Lovecraftian

Voices & Visions is a Lovecraftian RPG Maker game. As "The Wanderer," you investigate a village where Evil Things are happening, finding bits of prose left here and there by The Prophet and ultimately fighting a final boss battle, getting either the Good or Bad ending.

It has the main flaw of RPG Maker games -- tedious Final Fantasy-esque combat -- but many virtues as well. Indeed, except in rare cases, combat is entirely optional; you don't level up through combat, and there are only a few occasions in which it's required.

The game takes place over ten "days," but time does not pass autonomously; rather, when you choose to go to sleep at the inn, the next day begins. Each day, new things appear in the village, so even if you explore every last area (and some are purely optional dungeons or wilderness areas), you will eventually run out of things to do and want to sleep to see the new content.

The characters who join you are well portrayed, and each have individual personalities as well as "feats" that can benefit you -- abilities that let you (a limited number of times per day) overcome obstacles without using items.

The game becomes somewhat surreal in later days, with the protagonist hearing voices and subject to visions that play an important part in unravelling the game's mystery. This is, to be sure, an unusual aspect to an RPG. In some ways, Visions & Voices plays out more like a graphic adventure than an RPG.

In short, while the game is subject to the limitations of RPG Maker, Karsuman and Craze are pushing the tool in experimental and interesting directions.

I need to sleep, why don't you let me? Insomnia, in dry terms, is a vertical forced-scrolling platformer made for TIGS' Common Place Book competition from roughly a year ago. Like Eversion, a title from the same compo, Insomniais a 2D low-fi interpretation of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Your initial playthrough may seem underwhelming. Mine did. However, after a couple of playthroughs and a rereading of the introductory text I found that there is something lurking beneath the surface -- the mark of any good horror piece. What ultimately makes Insomnia compelling is its dual interlocking mechanics of sleep deprivation and the drugs the protagonist uses to combat it, and what comes across as a result.

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.

Cactus's Lovecraft Game is a quick vignette he developed for a TIG Source competition. By "vignette," I mean this isn't a completed game, and is missing some of the things we normally expect from games, like a quantifiable outcome. But as is typical of Cactus's efforts, it gets a lot of points for sheer style.

Platformers are cute, right? Nothing more than super-saturated, saccharine romps through whimsical worlds populated by bug-eyed and harmless enemies... right? Eversion defies the rule by providing a typically cheery world and slowly letting it decay.