The Stack

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 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, ¹The 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. 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.

(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” command 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. , 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.

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. ¹This 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. 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.

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.