The Digital Antiquarian

Wetlands is an entry in what I sometimes call the Myst-alike subgenre of IF. Its story, especially initially, is rather backgrounded in favor of the exploration of an almost deserted environment and the solving of lots of puzzles informed by that unique Myst flavor of semi-magical engineering. At one time, when we were getting a lot more statically plotted puzzlers like this, I might have chaffed more about the lack of innovation here. However, this is one of the things that IF can do really well, and it’s something that gets done seldom enough now that when a really get example comes along, as this largely is, I can put aside my normal story-centeredness and just enjoy it for what it is.

So, in the first paragraph we are informed that our vague goal is to see the “Crystal City,” whatever that is. There follows a whole lot of fiddling about with plumbing and hydraulics because they are there, until we manage about 80% of the points, at which time the backstory comes to us in a rush. That’s not to say, though, that the game is devoid of literary merit. Raubertas does a very good job of evoking a mood of a certain contemplative beauty with her writing without ever seeming to work too hard at doing so. That, combined with the fact that these puzzles are tricky but not overly so, made the game as a whole an oddly relaxing experience for me. Although there is a lot of fiddling and wandering back and forth, Raubertas’s design and storyworld are tight and compact enough that things never start to feel too labored, and the process of gradually discovering what one’s goals actually are is satisfying enough for the persistent to justify a certain lack of direction in the early stages. This sort of balance is tough to bring off, and it’s to Raubertas’s credit that she does it so well.

While the writing is polished and the game certainly shows evidence of testing, there are some glitches here which occasionally made me wonder whether problems I was having were down to puzzles or bugs. Likewise, the writing was sometimes not quite as precise as it might have been; I sometimes felt like Raubertas’s mental vision of some of these intricate contraptions wasn’t quite all there in the words on the screen. In one place this was particularly problematic: a device had a leaky hose, a fact that should have been obvious, but I had to struggle mightily with the parser to finally determine this. Both of the times that I turned to the walkthrough were due to issues like this, places where the storyworld I was seeing and the storyworld that (I realized afterward) Raubertas was seeing just didn’t turn out to be entirely in sync.

Yet while my faith in the game did occasionally waver, it never completely broke, and on the whole I enjoyed my time with it quite a bit. Even the story, while it retains something of the atmosphere of a dream right until the end, does turn out to hinge on an interesting if somewhat underdeveloped little moral quandary. If you catch it when you’re in the right frame of mind, this atmospheric puzzler may just charm and entrance you like it did me.

Score: 7

And since this is the last game in this Spring Thing, perhaps a sentence or two about the competition as a whole is in order. Sometimes these reviews come off more critical than I intend them; it’s always easier to point out flaws than to analyze the many unobtrusive little things that worked in a particular game, after all. While it’s true that there were no games that I was unreservedly delighted with, it’s also true that four of the six were almost bug-free, and one of the remaining two did show plenty of evidence of technical competence only to fall victim to a single silly — but in this case fatal — bug, the kind that can be fixed easily enough. And the writing across the balance of the entrants was up to a similar standard. These things meant that instead of hammering on bugs and grammatical problems I could devote my criticisms to bigger questions of theme and design. Those are much more interesting subjects for me as a reviewer to write about, and hopefully for you to read. So, when I couple this competition with the big Comp from last year, which showed a similar trend, it seems we’re getting somewhere in the IF community, raising the bar, etc. (choose your cliche). And that in turn is a pretty good trend to see.

In one of those odd synchroneities that so often occur around these competitions, this is the second game of Spring Thing 2011 to be a work of fantasy aimed at relatively young children, a demographic IF hasn’t really tended to target all that often in the past. Even more surprisingly, the two games are almost of a piece in my mind, succeeding and failing in quite similar ways.

The Promise cast as you as a ten-year-old living in a tiny fishing village where the environment is harsh and cold but the people are kind and warm. In the first of its three acts, you run about the village performing workaday tasks as requested by the various inhabitants: cutting wood and delivering it to the boatmaker, making a candle for your mother, etc. These tasks are so varied and extensive that you’ll quickly get a pretty good idea what Robbie Robertson must have been feeling when he wrote “The Weight.”

Certainly the village could use some more child-safety laws. Some of these chores are more chilling than the evil marauders who show up later:

>saw log
You pull the crank. The saw blades go up and down. Cranking and cranking, the saw blades cut into the birch log, over and over until the entire log has a slab cut from it on one side, then you repeat the process until the once round birch log is now an unevenly cut plank, and sawdust and shavings litter the floor.

The plot begins in earnest only with Act 2, when news comes that those marauders are about to attack the village from the sea, just as virtually all of the men are away on a hunt. And so you are pressed into service, given responsibilities which, if out of keeping with anything anyone is ever likely to entrust a real ten-year-old with, are certainly well in keeping with children’s literature of this tradition.

All in all, The Promise is a very competent game, an enjoyable enough way to spend an evening. As with The Lost Islands of Alabaz, however, it fails to become a really compelling experience due not so much to any one or two major failings as a number of low-key niggles and questionable decisions.

For instance, the writing, while grammatical and even polished in its way, doesn’t quite sing like it might. I think I know what atmosphere Mr. Huxter was going for — a stoic Scandinavian beauty, as resplendent as it is desolate — but that doesn’t always come through as well as it might. Sometimes the text seems to be trying too hard, and the reader ends up swimming in a sort of adjective soup. Take the very first sentence of the dream sequence that opens the game: “You are in a wide, seemingly endless flower-filled meadow on a gorgeous summer day.” (When you line up so many adjectives in front of a noun that you have to start inserting commas to separate them, it may be time to have another look at the sentence as a whole — a lesson I too have learned only slowly, painfully, and still incompletely.) At other times — and more problematically — the text becomes little more than lists of compass directions, a problem that is compounded by a somewhat sprawling storyworld with plenty of rooms that only serve as connections.

And there are other design decisions that are perhaps questionable, or simply not quite implemented as well as they might be. In light of that sprawling storyworld, the attractive map that Huxter includes in the game itself is much appreciated — yet his choice to display said map inline with the main text rather than in a separate window is a bit annoying, forcing the player as it does to constantly scroll back to consult it. His choice to suddenly increase the maximum score every time the player seems to be nearing the end of the game, meanwhile, is not so much annoying as just kind of odd.

But these things — all of them, really — are just niggles. My biggest complaint comes with the ending. During the middle part of the game, you make a promise to a certain, let’s just say, “entity” not to visit a certain location in the forest outside of the village ever again, a promise prompted by some errors of judgment your father made with regard to said entity. In the context of this fantasy mileau, that’s all fair enough. At the climax of the game, however, the village finds itself in desperate straits thanks to the marauders who have now landed and started on their work of raping and pillaging. The only possiblilty of hope for you, your mother, and the entire village lies in that place you promised not to visit. Now, given these circumstances I know what I would do: I’d break my promise without a second thought, throw myself at the feet of the entity, explain my desperate situation, and hope for the best. I like to think that most reasonable people would do the same. Yet, incredibly, this game expects you to “keep your promise” even if it means watching the village burn and everyone die. In its last sentence it solemnly informs us that, “Today you have learned the true value of a promise.” That’s just… well, that’s just fucked up. It’s not only jarring, it’s downright disturbing. If I had a child, this is exactly the sort of rigid thinking I’d want to teach him to avoid. It’s thinking just like this that has caused incalculable pain and death and destruction in our world, all in the service of some inflexible code of conduct laid down in a religious text, a solemn oath, or a samurai code. It’s unfortunate that this is the message the game chooses to conclude with, without a hint of irony or equivocation.

Like Alabaz, then, we have here a solid game that has an unfortunate element of (what strikes me as) moral tone-deafness. And also like Alabaz, I’m not entirely sure whether that’s down to genuine differences of belief between me and the author or merely an author who didn’t think through all of the ramifications of his story as well as he might. Which doesn’t erase its genuine strengths or mean you shouldn’t play it, of course. Just be prepared to be left scratching your forehead — or banging it on your desk — at that ending.

Score: 6

This game is either called Stiffy Makane: Apocolocyntosis or Mentula Macanus; it can’t quite seem to decide which. While I’m sure there’s some sort of obscure Latin-derived meaning for this apparent confusion that would leave me smugly chuckling into my professorial beard if I were a brighter sort, I’m afraid I’m like Shakespeare in having “little Latin and less Greek.” So, we’ll just call this one Stiffy.

Stiffy, then, is a sprawling old-school piece — the most old-school yet in what has so far been a surprisingly old-school competition — set in a Free Love version of ancient Rome which would shock even HBO. Two reviewers whose opinions I respect a lot, Sam Kabo Ashwell and Emily Short, both compared it to Graham Nelson’s classic Curses. I can certainly understand where they’re coming from in doing this. What I can’t understand is their actually liking this game; I hated it with a passion.

Stiffy considers itself, amongst other things, funny. Now, humor in IF is always a hit-or-miss proposition for me. For every comedy game that makes me laugh, there are several that only make me impatient. I’m afraid Stiffy falls into the latter category — but the way that it fails to amuse me is rather unusual. Most funny IF is kind of friendly and self-conscious about it. “I really, really want you to have a good time,” it says, “but I just don’t know quite how to overcome this or that limitation, so instead I’ll make a joke about it and maybe, instead of you being annoyed with me, we can laugh together… maybe?” Even when it fails — and it usually does — this sort of humor means well. After all, it wants to make me laugh. How bad could that be?

Stiffy‘s humor, however, is of the smug, condescending stripe. It has neither the lusty good spirit of a Shakespeare nor the angry satirical edge of a Swift. It doesn’t laugh with me, doesn’t challenge me; it smirks at me. The very best humorists are moralists at heart, laughing to keep from crying at the inanities of the world. But this game has no capacity for moral concern or outrage. In fact, it has no capacity for any real and human emotion. And so what we’re left with is a thin gruel of tedious intellectualism — and of course lots of sex that wants to be transgressive but isn’t. It’s just boring. It’s the “edgy” kid at university who enrolls in Human Sexuality 101 and walks around with a battered copy of The Story of O but has no clue how to actually get it on with anyone.

Graham Nelson has influenced my thinking and writing to an extent that is almost embarrassing to admit. One thing I love about his style, whether it’s in Curses or Jigsaw or those endless asides and digressions in the old Inform Designer’s Manual, is the way that it refuses to confine itself to a single intellectual sphere. Nelson is a much smarter and more educated man than I, and he doesn’t hesitate to share his erudition in virtually everything he writes. Yet he has the peculiar genius of making all of his esoteric knowledge inspiring and interesting, of never making his reader feel like he is showing off just for the sake of it. It was many years in happening, but the fact that I spent the last half of last year reading the whole of In Search of Lost Time is really down to that vignette of Proust I experienced in Jigsaw a long time ago. It sounds trite, but I feel I’m a better person for having read Nelson, if only because through Nelson I came to Proust.

Stiffy, while I suppose it reflects almost equal erudition, doesn’t inspire me at all. Its self-satisfied tone and sparse, brittle storyworld only awakens long-dormant anti-intellectual biases I didn’t even know I had any longer. (Anti-intellectualism is of course a birthright of every American.) This is IF as it might be written by the father from The Squid and the Whale: the professor for whom A Tale of Two Cities is “minor Dickens,” who cannot think of a stronger adjective of praise than “dense,” and yet is still even more pathetically desperate for a blow job from the local hottie than is his son. This is art with all of the magic of life boiled away, leaving behind just a residue of formal logic and literary references.

Objectively, this is the most polished and complete of any of the games I’ve played so far in this Spring Thing; certainly it would seem to realize all of its design goals beautifully. Subjectively, however, those goals are so antithetical to everything I enjoy about IF or, indeed, art in general that I can’t bear to give it a very good score. So, we’ll start with a nice neutral 5, then subtract 2 because it pissed me off so fucking much. Your mileage may vary.

Score: 3