequently, I found myself feeling disappointed by finding only anticlimactic, abrupt endings, and so turned to the walkthrough after winning but still feeling unsatisfied. From there, I became confused and frustrated by the way this game’s magic differed from that of S-F. These factors combined to make my playing experience less than fun.

It didn’t help that the first winning ending I reached was, I think, buggily incomplete. There was a “time’s up” message and a “You have won” message, but no connective material between them, which of course felt bare and anticlimactic. I’m assuming this was a bug, but there were a number of places in the game where logical connections felt missing. For instance, in a branch where I had killed Clemens, left him in the study, and ducked outside, I thought I’d hide under a pile of hay. Here’s what happened:

>hide
What do you want to hide under?

>hay
Without some decoy, they'll certainly look hard enough to find you.

What, the corpse of my doppelganger up in the study isn’t enough of a decoy?

I chalk these lacunae up to the fact that the point here is not to create a perfect, polished game but rather to demonstrate Inform 7 rules within the context of a nominally game-like structure. Also, despite the fact that this game is tiny, the number of possible interactions between objects makes for a plethora of implementation details, so it’s natural that without extensive beta-testing (as a full-fledged game would have received), some would be missed. As I said, I mistakenly entered the game with the wrong expectation about that, and in any case, I feel like I’m beginning to cross over into the uncouth practice of airing bugs in a review rather than privately to the author, so let me move on to a different topic: the functional differences between this game’s magic system and that of Savoir-Faire.

I had never played S-F to completion, so I prefaced my approach to this game by playing through its larger cousin. Savoir-Faire is a marvelous game, with an internally consistent magic system of linking and reverse linking that enables both its puzzles and its story. However, the logic of linking in Damnatio Memoriae parts ways with S-F in several areas, so I found it a disadvantage to have S-F so fresh in my memory as I played DM.

For one thing, Savoir-Faire disallows linking anything to the PC, saying, “Linking yourself is generally considered a very bad idea.” In DM, however, linking the PC is an important tool. This hurdle is easily cleared, but it leaves the player to figure out how linkages between people operate, and their operations are in fact rather counterintuitive. On top of this, DM also adds a new kind of linkage: slave linkage. The differences between the three types of links can be subtle indeed. Consider these three messages:

>link clemens to me
(first unlinking Clemens)
You build a mutually-effective link between Clemens and yourself.

>reverse link clemens to me
You reverse link Clemens to yourself (son of Julia and Agrippa, who died before you were born). While one of you lives, so does the other.

>slave link clemens to me
You build the link, enslaving Clemens to yourself. It is an expedient Augustus has been using for years: now any attempt upon your life will instead kill your slave.

On the face of it, these messages would seem to indicate that the regular link allows you to control Clemens, the reverse link causes harm to both when anything is inflicted on either, while the slave link transfers that harm from you to Clemens. However, a simple link doesn’t allow you to control Clemens. Instead, a regular link behaves in the way I expected a reverse link to act, and vice versa.

The other significant difference between S-F‘s linking and that in DM is that DM is much less consistent about disallowing linkages. In Savoir-Faire, you could depend on the fact that unless two objects had some sort of common quality, they could not be linked. Damnatio Memoriae is a little more capricious:

>link window to pitcher
The window is insufficiently similar to the painted glass pitcher of water for the two to be linked.

>link letter to pitcher
You build a mutually-effective link between the old letter and the painted glass pitcher of water.

I was able to understand the first result a bit more when I realized belatedly that there’s probably no glass in the window, but that still doesn’t explain how I can link the pitcher to a letter. Similarly:

>link pitcher to clemens
This would work better if the painted glass pitcher of water were a person.

>link vase to clemens
You build a mutually-effective link between the vase and Clemens.

I’m not sure how much these inconsistencies would have bothered me if I hadn’t just played Savoir-Faire, but that game sets a standard that Damnatio Memoriae fails to meet. Consequently, I felt a lot of annoyance at seeing solutions in the walkthrough that never would have occurred to me, since I was expecting DM‘s magic system to be more like that of S-F.

This is a whole lot of kvetching over a sample game, and in a way, it’s a nice problem to have: Emily’s work, even other samples like Bronze, is of such impeccable quality that I’ve begun to hold even her slightest output to what may be a ridiculously high standard. When a game like Damnatio Memoriae fails to meet that standard, I’m more disappointed than I would be in another author’s work, and linking (sorry) this game to one of her real masterpieces only aggravated the problem.

I guess all this is to say that I’d love to see other games set in the various historical periods of the Lavori d’Aracne universe, but I hope they’re created as games rather than as samples. That way, the focus can be on story and craft, rather than on teaching the features of a system. That’s my selfish desire as a player, mind you — no doubt when I’m working on learning Inform 7 I’ll wish just the opposite.

Lock & Key by Adam Cadre [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2003.]

IFDB Page: Lock & Key

Death Becomes You

[NOTE: Lock & Key has a twist right at the beginning, and I’m going to give it away because it’s not practical to discuss the game without doing so. So if you haven’t played it yet and you want to be surprised, go play it before reading this, at least up to the twist anyway.]

I love editing SPAG, but the job does have its down-sides. For instance, I’m frequently obliged to read reviews of games I haven’t played yet. Most of the time, this isn’t much of a problem, since SPAG reviews are required to be spoiler-free. However, there is a small, occasional section of the ‘zine called SPAG Specifics, wherein reviewers are allowed to spoil as much as they like in the interest of promoting specific, detailed discussion about particular games. When I get a review for this section, I need to read it whether I’ve played the game in question or not.

That’s exactly what happened to me with Lock & Key — I’d played the game enough to get beyond the initial twist, see the setup, say “Cool”, and vaguely resolve to play it whenever I found the time. Shortly afterward, Eytan Zweig submitted a thoughtful, fairly critical review of the game for SPAG Specifics, and I decided that I wanted to wait a while to play the game after that, so that the review would fade enough in memory that it wouldn’t color my perceptions. Now it’s been about a year since that issue, Lock & Key has just won a handful of XYZZY Awards, and I have a new laptop I needed to test this past weekend; the stars were aligned, and I finished the game.

I wasn’t disappointed. Cadre’s writing shines as usual, as does his knack for giving every game a fresh angle. In this one, you play a prison designer and security expert in a mildly jokey pseudo-medieval milieu. Your job is to craft the perfect sequence of death-traps for the King’s dungeon, enough to defeat even the hardiest adventurer who might try to escape it. If you succeed, you’ll make a fortune and be able to retire. If you fail, well, you get beheaded. Those medieval managers really knew how to motivate their employees.

The meat of the game is its one and only puzzle, the one for which it earned the XYZZY for Best Individual Puzzle: setting the traps. It’s not that setting the traps themselves is all that difficult, but choosing the right ones… ah, that’s another matter. See, once you’ve finished constructing your ideal dungeon, it is put to the test by Boldo, a thick-thewed adventurer who, in the best IF fashion, seems to have an endless inventory of items that happen to counteract your traps perfectly. Every time he encounters a death-trap, you get to see exactly how he defeats it, and this in turn allows you to begin scheming about how you might deprive him of that method. Like Varicella, the game is highly iterative — the chances you’ll beat it the first time through are virtually nil, and this is by design. Instead, Boldo’s many triumphs allow you to make your own advances towards building the perfect dungeon upon restarting.

It’s a deeply rewarding puzzle of marvelously interlocking elements. Not only does it operate on several levels to begin with, it builds on itself to make lots of little “aha!” moments combine into a greater experience of overall insight. In addition, the game’s use of graphics do it a great service, presenting a clean and attractive game board to help players to see exactly what choices they’ve made.

My favorite part of the puzzle, though, is the hinting. The prose that describes Boldo conquering your traps is funny and enjoyable to read on its own merits, but it also frequently contains wonderfully subtle hints about how the dungeon might be better constructed. For the sake of spoiler-avoidance, I won’t quote any of those hints here, but I will say that they capture the feel that Infocom at its best was able to provide, of prose that is just as good on a game level as it is on a story level.

So Lock & Key wholly deserved its XYZZY for Best Puzzle. The other awards, I’m not so sure about. At the end of the XYZZYs, Lock & Key went away with the prizes for both Best Individual NPC (Boldo) and Best NPCs in general. The fact that it won these accolades for NPCs with whom (for the most part) the player cannot directly interact AT ALL is rather astonishing. I’m not sure what to make of it. Perhaps writing is just much, much more important than coding when it comes to NPCs, at least as far as the XYZZY voters are concerned. Certainly Boldo reacts to the traps placed by the player, and the descriptions of his reactions are all great and funny, but that’s a very limited sort of interaction, nothing at all like the dozens and dozens of responses that make up the typical fully-fleshed IF NPC. I wonder: can great writing alone make a great NPC?

Maybe sometimes it can, but I’ve yet to see it. Certainly this game’s excellent writing didn’t make Boldo an excellent NPC. He’s simply a cipher, an intentionally broad cliche whom the PC never meets, instead only watching cut-scenes of him on a sort of magic TV. He’s entertaining enough for the purpose he serves, but he hardly feels like a deeply implemented NPC, though he’s the deepest of the bunch. The other NPCs — the King, a gladiator named Musculo, and a host of others who appear in brief cameos — are present only in cut-scenes. The only exception to this, the only NPC who even responds to “ASK”, is the guard at the beginning. His response: “No talking in the dungeon!”

I would contend that the really remarkable character in Lock & Key is the player character. What’s remarkable about him? [1] Why, his cleverness, of course — his ability to string together just the right combination of traps to defeat Boldo. More to the point, what’s remarkable is the way in which the game constructs this cleverness. Like Primo Varicella, the PC of Lock & Key is what I’ll call an accretive PC, meaning that he becomes more and more himself with each iteration of the game, as the player’s knowledge accretes.

In most IF games, your character will never live up to you — it will never be able to do most of the things you can think of, nor say most of the things you can say. This is still true of Lock & Key and Varicella, but in an important way, what’s also true of those games is that you must live up to your character. You’re told a salient quality about the PC at the outset of the game — his expertise in dungeon design, or his Machiavellian plan to take over the regency — and then you must take him through one iteration after another until you yourself have attained enough of that quality to guide the PC to a successful conclusion. When you finally do reach that conclusion, it’s as if you’ve finally learned the real story, and all the failed attempts leading up to it exist only in shadowy parallel universes. This is who the character was all along — it just took you a while to catch up with him.

Of course, the case could be made that all IF PCs are like this to some degree. That may be true, but then again it’s de rigueur in most other IF to avoid game designs in which the PC must learn something by dying. Graham Nelson even made it Rule Number Three in his Player’s Bill Of Rights. [2] Of course, when a player must be able to step successfully into the PC’s viewpoint without any previous knowledge whatsoever, it becomes rather hard to give that PC any sort of expertise in the game world, which is why we so frequently see PCs who suffer from amnesia, or are fish-out-of-water, or other such tricks. Lock & Key and Varicella break this rule so brilliantly that it doesn’t even seem like a valid rule anymore. Why shouldn’t the player learn from past lives? After all, unless the PC is placed in some sort of contrived situation to deprive her of all her natural knowledge, she’ll inevitably know more than the player does the first time that player begins the game.

After a while, the requirement to match the PC’s knowledge with the player’s can begin to feel like a bit of a cage, and the most common contortions an IF game goes through to live inside it (such as amnesia) have long since lost their appeal. Even the freshest ones can still feel a bit tired and gimmicky unless done exactly right. The accretive PC is one key to this cage — it’s wonderfully refreshing to play a character who’s really good at something, and even better to become good at it yourself. Of all the jail-breaks that happen in Lock & Key, this one is the most satisfying.

[1] I’m referring to the PC as a male for convenience’s sake — I don’t recall its gender ever being specified in the game.

[2] See his excellent article The Craft Of Adventure, available in the info directory of the IF Archive.