{"id":631,"date":"2009-11-03T22:02:14","date_gmt":"2009-11-04T03:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/631"},"modified":"2016-10-21T10:36:25","modified_gmt":"2016-10-21T17:36:25","slug":"shelter-from-the-storm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/631","title":{"rendered":"Shelter from the Storm"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>And now a wartime tale from Eric Eve, author of last year&#8217;s <em>Nightfall<\/em>.  The year is 1940.  A British lieutenant, on his way to report for duty, gets stuck in a thunderstorm in the countryside.  Finding a house nearby, he persuades the maid to let him in; there follows a section where he meets the family, follows people around and engages in lots of the sort of menu-based conversation where there are more options than you can choose in the number of turns allotted.  This goes on for a while, then stops abruptly, the soldier left alone while some mysterious noises upstairs draw his attention.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s strange, but at this point, despite having played the game for a while, I still had no clear idea of what sort of game it is.  I&#8217;d have said it was basically a character-based drama, until I was abandoned to the world of objects and forced to take Action.  Strange noises in a large house could mean anything from H. P. Lovecraft to C. S. Lewis.  After a while, I started to suspect that things were a bit more prosaic than either of those extremes, and that I was simply dealing with a Nazi spy ring.  My first clue was that the housemaid, supposedly a Jewish refugee, is contentedly listening to Wagner on the radio as she irons.  And, once I had gotten my head sufficiently out of character-based-drama mode to start searching closets at random, I started finding more clues suggestive of this conclusion.  I still don&#8217;t know who else in the house is involved, though, or even if the people I&#8217;ve met are who they claim to be.  The noises I heard could be the house&#8217;s rightful inhabitants, tied up in the closet.<\/p>\n<p>I should mention one of the game&#8217;s larger peculiarities: that it lets the player choose the person and tense of the entire game.  I&#8217;ve chosen to play it in first person past tense, like it&#8217;s an episode from the soldier&#8217;s memoirs.  I know I&#8217;ve seen at least one other incomplete fragment game that allowed the player to choose the tense, but the effort to produce this degree of variation over a full game seems strangely decadent.  Still, it makes it a valuable resource for anyone investigating the effect of tense and person on the feel of a game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And now a wartime tale from Eric Eve, author of last year&#8217;s Nightfall. The year is 1940. A British lieutenant, on his way to report for duty, gets stuck in a thunderstorm in the countryside. Finding a house nearby, he persuades the maid to let him in; there follows a section where he meets the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[315,84,316],"class_list":["post-631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-if","tag-eric-eve","tag-if","tag-shelter-from-the-storm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4241,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions\/4241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}