IFDB page: The Colour Pink
Final placement: 6th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition
The Colour Pink is one of those games that starts out with one premise and then wildly shifts gears into something else entirely. There’s nothing wrong with games like that. Heck, I even wrote one. But putting your players through a major shift incurs a responsibility, and that responsibility is to make it clear what is happening. You don’t have to do that immediately — it’s perfectly fine to let a mystery simmer and then have the solution coalesce, either slowly or quickly, at the very end or before that. But if you never explain what happened, your players are left sputtering, “Wait, but how come… what was the… why was everything, and then… WHAT???”
That was me at the end of The Colour Pink, a game which starts out sci-fi, then turns into fairy-tale/fantasy, then skids back to sci-fi at the last move (or doesn’t, depending on which ending you choose), but at no point makes it clear just what you’ve experienced. It seems like maybe you eat a hallucinogen, but apparently its effects can last forever, if you so choose? Oh, and the thing you eat has one set of effects immediately (and even some effects before you eat it, along the lines of compelling you to eat it… in some unexplained way) and then a different set of effects later? Unless the second part (the shift to fantasy) wasn’t a result of eating the thing at all, but is some other weird thing happening on the planet?
Also, there are missing people, and we never find out what happened to them. Did they turn into the animals that we meet in the fantasy land? Are they normal but we’re just experiencing them as animals? What is the War that the fantasy animals keep referencing? I guess there’s a wizard who does a thing to a princess, but what is that even about? Or is the princess not a person at all, but rather a hallucinatory projection of a missing item? There’s some whole thing at the sci-fi level about trying to create a (sci-fi) love potion, and what happens with that? Is it what causes us to be compelled to eat the hallucinatory (or whatever) food? Is the whole fantasy landscape a dream or something? Or are we sharing a dream with the missing people, and the PC is the only one who gets out? (In endings that exit it?) Why is everybody an animal except us?
Questions, questions, questions, and there are no answers forthcoming. I kept waiting for them, and they never arrived. This is a… I want to say “betrayal”, and that’s a highly charged word, so maybe it’s a little too much. It is a shirking of authorial responsibility. Now, I will own the fact that I played this game in two installments with about a two-month gap between them. Maybe my failure to understand what was going on is on me. But even in my first few moments with the game, I immediately found myself scrambling for answers, trying to get my bearings in the description of events. Here’s that introduction:
You are on an abandoned planet again. Not content with almost killing you the last time, the Captain has delegated you again to investigate another out-of-contact colony. Apparently you impressed him with your survival instincts, by evading thousands of insect-like creatures before the ship finally sent down enough people to wipe them out. Maybe your job description should just be renamed as the Expendable Explorer. Unfortunately, you have no choice but to obey the Captain’s orders.
An hour ago you were sent down into a thick jungle. When you made contact with the ship you found out that they had missed the clearing where you were supposed to land. The intervening hour was spent cutting through the energetic plant-life until you finally reached your destination.
Immediately following that, I wrote: Already confused. “When you made contact with the ship”… Wasn’t I sent down from the ship? I “found out that they missed the clearing” where I was supposed to land? Wouldn’t I have known that from the fact that I didn’t land in the clearing? What is my destination? The out-of-contact colony? Was that where the ship was supposed to land?
I mean, once each milieu settles in, there’s a bunch of running around and solving puzzles in a very familiar IF way, and taken on their own, they’re reasonably satisfying, but they’re a bit like ornaments hanging on an invisible Christmas tree. Sure, they’re fine and pretty, but nothing seems to connect them in any way, which makes everything feel arbitrary and baffling. Consequently, while I had fun at moments in the game, it kept accumulating narrative debt that it never paid off, so even with multiple endings available (and even a whole potential violent path, a la Undertale, that I never bothered to explore), I still felt kinda cheated when it was done.
Rating: 7.0