The Stack

The premise of Hadean Lands, the pretext for its puzzles, is one of adventure games’ oldest, pioneered by the likes of Planetfall. You could call it the Systems Repair story. You find yourself in a spaceship, or a space station, or a remote high-tech laboratory, or a submarine, or some other such enclosed and mechanical environment. The machines that support this artificial environment have gone catastrophically wrong, and for some reason you’re the only one around to repair and reactivate it all. The main thing that separates HL from the bulk of these stories is that it’s more up-front about all the technology being made-up.

It takes a good long time to get to the point of even contemplating repairing stuff in HL, though. I’ve spent most of my time in the game so far just trying to unlock various doors and cabinets, in order to gain access to more stuff to unlock doors and cabinets with. (I recently discovered that the game even has a special command, “doors”, to keep track of the doors and cabinets you haven’t opened yet.) But ultimate goals start asserting themselves once you finally stand in front of one of the ship’s Dragons.

The text of the game makes mention of Dragons in several places before you actually get to see one, letting the player assume that the word is literal, that there are actual scaly beasts harnessed to the ship’s systems. But, as the player character’s inner voice keeps reminding us, this is not a fantasy world, this is a world of Modern Alchemical Science. “Dragon” is just a term of art for a kind of complicated alchemical pattern, like a self-animating mandala. The ship has four of them. I know where they all are, but I’ve seen only one of them. It’s visibly wrong, anemic, virtually inactive. I have no idea how to make it right. So I guess I’ll keep on opening doors and cabinets until I do.

Finding the Dragon threw my plans for something of a loop. Basically all of the the rituals that I know but haven’t yet completed have a single prerequisite in common: Elemental Fire, which can be produced by a simple recipe involving phlogisticated gold, camphrost vapor, and a splint of burning blackwood (a fictional wood that burns at a very high temperature). Camphrost and blackwood are easy to acquire, but it took me a long time to find phlogisticated gold, due to mistakenly thinking that I didn’t have the item required to unlock a cabinet when I actually did. With that in hand, I finally had everything I needed to unlock the rest of the game — or so I thought, until I actually tried lighting the blackwood and discovered it to be stubbornly resistant, even when tossed in a kiln used for melting metals. Well, if it burns very hot, it probably needs a very hot flame to ignite it, right? And I figured that the hottest flames on the ship had to be the fiery breath of the ship’s powerful fire-breathing dragons. Well, no such luck.

Just a quick post today. I keep on mentioning how Hadean Lands fills in intermediary steps for puzzles you’ve already solved, but I don’t think I’ve communicated just how extensively it does so. So, here’s a rather extreme example. It’s the output generated from the command “go to observatory”, executed immediately after a reset. In the iOS version, this can also be done by simply tapping the observatory on the in-game map. I’m putting it after the fold because it’s full of spoilers. But it’s also full of flavor, so you can use it to get a sense of the game’s sensibilities if you think you’re not going to play it.

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If there’s one thing every sufficiently-large puzzle game needs, it’s an excuse. Some reason why walking around and doing stuff requires convoluted shenanigans. You’re sneaking around a high-security facility and would be observed if you took the obvious routes. You’re exploring a ruin, and a lot of the floors and staircases are collapsed and impassible. It’s all a test. There’s wild magic interfering with you. The whole world is stylized enough that you automatically don’t take it seriously.

In Hadean Lands, the primary excuse consists of fractures in time. Something has gone wrong and various bits of the “marcher” (alchemical spaceship) you’re on are frozen in time, with barely-visible barriers separating you from your trapped-mid-stride crewmates, or from glimpses of alien planets. Yes, planets, plural. Whatever befell the marcher has twisted space up enough that different fractures show plainly different worlds: a Hadean land here, grey and airless, a Thalassan land there, covered in toxic sea.

But then, there’s some indication that having access to multiple worlds at once is normal. One room has a dome full of windows, each showing a different sky. Apparently the marcher uses this to navigate. And then there’s the peculiar matter of the basement, which leads to a ledge on an underground chasm, which is deep enough that you can’t see the bottom. The chasm has a number of doors leading to parts of the marcher, which makes it seem like a permanent feature of the thing, not a by-product of the time-fracturing accident. And yet, it’s underground. Perhaps the marcher isn’t so much a ship as a building that generates portals? But it’s described in nautical terms otherwise.

So basically the setting keeps you a little unbalanced by combining disparate ideas, convincing you it’s one thing and then showing you that it’s another. Even the base concept of “alchemists on a spaceship” works into this. Even the mechanics, as described last post: inventory items that you later realize you don’t need to pick up, a reset button that preserves state. Alchemical transformations symbolized by transformations of understanding, and vice versa. I’ve found a scrap fragment referring to the creation of a homunculus, and I won’t be at all surprised if it turns out that this is what the player character was all along without knowing.

I had a plan. I was going to do a series of posts about Hadean Lands in lieu of writing about the Comp this year. Hadean Lands seems like a likely Best Puzzles winner at the Xyzzy Awards, and an almost certain finalist, so if I wanted to do writeups of that category again (as I have done for the last two years), it would be good to get my thoughts about it down in advance. Once I had that done, I could move on to blogging other games, ideally before the Steam holiday sale.

The proximate cause of this plan’s failure was an extended crunch at work, but that’s been over for a while now. No, the reason the plan failed is that it was easily derailed. Having started the game, and put it aside, I found it daunting to return to. The amount of stuff you have to know about just seems to keep growing! Scrap paper is particularly deceptive. You’ll have an incomplete description of a useful ritual, and you’ll see a bit of scrap paper in a hard-to-reach place, and you’ll hope that it might contain the secrets you’re seeking, but when you finally solve the puzzle to reach it, it’ll more likely turn out to be instructions for a completely unrelated ritual — one that you don’t have any immediate need for, but which, by its mere presence, you now know that you’ll have to perform at some point. Sure, every ritual you can perform increases your powers, but until you have what you need to perform it, it’s just a looming obligation.

Now, the author knows that he’s built a daunting game. This is largely the point of it: to give the players the experience of mastering a large and complex system. And to that end, the game gives the player quite a lot of help, keeping track of all the formulas and rituals you’ve discovered and letting you repeat them with minimal fuss, not troubling you with intermediary steps that can be taken care of automatically, even automatically unlocking doors that stand in the way of necessary ingredients and the like. Everything has to be done manually once, but no more. And if you accidentally destroy something crucial and get the game into an unwinnable state and haven’t saved in a long time? You still don’t have to repeat anything. At various places on the map there are dark voids, part of a general rupturing of time and space in the vicinity of your alchemical spaceship. Entering one of these voids resets the state of the game to the beginning, except for the player character’s accumulated knowledge, which is the one important thing. With the ability to automatically skip over the details, starting over is no chore.

Indeed, it will probably be essential. I’m still in the early stages, but I think I can see how this is going to go. The goals you’re trying to reach in this game — the rewards for solving puzzles — basically come in two sorts: materials and information, the stuff used in alchemical rituals and the instructions on how to use them. Sometimes a ritual will consume a thing, so it can only be performed once. And what if two rituals both require the same consumable ingredient? Well, if the ultimate reason you’re performing the ritual is to gain access to information, you can just reset afterward and keep the information. It effectively doesn’t cost anything at all.

This may sound like sequence-breaking. After all, if the only thing standing between you and your goals is information, a player who has that information can make the protagonist act on it without learning it, like skipping directly to Atrus in Myst. Well, the author has come up with a clever way around that: Formulas. These are the incantations used in rituals by means of commands like “recite the word of anaphylaxis”, and the point of them, beyond flavor, is that the player character has to actually learn the word of anaphylaxis first. This means that formulas act more like inventory items than information, but, unlike your material inventory, you get to keep them across resets.

Meanwhile, the material inventory becomes more like information. Contrary to ingrained adventure-game habit, picking up every item you find isn’t important, and can even be detrimental if you’re planning on walking through a fire or something. Knowing where you can find a thing is for most purposes as good as having it in your hand; at worst, you can go to its location and pick it up with just two commands, and if it’s part of a ritual you’ve performed once before, you don’t even need that. And when I say “knowing”, I am again talking about player-character knowledge rather than player knowledge. The PC knows where things are even if you forget — and, yes, retains that knowledge across resets.

Hadean Lands, a text adventure by renowned IF author Andrew Plotkin, was the first successful Kickstarter project I ever backed. He asked for a mere $8000, and got nearly four times that, which seemed like a lot of money for a Kickstarter back in 2010. And, just as he got four times what he asked, he took four times as long as he expected. The most anticipated text adventure in many years, it shipped just a few days ago, and I finally gave it a serious try this weekend.

Despite a multi-hour session, I feel like I’ve just barely started it. The whole thing is predicated on alchemical rituals that require combinations of ingredients under specific elemental or planetary influences established by symbols and incenses, and sequences of commands like “invoke lesser phlogistical saturation” or “recite the categorical imperative”. In other words, this isn’t your “select a spell from a list” system; magic takes work. Even just following instructions written out for you can require research to find out what those instructions mean. It reminds me a little of spellcasting by typing sequences of text from the manual in King’s Quest 3 and a little of the more involved schools of ritual magic in Ultima VIII (a game that I remember as essentially a series of demos for different magic systems), but with one big difference: it’s systematic. Rituals aren’t just arbitrary sequences of actions, they’re techniques that produce specific effects, and that can be tweaked to produce different effects if you understand the theory behind them. Just getting out of the first room requires making a reasonable substitution in the one recipe available to you at that point, tutorializing this variability.

And it keeps on tutorializing for a good while, introducing new aspects of alchemical practice one by one, mainly by means of blocked doors. Here’s one that’s rusted shut, here’s one that’s rusted even more so that your previous anti-rust ritual doesn’t cut it, one overgrown with mold, one that’s locked and the key tossed in a blazing furnace. I’ve reached the point where things open up a bit, where I have multiple unsolved puzzles in front of me and multiple recipes that I have no immediate use for. It’s still looking like alchemy is always the answer to every puzzle, though.

Fortunately, the game only expects you to perform each ritual once. Repeating a ritual is as simple as typing “make fungicide” or whatever, provided you have access to everything you need. I understand that macro-instructions of this sort become increasingly important as the game goes on. We’ll see how that goes in future posts.

OK, something very cool happened last night that people watching the IF Comp from the outside should be told about. An enigmatic post appeared on the forum at int.fiction.org:

No one has yet put together the full truth. Will the man with the hat ever be redeemed?

(signed) Lyman Clive Charles, Pam Comfite, Cameron Fox, and Edmund Wells.

The four signers are the authors of Cold Iron, Playing Games, Last Day of Summer, and Doctor M, respectively. Since Edmund Wells was known to be a pseudonym, it seemed likely that the other three were as well.

This sparked excited discussion on IFmud, the MUD were various IF authors and enthusiasts gather. No one seems to have suspected a connection between them beforehand, but once you isolate them like this, some patterns jump out. Yes, all four involve a mysterious stranger in a vaguely-described hat — although in Doctor M, the one where he plays the largest role, he isn’t wearing the hat when you meet him; he’s lost it and you have to find it for him. Which links to another commonality: in all four games, you trade a found item to the stranger for something else. Furthermore, the items are repeated from game to game: you trade a pocket watch for a gemstone in Games, a gemstone for a knife in Iron, a knife for a hat in Summer, and a hat for a watch chain in Doctor M. Clearly something was up. Other confirming details became apparent. For example, both Iron and Summer prominently feature a storybook written by a reverend, and a set of four paintings in Doctor M clearly depict scenes from each of the four games, once you’re sensitized to the connection.

A few hours later, a collaborative effort had put together the clues found in all four games and finally redeemed the man in the hat. I won’t go into detail here — Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin has posted a near-complete transcript of the proceedings if you’re interested — but it turns out that some of the games involved contain hints for actions you can perform in other games, some involving details that served no obvious purpose within their own context.

Once the riddle was solved, the authors unmasked themselves. Lyman Clive Charles tuned out to be Zarf himself, who had been discreetly observing the unraveling without comment. This surprised me, because Cold Iron had seemed rather cursory and incomplete, but I suppose that’s because so much of its content was bound up in the hat mystery. Also surprising is that Doctor M is the first released work by its author, Mike Hilborn. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next.

Apparently the authors were hoping that someone would discover the secret during the Comp, and worried that the clues were too obvious, that people would pick up on the secret too quickly. It’s always hard to judge how difficult a puzzle is without testing it on people, which is difficult for secret puzzles like this one. I recall that Kit Williams, creator of the treasure-hunt book Masquerade, expected it would take a week or two for someone to solve its puzzle and find the jewel, but in the end, even the person who claimed the prize turned out to have cheated.

For my part, I recall noticing two indescribable hats in two of the games I played in close proximity, but thought of it as just a funny coincidence, not worth mentioning in my reviews. The thing is, there were a lot of funny coincidences in this Comp. I myself joked in a previous post about collusion between the authors of all the detective games. I mentioned the odd coincidence of two games about little girls playing hide-and-seek, but I didn’t even realize at the time that both were by Australians. Even the games in the hat mystery have strong connections to ones not involved. Cold Iron and Last Day of Summer both involve a rustic’s relation to a reverend, but so does Beet the Devil, which, like Playing Games, uses a tunnel hidden by a bush to divide the prologue from the midgame. (If I had noticed this during the Comp, I probably would have wasted some time searching Beet the Devil for that storybook.) Furthermore, 38 games is a lot, so without that nudge advising us to look at that group of four together, we didn’t really have a foothold. The nudge, however, is all it took.

So I say I’m going to blog the Comp, and then it takes me a matter of days to write my first post. Let’s rectify that. First up is Cold Iron by Lyman Clive Charles. Spoilers follow the break.

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Around the turn of the millennium, Tivola Publishing released a series of three German-developed Myst-style first-person adventure games with educational aspirations, each focusing on a different science. The most celebrated of the three, and the one with by far the highest production values, is Chemicus. Andrew Plotkin’s review of Chemicus got me curious about it, and by extension, the other two, Physicus and Bioscopia.

Physicus and Bioscopia are both blatant Director games, Made in Macromedia and not too proud to show it, like many of their generation of cheap Myst imitators. All three games follow the basic model of wandering around a strange and deserted environment, poking at things with your cursor and solving puzzles that open up new areas — the puzzles, in these particular games, being to a large extent (but not entirely!) tests of your knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, which is also available through a sort of narrated and animated textbook within the game (sometimes a little shaky in its English translation). Physicus was much shorter and easier than Chemicus, basically a one-sitting game. I can’t really speak to the length of Bioscopia, though, because I haven’t finished it yet. I stopped playing fairly early on, finding it far less interesting than either of its brethren.

This isn’t because the curriculum was less interesting. It’s because it was less well-integrated into the gameplay. Chemicus worked as well as it did because it used practical chemistry to solve adventure-game puzzles — for example, freeing a golden object embedded in a block of silver by immersing it in nitric acid. Physicus was more like a bunch of concretized word problems: there were lots of machines that needed just one or two things adjusted, like the right weight to balance a lever, or the right amount of power through an induction coil. It was more contrived than the situational puzzles in Chemicus, but it was still based on interacting with the environment as an environment. Bioscopia, from what I’ve seen so far, mainly just tries to teach biology by occasionally quizzing you in various ways. There are puzzles about manipulating the environment, using objects on other objects and whatnot, but these puzzles have absolutely nothing to do with biology. They’re mostly about manipulating machines, prominently including robots — were the authors aware of the irony here? And some of the machines require you to demonstrate biological knowledge, but they could just as well be asking you about art history or Doctor Who trivia.

I suppose it shows something about the way the three subjects are taught in school. Chemistry and physics are presented as techniques, and techniques are things that can be applied in a simulated world. But biology is presented mainly as a collection of facts. It’s impossible to perform science of that sort.

Perhaps it’s best to not even think of Bioscopia as educational and just approach it as a game. We’ll see how well that works. But right now, I don’t think it works very well that way either.

Grassland
You are in a pleasant grassy meadow. To the north, south, east, northeast, southeast, and southwest is a meadow; to the west and northwest is seething lava.
A red pyramid stands to the north.
A green pyramid stands to the south.
A blue pyramid stands to the east.

Since people have expressed interest in the IF adaptation of Icebreaker included on the CD, I suppose I should say a few words about it. In a way, it’s similar to the IF adaptation of Doom: when something is about to kill you, you simply type in a command beginning with the word “shoot” and that’s that, with no possibility of missing. Unless, that is, two seekers happen to come on you simultaneously from different directions, which can happen, but isn’t likely as long as you stay in the region where the pyramids and the natural obstacles are. This seems to be a 6×6 region, much smaller than in a normal Icebreaker level, and there are only 14 pyramids to destroy in it. It’s just as well that it doesn’t try to create a full Icebreaker level, if you ask me. The whole thing is basically a curiosity, and is just large enough to make its point.

The most interesting part is also the chief way it differs from the game it’s based on: the point of view. In the original game, you see a broad area around you — not the full playfield, but enough for you to make plans based on where everything is, and to see the Seekers coming. In the text version, all you can see is the square you’re on and the squares adjacent to it. Information about what’s going on elsewhere is conveyed through sound — which, actually, happens to some extent in the original game too: you can always tell when a Seeker offscreen has crushed a green pyramid from the distinctive “kssh”. But in the text game, “offscreen” means almost everywhere, so the noises play a larger role. Apart from that, the fact that you can see only one square around you means that it’s possible to forget where you are relative to other things — in other words, to get lost. Which means that, in grand adventure-game tradition, there’s motivation to draw a map.

The mechanics aren’t completely faithful to the original. You can’t edge between a pair of adjacent pyramids here; any attempt at movement sends you straight at the center of the square in the specified compass direction. You can shoot stuff by specifying a compass direction, but your shots seem to only have a range of one square: shooting at a red pyramid from two squares away does nothing. I have no idea if the pathing algorithm for the Seekers bears any resemblance to that in the original — it’s hard to tell, when you can’t see beyond one square — but I suspect not, because it has to happen on the level of grid-squares here, not on the pixel level. Still, you expect changes when going from one format to another. Icebreaker: The Text Adventure does a reasonably good job of aping the experience of the game it was based on, and that’s all we can really ask of it.

Something must be said about the game’s origins, about Andrew Looney and his obsession with pyramids. This is all well-documented elsewhere on the web — that is, after all, how I came to know everything I’m about to say — so I’ll be brief.

It started with a self-published novella called The Empty City — the full text is now available online, if you’re curious. In this story, Looney described a tabletop game called Icehouse, and the ethos of cool that had developed around it. Icehouse, as described in the story, was a peculiar thing: a board game without a board, a strategy game without turns. If you saw an opportunity in the way the pyramids were arranged, you grabbed it before someone blocked it. Understandably curious about whether such a system could be made to work in real life, Looney decided to develop the in-fiction descriptions into a game that people could actually play. And thus began his career as a game designer.

But not, it must be said, a videogame designer. Icebreaker was and remains his only credit on Mobygames. He mostly does card games — his best-known work is probably Fluxx, a game where the basic conceit is that the cards you play change the rules (albeit only in specific ways, like how many cards you draw at the beginning of each turn and which combination of cards you need to win). I’ve played much of the Looney Laboratories catalog, but I have to admit that his games generally aren’t what I want from a game — too much alea, not enough agon. Usually the winning move comes as a surprise, which means there’s no opportunity to strategize against it. But tastes differ. Some prefer the beer-and-pretzels school of design, and I’ve noticed in particular that the people who like Fluxx the most are people who don’t usually like games. Anyway, Icehouse doesn’t fit this pattern at all. I find it almost unbearably stressful to play. Perhaps this is part of why people who bought Icehouse sets immediately started inventing other games to play with the pyramids — although aesthetic appeal of those pyramids also played a role, of course. If there’s one thing that the original Icehouse has going for it, it’s that every session results in a unique tableau that looks like the skyline of a Martian city.

Knowing all this, Icebreaker feels a bit like a game from an alternate universe where Andrew Looney’s life went differently. But my first exposure to the game came years before I had any other knowledge of the man or his works: I saw it reviewed in a gaming magazine or two on its initial release, where it was praised as new and different, but apparently not considered important enough to merit anything more than a few sentences in a sidebar. I remember seeing the comment in Electronic Gaming Monthly expressing confusion over the fact that you’re a pyramid blasting other pyramids, and thinking what a weird thing that was to find confusing. I mean, there are plenty of games where you’re a spaceship blasting other spaceships, right? It’s true that pyramids in real life don’t usually come equipped with blasters, but then, neither do real spacecraft. (Come to think of it, the ships in Spacewar are about the same shape as Icehouse pieces. Perhaps they were really pyramids all along!) But I suppose the confusion is more understandable given the blurb in the manual:

Icebreaker is about destroying pyramids. Pyramids are bad. They are evil and nasty. You’re outnumbered and alone. All you’ve got are our wits and cunning… Oh yeah. And a real big plasma blaster.

That’s as much story as you get in this game — yet another way it resembles the coin-op games of yore.

Some time after this, I learned of Icehouse and became intrigued enough to try it. When realized that Icebreaker was by the same person, I naturally wanted to try that too. And so, when I found a bin full of original Icebreaker boxes at a computer show, selling for cheap, I snatched one up. I really should have snatched up more than one, for distribution to the Interactive Fiction community, because the disc contains, as an easter egg, a text-based adaptation of the game by none other than Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin, author of such works as So Far, Shade, and Spider & Web, and a personal friend of Looney. It’s not much of a game — more of a joke, really — but it’s a text adventure, by a prominent author no less, published on CD-ROM and sold in stores, and that makes it a rarity. Really, I think more games should ship with text adventures as bonus items, and there are people who agree with me and are willing to make it happen. I suppose the biggest obstacle is getting approval: games are big business these days, and big business doesn’t like content that hasn’t been vetted by legal.

It’s a little eerie how I was led toward this obscure title by three different channels — computer game magazines, tabletop gaming, and IF. Or was it only two? I don’t remember where I first learned of Icehouse; it could have been from the IF community.