Interactive Fiction

Walker and Silhouette used to be antagonists. He's a police detective; she's a criminal of sorts, though it seems that most of her crimes were expressions of social subversiveness, rather than anything too hard-core. Now, of course, they solve crimes.

Walker & Silhouette is designed to be friendly to novice players, and in particular to get around some of the challenges of parser-based IF: instead of requiring the player to type full commands, it provides keywords that can be typed in or (on interpreters that support hyperlinks) just clicked on. Selecting a keyword means having the protagonist do whatever he (or she -- you play both characters during the game) thinks is the most reasonable action applying to that object at the moment.

Most objects don't get picked up, either, which means that the player has a fairly static inventory. And movement is limited to using the leave keyword when it becomes available -- which means that there's no map to keep track of and no compass directions to memorize. There are even some achievements to unlock, which is cute, a borrowing of game tropes decidedly alien to standard IF.

As one might expect, the keyword-dependency narrows the puzzle range of Walker & Silhouette: any given thing is only useful in one way at one time. It's not completely without challenge, though. It soon becomes evident that puzzle solutions are about interacting with objects in the right order, or timed to coincide right with external events.

I'm describing this keyword-based IF as though it were a novelty. It isn't: people have been playing with variations on this idea for a long time, because it offers obvious advantages to players who find the regular IF parser too frustrating or challenging to learn. Adventures of Helpfulman used clickable keyword-driven conversation back in 1999; in 2007, Ferrous Ring explored the possibility of giving the player multiple modes of play, ranging from the standard parser through keyword play to a system that would more or less play the game for you, so you could read it like a book. There are others. But unless you've followed the IF community and its competitions very closely, you probably haven't heard of those games, and that's largely because they didn't entirely work. Some of that has to do with writing (Ferrous Ring was deeply surreal, so it was hard to figure out what was going on), but some of it was because the authors hadn't given enough thought to how a keyword-based system might be fundamentally different to interact with from a parsed-command system.

More recently, Blue Lacuna offered a partially keyword-based system: it was possible to play quite a lot of the game typing only one-word commands to examine things or move from place to place, resorting to the fuller commands at the parser only for extraordinary actions. But it tended more or less to fall back on the parser when puzzle content was needed; whereas Walker & Silhouette really commits to the idea that the keywords are going to suffice for all gameplay. And they do.

In spite of that, W&S is not quite the same as a hypertext story, and not just because the world model has more state than the average hypertext story tracks. There is still a command prompt, and if you want to, you can type commands in classic IF style. It's not necessary to do that in order to win, and most of the time it won't be productive of anything important, but there are occasionally moments when I wanted to toy with the characters by suggesting actions that they aren't consciously considering. And this paid off: the game responded as though the protagonist was surprised by an unanticipated nudge from the id, often with rather entertaining text.

All this about interface and I haven't talked about the content. Walker & Silhouette is pleasing for some of the same reasons that Gun Mute is pleasing. Pacian likes to take a setting that you think you understand (the old west, early 20th-century England) and then add layers of worldbuilding that make that setting strange and new again. Each new scene brings twists not only for the mystery in the foreground, the one the protagonists are trying to solve, but for the mystery in the background about what kind of a world this is.

I am not describing the setting at all, because one of the constant pleasures of the game, for me, was in discovering that this world contained Surprising Element X... and that Walker and Silhouette considered Element X commonplace. The keyword system helps out with that effect, too, because it allows the protagonists to act on their world knowledge in situations where the player might not completely understand what's going on. If that sounds like a demerit, trust me: in this game it generally works.

Add to that a light romance and a theme about promoting gender equality, and you have a distinctively Pacian-esque piece. It's fun, adventurous, and not too hard; it feels like enjoyable fluff while you're playing, but after you're done you may find it leaves more of an impression than you expected.

The Shadow in the Cathedral is a member of a supposedly extinct species, the commercial interactive fiction game. It's the second work out by Textfyre, and was designed by Ian Finley and written by Jon Ingold -- both well-known in the hobbyist community for diverse, gripping, and sometimes disturbing work, though Finley's last notable game came out back in 2000.

The Gostak is a game partly, but not entirely, in English. The usual word order words apply. Most pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions are unchanged ("you", "and", "on", etc.), and some modal verbs ("can", "could"), as well as a few other words somewhat arbitrarily ("five"). But most of the adjectives, nouns, and non-modal verbs have been swapped for their own new vocabulary.

The Nemean Lion is a super-tiny, super-easy interactive fiction. It's a comment on the form, in particular the relationship between player and game -- in its own way and medium not much different from You Have to Burn The Rope. You're Heracles, and you need to kill and skin the lion of the title and bring him back to king Eurystheus.

As with 9:05, it would be spoiled by too much advance explanation, so I urge you to play now, which will take about two minutes, and then read the rest of my comments.

(Notice that typing VERBS at any prompt will give you the complete list of commands you can use.)

Spoilers after this point.

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.

There's an ongoing discussion in the interactive fiction community about whether or not we're well-served by our traditional reliance on second person present-tense narration -- the kind of thing that works for

You are standing in a damp cave.

or

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

...but not so much for

You feel overwhelmed by existential angst and break down weeping.

Make It Good is a dark detective mystery from Jon Ingold: there's been a murder, and everyone who was in the house at the time is a suspect. The protagonist is a cop whose drinking career has all but eclipsed his career on the force. His sidekick doesn't bother to conceal his contempt at having to serve such a useless master.

On this description, Make It Good looks like a classic style of interactive fiction, in the tradition of Infocom's Deadline and Witness. Those early commercial mysteries involved some of Infocom's most innovative character work: the non-player characters in Deadline give a strong impression of independent purpose as they move about on their own schedules.

Make It Good improves on this tradition.

Lots of IF lately is written for competition play and is therefore designed to be completed in two to five hours, and more deserves the name of interactive short story. Aaron Reed's Blue Lacuna triumphantly defies that tradition: Aaron calls it an interactive novel, and that seems entirely fair, because the game contains enough text for several full-length novels and is likely to play over 18-25 hours. The result is that it feels gratifyingly spacious, as less ambitious IF cannot, and there is room for emotional effects to build gradually.

Summer Session is from "Tycoon Games," but Hanako's logo is on it too, and it sure looks (and plays) like Georgina Okerson's work -- so, since there aren't any in-game credits, I'm going to assume it's hers. (Okerson also created Summer Schoolgirls, Cute Knight and Fatal Hearts.) In fact, Summer Session plays a lot like Summer Schoolgirls, redeveloped for boys. The objective here isn't to make friends, however, but to get a girl friend -- perhaps a minor difference, but one that adds a mild sexual frisson.

Shade is one of those classics that get recommended anytime anyone recommends any IF to newcomers: it's brief, disquieting, ambiguous, memorable without being especially difficult. It offers an interaction style too guided and fluid to be called "puzzly", and which probably belongs in some other category. It threatens one's ideas of the relationship between the player and the protagonist. It has entered the canon, as far as interactive fiction has one.