Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n
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In what is probably my least-expected reaction in the Comp so far, Cana According to Micah<\/em> comes as a breath of fresh air. This is the game that made me realize how unfair I was being by not calling out mediocre writing when I saw it — unfair, that is, to games like this one. It’s not that the prose here is the flashy sort that calls attention to itself, but it’s competent and, more importantly, it’s meaningful. Every sentence tells you something, even if it’s just something about what the player character considers important. As well, there’s a very comfortable texture to the interaction; the text you’re expected to read between command prompts is neither too thin nor too thick, particularly in the room descriptions, whose brevity reflects the PC’s familiarity with the setting.<\/p>\n All this may seem like faint praise. Surely this competence, as i have described it, should be the minimum we expect of a Comp game? Ah, if only it were.<\/p>\n Competent authoring is made all the more surprising by the fact that it’s Bible fanfic.\u00a0It’s the story of the miracle of water into wine, told from the point of view of a\u00a0servant at the wedding. That is, it takes the same approach to scriptural adaptation as last year’s The Bible Retold: Following a Star<\/em><\/a>, expanding on a small role, one mentioned in a single sentence and not even named. It’s not nearly as silly as TBR:FaS<\/em>, though. There are jokey bits, such as when you spot Coleridge’s ancient mariner, who’s apparently more ancient than I thought, haranguing a bridesmaid. But even stuff like that tends to feed into the game’s religious themes. Once you have a handle on what the mariner is saying, you can tell the story to the officiating rabbi and his retinue, provoking questions: What is the point of this long, rambling story? If, as the mariner insists, it’s all true, what does that tell us about God?<\/p>\n Not that God is at the top of most people’s concerns in this story. Most of the action is set firmly at the level of the historically mundane. Your chief concern is simply that the party is running out of wine<\/em>, and the first brace of puzzles is all about locating and procuring a jug that went missing (stolen by John the Baptist, it turns out, who’s more or less running wild these days). Jesus himself isn’t really Jesus yet; the miracle at Cana was his first, so until you reach the point in the story where he performs it, which is basically the end, he’s just a part of the community, someone close enough to the families involved to get invited to weddings, and definitely not above criticism. You can ask pretty much any NPC about anyone else in the game (and even about some biblical characters not even mentioned) and get a meaningful response, so everyone has some kind of opinion of him; the rabbi, for example, says “That boy is entirely too smart for his own good”.<\/p>\n As for me, I was a bit taken aback by how unhelpful Jesus was. Once you convince yourself that the last of the wine is gone — John the Baptist can really tuck it away, it seems — you can ask him for help, and his response is basically “Why should I care?” This is the one part where I got stuck enough to need hints. Someone more familiar with the source material 1<\/sup><\/a>Or someone with the presence of mind to look it up. I guess my failure to think of this at the time shows how successful the game was at getting me to think of this as my own problem, rather than a re-enactment of a fixed story.<\/span><\/span>