The Stack

The third game of the Penumbra trilogy is actually an expansion pack for the second game. Various blurbs say that it “ties up loose ends” in the first two games, but really, the only loose end is what happens to Shelter (as the secret excavation site is called) after Philip’s messages go out, and it doesn’t even address that. I suppose there are probably players asking “What happened to Philip after the second game? How did he escape?” — to which the only sensible answers are “Exactly what you saw” and “He didn’t”. It’s a horror story. Seekers after forbidden knowledge have to pay a terrible price.

Nonetheless, Penumbra: Requiem follows Philip’s further adventures. Just one problem: none of it is real. I’ll avoid spoilers about the precise sort of unreality it is — certainly there are multiple possibilities within the previous game’s fiction — but the game doesn’t take long to start dropping hints of irrationality underlying the world, like in a Philip K. Dick novel. For example, at one point, the automatic PA-recording voice, previously heard issuing GLaDOS-like cheerful reminders about how all personnel are required to bring their cyanide capsules when on shift and suchlike, addresses Philip by name, and whispers advice clearly meant for you specifically. Later, it addresses you as “Player”. (Add Metal Gear Solid 2 to the list of games Penumbra has reminded me of!) It’s surreal, but it also lowers the stakes somewhat: how can you be worried about the effects of your actions in a world that makes no sense?

But then, the stakes are already low, because there are no monsters at all this time around. That means it can’t really be described as a survival-horror or a stealth game any more. (Crouching in darkness produces the now-familiar hiding-in-shadows screen effects, but there’s no one around to appreciate it.) Since there’s no need for places to hide in or flee through, the hub areas made of networks of corridors have been eliminated too. Instead, what we have left is a series of self-contained puzzle scenarios with no logical connections to each other: each segment ends with Philip going through a teleporter. So, it’s more purely a puzzle game than the previous installments — the only thing that breaks it up is the frequent platforming elements (including, at one point, a Donkey Kong homage).

Oddly enough for an adventure game, it doesn’t use the inventory for anything except your standard tools (flashlight, notebook, pain relievers, etc). There are things you need to carry around, but it’s always done by dragging them from place to place in the scene itself, like in Half-Life 2 and Portal. Those games built puzzles around this interface, but didn’t explore it as much as this Requiem does, or show how well it works in an adventure context. I’d say it works pretty well, as long as the puzzles are designed for it. It feels more natural than an inventory menu, more like a unified interface of the sort found in Mystlike games, but provides a greater range of action than a pure Mystlike click-on-stuff interface. One key mechanic to support it is the way that objects that have to be put in a particular place (in a slot, say) are guided to that position automatically when you get them close enough. This provides important feedback, letting the player know that they’ve done something right.

I should talk about the light. All three games give you three ways of lighting up dark places: glowstick, flashlight, and flares. Overture had text suggesting that the flashlight was the best light source, but the ridiculous rate at which it chewed up batteries meant that you’d sometimes have to resort to the never-dying glowstick. I personally found that this was hogwash: the flashlight may have been better for lighting things at a distance, but since you can’t interact with distant things, the glowstick, with its 360-degree illumination, was more practical. Somehow, though, I found myself using the flashlight more in Black Plague. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was changed to illuminate immediate surroundings better, or maybe the levels just had more long, dark corridors. At any rate, the whole idea of conserving your light fits better with the survival-horror stuff than with a pure adventure game, so Requiem dropped it, and gave you a flashlight with infinite charge. I basically never turned it off.

I notice that I’m talking mostly about mechanics this time, whereas my posts about the previous ones are almost entirely about plot. That’s because there really isn’t much plot this time around. I’d guess that the authors were thinking that, because this is just an expansion pack and not a proper sequel, it can’t have any important plot developments. It’s like the Sunday episodes of syndicated comic strips: since not all newspapers have a Sunday edition, nothing can be allowed to happen that affects continuity. The mechanics, though, are top-notch.

The ending of Penumbra: Black Plague, and the events leading up to it, confirm some of the speculation in my last post about the role of the virus in ancient times — at least, if you trust the central virus hive mind, which can’t be completely objective on the matter. (Yes, it’s another story about a misunderstood alien hive mind. The more I play of Penumbra, the more I notice ideas from other games I’ve played recently, including ones written later. It’s as if the attempt at so many formal genres at once has turned it into a kind of cliché nexus.) It claims that it was once benevolent, but has been fighting for its life ever since the Archaic (the secret organization that built the laboratories) decided that it was a disease and had to be cured. Ah, but what about the zombies? Just infected individuals sent out to patrol the outer reaches; their zombie-like behavior is a consequence of being too far separated from the core to participate in the hive intelligence properly.

Clarence, now. He’s a different kettle of fish. “Clarence” is the name that the player character’s infection gives to himself, sardonically choosing it after inspecting your memory of It’s a Wonderful Life. A complaining bully with an Oscar-the-Grouch accent, he’s both individually smart and unambiguously malevolent, even if he does sometimes help you survive. Furthermore, he has an unnerving amount of power over your mind. He can occasionally take control of your senses, make you see things the way he wants you to see them — for example, eliminating doors that he doesn’t want you to go through, giving an excuse for Silent Hill-style variable geography. He can even erase your memories to make more room for himself. There’s one bit where Clarence implies that you didn’t actually kill Red in the first game, but that your memory of doing so is just him messing with your head for lulz. He could be lying about that, of course. He lies a lot.

I’ve talked before about how annoying the “disembodied sidekick” in an adventure game can be even when the authors don’t intend it that way, but in this game, they just ran with it. In one scene in a library, Clarence repeatedly gives obvious hints that there’s a secret passage behind one of the bookshelves. It takes a while to find the fake book that triggers it, and while you’re looking, Clarence repeatedly berates the player’s intelligence. In most other games, this would be a bad thing, but here, it serves the authors’ purpose, which is, to make you hate Clarence even more.

When you eventually find a way to cure the virus, Clarence does everything he can to try to stop you, including, in the end, simply pleading for his life. (Strange behavior for a disease!) And despite everything he’s done to you, the simple abjectness of his position provokes some pity. You are, after all, murdering a conscious being, but what choice do you have? You can’t trust him to leave you alone. It’s him or you.

But having been infected once, you retain the ability to contact and be contacted by the hive mind, and thereby get the exposition I described back in the first paragraph. The hive mind isn’t like Clarence — it’s far more menacing. It doesn’t blame you for murder because it too wanted Clarence dead. Not because he was evil, but because because he was too individual, too human. Fortunately, all it wants at this point is to be left alone, to have the outside world forget that it exists.

But that isn’t going to happen. We still have one more game to go.

Black Plague, the second installment of the Penumbra trilogy, starts shortly after the first left off, with Philip, the player character, waking up in a cell in a secret research station hidden under the mines. I’m immediately struck by a number of surface similarities to Half-Life: ruined-laboratory look, mutated zombie-like monsters, booby-traps made of explosives wired to laser tripwires across hallways. It’s a pretty big contrast to Penumbra: Overture in style, but the gameplay hasn’t changed much — if anything, it’s this episode plays less like Half-Life than its predecessor, as I haven’t found anything that can be used as a weapon, except perhaps some bricks I could throw. Presumably the creators got complaints about the awkwardness of melee in Overture and decided to just eliminate it.

This means that stealth is even more paramount, especially since some of those zombies have flashlights. They’re pretty smart for zombies, really, capable of speaking in coherent sentences and everything. “Zombie” is probably the wrong word. Call them “infected” if you like, because documents in the game are pretty clear that we’re dealing with an alien virus here. One that takes over your mind, or, at first, just produces a second mind, which the infected hear as a voice in their head. Red, the madman in the previous episode, wasn’t just insane from isolation, he was infected and knew it. And now Philip is too. There’s a point where you find documents describing the early symptoms of the virus, such as auditory hallucinations and déjà vu, and realize that you’ve already experienced most of them. Shortly afterward, you get a full-fledged voice in your head telling you what to do, taking over Red’s previous role as disembodied sidekick, but more antagonistic.

The interesting thing here is that it seems like the virus-personality might not be necessarily evil. It might, in your case at least, be more of a symbiosis than a disease. It’s certainly capable of being helpful, and there’s been mention made of the virus helping its host to survive (or, as in Red’s case, forcing its host to survive). To a large extent, Philip’s new brain-buddy is as new to this whole situation as Philip is; its whole personality seems to be formed from reading his memories, which means that its notion of what it is and what it should be doing is informed by its host’s expectations. The whole phenomenon is linked somehow to pre-Columbian Inuit superstitions and practices that were abandoned as demonic with the conversion to Christianity (as described in a document in the previous game — this story is starting to pull together elements that didn’t seem connected before). When the infection takes hold, you have a series of nightmarish interactive visions/hallucinations/ordeals involving elements of ritual sacrifice and elements of events in the previous game (with Red’s death qualifying as both). Until you reach the end and come back to the real world, the game basically stops feeling like Half-Life and instead feels like Silent Hill. This whole bit seems like a kind of initiatory passage through the Abyss, and I can easily imagine ancient shamans, who hadn’t yet been told that the spirits are evil, deliberatly becoming infected/possessed to share their wisdom.

But then again, zombies. If the infection is supposed to be benevolent, something has clearly gone wrong. If I understand right, the virus has basically killed the original personality in these cases, and, in the process, left itself stunted. But perhaps it did this in self-defense.

Penumbra: Overture ends inconclusively, which I suppose is its right, as the start of a series. There are certainly loathsome things in the depths — there are a couple of harrowing chase scenes involving gigantic annelids that remind me of D&D’s Purple Worms — but the one character who talks to you is convinced that there’s something worse beyond the sealed door at the game’s very end.

About that one NPC: He calls himself “Red”, and you never meet him directly; the closest you ever get to him is the other side of an unopenable door. He communicates with you by radio (don’t ask me how that works in a mine). He’s been trapped in the mine for a long time, and has gone quite mad, and talks very oddly¹ and is apparently a cannibal as well, if his stilted rantings are to be believed. But he talks as if he expects you to come meet him (despite the obvious danger), and his messages provide you with cryptic guidance through most of the game. And in the end, you kill him. Or he uses you to kill himself — he admits that he really guided you to him for that specific purpose, because the entities that share his head won’t let him do the deed himself. He’s locked himself in an incinerator, along with a key you need to open that final door, the one he desperately wants to remain closed. And it’s a peculiar moment, one of those uncomfortable places where you hesitate to go where the game is leading you. The floor of the room is littered with crude planking crosses — one of the writeups at Gamefaqs sees this as evidence that Red is a vampire, but that interpretation strikes me as bizarre and out-of-place; more likely it’s intended as a somewhat confusing comparison of Christ’s self-sacrifice to Red’s suicide-by proxy, implicitly casting the player in the role of Judas. There’s definitely a sense of agency about turning the furnace on — you can choose to just poke around avoiding the issue for long as you want, but the consequence of not doing it is that you can’t finish the game and get stuck there forever in the bottom of the mine, just like Red, which presumably means you have a lifetime of eating rats and losing your mind to look forward to. So I make the unpleasant choice.

There’s one more slight detour before you can get through that final game-ending door, and that’s going into Red’s living quarters. You get to see how this unfortunate man lived, and the things he surrounded himself with, and suddenly the dominant emotion isn’t fear but sadness. A letter reveals that he’s been trapped for 30 years, since the age of 14. And that, for me, is the emotional climax of the game. Actually going through the forbidden door and getting jumped in the dark by persons unknown is denouement.

And that’s probably where I’ll leave it for a while. Near the end, I started having those graphics card issues I’ve been having lately. Taking the system apart and blowing the dust out seems like it might have helped me get through the ending, but I want to do a fuller investigation before I start any more graphically-intensive titles.

1. At one point he says “There is much that should leave my throat box now, but words elude me”, which immediately made me think of “My blood pumper is wronged!” [↩]

When I lived within easy walking distance of a good art theatre, I used to go to a lot of movies that I had never heard of. There was something enjoyable about coming into the experience with no expectations beyond the title. It was in something of this spirit that I bought the Penumbra series when Steam put it on sale a few months ago. They were billed as horror adventure games, and seemed to have gotten pretty good reviews, and that’s about all I knew — and, since people who categorize games often have only a vague notion of what the adventure genre is¹ , even that much was uncertain. From the title, I vaguely expected something sci-fi — “penumbra” connotes eclipses to me, which suggests a plot involving orbital mechanics, but I suppose to another person it would connote constitutional law, and that person would be as wrong as me. The setting of the first game is an abandoned mine in the cold wastes of northern Greenland, where the people apparently dug too greedily and too deep, and awoke something ancient and terrible in the darkness, as tends to happen in mines in games. ²

It turns out to be a blend of adventure, survival horror, and stealth game, all done from a first-person perspective with the familiar FPS-style control scheme. (It was quite pleasant trying the standard keys and seeing that they all worked. Can I run? Yes! OK, can I crouch? Yes! Oh, man, I can even lean!) Stealth and horror are such a natural fit that it’s surprising that they’re not explicitly blended more often. After all, given the presence of a horrible monster, what’s more natural than hiding from it? One of my big complaints about the Resident Evil style of game is that fighting monsters and winning tends to weaken the sense of fear. And it had something of that effect here, once I realized that the most common monsters can actually be fought. (There are no guns, but a hammer or a pickaxe can be used as a melee weapon.) Still, fighting is extraordinarily risky, due in part to the awkwardness of the weapon-swinging interface, so stealth is your best bet most of the time. Monster dogs of some sort (rabid? demonic? zombie?) prowl the mines; if you crouch in the darkness without moving for a second or so, your view stretches out and turns blue, simultaneously signaling that you’re safe from canine eyes and putting an unnatural cast to the experience. The best part is that hiding makes the player character anxious: if you look directly at a dog, you start to shake and can give away your location. This is a brilliant touch. Scary stuff is often scariest when merely glimpsed, and here the player is given a game-mechanical motivation to choose mere glimpsing.

The monster-avoidance parts have a certain amount of adventure-game-like content, but not more than is typical for a survival horror. It’s in the isolated safe places that the adventure content really comes to the fore and the game turns into a self-contained puzzle scenario. It’s also in these sections that the game seems least like a horror story. It’s all about repairing machinery and improvising explosives and other such hard-headed masculine activities. Much of it is physics-based, too, with things you can stack on top of each other or throw into ledges or whatever. Inventory items are typically applied in point-and-click fashion, but most items don’t go into your inventory at all, and instead have to be dragged around with the mouse cursor. Sometimes this can be difficult; I’ve had a terrible time trying to turn valve handles this way. Still, I find it satisfying to see adventure content in a full-freedom-of-movement first-person system, a combination that hasn’t been done enough for my liking.

The overall structure so far seems to be a linear sequence of hub areas made of dog-infested corridors, each of which has several adventure-game rooms on its periphery. Backtracking is made impossible by frequent cave-ins. I could make sarcastic comments about that, but I actually think the cave-ins are presented really well. Especially the cloud of dust that they raise. I can practically smell the dust clouds in this game.

1. For example, Steam also gives the Adventure designation to such titles as Earthworm Jim, Rayman Raving Rabbids, and Terminator: Salvation. [↩]
2. I myself have used this premise multiple times when I needed a plot for a RPG session and couldn’t think of anything else. One time I even used it in Dogs in the Vineyard, which is a real stretch. [↩]

And so my month-and-a-half of IF blogging draws to a close. There were 11 games listed on the IFWiki front page when I started; a twelfth has been added since then. I’ve only posted about ten of them so far. The remaining two are both works of Textfyre¹ , a small company that’s trying to make text adventures commercially viable again by catering to a new audience.

There has always been IF marketed for sale by individual creators — Howard Sherman alone would make sure of that, relentless huckster that he is² — but Textfyre is, to my knowledge, the first serious effort at making a real company that solicits and publishes IF by multiple authors since the brief life of Cascade Mountain Publishing a decade ago. And it can even be called into question whether CMP really counts as a “serious effort”; it apparently started up without much thought about how to gain an audience outside the IF community. I’ll probably go into more detail about CMP in the future, because half of their catalog³ is still on the Stack. I bring them up mainly to contrast them with Textfyre. Although they only started releasing games this summer, Textfyre has been in the planning stages for years, and has a good notion of its market position. Just look at the website, with its “Parents” and “Teachers” tabs. David Cornelson, the company’s founder, understands that he’s competing with videogames, and that, although text games can be enthralling when you’re actually playing them, they can’t hold a candle to today’s graphics for the kind of obvious appeal that makes people look at an ad and say “I want to play that”. And so he’s marketing the games at one remove, overcoming the handicap by replacing the appeal of “I want to play that” with “I want my kids to play that”. How well it works, only time will tell.

The commercial aspect does have one disadvantage for this blog in particular: by the terms of the Oath, I can’t buy them yet. I haven’t gotten anything off the Stack since September, and Steam weekend sales haven’t stopped during that time, so my game budget is all tapped out right now. But there are demos, which I have now played. There are currently two games on offer — Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter, by David Cornelson and Michael Gentry, and The Shadow in the Cathedral, by Ian Finley and Jon Ingold — each meant as the first episode of a series. These are all known names, with a number of titles under their belts, major and minor; just to name a couple, Gentry wrote Anchorhead, which I was commenting on in passing lately, and Ingold wrote Make It Good.

The Secret Letter demo seems satisfactorily solid and lushly detailed, and makes it clear that even in the part that I saw, there are interactions beyond what I tried. In short, it’s the level of professionalism that we demand even of amateur IF these days. Also, it’s very much written to appeal to the target demographic: this is young-adult fantasy to a T, and reminds me a lot of some of Lloyd Alexander’s books, particularly the Westmark trilogy. The setting is a fictional kingdom in something resembling an 18th century. Complications in the royal succession are mentioned enough times to make it clear that it’s going to be a big part of the plot later on, but the player character starts at the bottom of society, as a penniless orphan who spends time filching food from the open-air marketplace and getting into trouble. And is secretly a girl, as we find out towards the end of the opening chapter. By now, you presumably know if this is the sort of story that appeals to you. There are noninteractive text sequences of a length that I think I’d normally consider excessive, but they seem fine here, probably because they keep the story moving, rather than degenerating into infodumps. (The storybook-like interface may even help a little here, changing my expectations of how the text should look.)

The Shadow in the Cathedral is considerably sparer in its prose, preferring to do its world-building through the accumulation of little details mentioned in passing. It’s set in a world that literally worships clockwork and considers it sacred, providing a point of view that seeps all the way down to the player character’s automatic habits and the idioms used to describe the world. This demo seems a lot smaller than the Secret Letter demo, but it has a lot of promise. Specifically, it promises lots of opportunities to interact with elaborate mechanisms, and that’s always fun. It’s also the sort of thing that IF can do really well, much better than it can do interaction with characters. The gameworld is clockwork anyway, so we might as well celebrate it.

Anyway, that’s a lot of words said already about mere demos that you can try for yourself if you want to, so I’ll just conclude by saying that I look forward to playing the full versions of both of these games, once I can afford them.

1. Not to be confused with Textfire, a fictional company that was the subject of an April Fool’s Day hoax back in 1998. [↩]
2. This article isn’t really the place to go into detail about Sherman, so I’ll just point you to a blog post by the illustrious Dave Gilbert. [↩]
3. Once and Future, by G. Kevin “Whizzard” Wilson. The other half of the catalog was a remake of Doc Dumont’s Wild PARTI by Mike Berlyn, which I had already played at the time. [↩]

I suppose that human sacrifice is often a metaphor for sexual violation: the thrust of the knife, the preference for virgins, the typical accompaniment by rhythmic chanting that increases in speed and intensity until it reaches an uncontrollable rapturous climax. The King of Shreds and Patches takes the analogy a step or two farther, having the villainous Barker lure Lucy to her doom by pretending to be in love with her. Rather than snatch her from her room by force, he invites her to a secret midnight tryst; when her housemaid learns of this, she’s begs the PC to intervene, fearing not for Lucy’s life but for her virtue and reputation. And even though the player knows better than that, the whole situation still has a strong whiff of romantic rivalry, with Barker in the role of the jerk who your long-standing crush is inexplicably gaga over, even though he doesn’t really appreciate her as a person and just wants to use her (albeit not, in this case, for carnal pleasure). I suspect that this is something that male and female players will read differently, with the men feeling the pangs of despised love more keenly. But when the PC finds out that the reason Lucy broke up with him months ago is that she was already seeing Barker in secret, well, I think we can all appreciate how nightmarish that situation is, even without the fear of death and summoning mad gods and so forth.

And in the end, when the player stumbles into the cultist frat party, Barker already has her naked and spread-eagled, chained to an altar. But the indignity doesn’t stop there. He hasn’t told her, but he’s planning a threesome. He’s going to share her with his colleague Van Wyck. There are two other sacrifices beforehand, one performed by each man, so you get to observe their technique; Van Wyck seems to savor the moment, while Barker just seems to want to get it over with. But then they raise their knives and prepare to penetrate Lucy together.

There’s only one way to stop them, and that’s with a better phallic symbol. By this point in the story, I had two pistols. And you need two to rescue Lucy, because you have two people to shoot, and these are 17th-century wheellock pistols that take multiple turns to load,¹ and which have to be laboriously reloaded if the powder gets wet, which it probably is at this juncture. I wrote in my last post that either rescuing Lucy or failing to rescue her could produce a satisfactory conclusion to the story, and in fact the game allows either: any ending where you send the loathsome thing that the cultists have summoned back to whence it came is considered to be a victory worthy of an epilogue. But for a while, I thought that saving Lucy was impossible, so great was my trouble with damp powder.

Speaking of endings, I’ve joked before now that the biggest way in which Lovecraft-based games fail to be faithful to Lovecraft’s writings is that they’re winnable. To really be true to the original stories, the best ending should be the one that you get by quitting immediately. Investigating dark secrets only makes things worse. But then, this game isn’t a direct adaptation of Lovecraft, but an adaptation of a Call of Cthulhu module, and it’s very true to the spirit of that game.

1. The game handles this really well. Loading a pistol for the first time is treated as a puzzle: open this cover with a lever, rotate that bit with a spanner, pour the powder in, etc. Once you’ve done it once, you can repeat the actions by simply entering the command “load pistol” — but it still goes through the entire process, or as much of the process as necessary given the pistol’s current state. And in the endgame, where things are happening fast and threats can come at a moment’s notice, “load pistol” simply performs the next step in the process. I don’t know how the development of this game went, but this all seems like the sort of thing that you get in games with really good playtesters. [↩]

(Spoilers ahead.)

The King of Shreds and Patches is pretty good at small-scale variability. There are a number of little choices not just in what order you things happen, but how. For example, at one point I stopped a man from finishing a dread incantation by assaulting him with my bare fists. I later discovered that I could have obtained a wheellock pistol in an area I had already passed through. I’m not sure what the consequences of using that instead would have been. In the story as I’ve seen it, I had to climb up to where the man was with a makeshift grappling hook, and after I interrupted him, he cursed me and ran away. Either of those things could have been changed with a way of killing from a distance. But even if they didn’t, the scene was able to play out to its conclusion with the player either armed or unarmed.

More broadly, much of the game is spent questioning people like a sort of Elizabethan detective, and the number of things you can ask people about grows as you progress. In general, it feels like each person you visit generates one or two new snippets of useful information, but which snippets you learn from whom depends on what order you visit them in. In the story as I experienced it, I got some of my early leads from a patron at a pub frequented by the likes of Shakespeare and Marlowe. I eventually visited him again, for no other reason than that I was temporarily stuck, and found that he had information about the whereabouts of one Barker, the man of mystery at the center of events who I hadn’t even heard of on my first visit. I could have easily not noticed this, just as someone who visited the pub later than I did might not have noticed that the same information could be squeezed out of the illustrious John Dee. The game kind of discourages visiting most characters twice; once you’ve questioned someone, they’re left out of the task list produced by the “think” command¹ , even if they have more information.

But of course any variability is set within a fixed framework. Despite what I said before about the day/night cycle, I now think that the game doesn’t actually let you miss important plot events. One thread of the story concerns a vanished girl named Marijne, whose cousin, the well-to-do Lucy Henry, was once courted by the player character. It’s pretty much a given that Marijne will be dead by the time you find her, just because a horror story needs a corpse or two by the end of the first act to let the audience know it means business. And when Lucy is in danger later on, and I arrive on the scene just a little too late to prevent her abduction, I recognize that this happens to provide motivation in the story’s imminent climax, not because I was too slow. But I don’t know yet what Lucy’s ultimate fate will be. In a conventional game, this would be the setup for rescue-the-princess, and any failure to rescue her would simply be the player’s fault, and a temporary condition at that. But in a Lovecraftian horror, a happy ending might not even be an option.

Oh, I have little doubt that I’ll be allowed to halt the ritual and banish the monster, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll be able to save the damsel. The author lets the player know when and where the ritual is to occur, which means that the cultists have to keep Lucy alive until then. This explicitly gives the player character hope, presumably shared by the player, but the same knowledge could easily provoke dread, with the time running out while you struggle to reach the appointed place. Either way it goes, it could fit into the story. Which means that this isn’t necessarily just a matter of success and failure, but may even be another matter of narrative variation. We’ll see how it plays out.

1. ”Think” to produce minor hints or reminders seems to be rapidly becoming standard; several of the games I’ve played this year implement it. Perhaps this is in part because the verb is included in the standard Inform library, although without modification it just produces a snarky reply. [↩]

Let’s talk for a moment about this game’s use of sound. There’s one puzzle in particular where you render a Bedlamite temporarily coherent by unscrambling some dismembered music. It’s not completely essential to have sound — you get some textual feedback, but it’s subtle and requires a lot more trial-and-error if you can’t hear what you’re doing. And for a while, that’s how I tried to solve it. I had the sound turned off. I had forgotten about it. The in-game documentation said that there was occasional sound, and even warned me that there was a sound puzzle, but it also said that I’d know it when I came to it, and, well, I didn’t at first.

I don’t normally turn sound off in games. I generally want the full experience intended by the author. I do find sound in text games a little weird, though. I find that playing IF, like reading a book, essentially puts the mind into a mode disconnected from direct sensory experience — one where you’re seeing through the mind’s eye, and, similarly, hearing through the mind’s ear, filtering out the real world. Illustrations interrupt this mode, but then, so do the command prompts, and you just get used to a certain rhythm of going into and out of reading mode.¹ Sound, on the other hand, plays while you’re reading, and conflicts with the imagined experience.

But that’s not why I had the sound off. I had it off simply because for the last month I’ve been playing IF primarily in public. (I’m spending upwards of two hours a day on a bus these days.) I have headphones I can hook up to my laptop, but digging them out and dealing with the cord (either unwinding it or untangling it, depending on how careful I was about stowing it last time) seldom seems worthwhile, especially for a game that only features occasional sound. And, my personal experiences aside, I think there’s a valid criticism to be made here: if you’re going to use sound in a game, it’s better to make it a constant presence that the player gets used to, not an occasional surprise.

1. This is why it’s considered a good idea in IF to break up long text-dumps with command prompts, even when the player can’t actually affect anything: it preserves that rhythm. I’m starting to wonder if breaking up the text with illustrations would be just as effective. [↩]

January, 1603. Queen Bess is on the throne, Shakespeare is on the stage, and the black death casts its shadow over London. And, of course, in his house in R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming, as he has for eons. Based (with permission) on a scenario for the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG, The King of Shreds and Patches throws all of these things together into a single story. Which is kind of like writing a modern-day Cthulhu story about Barack Obama, Pixar, and swine flu, but that’s period drama for you.

Any substantial work of Lovecraft-based IF invites comparison to Anchorhead, the classic of of the genre, but playing this game really reminds me more of playing Call of Cthulhu. And not for obvious reasons — it doesn’t have what I normally think of as RPG elements, such as upgradable stats or skill checks or randomized combat. Rather, the structure so far is more what I associate with the live CoC sessions I’ve tried: you’re presented with lots of leads to follow up on, but not enough time to follow up on them all before bad things start happening. The game has a day/night cycle, and unless I’m misinterpreting things, it seems to be linked to the number of turns taken, rather than (as in Anchorhead) linking days to progress in the story.

Also reminding me of CoC is the way it throws lots of recognizable Cthulhu Mythos stuff at the player from early on. Anchorhead didn’t use any established Mythos material at all; the fact that the Lovecraft inspiration was clearly recognizable despite this is a sign of how well it achieved its aims. But also, using entirely new stuff preserved a sense of mystery. In TKoSaP, when I find the Yellow Sign depicted in one of the game’s rare uses of graphics, I immediately recognize it as the Yellow Sign. The character I’m playing doesn’t know what “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” means, but I do, and it’s going to affect how I play that character.

But then, given the decidedly non-Lovecraftian setting, would it be recognizable as a Cthulhu Mythos story without these touches? Even in the game as it is, an episode of supernatural disruption of a performance at the Globe put me more in mind of a certain Doctor Who episode than anything else.