Here's what's great about a Call of Cthulhu interactive fiction: you can peer at the unspeakable evils, go mad, be sent to a lunatic asylum, and gruesomely die as often as you want -- and then UNDO to play on, your protagonist unsullied by madness while the player has seen into the abyss over and over.
The King of Shreds and Patches is Jimmy Maher's adaptation of a Call of Cthulhu module by Justin Tynes, and created with the permission of Chaosium. It's interactive fiction, but IF bolstered by atypical extras: a graphical map that develops during play, a goal-tracking system that keeps track of what you're supposed to be working on at the moment, and context-based hints. A characteristic it shares with some other very recent releases -- notably Aaron Reed's massive Blue Lacuna -- is its willingness to adopt gameplay conventions from other forms of gaming in order to make play more accessible to people who haven't spent their whole lives playing IF.
In other formal respects, The King of Shreds and Patches is notable not so much for any specific features as for its scope, solidity, and ability to pull together many already-known IF virtues. There's extensive conversation, and (more surprisingly) combat; not randomized fight scenes, but combat puzzles of the sort where there are multiple ways to block or disarm the opponent but you only have a few moves to think of one. The setting is Elizabethan London, just -- the Queen is dying -- and the geography and props give a sense of period, though the dialogue and conception of the universe sometimes seem a bit more modern; both of which elements are probably true to the original RPG module, though I imagine Jimmy must have done a fair amount of research to fill in such details as the correct working of a printing press ca. 1600.
But what makes the game interesting from an interactive storytelling perspective is its particular use of the losing endings: the way it invites the player to go mad, and go mad, and go mad again (and then UNDO and happily escape). In this respect it is not unlike Anchorhead, another game that gives depths to the protagonist's terror by implementing many forms of death and making it likely that the player will meet quite a few of them before succeeding.
The difference is that in Anchorhead, those deaths are usually the result of the player's failure: failure to solve a difficult puzzle in time, failure to plan ahead. When the protagonist succeeds, it is through cunning, skill, and determination. In The King of Shreds and Patches, the emphasis on terrible (yet fascinating) secrets is stronger, and the descriptions of many dread documents and other occult objects lure the player on to look. The player's interest in finding out what is going on is at odds with the protagonist's need to survive. I rarely died in The King of Shreds and Patches without knowing what I was getting into and bringing that outcome on myself deliberately.
I didn't think, ultimately, that The King of Shreds and Patches achieved quite Anchorhead's successes with mood and menace expressed through setting. The writing is a little less well observed and the set scenes less subtle. But it achieves something else instead. The temptation to discover the unspeakable, and the imperative not to, is the main conflict in Lovecraftian stories and a core mechanic in Call of Cthulhu. Maher's undo-able deaths -- some of which are merely horrific, others surprisingly evocative -- handle the same problem but in a way unique to his medium.
Having the experience of giving in to that temptation makes the overall story richer and deeper, because it allows the player to experience the world fully even as the protagonist absolutely must not.
N.B.: The King of Shreds and Patches was built using Glulx. To play the game, you need to install a Glulx interpreter on your machine, and download the game file. We link to Glulx interpreters for PC, Mac, and Linux above. Those new to interactive fiction may also be interested in the introduction found here.
