The Stack

At the beginning of Demoniak, the player controls one Johnny Sirius, whose half-alien parentage allegedly gives him incredible physical prowess, as he arrives late to a meeting called by Doctor Cortex, an alleged genius with an enormous brain and a stunted body who floats around in a MODOK chair. Cortex has a plan to destroy Demoniak’s portal into our world by building “the Ultimate Bomb”, which involves retrieving things from two planets, which you can visit in either order. By default, the first is the planet Freezyassov, the ice-covered site of a special prison for special prisoners, where we seek a decommissioned war robot named B-52. The warden denies he’s still there, but we know for a fact that he’s lying — I can simply switch control to B-52 and observe that he’s in his cell.

What do you do about this? Well, you have options. There are some ingredients for adventure-game puzzles lying around: a laundry bag containing a guard’s uniform, for example, and some documentation for the various pipes leading from the site’s power plant. Or you could just start fighting everyone. The game’s combat system isn’t very detailed, but it clearly wants you to use it; too many characters are defined in terms of their superlative combat skills for you not to mash them together like action figures. And once you’ve beat up the guards sufficiently, you can take their keys.

Or you can just, y’know, switch control to the guy who has the keys to B-52’s cell and let him out. That’s the simplest solution. It’s not quite as easy as I’m making it sound, because you can only control one guard at a time, and the others sometimes object to what you’re doing. But not nearly as often as you’d think!

I have some slight qualms about this approach. The manual tells me that it’s possible to win the game entirely as Johnny Sirius, without ever switching control. By abusing the character-switching system, am I subverting authorial intention, missing out on the story they wanted to tell? But then, if they didn’t want me to take advantage of it, they wouldn’t have put it in. I think of the action-figures metaphor again. This game isn’t a story so much as a playhouse to mess around in.

I’ve played Demoniak only a slight amount since yesterday, so I’m just going to take a moment to describe a very slight feature of the game: the graphics. This is fundamentally a text adventure, but it has occasional full-screen interstitial graphics, either character portraits or establishing shots of locations, displayed just long enough for you to press a key. I’m guessing they took a significant time to load on the original hardware. Also, there’s an intro with a certain amount of animation. In the PC version, the intro is actually a completely separate executable from the game proper; the official way to launch the whole thing, documented in the manual, is to run a .bat file that executes the intro and then the game.

And the thing is, the pictures mainly serve to make the whole thing seem a little more amateurish. They’re the sort of illustrations that I can imagine thinking were the coolest thing you’d ever seen when your classmate in middle school draws them. Lots of squiggly spikes and lumpy gradients, relatively little thought to composition or readability. The irony is that this is the stuff that they had to use in all their promotional screenshots, even though it’s really not representative of the game’s content, because the alternative was to just show screenfuls of text, which would have turned people off even more.

Demoniak is a 1991 text adventure that I mainly think of as Suspended taken to an extreme: it has a cast of about 50 characters, acting autonomously in the world, and with only a few exceptions, you can switch control to any of them at any time, including the antagonists. There’s a core team of five heroes with special powers, although only one of them thinks of herself as a superhero. Their mission is to stop a dimensional breach that will allow Demoniak, god of destruction, to enter our world and wreak havoc. The overall feel is one of comically over-the-top and somewhat puerile sci-fi brutality and nihilism, like an old 2000 AD comic — which is no coincidence; the credited writer is regular Judge Dredd writer Alan Grant.

I’ve written about a failed attempt at playing Demoniak before; basically, it uses key-word copy protection, prompting the player for words from specific pages of the manual, and my copy of the game is on an ill-thought-out shovelware disc that includes the manual only as plain text, unpaginated, making the key words impossible to find. At the time, one of my readers mailed me a cracked copy. I still have that email, but gmail now refuses to let me download the attachment, claiming it’s malware. Ah well. Fortunately, there’s another solution now: a PDF of the original manual can easily be found online.

Even with that overcome, it’s a difficult game to get started in. It lacks conveniences like scrollback and undo, and it doesn’t use the familiar Infocom-derived shorthand: I, for example, doesn’t take inventory, X is short for “list exits” rather than “examine”, and issuing commands to other characters is done with quotation marks, like SONDRA "FOLLOW ME", rather than with a comma, like SONDRA, FOLLOW ME. (In fact, the in-game help leaves out the space, like SONDRA"FOLLOW ME", making it feel even stranger.) And even ignoring all that, it took me multiple restarts to cope with the mere mechanics of operating in this world. It’s very easy to miss essential exposition just because you’re in the wrong room, or inhabiting the wrong body, or fumbling around with inventory instead of following events as they happen. I feel like this isn’t a game you can simply play through once, that the first sessions have to be all about learning how to play it. The manual explicitly suggests making the hero characters attack each other for no reason, just to try their powers out. I have to remind myself that I’ve been over this hump before, that all adventure games were like this once.

The thing is, the gameworld operates on Melbourne-House-Hobbit-like proceduralism. Those 50-or-so characters are going through their routines all the time, whatever that may mean. It might be a good idea to spend a few sessions just inhabiting various NPCs to figure out what’s going on. Or not actually switching to control them, because if you do that, they stop performing their automatic actions. But there’s a better alternative: Sondra Houdini, the psychic party member, who can read people’s minds even at interplanetary distances. This puts the game into a split-screen mode, letting you see everything a character sees without controlling them. I’ll give that a solid try before my next post.

It turns out that it’s possible to finish most of the main quests in Avalon before the detour through Fairyland. I just happened to solve the puzzles that led to getting stuck in Fairyland before doing much of anything else, and this skewed my perception of the story. I could have purified the grail first thing, if I’d had more patience. I could have awakened Merlin first, and gotten answers a lot earlier about what was going on, what I was supposed to be doing and why. That might have grounded my adventures more.

Or maybe not. The truth is frankly bizarre: to save the world from the doom you’ve foreseen, you have to accompany Merlin to present-day Stonehenge to tap into its magic, so he can cast a spell to send you back in time to exorcise and slay the demon possessing Lee Harvey Oswald before he assassinates Kennedy. I guess this means real life is still on the bad timeline. There’s some suggestion that Frank is, too: the ending hints that even in the midst of your hard-earned happily-ever-after, your travails aren’t over.

Or at least, the ending I got does so. Apparently there are multiple endings, depending on what decisions you made and which optional puzzles you solved along the way. I don’t think there’s a great deal of variability in Fairyland, but in Avalon, there was an entire puzzle sequence about slaying a dragon that I simply never solved. Consulting a walkthrough afterward, I find it has to do with Excalibur’s ability to summon spirits the dead. Not a power I recall seeing elsewhere in Arthurian literature, but I did see it mentioned in this game by multiple sources, so I knew it was possible. Nonetheless, no matter who I tried to summon, it simply failed. It turns out that the only summonable spirits are Launcelot and Galahad, and Merlin would have told me this if I had asked him about the right topic. I can’t be too upset about this, though, because you can win the game perfectly well without them.

But I’m not inclined to pursue the other endings and see if they’re better, because that would require redoing the entire Stonehenge sequence, which is the single most tedious part of the game. Stonehenge is represented as a grid of rooms, with individual stones and trilithons implemented as objects, and you’re expected to examine them individually to find the marks Merlin needs for his spell. There’s a modicum of interesting commentary in the rock descriptions, but I suspect that the gameplay here was invented to justify the effort that went into the implementation, rather than to serve the player experience. I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad the second time around, though, when you know where everything is. That’s one of the nice things about text adventures: the ease with which you can breeze through the familiar parts. I just gripe because I’m playing from the perspective of the year 2021, where wasting the player’s time and attention is less easily forgiven than it was in 1998.

Meanwhile, the Dallas section uses the division of space into more rooms than necessary in a way that I thought fit the story quite neatly. You’re on a race against time to reach the book depository before it’s too late, so of course this requires more steps than you want it to. That’s exactly what it would feel like.

Anyway, even from a 2021 perspective, I did enjoy this game overall. I just enjoyed it more in the Fairyland section, where the puzzles are stronger and the story is more stylized. The whole story is built around an incongruous juxtaposition, but the end notes indicate that the author was more interested in using Frank Leandro to talk about King Arthur than in using King Arthur to talk about Frank Leandro, and it shows.

With the hard-bought help of the fairy queen, I’ve only just made it back to Avalon, and can now travel freely between the two realms. So, back to the main quest. But first, let’s reflect briefly on what I’ve come through.

This game was written at a time when Infocom was still the dominant paradigm for IF, which means there are some gratuitous mechanical puzzles, including at one point a Lights Out. Over the years, I’ve come to dislike Lights Out as a pointless waste of time almost as much as Towers of Hanoi, but at least it’s used in a somewhat clever variation here. And anyway, at least the clarity of intent in such puzzles makes it difficult to get truly stuck. I did spend a good few hours stuck on a couple of puzzles in fairyland, but it was always the environmental ones, where it wasn’t obvious what my options were.

The game is full of folkloric and fairy-tale stuff, with a notable repeated motif of Frank being turned into various animals against his will. It seems to be related to the dehumanizing effects of war, particularly in the climax of the Fairyland chapter. There, a masked and antlered being called the Hunter, who had made attempts on your life earlier, decides to keep you as an attack dog instead. And this is notable for a number of reasons. First, it’s the one transformation that you’re capable of actively resisting. Second, it’s one of the few times that the random misadventures tie together, referring back to earlier events — and not just to the earlier murder attack: unmasked, the Hunter turns out to be an elf woman you’d also encountered in a different context. Pieces suddenly come together to form a story, one of someone who can’t bear to be ignored, who will satisfied with being your killer, lover, or master, as long as she’s your something. And the solution, the way to save yourself from her domination? You first have to witness her. To view her life, her story from childhood onward, rather than relating to her purely as an obstacle. It’s only in these flashbacks that you learn her name.

And that makes me think of what I said in my last post about the little girl who Joe killed. Joe is referenced again in this sequence, as one of many whose mortal remains decorate the Hunter’s lair. I’m starting to suspect that sequence may have been subtler than I gave it credit for.

There’s at least one other young girl who needs rescuing: the Oracle back in Avalon, a seven-year-old manacled to a throne, breathing volcanic fumes and giving cryptic hints on a number of topics. I actually broke sequence on this a little inadvertently: in conversations with True Thomas (the fairy queen’s human lover/advisor, who can only speak the truth), Frank references a dialogue with the Oracle on how to free her that I hadn’t actually had yet. When you do free her, there’s a moment when Frank calls her by name, despite him never having learned it — and for once, the game calls him out on it, makes it clear that this slip-up is deliberate. What is going on?

That initial island with the unicorn and the fairy ring turns out to be smaller than I had thought, and also a smaller portion of the game as a whole than I thought. My experiences since my last post have been defined by a game design pattern you might call One Damn Thing After Another. I know I have goals waiting for me back on Avalon if I ever find my way back there, but in the meantime, everything has been a chain of events where I’m trapped or in danger and have to solve a puzzle or two to get out of that situation and into a different one where I’m also trapped or in danger.

This has included a sequence where Frank returns to reality as a sort of ghost at various points in time, witnessing an environmentally-ravaged future, seeing what terrible things befell the brothers-in-arms who Frank gave his life for. So, there’s the answer to what I was wondering in my last post. It’s here that the influence of Infocom’s Trinity becomes clearest, except that where Trinity is all about inescapable self-causing time loops, the whole point of this section in Once and Future is changing fate. Your interventions into the lives of individual soldiers prove it’s possible, which means you can also do it on the larger scale.

There’s one vignette that I found striking for its priorities and perspective. One of Frank’s buddies, Joe, goes into an irreversible decline after he’s too quick on the trigger and kills a young Vietnamese girl. You have to prevent this from coming to pass. The thing is, this is all framed not as saving the little girl, but as saving Joe. The girl isn’t even given a name, because she fundamentally doesn’t matter except as a bit-player in Joe’s story. The game is basically anti-war, but it still privileges the experience of American soldiers.

After this whole foray into reality, the game breaks the mood by throwing you into Fairyland, which is even more whimsy-magical than Avalon was, and so jam-packed with wonders that it becomes a little monotonous. But this time, the darkness is more exposed. It isn’t just magical, it’s mercurial, and irrational in a threatening way. Frank has to make ill-advised bargains with a witch, and then, to escape the consequences, with a demon. There may be metaphors for Vietnam in that, but even if not, there’s definitely a mood.

But if you want metaphors, here’s a bigger one: The game’s opening makes it seem like it’s providing the main setting that you’ll be exploring, gives you goals that only make sense there. I’ve been torn away from that setting, and I’m starting to doubt if I’ll ever return.

Kevin Wilson is today probably best known for his work in board games, with over 100 design credits listed at boardgamegeek.com. Back in the 90s, though, he was a prominent member of the amateur Interactive Fiction community — in fact, he created the annual IFComp in 1995, which has since become an entrenched institution and one of the longest-running regular events in the world of game development. When he first started writing IF, he had grand plans. Adopting the company name Vertigo Software, he teased planned titles on Usenet: one about rationing oxygen in a space emergency, another about a blind person being stalked, another about rebellion against a future dystopia — all themes that have been tackled by IFComp entries, so in a way, he did bring these ideas to fruition. He never released them himself, though. Writing a full-sized game turned out to be a much larger task than he had anticipated, and the only projected Vertigo Software title to be completed was Once and Future (originally titled Avalon in these early announcements), a story of an American soldier in Vietnam transported to a realm of Arthurian magic on his death. Perhaps appropriately, it was one of the two titles to get a physical-media release from Mike Berlyn’s Cascade Mountain Publishing, another of the medium’s great bit-off-more-than-he-could-chew stories.

Today, you can get the game for free from the IF Archive, and indeed, that is the version I’m currently playing. But I did purchase the CD-ROM version back in the day, with its collection of printed feelies: various letters concerning Private Frank Leandro, his death, his relationships back home. These feelies are largely the reason I never played past the game’s intro: I felt like I should read the letters first, and a couple of them are in difficult handwriting — difficult enough to make me put it off for more than twenty years. I shouldn’t have bothered; the letters don’t really add anything to the experience, and seem like an afterthought. On top of that, once you’ve deciphered Frank’s scrawls, the game itself starts with an entire page of its own hard-to-read text: an account of Arthur’s final hours in archaic spelling, like “Take thou here Excalyber, my good swerde, and go wyth hit to yondir watirs syde”. I actually read all the way through Le Morte D’Arthur as a youth — cover to cover, even including the interminable tournament scenes — but the edition I read modernized the spelling, even as it kept the 15th-century grammar and vocabulary. I greatly prefer that approach for texts like this: it preserves the antique flavor without interfering excessively with comprehension.

At any rate, Frank is currently still carrying out his initial reconnoiter of the isle of Avalon, which seems to be grid-based and sparse, like an old Sierra game. Here a fairy ring, there a unicorn, Mordred lounging about insulting you at one juncture. At the very beginning, you’re issued several quests: purify the Holy Grail and recover Excalibur and the sheath and belt that go with it. The whole situation is disconnected enough from Frank’s life that it makes me wonder why he was assigned one in the first place. Why a soldier in Vietnam? I trust the author enough to believe that an answer will be revealed eventually, but it’s obscure right now. Apart from a brief mention of his sweetheart back home, Frank’s character hasn’t been particularly reflected in the room and object descriptions. The only thing indicating that he isn’t a natural part of this setting is the army fatigues and dog tag in his inventory.

April Fools Day has come and gone for the year. I’ve been wanting to start up blogging again after the month’s rest, regarding it as a sort of New Month’s resolution for the year’s dawn, but chose to skip the day itself due to the poisonous expectations the day brings. Entirely by coincidence, however, some comments online recently inspired me to give a second look at a game that apparently has its origins in an April Fools Day joke. As much as I detest the holiday, this is a fine way for games to be born, granting designers the freedom to be audacious they really should be feeling all year round.

Drunken Robot Pornography is a 2014 release by Dejobaan, the same indie outfit that produced the BASE-jumping game AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!, as well as The Wonderful End of the World, one of the few blatant Katamari imitations on PC. It’s an abstractish first-person shooter consisting mainly of fighting huge bosses while poinging around on jump pads. There are levels with other goals, like collecting stuff or just shooting at massed drones to reach a target score, but it’s the battles against the Titans, heavily-armed radially-symmetric robots that sit in place and rotate, that form the game’s focus. Sometimes all you have to do in a level is defeat a single Titan. Regardless of a level’s goal, it has to be done within a time limit of just a few minutes, tight enough to force reckless behavior, and thereby excuse it.

It’s got a similar sense of humor to other Dejobaan games: breezy wackiness tinged with apocalyptic desperation. The player character, Reuben Matsumoto, is comically irresponsible, essentially only fighting the robots destroying the metropolitan Boston area to avoid personal blame, probably hoping he can have the whole thing cleared up before anyone notices. “Reuben, do you think the Titans have souls?” queries his intelligent flight suit at one point, with exaggerated care; Reuben brushes him off with a weary “I dunno. Probably.”

But the main joke is in the gameplay. See, the Titans are a sort of boss usually seen in danmaku shooters: the kind where each weapon has its own hit box, and has to be destroyed individually. Except that bosses of this sort usually require a whole bunch of concerted fire at each piece to destroy it, and that’s not the case here. Weapons just sort of flake off, shed like autumn leaves at the barest touch. They compensate for this by having lots and lots of weapons. Destroying them feels less like blowing things up in a typical shooter than carving or shaving them off with strokes from your gun, paring off layer after layer of lethal ordnance to expose the fragile core. Their entire design is a laughable mismatch between power and vulnerability, and it’s something of a revelation that this makes for not only a viable game but, once you’re past the first dozen or so levels, actually a very hard one.

Hard enough that I don’t know if I’m going to be able to finish it. I think I’m about halfway to the end now, and I keep hitting walls.

I’ve talked a little about the emerging genre of puzzle-packages, a genre so new that there isn’t really an accepted name for it yet. My experience of the thing is mainly of boutique indie experiences with small runs, but more mass-market versions exist. I recently played through one that’s so mass-market, it’s sold (exclusively) at Target: Box One, presented by Neil Patrick Harris.

Now, I’m hesitant to describe this work in much detail, in part because the post-game content is so insistent that I not reveal any of its secrets. So let’s start off with vague generalities. Escape rooms and puzzle hunts are usually best solved by teams, in part because it lets the hints be vague enough to go over some people’s heads. Box One, however, explicitly bills itself as a game for one player, and that seems like the right amount to me. In fact, it may be ideally suited for half a player — that is, a player who has other stuff going on and isn’t giving the game their full attention. I’ll get into why I say this in a bit, but it’s spoilery.

Materials in and around the game put forth the narrative that “single player” was the game’s central innovation — that it was conceived not as an escape-room-in-a-box or a puzzle-hunt-at-home, but as a party-game-by-yourself, essentially a solitaire version of the previous “presented by Neil Patrick Harris” game, Amazed (which I know nothing about). This raises the question: Do the designers not know of the genre they’re participating in? I find their ignorance unlikely, but they’re not assuming that the player knows about it. (Spoilers turn up one notch every paragraph from this point onward.)

Now, as someone who was aware of the genre, and was expecting a puzzle-package, opening the box was initially disappointing to me, as it seemed that all it contained was a tall deck of “challenge cards” (to be drawn and acted on one by one, Pandemic Legacy-style), a notepad, a pen, and a large spacer to fill out the box. There ultimately turns out to be more to it, but the first phase of the game, in which you just draw cards and answer interlinked trivia questions, lasted long enough for me to genuinely think that this was all there was going to be. As a result, I was pleasantly surprised when the twist occurred, even though I had gone in expecting it. That’s a feat pulled off well.

The game turns out to have a substantial online component, which always seems a little like cheating to me. I bought this box as an alternative to playing videogames, darn it. It gives Neil Patrick Harris the opportunity for a little screen time, though, and he’s always a treat to watch. He’s basically in Doctor Horrible mode here, playing himself as a comically self-centered heavy against the story’s true hero, played by an actor who does a lot more acting than NPH but doesn’t get his name on the box. It seems a little unfair, but it’s an unfairness that’s at least in line with the story.

Everything funnels into what is essentially an escape room turned inside-out, the player using the game’s website to remotely help the hero escape captivity. But before you can get started at that, there’s a built-in delay of 24 hours. I suppose the intended effect was to split the game into two episodes — you were supposed to hit the “Come back tomorrow” and actually put the box aside and do something else. This is the game’s biggest misstep, at least for a player such as myself. For why would I stop poking around and seeking secrets, just because one avenue of progress is blocked? That’s not how you play adventure games! (And yes, I was pretty much thinking of it as an adventure game by this point.) As a result, I found most of the game’s secrets before the game led me to them, and that’s a shame, because it meant I missed out on some of the showmanship of the reveals, the “omg it was there all along and I didn’t see it until you pointed it out” factor.

For all that, it’s a pretty satisfying experience. It’s basically all about hiding information in as many ways as possible. It’s just optimized for a player who’s willing to sit down and follow directions sometimes — something it actually emphasizes in the beginning of the challenge cards. To its credit, it is also fully resettable, provided you take care not to damage the components.

I’ve been playing a fair amount of Supergiant’s Hades over the last few months, but I don’t intend to do a full series of posts about it. I feel like it’s been getting enough attention lately that reiterating every little thing about it would be unnecessary. But I do have a few stray observations I’d like to get down.

First, others have observed that Hades bears a lot of resemblance to Slay the Spire at the large scale, despite being a completely different genre: Spire is a turn-based deck-building game, Hades a fast-paced action-RPG. But both games are all about battling your way upward, through three main layers of guarded rooms followed by a smaller fourth containing the final boss, in one-sitting sallies where you’re expected to fail most of the time, Roguelike-style. Now, I said before that one of the notable things about Slay the Spire is that it manages to make each layer of its hierarchy of goals — beating the first tier, beating all three main tiers, doing the same with the three main classes, unlocking the final encounter and actually slaying the spire — feel like a real victory when you first manage it. Well, Hades does this even harder. When I escaped the underworld for the first time, I thought “Yeah! I beat the game!” When I escaped the underworld enough times to complete the main plot, and the credits rolled, I again thought “Yeah! I beat the game!” In both cases, it was accompanied by story elements that made it clear that I wasn’t really finished. Even when the credits roll, anyone familiar with the myth of Persephone knows that we’re only halfway through that story. I’m currently trying to help her complete it. I wonder what happens then? The game has got to run out of story eventually.

Speaking of familiarity with myth, I hadn’t heard of Zagreus (the player character) before playing the game, and somehow it didn’t occur to me to look him up and find out if he had any precedent in myth until I was very far into the game. Now, there’s a minor sub-plot in the game where Zagreus and Dionysus prank Orpheus by telling him that they’re really the same person, and spinning tall tales about this combined person’s exploits. Later, Zagreus tries to come clean, but Orpheus refuses to believe him, calling it false modesty and continuing to spread his lies through song. The point is, reading the opening lines of the Wikipedia article on Zagreus retroactively made that at least 20% funnier. I suspect there are subtler mythology gags that I haven’t even noticed.

One thing this game has really impressed upon me is just how many different gods of the dead there are in the Greek pantheon, and how many psychopomps. I assume that this is the result of different traditions merging: This group says Hermes takes your soul to the afterlife, that group says it’s Charon, these other guys say Thanatos, but now they’re all part of the same group so someone comes up with a big retcon in which they can all be right simultaneously.

The game has multiple kinds of in-game currency, and the interesting thing about them is that they’re mostly but not entirely separate. There’s gemstones, which mainly buys cosmetic enhancements to the main house, and shards of pure darkness (which is somehow purple), which you use to upgrade your character, and nectar, which you gift to other characters to improve your relationship, and titan blood, which upgrades weapons. To some extent, these are convertible, but I found I generally wanted to use my gems as gems rather than using them to buy some other resource, even though I didn’t really care much about changing the house decor for its own sake. But the weird part really comes in with the diamonds. Diamonds are normally gained by defeating the level 2 boss, which you can do only once per sally. You only ever have a few of them at a time. I’ve found two main uses for them: buying out the contracts that Hades made with certain characters, and some of the more expensive pieces of furniture. The former affects story (and can have mechanical rewards as a side effect), the latter might sometimes affect the story but usually doesn’t. And yet, I find myself sometimes splurging on the cosmetic effects, rather than saving up to help my friends! The closest I can come to justifying this is by calling it curiosity.

The game starts in media res, leaving out any opening cutscene in favor of getting right into the action. A lot of what you learn about the backstory is learned through suggestion and implication rather than stated outright, at least at first — you suspect that Zagreus is deceiving the Olympians long before this is stated outright. And in some cases, the secrets that eventually come out are ones that the player is likely to know already, even when the player character doesn’t. The very fact that Zagreus doesn’t know that Demeter is Persephone’s mother, even after talking to each of them independently multiple times, is itself one of those bits of backstory that the player learns by implication.

Orpheus repeatedly refers to Eurydice as his “muse”. When you finally meet Eurydice, she informs you that in fact she wrote most of Orpheus’ material. But when you think about it, isn’t that what he said? The poets of antiquity invoked the muses in terms like “Speak through me” and “Whisper into my ear”. They always gave the muses full credit as the real authors of their works, the artist being merely a vessel. Something to bear in mind whenever an artist calls someone “my muse” in real life.