Tag: unreliable narrator

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

The Case Of Samuel Gregor by Stephen Hilderbrand [Comp02]

IFDB page: The Case Of Samuel Gregor
Final placement: 27th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

I think I can see what this game tries and fails to do. Of course, I may be totally mistaken about this, but I think what’s happening here is that TCOSG is trying to show us something like an insane PC, an unreliable narrator whose version of reality shifts as the game progresses. Unfortunately, what it ends up with is an incomprehensible PC whose descriptions, reactions, and actions make less and less sense as the game progresses. The unreliable narrator is an extremely tricky gimmick, and would be hard for anybody to pull off successfully; for a host of reasons, this game is not up to the task.

For one thing, the writing is frequently unclear. For instance, take a look at the following:

Samuel Gregor's Kitchen
Apparently Mr. Gregor does not prepare food at home very often, for
the kitchen is in immaculate condition. That is, if the appliances
weren't showing signs of being thirty years old. And it's no wonder,
since the room is only eight feet across, and there are no windows.
You can understand why he is not presently at home.

Okay, first sentence, so far so good. Second sentence: all right, I’m thinking this means that the kitchen would look more immaculate if the appliances didn’t look old. I’m still understanding. Then the third sentence comes along and everything goes haywire. What’s no wonder? That the appliances look old? The appliances look old because the room is small and has no windows? Surely not. Reaching further back, perhaps it’s no wonder the kitchen is immaculate, because it’s small. Because… small kitchens stay cleaner? They take less time to clean?

Maybe it’s no wonder Mr. Gregor doesn’t use the kitchen, because it’s small. This makes the most sense of all, though it’s a big stretch from the actual words. So okay, let’s provisionally go with that, and on to the fourth sentence. I can understand why he is not presently at home. Um, I can? Is my understanding that he’s not home because he has a small, clean kitchen with old appliances? If so, I don’t really understand my understanding. Do people avoid their own homes because they wish the kitchen were bigger? Not anybody I know.

There’s a lot of this sort of unclear writing throughout the game. At one point, it told me, “You are becoming increasingly aware that the whole of this story is being foisted upon you.” I thought, “well, yes, and not very well at that. But what does this mean to the PC?” Apparently it means a great deal, because there was a huge, otherwise unannounced shift in the game at that point, which pretty much left me behind, never to catch up, even after throwing up my hands and going straight from the walkthrough.

Once I did go to the walkthrough, I discovered that not only is this game plagued by unclear writing, its puzzles are hopelessly obscure as well. There’s one puzzle that involves getting through a locked door, which of course is nothing strange. What makes it unique, though, is that the actions required to get through the door have absolutely nothing to do with the door itself, and there’s no reasonable way to expect that those actions would have any effect on the door at all. The only reason to do them is because they’re implemented, not because they make any kind of story sense. Apparently, there was an alternate solution that involves giving food to someone who’s carrying massive amounts of food already and shows no sign of being hungry, but I could never get this to work. It’s just as well, because the working solution had all the illogic I could stomach at that moment anyway.

TCOSG calls itself “An Existential Adventure” and throws in a Kafka quote at the end, but I have to say I didn’t see the existentialism in it. I’ve read Kafka, Camus, Dostoyevsky, and Sartre, and enjoyed them all — this game doesn’t have much in common with them. It certainly brings forth a certain meaninglessness, but not in a good way. It does seem to attempt to take us into the subjective world of one individual, but the execution is so muddled and confusing that instead of inhabiting a point-of-view, I ended up on the outside of both the fiction and the interactivity, poking the game as if it were an anthill.

In the general sparseness of its implementation and the linearity of its plot, TCOSG leaves virtually no room for freedom of choice, and so another existentialist tenet goes out the window. In fact, between its writing, its coding, and its puzzles, the experience of playing this game is less existential than it is absurd. Absurdist IF can be great if it’s done intentionally. That’s not what happened here.

Rating: 3.7