The Stack

This is a decently-put-together short piece that feels like an intriguing first chapter. It follows the same basic pattern as the opening to Curses!, giving the player a deceptively mundane task — moving three boxes to the loading dock — that lead you into something strange and supernatural, involving a mysterious cave under the storage facility. And then the game ends.

That’s my biggest complaint, really: that the balance of content is tilted against the part where it starts getting really interesting. The bulk of the player’s time is spent firmly in the realm of the mundane and mechanical, including some fiddly business about a tight passage and a freight elevator. If the game were much longer, I’d say that this is the sort of interaction that needs to be either circumvented or automated on repeat visits. In fact, the game kind of does that in the end, skipping over the whole thing when you get the final box.

I suppose the real point, though, is in the depiction of place, which is one of the things parser IF is really good at.

Neil deMause is one of the old guard of IF, an entrant in the very first IFComp and author of the acclaimed Lost New York. But it’s a bit of a surprise to see his name crop up here, because his last known IF work was 20 years ago. (Welcome back, Neil!)

Improv: Origins is a prequel to a series of superhero parody games he wrote from 1997 to 2002, featuring the “Frenetic Five”, a team whose questionably-useful powers are all inspired by parser-driven text adventures. The player character, Improv, specializes in using ordinary objects in unusual ways, and he’s supported by a character who can find objects, a character who can guess words for you, and so forth. As such, ParserComp is almost the only venue where they really fit any more, in an IF world that’s increasingly leaving both parsers and puzzles behind. Although the game presents itself at first as an Improv solo adventure, it’s really an origin story for the team, showing how Improv met everyone else.

The whole game takes place in a single room, a sort of comically adventure-gamey bank vault, containing an impossible-to-open safe that you’ve been hired to open. Some of the puzzles are quite difficult even with the hints you can get from the other heroes; I know I’m not the only one to get stuck on the puzzle to find duct tape, which, given the power to locate objects, is really just a puzzle to realize that you should be looking for it. (I have some complaints about that power, by the way. It doesn’t seem to work on rubber bands, and you need a lot of rubber bands.) Still, it’s satisfying to make use of everyone’s powers, even (especially!) the less obviously useful ones.

The prose is generally good — there’s a repeated gag I particularly liked of Lexicon, the word hero, responding directly to narration — but much of the humor is based around casually mentioning absurd superheero names, which I suppose is consistent with the original Frenetic Five games, but it feels to me rather played-out by now, the same old joke about a subject that isn’t what it was 20 years ago — heck, the superhero parody genre has moved on. We’re in the age of One Punch Man now and this game is still imitating The Tick.

Okay, we’re not off to an auspicious start here. Lantern is a Windows app with a hybrid hypertext/command-line interface in a graphical display, written in a Lua-driven engine called LÖVE, which doesn’t seem to be designed primarily for parser IF. The first thing we’re told is “The story is about a blind man carrying a lantern, trying to solve the mystery of his blindness. As he walks around the only sense is hearing, smell, touch, and taste.” Interactive fiction has historically had a substantial following among blind people, as it’s one of the few forms of computer game that they can play, provided it’s in a format that’s friendly with text-to-speech software. This game isn’t.

It starts with your basic amnesia plot: you’re stuck in three rooms (that I could find), with no idea how you got there, and puzzled by the fact that “your sense of sight is missing”. Except I’m more puzzled by why the player character thinks that. If I found myself in a strange room and unable to see anything, I wouldn’t think “I must be blind”, I’d think “Gee, it’s completely dark in here”. I suppose the lit lantern in your hands is supposed to address this, but even with that, I really think my first thought would be “There’s something wrong with this lantern. It’s giving off heat but not light. Is there some kind of cover I have to open?”

I struggled a bit with the UI. The introductory instructions are longer than the screen, and at first I thought it was impossible to scroll — it doesn’t recognize scrollwheel or arrow keys, but can be dragged with the mouse. If you type a command and press enter, and the command isn’t one that the game understands, absolutely nothing happens — no error message, not even clearing the command line. To make it worse, what commands are recognized is highly contextual, even for things that shouldn’t be. You can’t refer to objects that aren’t currently named on the screen — and pretty much every command response has its own screen, because output is all based around nodes, like a Twine game. So if you, say, examine an object, the response acts like a modal pop-up, blocking all other interaction until it’s closed.

In fact, what this scoping suggests is that typed commands are simply mapped onto highlighted keywords or pairs of keywords from the output text, including the sense organs (“fingers”, “ears”, etc.) and so forth that are (otherwise bafflingly) included in your inventory listing. Verbs are effectively fake: “touch” is a synonym for “fingers” and so forth. Thus, in contradiction to the spirit of ParserComp and possibly its actual rules as well, the game seems to be primarily built for mouse input, with the command line as an afterthought. The parsing is lousy enough that I’m not convinced that it’s even happening — the game recognizes so few commands that the game could very well just be looking up the entire command string in a table. Supporting this hypothesis is the fact that adding an extra space between words is enough to turn a valid command into an invalid one.

It’s a difficult game to communicate with — the whole premise is that it’s giving you less information than you want, and it doesn’t make it easy to make your intentions known via input either. After a few hours of just exhaustively trying all the possible combinations of keywords, I’m giving up on it. I solved a bunch of inventory puzzles but I haven’t solved the mystery of blindness. I don’t know what proportion of the game I’ve seen. I’ve seen enough.

Time to reconnect to my roots a little. The voting period for ParserComp 2022 started just yesterday. Like the Spring Thing, this is an alternative to the annual IFComp, and a newish one at that — apparently the first ParserComp was run in 2015, but that was a one-off until it was revived last year. The main thing distinguishing it from the main Comp is that only entries with a text parser are allowed — so no Twine or Choicescript or other choice-based or hypertext works. In other words, it’s an attempt at addressing the problem of judging parser games and hypertext games together, and doing it without kicking Twine out of the main Comp. I slept through it last year, but I’m told there was some good stuff in it.

There are 20 entries this year, which seems to me a very comfortable quantity. I could play one a day and comment on them all here and be finished before Narrascope.

What’s your least favorite part of Tomb Raider?

Is it the water levels, making you search desperately for the next air pocket while using a less familiar control scheme? Or maybe it’s the boss fights, making you figure out puzzles while constantly distracting you by chasing you around? Perhaps it’s the parts where you pull a lever to open a door, but it only opens for a little while, forcing you to do a difficult sequence of jumps within a tight time limit and start over whenever you fail?

Well, whatever your preference, the last few levels of Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness have got you covered.

The final boss fight against Eckhardt actually isn’t all that bad — my only complaint about it is that you spend a lot of time waiting through phases where Eckhardt isn’t attacking or vulnerable — but it’s preceded by a far more aggravating one, where Kurtis, now allied with Lara for the moment, battles a huge insectoid abomination that spits acid. Being hit by an acid missile makes Kurtis flinch, which makes it harder to dodge the next missile — a classic “stun lock” effect. And at the end of it, Kurtis appears to die a cutscene death, making me wonder why I just put in so much effort to keep him alive. But really, it only took me so many tries because, even after playing for so many hours, I still didn’t fully understand the controls. The monster has multiple targetable spots, which you have to switch between, and the game is generally light enough on combat that this was the first time I ever needed to use the “switch targets” button.

On a positive note, there are some really good sets throughout this section. The twisty catwalks above the marine biology area are like a satisfyingly explorable jungle gym, and Eckhardt’s old alchemical laboratory is full of first-rate atmospheric knick-knacks.

The ending is a bit of a confusing mess, though, and I’m guessing it’s a big part of why the game got a reputation as rushed and unfinished. Specifically, a character who I don’t recall ever seeing before, but who Lara recognizes, reveals himself to be a nephil shape-shifter, and the real identity behind every single person who helped Lara throughout the game, including Kurtis. The more I think about this, the less sense it makes. Kurtis has a bio on various wikis. He has a backstory. Apparently there were plans to spin him off into his own games if he was popular enough — and no surprise there, that was pretty obvious from the moment he appeared onscreen. And yet here the game is, implying that he was never a real person. Maybe some of his appearances were the real Kurtis and some were the shape-shifter? I’m mulling over the possible combinations, and I don’t see one that works.

At any rate, I’m not the only one with criticisms like these. This game was enough of a critical failure to kill the original Tomb Raider continuity. Lara’s next game is a reboot, made by a different studio. This seems like a good opportunity to close the book on her adventures for a little while.

In the lower depths of the secret research complex under Prague — like Amnesia, this game largely equates progress with downward motion — Lara runs into Kurtis again, and again he constrains and disempowers her, trapping her in an airlock to keep her from causing any more trouble than she already has. And he has something of a point: Lara’s ingress involved shutting off the power to the security systems, which were also the systems keeping the monsters under control. She’s literally meddling in things she doesn’t understand, and for the first time in her life someone is effectively holding her accountable for her actions. It still bodes ill for their budding relationship, though. I can’t imagine Lara Croft accepting someone who keeps trying to control her like this.

While Lara’s stashed, player control shifts to Kurtis. It’s a move that reminds me of the seasons of Murder, She Wrote where they experimented with protagonists other than Jessica Fletcher: it feels a little wrong, but it’s really not all that objectively different. The main effect is that it takes away the opportunity to ogle Lara, and thus makes me aware of the extent to which I was doing so: not a lot, as my attention is generally on the game’s challenges, but every once in a while. The sorcerous powers that Kurtis displayed in his first appearance are disappointingly limited to cinematics, and beyond player control. Early on, there’s a bit where he uses his “Far See” power to get a keycode from a post-it on the other side of a locked door, and afterward I kept thinking “I wish I could Far See right now. That would be nice.” It’s like they designed a special mechanic for the character and then didn’t get around to actually implementing it.

The really peculiar part is that we don’t really know what Kurtis is trying to accomplish. We’re just piloting him forward in the hope that he knows as much about what’s going on as he seems to. He seems to be a good guy, at least to the extent that he’s fighting the bad guys. He’s probably with the Lux Veritatis, the secret guardians of forbidden knowledge who have been battling dark alchemists for centuries. That would make him the enemy of Lara’s enemy, but not her friend. This is a pattern we’ve seen as far back as Tomb Raider II: You have two warring sides, one dedicated to securing and protecting a dangerous power, one that wants to seize that power for themselves and exploit it. Then Lara Croft enters the picture. Now there are three sides.

After Paris, the action shifts to Prague, home to a mad-science complex where the Cabal is making monsters using Nephilim DNA. It’s the classic Tomb Raider design pattern: start mundane and gradually turn up the weirdness dial.

But before I do any more analysis, let me devote an entire post to complaining about one particular puzzle. Shortly after arriving in Prague, Lara finds herself in a room in a rich person’s house, and refuses to leave until she’s found a secret passage. The walls are lined with paintings and bookshelves, and the floor has a large circular mosaic showing four landscapes, ringed by twelve roman numerals. A little platforming lets you access a mechanism: the camera shifts to show the cover on a grandfather clock opening up, then focuses on the numbers around the mosaic.

“Aha!” think I. “The hands of the clock are now accessible, and it’s hinting that the numbers on the floor are a clue to their required setting!” And so I spend some time fiddling with the clock, and staring at the landscapes, and consulting Von Croy’s journal (which has provided useful information about mechanical puzzles in the past). But there is no solution to be found. Eventually I hit the walkthrough again, and find out the clue I missed was that when the clock opened and the camera shifted over to the mosaic, it was specifically focusing on the number III. The answer was to set the hands to 3 o’clock.

Now, the main irritating thing about this is that it’s making forward progress contingent on information that, if you fail to catch it the first time, you have no way of accessing again, short of reloading an older save. If you walked into the room and someone handed you the controller after the clock was already open, you’d have no way of solving the puzzle other than brute force. But even ignoring that, it bothers me because it’s a blurring of levels. The player has been given information that Lara Croft does not have, but which Lara Croft then acts on. I suppose there’s always been an element of that, whenever Lara pulls a lever and the player is shown a door opening that’s out of Lara’s view, but somehow this feels more egregious. Maybe because it’s more purely an information puzzle. Showing the door that opened is a convenience to the player that doesn’t affect the story of Lara’s adventures in any significant way, but how does Lara explain how she solved the clock puzzle to anyone else?

Tangentially, I wound up going back to that clock often enough to notice something strange about the UI. The clock face is presented as an overlay, right? The game has done similar overlays for the occasional keypad and other devices — I think is a new thing for the series. Well, at one point, I approached the clock from a weird angle, with the result that the cover was poking through the overlay. So these special UI overlays aren’t separate layers, the way you’d do it in most game engines. They’re in-world, and viewed through the same camera as everything else. When Lara fiddles with the clock, a physical giant clock face materializes behind her. I wonder if she knows?

The climax of the Louvre is a boss fight where you’re chased around a crypt by a ghost. I had to hit up some hints to find out what I was supposed to be doing here. You can’t kill the ghost, and to my eye, the game doesn’t adequately indicate your goals or the effects of your actions. The whole thing hinges on realizing that if you shoot the ghost a whole lot, eventually it stops moving for a few seconds, and you have to take advantage of this before it wakes up again. Without the walkthrough, I couldn’t tell that these pauses weren’t part of its normal movement cycle.

After you get what you need and run away, leaving the guardian ghost protecting nothing for all eternity, the game does two notable things. First, it takes the unusual step (for a Tomb Raider) of making you backtrack through the way in. Usually the treasure room in these games has one-way entrances and exits, if the need to get out is acknowledged at all. Here, you make your way back through the same levels you went through to get in, albeit mostly in abbreviated form — one section, previously seen as a difficult climb downward, is made easier by flooding the chamber, letting you simply swim to the top. On the way out, the Louvre gallery itself is swarming with heavily-armed bad guys looking for Lara and her loot, recontextualizing the space, adding danger to areas that were safe bafore.

The second notable thing is the introduction of a hunk. A young man with a smoldering gaze, a lean and athletic build, artfully unkempt hair, and just enough stubble to establish his masculinity, as well as apparent telekinetic powers and some kind of magic shuriken. He doesn’t have a name yet — he hasn’t spoken a word — but I noticed some mentions of a Kurtis in those walkthroughs, and image searches confirm that’s who he is. He’s not exactly on Lara’s side, but he’s definitely supposed to be a potential love interest, and also Lara’s equal, both of which are things she’s never had before. His introduction is the longest in-engine cutcene so far, and it starts with him getting the drop on her, putting a gun to her head (which probably counts as flirtation for creatures such as they), and slowly, seductively stripping her of her weapons. It’s a scene that’s inevitably a bit laughable, if you feel like laughing at it, but it’s also a fairly impressive showcase of the engine’s ability to handle acting without dialogue, as we see Lara react with surprise, desire, and annoyance all at once, mainly just through body language, without changing her facial expression. And it strikes me as fairly significant that the first spark of romance in the series starts by putting the strong-willed and self-sufficient Lara into a rare situation of helplessness.

In the secret dig underneath the Louvre, things finally start feeling like a proper Tomb Raider. We’ve got mysterious ruins! We’ve got dart traps and spike traps! We’ve got undead guardians, tests and trials, and an unusual amount of free-flowing lava for the middle of Paris!

We also get a much-needed and possibly inadvertent clarification about the strength mechanic. This is a new element for the series, experimental and in my view not particularly successful. See, most levels have some opportunity to increase the strength of Lara’s arms and/or legs via exercise. Stronger arms help you break down doors and maintain your grip on ledges for longer. Stronger legs help you shift massive stone blocks and jump farther. When you try to open a door or move a block that you’re not strong enough for, Lara says “I’m not strong enough” to let you know. How do you increase your strength? By breaking down doors and shifting massive stone blocks, often ones that you have no other reason to mess with. And that feels a bit silly.

I found this whole system worrisome at first. What if I missed an opportunity to raise Lara’s strength, and locked myself out of content and/or upgrades down the line? The game seemed to be willing to let such things happen: you can easily miss out on the opportunity to obtain Von Croy’s notebook, which contains crucial information for puzzles later on. But after a while, I noticed a distinct pattern. I’d find a door blocking the way to some optional pickups, but Lara wouldn’t be strong enough. After exploring the level a bit, I’d find another door, break it open, and Lara’s strength would go up, enabling me to open the first door. In other words, it was acting less like the stat system I had assumed and more like a lock and key. And that made me wonder: Does strength carry over between levels at all, like your inventory and ammo does? Or is it purely a matter of “Open this door to open that door”?

Well, down in the ruins, there’s critical path exercise. A tunnel has a door you have to go through to progress, and you can’t open it until you’ve gone down a different tunnel branch and opened another door. And that seemed to settle it. Even if you think they would have been mad enough to make opening that door and continuing in the game contingent on having found enough optional strengthening actions in previous levels that you can’t get back to, it seems unlikely that I just happened to have found exactly enough strength to put Lara right on the edge of being able to get through, and pushed her over with exactly what was available.

Sometimes — not always, but sometimes — Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness feels like it was written for a different character. Like how the movie version of Days of Future Past swapped out Kitty Pryde for Wolverine because he was an easier sell. You could imagine that happening with Lara Croft, couldn’t you? I don’t think the idea is at all supported by the game’s development history, though — as far as anyone knows, it was pitched as a Lara Croft game, and any differences in feel from the previous Tomb Raider games are just the result of the developers trying to break the franchise out of a rut.

If it’s not taking its design cues from previous Tomb Raider games, what is it imitating? It’s been pointed out that the stealth mechanics and optional nonlethal weapons are basically out of Metal Gear Solid, but honestly I’ve been able to get away with almost entirely ignoring stealth elements, even in a scene in the Louvre gallery at night when you’d think it would be useful. Rather, the most striking apparent influence is The Da Vinci Code.

And if that is a genuine influence, rather than a set of mere coincidences, it must have been a pretty quick turnaround: DVC was released in April 2003, TR6 in June of the same year. That’s barely even enough time to get a game through certification, let alone rewrite its plot. But consider the similarities. In both, we start off investigating a murder — in DVC, the victim is a curator at the Louvre, in TR6, an archeologist who was working with a researcher at the Louvre, who is also murdered in short order. Both involve clues encoded in artwork — in TR6, a set of sketches indicate the locations of the “Obscura paintings”, which have secret alchemical glyphs under the paint. One of the Obscura paintings is apparently located deep underneath the Louvre, where the final secret in DVC was located. DVC has people looking for the Sangraal, TR6 for something called the Sanglyph. Both involve secrets about divine bloodlines: descendants of Christ in DVC, nephilim in TR6. And in both, you’re opposed by a sinister Latin-named religious group that’s willing to murder people to keep its secrets: Opus Dei in DVC, Lux Veritatis in TR6. (The latter of which makes me wonder if they all went to Yale or something.) This is enough to make me think that even if the main plot was already set before the designers read DVC, they probably at least tweaked some details at the last minute to make it more DVC-like. Some of the above is only found in text form, in Von Croy’s notebook, and thus wouldn’t involve time-consuming alterations like recording new voice lines.

Tangentially, there was an official game adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, released in 2006 to coincide with the film adaptation. I played it, mainly because if anyone asked me if I had read the novel or seen the film, I wanted to be able to answer “No, but I’ve played the videogame.” I understand that the game takes considerable liberties with the source material. Where the source has a cryptex, the game has multiple nested cryptexes (cryptices?) to make for better gameplay. Opus Dei is renamed Manus Dei out of consideration for (or in response to complaints from) the real Opus Dei, an organization that, whatever you might think of them, has never been credibly accused of being a front for the Pope’s hitmen. I find myself wondering if the makers of the DVC game played TR6, and if there are any ideas they stole back from it.