IFDB page: Tough Beans
Final placement: 5th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition
Tough Beans has, hands down, the most powerful opening of any Comp05 game I’ve played yet. Here’s the first screen:
Lambkin. Babydoll. Princess.
In the large oval mirror above your dresser you watch a pale hand drag a bubblegum-pink brush downward through a section of fine blond hair. It is your hand. It is your hair.
You can’t feel anything.
WHOO! That alone knocked my socks off, and then it was followed by several more screens in the same tone, depicting a PC who has been “swaddled in epithets” (what a turn of phrase!) like the 3 words that start the game, but who is starting to emerge from her doll-like stupor. (And in that spirit, let’s note here that the PC does indeed have a name: Wendy.) In fact, as we discover gradually, pieces of her have been in rebellion for a long time, but today is the day it all breaks.
Man, did I love this premise, and for the most part, Tough Beans really delivers, with several cool techniques for enhancing its narrative power. There’s that stunning intro, with multiple screens of text, each one of which blanks out the last before finally giving way to the game proper. We’ve seen that before in IF, and it’s used very well here.
There are the introspective flashbacks tied to otherwise ordinary game actions, memories from childhood that deepen our understanding of Wendy and how she got into her current situation. Sometimes, those flashbacks show us those rebellious parts of her, parts which have been dutifully squelched in support of her conformist ambitions, but which roar up to support the destroyer that emerges. This, too, is not a new technique in IF, but Dee does a marvelous job with them, writing vignettes of memory that are not only compelling on their own, but which tie elegantly to both the specific action that prompted them and the overarching themes of the game.
Then there’s something I don’t remember ever seeing, but which made for a really potent effect when it worked. Upon Wendy entering a new location, Dee will often hijack the initial room description to instead provide a little cut-scene, before then allowing the room description to, well, describe the room. Here’s an example from early in the game:
Living Room
There is so much sunlight streaming in from the window over the sofa that you have to blink your eyes a few times before they are fully focused. When your vision is restored, you notice a red rubber chew toy peeking out from behind a pillow on the couch. Barkley! As if on cue, you hear a loud snuffling sound behind you. You turn around just in time to see Derek's beloved bull mastiff settle himself down in front of the entrance to the hallway. He proceeds to gnaw on his toy with gusto, completely ignoring you as usual...
Followed by a few more paragraphs setting up a puzzle. Look again, and we get:
Living Room
The living room, like the bedroom, is still a work in progress. All the necessaries are here, however: you've got a couch, a couple shelves to hold Derek's books, a TV, and plenty of sunlight. A colorful braided rug covers the floor.
This moment really worked for me. It acknowledged that I’d changed locations, but instead of being like another room in a colossal cave, the new location instead functioned like another beat in Wendy’s story. My focus was immediately drawn to figuring out what to do with Barkley (who is not only blocking Wendy’s way but also gnawing on her shoe… ick.) It was only after the first few obvious actions failed that I took stock of the room proper, a progression which felt strongly mimetic to how a person’s actual thought processes might work in such a scenario. There were other times when the technique didn’t flow so freely for me, and I found myself wishing I could see the room without having to LOOK a second time, but for the most part, I was happy to be swept through the story as I moved through the world.
The game isn’t pure narrative — there are definitely puzzles, one of which was enough of a doozy that it sent me to the walkthrough. But in employing a deft compositional hand between depicting Wendy’s interior and exterior worlds, Tough Beans got me strongly invested in navigating through her challenges.
I successfully managed to do so, at least after that little trip to the walkthrough, where I found out that my stuckness was due to neglecting the fact that the game frequently implements descriptions for second-level objects, and it turns out sometimes they’re important. However, I only finished the game with about half the points, and here’s where the final innovation lives. Tough Beans, we learn, awards points for solving puzzles, but just as often it does so for finding opportunities to fully realize the character. As the walkthrough puts it, points are awarded “in situations where Wendy shows some backbone, spunkiness, cleverness, etc.”
I would say it’s even a little more nuanced than that, as at least one point comes from behaving in an adult, responsible manner, though several others derive from being a hellion. In any case, the game was sized well enough that I’d found the non-optimal winning solution by about 80 minutes in, and could then spend my remaining 40 minutes finding opportunities to make Wendy an even stronger version of herself. It’s an ingenious idea to have the points, at least in part, function as a character-themed “Have You Tried…?” section.
This didn’t work perfectly. I think the point awarding could have been done a bit more consistently — 10 points is too few for all the potentially relevant opportunities in the game — and I wish the walkthrough had just come out and told me how to score the points rather than coyly hinting. Moreover, I really missed the inclusion of some features that do (I think) come natively with Inform, such as a Full Score breakdown and notifications when I scored a point.
Similarly, there are just a couple of little bugs and some places throughout where the prose stumbles, often by missing a word or a punctuation mark. Nonetheless, I spent the whole game rooting for Wendy and rooting for Tough Beans, and was happy to see them both succeed in the end, even if they weren’t flawless. In fact, as the game’s excellent characterization so effectively declares, flawlessness is most emphatically not the point.
Rating: 9.5