Planet Interactive Fiction

Drew Cook’s Portrait with Wolf,^1,2 a back garden entry in the 2025 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction, bears the tagline “a different kind of IF art show.” The IF Art Show was a competition that ran from 1999 to 2007. Entries included genre bending and defining works such as Emily Short’s Galatea (2000) and Jacqueline A. Lott’s The Fire Tower (2004). The IF Art Show is an apt reference for Portrait with Wolf: not only is it about creating art; like Galatea and The Fire Tower, it also experiments with the form and breaks new ground.

Portrait with Wolf takes place in a single room with (ostensibly) nothing inside it but the protagonist³ and an easel. The player’s task is to create a series of portraits that will eventually fill a gallery. To create a portrait, the player chooses from a set of four motifs: a cat, a turnip, a boot, and an astronaut. Each time they make a choice, the game prints a response and then prompts them to restart. Upon restarting, the player is returned to the room with the easel, but the room name and description, and other text have all shifted slightly. In fact, the room, the easel, and the motifs continue transforming throughout the game. A portrait is complete after the player incorporates 6 motifs into it. The game refers to each completed portrait as an “ending.” After completing 7 portraits (thereby unlocking 7 endings), the player unlocks the “true” ending: the 8th portrait. The player may continue creating unique portraits after the 8th portrait in order to unlock bonus content.

Portrait with Wolf explores themes of mental illness, abuse, health care, childhood, creativity, control, and pursuit. It is part parser, part poem; while at the same time being neither parser nor poem. Portrait with Wolf is something completely original. I am writing this article as a way to figure out what Portrait with Wolf is doing and what makes it effective. I also hope to identify some possible characteristics of a “parser poetics.” Finally, I’d like to encourage even more discussion of Portrait with Wolf,⁴ in hopes that it leads to more production of experimental work in the tradition of the IF Art Show.

The Space Under the Window (1997): The first parser poem?

In their intfiction.org postmortem, Drew Cook shares one of their motivations for making Portrait with Wolf: “I wondered: what would parser poetry look like? I never saw any models or examples for [this kind of] poetry, but I was curious about the subject.” However, there is indeed an earlier parser work that has drawn comparisons to poetry: Andrew Plotkin’s 1997 The Space Under the Window. Like Portrait with Wolf, The Space Under the Window was conceived of as an artistic endeavor: It was created as part of a collaborative art project in which participants were invited to create works in any medium, as long as they were all titled “The Space Under the Window.”

In Plotkin’s game, rather than interacting with objects and moving through simulated spaces, the player types the names of objects that appear in the narrative, and the narrative shifts focus accordingly. For example, early in the game, the player sees this description: “The window is open, so you climb down inside. The table is set for two. An empty vase, white glass, stands beside a single lit candle.” Typing “candle” at the command prompt causes the narrative to shift so that it emphasizes the play of light on the table and the walls of the room: “The window is open, so you climb down inside. The table is set; an ivory candle breathes light across it, and around the room. In the still glow of the flame, nothing moves.”

Of the game’s six IFDB reviews, two mention poetry. In fact, one of the reviews is titled “Essentially interactive poetry.” Emily Short, in her now archived essay “What’s Interactive Fiction,” also compares playing the game to experiencing poetry: “The effect was close to what I imagine interactive poetry might be like: imagine a sonnet in which you could demand the elaboration of a conceit, or reject it wholly–”

Let’s recall, however, that Cook was talking specifically about examples of “parser poetry” (emphasis mine). We have established that some reviewers–including authorities like Emily Short–consider The Space Under the Window to be like poetry. But is it parser poetry? In both Twisty Little Passages and his essay in The IF Theory Reader, Nick Montfort considers the mechanics underlying The Space Under the Window, and concludes that it is “a work of hypertext implemented in Inform; instead of clicking on a word as would be typical on the Web, typing one of the words displayed causes the appearance of a new lexia (Landow 1992), indicating a section of hypertext.”⁵

Granted, there are ways in which Portrait with Wolf resembles hypertext, too. Like The Space Under the Window, it is a “limited parser” game that restricts player input to an extremely narrow subset of commands. The player’s input in Portrait with Wolf–choosing one of four motifs–likewise results in the appearance of a new lexia: the response, epitaph, and prompt to restart. But, as I will explore in this article, Portrait with Wolf is inextricably linked to parser conventions and expectations. In fact, it relies on these conventions and expectations for its poetic meaning-making. In this way, I feel that Portrait with Wolf goes beyond The Space Under the Window to fully inhabit its identity as a “parser poem.”

Field composition and Game Poems

Poet Charles Olson’s conception of “field composition,” outlined in the 1951 manifesto “Projective Verse,” may be helpful to consider here. According to Olson, “the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge” that transfers energy from poet to reader. The poet orchestrates this energy transfer by manipulating “objects” (breath, sound, image, and space) in a “field” (the page).

It may seem odd to invoke “Projective Verse” in relation to Portrait with Wolf. Olson is, after all, advocating abandoning established poetic forms in favor of using “open” verse. And Cook, in their postmortem and in a Portrait with Wolf devlog on itch.io, explicitly refers to parser elements–banner text, room description, action/response, and epitaph–as a “poetic form” like “sonnets, haiku, limericks, and sestinas.” I propose considering parser elements not as the form that contains the poem, but rather as the material from which the poem is composed–that is, as analogous to the syllable, line, image, sound, breath, and white space that the poet uses to generate dynamism and energy, to eliminate “slackness,” and to ensure that, “in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!”⁶

In Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice, Jordan Magnuson makes a similar argument. He describes the “material” of videogame poems as “a vast tangled web of visual, auditory, and procedural signifiers, with all of their established ways of signifying (both denotatively and connotatively) in relation to one another and to the world at large.”⁷ These signifiers include the visual layout of a sidescrolling platformer and what it communicates about gameplay; sound effects like a shotgun reloading, and what they communicate about how the game will respond to player input; collision detection and what it communicates about how NPC sprites will respond to the protagonist. Magnuson writes, “the clusters of computation and interaction that are built into games can act as signifiers and establish a kind of vernacular language just as much as words, images, and sounds can.”⁸

In subsequent sections, I will explore how Portrait with Wolf creates poetic moments not through breath, sound, and syllable; and not through layout, sound effects, and collision detection; but through the elements that are specific to parser games: banner text, room descriptions, command prompts, and epitaphs.

Throughout the rest of the article, I’ll refer to elements of the game using some of the same vocabulary that Cook uses in their postmortem: banner text (consisting of title, headline, author, release number, serial number, and compiler letter), prefatory statement, room name, room description, easel, choices, command prompt, action response, epitaph, and prompt to restart.

Unlike Cook, I’ll refer to each encounter with the easel–the game loop (loup?) from banner text to prompt to restart–as a “poem.” I will call the title that begins the banner text (for example, “A Tin Cup Filled with Incisors,” “Everything’s OK! You Are OK!” “When You Cut Off One Wolf, Two Grow Back in Its Place”) the “poem title.” I will refer to each grouping of six poems produced within a single release (indicated by the release number that appears in the banner text) as a series. Finally, I will call the name of each “ending” (for example, “Cats Are Our Friends,” the ending unlocked after the player adds 6 cats to the portrait) the “portrait title.” To illustrate how these terms relate to one another: each “portrait,” is composed of a “series” of 6 “poems.”

Portrait with Wolf as parser poem

The banner text

A parser game’s banner text consists of a title, headline, author, release number, serial number, and compiler letter. It is described in the Inform 7 documentation as “bibliographic masthead text” comparable to the “imprint” or copyright page on the back of a printed book’s title page. It frames the game and marks the player’s entrance into the game world. In the example below, the title is “Portrait with Wolf ^_^”; the headline is “A fun activity <3”; the author is “Drew Cook”; the release number is “I”; the serial number is “12345”; and the compiler letter is “D.”

Portrait with Wolf ^_^

A fun activity <3 by Drew Cook

Release I / Serial number 12345 / Inform 7 v10.x / D

(Series I)

It should be noted however, that the text above is not the “real” banner text. The real banner text (consisting of bibliographic data drawn from the Inform story file) that appears at the very beginning of the game is:

Portrait with Wolf

A rendering by Drew Cook

Release 2 / Serial number 251122 / Inform 7 v10.1.2

Printing “fake” banner text over and over at the beginning of each poem, then, is clearly an intentional artistic choice on the author’s part. On the surface, the repeated banner text frames each poem as a one-move game played over and over again with increasingly dire results. It is a compact, circular form that evokes rumination and feelings of claustrophobia, or perhaps the behavior of a circling predator. Let’s take a closer look at whatʻs happening with some of the individual banner text elements.

The headline in a parser game is typically a short description of the work. In Portrait with Wolf, one of the forms the headline often takes is the medium field that composes an artwork’s gallery wall label text:⁹ “Red ink on parchment” (Series I, Portrait of Protagonist with Wolf),¹⁰ “Blue paint on drop-cloth” (Series II, Portrait of Patient with Wolf), “Red, gray, and brown on painted concrete” (Series V, Portrait of Throw Rug with Wolf) “Duct tape on visqueen” (Series VI, Portrait of Empty Bucket with Wolf ^-^). This makes perfect sense: the headline contains bibliographic information describing the work–in this case, a game about writing poems that become artworks. Accordingly, the artwork being described in the headline continuously mutates, becoming more sinister as the game progresses. Series I’s “Red ink on parchment” could easily describe a page of a medieval manuscript. By the time we get to Series VI’s “Duct tape on visqueen” (visqueen is a type of heavy duty plastic sheeting) the game has become so nightmarish that it’s hard not to imagine a work that resembles a dead body wrapped in plastic.

The author also shapeshifts. In Series I, author “Drew Cook” (Series I, Portrait with Wolf ^_^ ) seems to burrow into themselves like a nesting doll: “Drew “Drew Cook” Cook” (Series I, Portrait with Wolf ^_^ ).¹¹ The author is sometimes described in terms of what they are not: “NOT a WOLF” (Series I, WOLVES); they also go from one to many to one again: “We, Us, You” (Series VIII, Portrait with Wolf).

The serial number would usually be the compilation date in the format YYMMDD. In Portrait with Wolf, the serial numbers sometimes resemble vanity license plates: “WLFLVR” (Series IV, Stop Inviting Wolves Over), “BLLJR” (Series VI, In Joyous Anticipation). They also allude to pop culture and internet slang: “BWEH” (Series II, Tilt-a-Wolf @@), “<.<” (Series III, Portrait of Small Fires with Wolf), “1-800-CALL-NOW” (Series IV, Commemorative Porcelain Wallves), “W4WLF” (Series V, The Portrait We Lost in the Fire).

In a traditional parser game, the banner is a stable visual form containing authoritative metadata about the game. Portrait with Wolf uses this very recognizable form as material to demonstrate that the game and all of its components are malleable–that they are impossible to pin down, as the narrator keeps reminding us. By turns cheeky and menacing, the banner text casts into doubt our most foundational understandings of what we are experiencing.

The room and the easel

The Inform 7 documentation states that, “At its simplest, the interactive fiction will be simulating a physical world to explore.” This is the expectation that many players will enter Portrait with Wolf’s first room with: They will look to the game’s language and mechanics to delineate the world and facilitate exploration. More specifically, they might scan the descriptions trying to identify elements to examine further, objects to manipulate, or exits. Portrait with Wolf’s first room acknowledges and in fact draws attention to these parser mechanics and the associated player expectations.

A Brightly Lit Room

A light shines down from an unknown source. It is so bright that you can barely see anything.

An easel stands under the light. It is a very sturdy and safe place for a bit of portraiture. There are four options:

(Series I, Portrait with Wolf ^_^)

Even without the line break and the change in font weight, the room name (which literally includes the word “room”) is clearly differentiated from its description. The description of the light as it is perceived clearly situates the protagonist in the space. The description of the easel highlights its physical properties: its sturdiness and ability to reflect light. The space, the protagonist, and the object are all clearly–perhaps overly–circumscribed. This quickly begins to shift, however.

A few poems later, the player encounters this room:

Convalescence

The light is as cold as it is bright.

Imagine how cool it would feel on your cheek.

(Series I, I Was Only Trying to Help You)

Here, the room is no longer a room; it is a state: convalescence. This substitution compels the player to consider the ways in which a state might resemble a room. In what ways does convalescence enclose or contain the protagonist? What are its boundaries? Time? Health? In the context of this game and the experiences it describes, does convalescence protect, or does it stifle–or both? The light similarly breaches conventional parser “categories,” leaking from the room description (“The light is as cold as it is bright”) to what was, in previous rooms, the description of the easel (“Imagine how cool it would feel on your cheek”). Indeed, this room does not contain any reference to the easel; the easel is present only as a memory that endures, like a palimpsest, from previous rooms.

Deforming the parser elements–specifically, by substituting something temporal (convalescence) for what should be something spatial (the room), and by allowing descriptions to flow back and forth between containers like “room name” and “room description”–creates poetic moments that surprise, confuse, and delight.

Much later in the game, the player encounters this room:

All Forms of Insurance Accepted

Barely uncomfortable chairs. Photographs of casserole dishes and collectible coins. Fiberboard sheathed in veined, beige Formica. Music through invisible speakers fails to soften a growing menace. A waiting place.

Spread your fingers.

(Series VI, Lupine Splendor)

In this room, which to my mind evokes a doctor’s office waiting room from the 1970s or 1980s, we experience a more extensive fracturing of parser elements. The room name, which we recognize mostly by font weight, is not a name at all; it seems to be text from a sign in the waiting room or from a patient intake form, which has somehow migrated into the spot where the room name should be. “Photographs of casserole dishes and collectible coins” could be a description of the pages of a magazine in the waiting room–perhaps a year-old copy of Tennis or Sunset. This poem reads as though the “examine” text for all of the room’s objects has exploded. And as in the previous example, there is no easel; only the aggressive imperative “Spread your fingers,” with its suggestion of an invasive medical procedure.

Like in the convalescence room, parser elements like room name, room description, and object description fail to contain their text. Boundaries between this room’s elements and previous rooms’ elements are similarly porous. In this way, Portrait with Wolf’s room names and descriptions become “participants in the kinetic of the poem.”¹² The effect on the player is the “dance of the intellect” and play of perceptions that Olson describes.

The command prompt

The command prompt divides each poem in Portrait with Wolf in half. The first half of the poem consists of banner text, room name and description, easel, and choices, followed by the command prompt. At this point, the player chooses one of the four motifs–C, T, B, or A–then presses enter (if they don’t want to choose, they can simply press enter, and a motif will be chosen at random). After the player presses enter, the game responds with the second half of the poem: the action response, epitaph, and prompt to restart.

In this context, the command prompt functions a bit like a caesura: a hard stop between two discrete thoughts, a pause that allows the first half of the poem to “land.” Presenting the entire second half of the poem as a response to the player’s input also establishes a causal relationship between the first and second halves of the poem, and creates a sense of anticipation and surprise.

Letʻs take a look at this poem from Series II:

Everything’s OK! You Are OK!

A delicious and nutritious treat by The County Assessor

Release II / Serial number 12345 / Inform 7 v10.x / D

I hope you aren’t crying again.

Triagery

And now you know. But do you? Is there another secret? The wolf consumed by bear. Bear consumed by a family of tigers. Family consumed by a doom of rats, crashing in waves. Lattices of fungi rustling within a book lung.

Keep your hands off those snacks!

(*C*) satiated cat (times incorporated: 4)

(*T*) tickled turnip

(*B*) buoyant boot

(*A*) assuaged astronaut

>

The first half of this poem is a whirlwind of images and impressions. A headline that evokes advertising copy (“A delicious and nutritious treat”) morphs into the voice of a scolding parent (“I hope you aren’t crying again”). Then, the room name, “Triagery,” introduces the concept of classification; what follows is a dizzying sequence of fauna and fungi that feels a bit like flipping through the pages of a children’s encyclopedia set. The choices themselves, ”satiated cat,” “tickled turnip,” “buoyant boot,” and “assuaged astronaut,” are almost childlike in their nonsensical alliteration. Given the chaos of the first half of the poem, the command prompt feels like a breath, a moment in which the wolves, bears, tigers, rats, and fungi are held, suspended, awaiting the player’s input.

Upon entering “C” at the command prompt, the player sees the following text:

This neighborhood is best in fall. Early Saturdays at Schiller park on a bench near the pond. A cup of black coffee warming your hands. The city is still sleeping it off, and you are alone with a few runners and fewer ducks.

This city: a cool vividness, a printer’s tray of cherishments. A baffling insufficiency.

*** Your Cells Are Oscillating ***

It’s not my fault every time something bad happens to you.

This moment feels quite special to me. The cacophony of the first half of the poem crystalizes so beautifully around a single, peaceful moment. It is a moment of solidity and clarity in the midst of a game that seems to be all about the permeability of categories. The moment is not unlike a treasured curio mounted inside a shadow box–the “printer’s tray of cherishments.”

Similar to montage in film, the “jamming together” of two seemingly unrelated scenes generates tension, conflict, and surprise as the player struggles to identify some logical or narrative throughline. For instance, perhaps, in the second half of the poem, we are witnessing the protagonist as an adult, sitting in the park and reflecting on their childhood. We might consider the placid ducks in the second half of the poem, and contrast them with frenetic bestiary that came before. In addition to inspiring leaps of the imagination, juxtaposing scenes in this way underscores contrasts: the chaos of the first half of the poem, and the serenity of the second. The poem would not be nearly as effective if all of its text were displayed all at once. The command prompt and the play of perceptions it triggers truly animate this poem.

The command prompt in this poem from Series V, while still bifurcating the poem, operates in a slightly different way:

Your Teeth in a Printer’s Tray

A memorable occasion by Maxine Toothtaker

Release V / Serial number TTHTTH / Inform 7 v10.x / D

When you’re having fun, I’ll tell you.

Calcified Pergola

A pinprick of anticipation spearing a dark cloth.

You are a pure acetylene virgin attended by roses.

(*C*) dinner bell

(*T*) reed place-mat

(*B*) flat, long-handled spoon

(*A*) Bakelite flatware (times incorporated: 3)

>

The poem’s title again references the printer’s tray, but this time, instead of holding “cherishments,” it holds things that pierce and tear: teeth. The room name and description and the easel description (which quotes from Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103”) establish a series of contrasts: purity and defilement; the white of the pergola and red of the roses; the smooth surface of the cloth and the pin that pricks it. The choices themselves suggest a kind performative femininity. They are the accoutrements of a gracious midcentury hostess, symbols of the suffocating domesticity that so many of Plath’s narrators rage against.

Upon entering “A” at the command prompt, the player sees the following text:

This is the perforation

you’ve been

waiting for

*** You’re Bleeding All Over Me ***

You are a low fiber food.

In this poem, I see the command prompt functioning as a rupture that permits the first half of the poem to suffuse the second, like spreading blood. Indeed, the second half of the poem begins with an image of perforation, and the epitaph reads “*** You’re Bleeding All Over Me ***”. In this case, the command prompt is a device that reinforces the themes of the poem: puncturing the illusion of perfect femininity and domesticity and casting them instead as something deadly.

The player’s input

This brings us to the player’s input, which encompasses the choices the player makes (i.e., choosing the motifs), as well as the extradiegetic commands like accessing the help menu, reviewing the list of completed portraits, pressing any key to continue, and pressing “R” to begin a new portrait. I will explore both types of input here.

But first, let’s return for a moment to the Inform 7 manual and its description of interactive fiction: “At its simplest, the interactive fiction will be simulating a physical world to explore.” Within this statement, I detect two adversarial impulses. On the one hand, it suggests that the player has the freedom to explore a physical world. On the other, it admits that this world is simulated and therefore rule-bound. A player–especially a novice player–may approach a parser game with the expectation that natural language input will be accepted and free exploration will be permitted, only to have their freedom restricted and their behavior corrected with curt default error messages such as “You can’t see any such thing,” “That’s not a verb I recognize,” or “I only understood as far as wanting to…” This is by no means a “bad” thing. Rather, it suggests that on some level, playing a parser game is a process of negotiating roles and behavior through the enforcement of rules and boundaries. It hints at an underlying tension and eroticism inherent in parser games.

Portrait with Wolf  leans into this power play extremely hard. The act of choosing a motif becomes especially interesting in Series VI, because throughout this series, the narrator directs the player to choose specific motifs. This dynamic may represent consensual power play between adults; it may just as easily represent sexual abuse. In some poems, the narrator merely alludes to the motif they want the player to choose: “Astronaut?” (Series VI, A Tooth-Shaped Sunset), “The wolves are my motif” (Series VI, Portrait of Patient with Wolf). In others, the narrator commands the player to choose a particular motif: “Now be good and choose the cat motif. Go on, do it.” (Series VI, In Joyous Anticipation), “I want a dirty turnip now.” (Series VI, I Know This Is Your Favorite Part). In this way, the player’s choice can represent either provocation or submission, both of which affect the dynamism and energy of the poem.

Let’s consider this example:

The Velveteen Bible

An affordable softness by Some Action

Release VI / Serial number AHHHHH / Inform 7 v10.x / :}

Boot. Take the boot.

Basement

This room has grown smaller, and so have you.

A way for you to tell which way is up.

(*C*) don’t stop now (times incorporated: 1)

(*T*) don’t. don’t stop

(*B*) now, yes, now

(*A*) don’t stop, not now (times incorporated: 1)

>

The references to velveteen, affordability, and “some action,” give the poem a kind of tawdry Boogie Nights vibe. Right away, the narrator makes their desires clear: “Boot. Take the boot.” The sexualized nature of the choices, all imperatives, implicates the player in this exchange. Among the choices, B (“now, yes, now”) stands out as different from all the others. This is clearly the choice the narrator wants the player to make. In this climactic moment, the player’s keystrokes become almost like literal strokes. Upon entering “B” at the command prompt, the player sees the following text:

>b

I want to see you

where the action is

*** Lower ***

Keep up.

By choosing the boot motif, the player has chosen to submit to the narrator’s wishes. In the second half of the poem, the white space very effectively reinforces the dynamic between player and narrator: In order to read the epitaph, “*** Lower ***” the player must literally lower their gaze in obedience.

If the player obeys the narrator throughout Series VI, they produce a portrait titled “Who’s Been a Good Little Duck,” unlocking Series VII. In this series, the player must again follow the narrator’s instructions in order to complete the portrait “You Know What Happens to Willful Children,” unlocking the final series and the game’s true ending.

In Series I through V, there are no narrator directives present. However, this doesn’t mean that the player is free to choose whichever motifs they wish. As in Series VI and VII, there are rules that govern the choices of motifs. Let’s take a look at the list of completed portraits that appears early in the game, after the player unlocks the default ending:

Underfutured ^_^

Cats Are Our Friends —

Eat Your Vegetables —

Can You Run in Those Boots —

Space Is For Real —

[Hidden] —

[Hidden] —

[An Impossibility] —

The smiling emoticon indicates that the player has completed the portrait titled “Underfutured.” The titles of the other possible portraits, with their references to cats, vegetables, boots, and space, suggest that in order to advance, the player will need to create portraits made exclusively of each of the four motifs. If, in Series II, the player chooses a different selection of two or more motifs, they will simply achieve the default ending again. The game will not let the player progress from Series II to Series III unless they create a portrait consisting exclusively of cats, turnips, boots, or astronauts. And only by finishing the first five portraits can the player advance to Series VI, which appears in the list above as “[Hidden].” In this way, Portrait with Wolf gates the player’s progress until they have solved a very light puzzle, both of which are conventions in parser games, among many other types of games.

So what does the player’s input mean in Series I to V? Rather than choosing motifs based on poetic alignment with the text, the player is, in a way, simply “button mashing” or “grinding.” In most instances, in fact, the player must actively reject the poetic connection in order to “complete the stage.” Consider this poem from Series II:

Portrait of Patient with Wolf

Blue paint on drop-cloth by Lou Puzz

Release II / Serial number 240731 / Inform 7 v10.x / D

The wolves were just a creative risk! There were never more than two of them of them 0:3

Partially-Filled Room

This light, here, and the places without light, here.

Get down and smell the metal.

(*C*) cuddly cat picture (times incorporated: 5)

(*T*) turnip fritter photo

(*B*) boot, screen-scraped

(*A*) iron-on astronaut

As I was reading the banner text, room name and description, and easel text, I thought about the vacuum of space, about the Earth, and about wolves multiplying in the darkness; I thought about frozen metal; I remembered reading once that the moon smelled like gunpowder: I wanted to choose the astronaut. But because I had already chosen the cat 5 times, I needed to choose the cat again in order to complete the portrait “Cats Are Our Friends.” Whereas in Series VI and VII, the player’s input foregrounds themes of compliance and control, the player’s input in Series I through V seems to foreground the tension between creation and empty grinding. In the context of the game, perhaps this grinding is meant to evoke depression, or an inability to meaningfully engage with the world.

Choosing a motif to incorporate into a portrait is not the only opportunity for player input. After the action response, epitaph, and prompt to restart, the player must press any key to restart and add another motif to the portrait. After a portrait is completed, the player must press “R” to begin another portrait. The player can type “ENDINGS” or “E” to see a list of the completed portraits, or type “GUIDE” to review the instructions and explore post-game content. The player can also type “QUIT” at any point to (attempt to) exit the game. Here’s what happens when the player tries to quit:

>quit

You don’t really want to go, do you?

Well? Come on, speak up.

> y

You can’t quit this, me, or us. We’re not done with you. Yet.

Are you sure you want to quit?

y

What makes this moment feel especially harrowing is how it toys with interactive fiction’s triangle of identities. Quitting a game is typically an extradiegetic command in parser games, a transaction between the player and the narrator. But in Portrait with Wolf, the inability to truly escape the eponymous wolf is a central theme. So in this case, when the narrator says “You can’t quit this, me, or us. We’re not done with you,”–the language of an abuser–they seem to be speaking to both the player and the protagonist. The player must struggle to shed the identity of the protagonist and truly extricate themselves from the game. In this context, complicating the triangle of identities also raises troubling questions about the player’s continued participation in the game. Does continuing to play the game suggest the player is somehow consenting to their own (and the protagonist’s) abuse? Is engagement the same as consent? Either way, manipulating the game’s material (in this case, responses to the “QUIT” command), generates tension and heightens the peril the player feels in this moment.

The epitaph and prompt to restart

The epitaph is typographically indicated by three asterisks and a space that brackets the text. It often–but not always–signals the end of a parser game. In Zork and Anchorhead, the epitaph is “*** You have died. ***” In Galatea, the epitaph is “*** The end. ***” In Midnight, Swordfight, the epitaph is “*** Curtain. ***” In many parser games, the epitaph is kind of like a portal, a moment in which the player transitions from inhabiting the identity of the protagonist to becoming fully the player again. When the player reads the epitaph, they have one foot inside the game world and one foot outside it. The epitaph is often followed by an extradiegetic prompt that asks the player whether they would like to undo, restore, restart, or quit. These commands only make sense outside the game world. In this way, the prompt to restart repositions the player firmly “outside” the game again, marking the end of the transition from protagonist back to player. Portrait with Wolf, however, is a game defined by the instability of categories, and it features a narrator who relishes disorienting both protagonist and player. It is no surprise, then, that the epitaph and prompt to restart do not permit an easy escape. Consider the following:

*** Is That Your Blood ***

Let’s just finish this first.

(Series II, Some Wolving Required, C)

 

*** You Are Mostly Safe ***

We’re just getting started.

(Series III, There’s a Fang in My Soda, T)

In both of these examples, the narrator refers to themselves and the player in the first person plural. The triangle of identities has been compressed into a “line” of identities, pitting the player and narrator against the protagonist. This is very far from the tidy transformation from protagonist to player that we expect to experience when reaching an ending in a parser game. Not only is the player still inside the game world; they now seem to be implicated in the narrator’s abuse of the protagonist.

There is another epitaph that I’d like to explore further:

*** Portrait of Protagonist with Wolf ***

(Series VIII, Portrait with Wolf, C)

This is the epitaph that appears at the conclusion of Series VIII, the final series. The title of this last poem, “Portrait with Wolf,” is transformed in the epitaph into “Portrait of Protagonist with Wolf.” This was a powerful moment for me, because the entire game has been building up to it. In this final portrait, the protagonist materializes like a specter in a spirit photograph.

While powerful, it is not an altogether unexpected ending. Throughout the game, there are continual references to fixing the protagonist in place: “The easel might be a good place for a Caring Person to pin you, like a bug, and Keep You Out of Trouble” (Series I, WOLVES); “You’re such a cute little bug! I want to pin you to this easel” (Series II, Some Wolving Required). This final epitaph fixes the protagonist in the portrait, forever, with the wolf. For the protagonist, there is ultimately no escaping the game.

Conclusion

What I think sets Portrait with Wolf apart from other poetic games like The Space Under the Window is the degree to which it relies on deforming and experimenting with parser elements in order to make meaning, manipulate player expectations, and modulate perceptions. Portrait with Wolf’s poetics are, in other words, completely inseparable from its medium, the parser game. It is a work that can only exist as a parser poem. If I were to hazard a definition of a parser poem, then, it might be (cribbing from both Olson and Magnuson) a poem that uses parser mechanics as material in order to modulate energy and perception.

What might future parser poems look like? Cook offers these suggestions on their Top Expert blog:

• Get rid of the header and fake final question stuff, and make a traditional linear narrative instead.
• Introduce more complex state tracking and use conditional texts or even complex “to say” definitions to make a more sophisticated choice game.
• Make a personality quiz.

I would add the following:

• Charles Olson hints at the potential of projective verse to convey epic works like those of Homer. Write an epic as a parser poem.
• Write a parser poem that is non-representational–that is, a parser poem that conveys emotions not through poetic language and imagery, but solely through playing and experimenting with parser mechanics.
• Write a parser poem that can be read as Inform code.
• Write a parser poem that can be read “against” its code–that is, a parser poem in which the “meaning” of the code and the “meaning” of gameplay are in opposition to each other.

Image credit: Callie Smith

1 Disclosure: I did two rounds of testing for Portrait with Wolf.

2 This article is based on Release 2 of the game (November 22, 2025), hosted on itch.io.

3 Throughout this article, I will be using the terms “player,” “protagonist,” and “narrator” as they are defined by Graham Nelson in The Inform Designer’s Manual, fourth edition. See also the ifwiki article “Triangle of identities.”

4 See also the reviews on IFDB and on the intfiction.org forum.

5 Montfort, Nick, “Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction” in The IF Theory Reader, ed. Kevin Jackson Mead and J. Robinson Wheeler (Boston, MA: > Transcript On Press, 2011), 29-30. See also Montfort, Nick, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The MIT Press), 13.

6 Olson, “Projective Verse.”

7 Magnuson, Jordan, Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2023), 104.

8 Ibid., 100.

9 In museums, basic wall label text is often called “tombstone text.” In the case of PwW, alluding to tombstone text in the banner mirrors the epitaph that concludes each poem.

10 When citing text within the game I will follow the convention “Series, Title, Choice (if applicable).” This citation method was developed in consultation with Cook.

11 In my playthroughs, both the first and second poems in Series I were titled “Portrait with Wolf ^_^”.

12 Olson, “Projective Verse.”

(Continued from my previous posts about the game.)

Progress, but not quite as much as I’d like. Still, I think I’m one or two posts away from the end.

The most immediate thing I solved — roughly five minutes after making my last post — came from one last re-read of the fairy looking for their glasses.

I realized that it might not be a tiara or hat on the fairy’s head (as my brain was originally interpreting), but rather the glasses themselves (especially since the game already had the “hidden in sight” puzzle with the lockpick). It took a little fussing to actually work out what to do, though, since you can’t just GET them (the game does politely say you’re on the right track). HELP gives the majority of the verbs that are available, though.

GET, PUT, MOVE, OPEN, CLOSE, USE, OFFER, READ, TALK, GO, WAIT, CLIMB, LOOK, INV, OR A DIRECTION

(Not all of them – you can LIGHT CANDLESTICK back at the magician’s room.) I was trying to do POINT and SHOW and so forth but consulting the list the only thing that seemed like it might work was MOVE.

It’s wildly unusual at this point in gaming history to have a puzzle like this; most of our graphics up to 1982 have been too squiggly (even some of the games with very good art, like Lucifer’s Realm, did not have their art done in 1982; it was added later). Even then it took some squinting and a leap of faith because of the pixel size but at least it gets very directly mentioned in the text.

Unfortunately, the effect here has not led me to solving any new puzzles. This gives access to USE COLOR (which incidentally took some noodling to figure out — even with a mostly-complete verb list it’s not always easy to work out how to communicate things, and it’s still not clear what action the player is doing to cast the spell). This causes the screen to change color briefly before returning to normal, but I have tested it in over half of the rooms in the game with no effect. There is no textual message given, and I wonder if it’s meant to find something hidden.

Before leaving the fairy, I should mention I was misinterpreting another part of the image. There’s a door in the back but I thought it was simply the way we entered in on (the room only vaguely looks like the bottom of a well, so I thought there was some extra step being implicitly taken by going down, and you can easily go back up again). However, you can OPEN DOOR and find yourself on the other side of the hill. So that issue is resolved.

Nearby all that is the inn, and I misinterpreted yet another image.

I thought that was a door behind the bull, and it represented the way back into the inn. It does not: it’s a passage to the outside, through the back of the Inn, leading to a brand-new area. Mind you, not one that I have gotten too far into yet, but some screenshots to explain:

Putting together the clues from before, I need the ring and the sign language to communicate with the man in the Forest, who will then take me through the Fog here to the fifth and final mirror shard. So it likely should be saved for later.

Speaking of saving things for later, my suspicion on the tavern where supposedly we can learn sign language (but our stuff gets stolen instead)…

…is that this gets saved for last. That is, I need all four other mirror shards, and something will happen in the tavern which will allow a scene to go forward. I suspect this because the hint talks about Brother Jon only showing up “rarely”.

With that set aside, one last piece of progress is I took every single available item over to be appraised and found that the ones that work as bribes are not obvious treasures. Specifically, of the items I have…

AX, ROPE, BONES, CANDLESTICK, JUG, BROOM, LOCKPICK, COAT, SHOVEL, RING

…the AX, JUG and BROOM are all valued as bribes. I’m particularly surprised about the broom, since it was just taken from a room in the castle; the AX seems like a utility item, but now almost certainly not. Unless I’m far off base, anything that counts as a bribe does not otherwise get used as an item for puzzle-solving. This means the rope, bones, and coat are the only items left where I’m completely unsure as to where they go (I haven’t applied the ring yet, but the game hints amply where it will show up later).

I decided next to do a big push on the tower; while the person inside laughs if you TALK, the face also “beckons” you if you do LOOK. I decided this had to be the missing witch. Given you can see the tower from the outside, I wondered if you could enter from the outside, given there were two holes in the bushes just outside the tower.

Further experimentation (especially considering the verb CLIMB on the help-list) led me to realize that climb was being recognized in that room, I just needed extra conditions, or more specifically a ladder. (The noun LADDER is recognized.) We’ve already seen a ladder, though!

It is not obvious in the slightest from the picture that you can just rip the ladder right off the well — I would think it was mounted — but you can just take it, and then PUT it at the castle.

This doesn’t quite let you go high enough, but I also had a rope I hadn’t used yet, so:

Finally the witch!

The witch requests bones and the shadow of a child. The bones were easy (I was already holding them freshly dug from the graveyard) but I still don’t have the shadow. The vase that holds shadows was hinted at by the fortune-teller, but I still don’t know where to find it; I do know if you are at the hovel which has a child in the picture, you can try to GET SHADOW and it says you don’t have the right container for it.

One last bit of progress, kind of: on the south side of the town there is a barrel in the picture (not mentioned in the room description, just shown in the picture). I found I could MOVE BARREL and get the top off, and even GO BARREL afterwards.

The problem is that the barrel is dark. LIGHT CANDLESTICK (like I did at the magician) says something about lighting it at the nearest fire, so I went and tried to light it at the alchemist, and the baker, and the glassblower, and the blacksmith, and in all cases it said it didn’t understand the command LIGHT CANDLESTICK. I could go all the way to the magician and light the candlestick but it apparently is unlit by the time you walk over to the barrel. So I’m not clear what to do here.

Just for an open-problem update:

a.) finding the vase that holds shadows

b.) figuring out the barrel

c.) chocolate moose ingredient for the bakery to get the cookie

d.) figuring out where to use the color spell (this may only apply at the endgame)

This is a much shorter list than before which is why (despite me still only being a two pieces of the mirror) I suspect I’m winding closer to the end, at least closer to the point where I’ll be able to enter the endgame.

Not a Monty Python reference (unless you really want one), but rather: it's still spring (barely) and here's some games that surprised me. They popped up suddenly out of nowhere; I hadn't heard much about them; I enjoyed 'em.

(Okay, 7th Guest was announced a couple of months ago, and in fact has existed for three years in VR. Still, in the span of 1993 to now, that's sudden.)

Have some brief commentary, plus one design rumination.

• The Archives of Trevosa
• Hypogea
• The 7th Guest Remake (2023)

---

The Archives of Trevosa

• by Jamwitch -- web game

A free browser-based mini-Roottrees-like. Pin down the names and titles of thirty members of the royal family of Trevosa. The gimmick: all of their documents use Trevosan terms for familial relations. (Not to mention clans, animals, and so on.) It's not a full conlang but you have to figure out the words relevant to the family tree. To the Archives!

It took me a bit to internalize the setup. You can only search the Archives for Trevosan words and names. The search shows at most three documents at a time (hey, a Her Story-like too!) so you can't just flail; you have to focus on specifically-relevant terms. On the flip side, the list of documents that you've found is not so limited. There, you can search for English words and browse any number of matching results.

The game uses the now-standard "lock three correct guesses" mechanic. With only two blanks to fill in per person, you can probably brute-force anything you get really stuck on. But the clues are all fair and reasonably findable.

This only took me a couple of hours and I enjoyed the time. As with all these database-searching games, everybody's path through will be different. But at least in my case, the pacing was really good. By the time I hit 100% of documents found, I had 90% of the names filled in, and I was cackling over my answer to the bonus question: "Who are these people and what has kept their kingdom secret?"

Hypogea

• by Charlie Wagner -- game site

A sweet little nonverbal-narrative platformer. You're an acrobatic robot with a staff. You and a companion bot make your way through the ruins of an underground megastructure. Other friendly mechanical beings help you along the way.

The game is focused on the traversal puzzles rather than physical reflexes. You need some button skills. (Run towards edge, pole vault, jump, swing on hook, catch chain...) But the timing is generous and "push X to snag with staff" usually saves your ass. Mostly you're looking around to see where you can go, then deciding what moves will get you there. And feeling like a ninja while you do it.

No, not a ninja. Nonviolent game. Feeling like a robot monk, then.

The environments are rusty-industrial-ruin, which isn't my favorite genre of megastructure. But it does feature wonderfully vast depths and heights. Towers of collapsed machinery, cables trailing into misty-dark chasms. As long as I'm the robot-guy scaling the scenery, I have no complaint.

It occurs to me that the Steam page's key art uses a rough painterly style which I liked a lot more than the game's PS2-era lo-fi-lo-poly. Could the whole game have been done up with, I dunno, shaders? Well, the dev ran solo; I'm sure he scoped to what he could ship. No argument there. The lighting is excellent, regardless.

The machine-people you meet are beautifully animated and expressive. I wasn't so into the human prehistory, which you glimpse through brief recorded recollections. Those meat people looked like jerks. I would rather have had more about the robot times. Ah well.

Short, excellently designed. Well worth your time.

The 7th Guest Remake (2023)

• by Vertigo Games -- game site

I never played The 7th Guest. It was a big title in the 90s when I was excited about all sorts of Mac CD-ROM games. I somehow never got to it. Did I hear through the (Usenet) grapevine that the puzzles were bad? Maybe I was just lazy. I can't remember.

The puzzles were terrible. See Jimmy Maher's writeup. One of my Usenet compatriots made this comment, which was a popular sig-file quote for a while:

I mean, what the hell kind of villain thwarts the hero's              
progress with soup cans in the kitchen pantry?                        
  --Russ Bryan 

So when I heard there was a modern remake, I said: As long as they rewrite all the puzzles from scratch. And they did!

In fact I was behind the times. This 7th Guest Remake was a VR remake a few years ago. I paid no attention because I'm not interested in VR. Happily, the developers then decided to make the jump to regular flatscreen PC. I shall hope others follow suit.

(To be clear: this is the same game as the 2023 VR release. Same design, same graphics, same puzzles. Only the controls have been updated. So I'm referring to it as The 7th Guest Remake (2023), even though the Steam release is dated 2026. And even though "Reboot" or "Reimagining" would be more accurate.) (There was a literal remake in 2019, for some reason, but this isn't that.)

Really, you can tell this is a VR-native game. The core interactions are:

• You walk around an awesomely detailed creepy house.
• Spectral people appear and perform little scenes. You can walk around or even through them, but not interact.
• You can pick up any piece of scenery and numbly rotate it in space, but you can't do anything with it. Then you drop it -- doesn't matter where; it zaps back to where it belongs.
• Solve puzzles, but all the elements are selected with d-pad or arrow keys, not mouse.
• Swirls of spectral energy fly impressively around the room or turn into butterflies and flutter around.

In short, everything is visual and all around you, but there's no tangible interaction. Because you're waving a pair of plastic wands! (With d-pads on them.) No fine manipulation at all. It's the exact opposite of Myst's native mouse-focus or The Room's native finger-touch interaction.

(The one exception is a theremin puzzle, which is of course the perfect "wave your clunky hand extensions in space" interface. I suspect they simplified that one for mouse control.)

None of this is a complaint! It's just a distinctly weird experience after 35 flippin' years of "normal" (mouse-centric) graphical adventures. It took me a while to peg it as "Oh, VR controls!" and then it all made sense.

I don't have much to say about the puzzles. I'm sorry about that! They're most of the game. They're competent. They are, if not completely original, at least creative takes on stock ideas. Almost every puzzle is a notch easier than it could have been. I completely understand; the hardcore puzzle nerds were never going to show up for this party. But it means that the difficulty ranges from "took a bit of thought" down to "there were only three moves and I did them and that was it".

On top of that, there's free hints and nearly-free puzzle bypass tokens. You have to hunt around for the tokens, which is of course fun, but you'll find plenty.

As for the story, they kept the bones of the original plot. (I flipped through a video walkthrough of the original game to compare.) Same setup; some of the same dialogue even. They added quite a bit of new stuff to make the story flow better. They punched up the struggle between the six guests as the backbone of the plot. They added a bunch more backstory for evil old Henry Stauf. The narrative decisions are all reasonable. Again, it's competent work. But not compelling.

You'd think that in a game called The 7th Guest, there would be a story arc where the six guests realize that there is a seventh guest -- but who? Dramatic tension! But no. Some kid wanders in, and then at some point everybody is chasing the kid around, and that's the story.

The actors are fun to watch, sure. The original 1993 game was famously shot in a two-day rush with no-name community actors. How do you play a nostalgic remake of terrible acting? You can't make it good; fans would complain! The solution seems to be to find talented actors and tell them to ham it to the nines. That way everybody is in on the joke.

It's the overall shape that's missing. Stauf tells everybody that his house is full of clues about what to do. The house is not in fact full of clues. Buddy, I have been in a house full of clues, and this is not it. This is a house full of puzzles, but there is no metapuzzle. No surprise meanings or hidden patterns. The puzzles are purely a gating mechanism: solve all the puzzles in this chapter's room, and the next chapter unlocks.

There's exactly one puzzle where you're supposed to think about the story and the clues from elsewhere in the house... and then the game doesn't make you do that. You can ignore the story clues and solve it based on mechanical feedback.

The designers added a big climactic challenge, which I gather the original game lacked. But it's not dramatic either. It's not presented as you staking your life or taking a stand. It exists so that Stauf has a way to lose and thus get his comeuppance. It's not even a puzzle; it's a board game. You play Parcheesi against the forces of darkness. Stauf says he won't explain the rules, but you get an abundance of hints, and then winning is straightforward. It's just a slog.

I think the designers took the premise of The 7th Guest for granted. They didn't do the work to sell it to players in the game.

So: a perfectly good lightweight puzzle game, and the environment is wonderfully rendered. I loved poking around in all the corners. (The obligatory magic-lens-or-lantern is used to excellent effect.) But it's not a must-play unless the original is a hallowed creepy memory of your youth.

I will put in a rec for Jonathan van den Wijngaarden's soundtrack, though. It's a sweet blend of eerie ambience and mellow jazz themes. Appropriate for a game entirely populated by Jazz Age ghosts! And of course it's headlined by the classic theme from the original soundtrack. Props for getting George "The Fat Man" Sanger back as a performer.

Happy Pride! Choice of Games is proud to be gender-inclusive and LGBTQ+-affirming all year round, but during the month of June, we’re featuring writers whose work connects especially closely with those themes.

Today we’re sitting down with Evan Peterson, author of Drag Star! and Posthuman: Guardians vs PSION.

Your game Drag Star! (gotta remember that exclamation point!) was both hilarious and impressive in its attention to detail about drag culture. What’s something that someone outside the drag world should know about it that they might not?

It’s an art form found throughout history and around the globe. It is nothing new; what we see on television is just the latest iteration. To some cultures, it was and is a sacred practice of transcending the physical body. To others, it was a high art form that created spaces for queer and trans people to meet and explore. It’s always been messy, it’s always made people uncomfortable, and it’s always been fun. It’s only now that we have the media technology to prove that drag is truly global. Every culture tells stories, every culture makes and wears costumes, and every culture dances and makes music. And most cultures have drag. It’s a human practice, a human art.

Outside of your interactive fiction, you’ve got a truly extraordinary range as a writer, encompassing both nonfiction and fiction in all genres. Your award-winning novel, Better Living Through Alchemy, is a perfect example of that range: a noir detective story with supernatural elements. What drew you to the detective genre? How did your addition of magic affect the way you wrote the mystery?

Thank you! I would say it’s the addition of the mystery that affected the way I wrote the magic! I had the idea for the climax, the big reveal, before any of the rest of the content of Better Living. I imagined an investigator breaking into a seedy lab and finding the shocking, supernatural source from which a certain recreational substance is harvested. My inspiration was the magical substance and the captive bodies undergoing occult experimentation, and the mystery itself was incidental to that. My favorite mysteries and thrillers are often not really “Whodunits,” but rather they ask questions about where and what is the murder weapon, where are captives being held, etc. But now I write mysteries, evidently. Drag Star! and Posthuman both include major mystery subplots, which give players more competing goal paths and more narrative intrigue.

On the nonfiction side, you’ve done a lot of commentary about queerness in the horror genre, especially classic horror writers like William S. Burroughs and Clive Barker. Who are some of your favorite current horror writers who incorporate queer elements into their work?

How much space have we got? I’ve been on a big Hailey Piper kick this year. She’s the trans lesbian horror punk we’ve been waiting for (The Worm and His Kings made me swoon). But so is Hiron Ennes, whose newest book is The Works of Vermin, which I adore. Nadia Bulkin and Priya Sharma have never published a boring story in their lives, and I’ll read anything they write. I also enjoy Sarah Gailey’s Spread Me and John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build A Nest In.

We’re asking all of our authors this: How has your representation of LGBTQ+ themes in your writing evolved over the course of your career?

The more I learn about how the world really works, the more I want to disrupt injustice. Representation and inclusion are really low bars to clear. A truly diverse cast is an absolute minimum; I’m acknowledging that people exist. How revolutionary. From there, I can actually do some good and imagine a world that’s kinder and more just than our own. I enjoy busting monoliths and disrupting the comfort of people with too much power over others. A character like Vogue, a Black trans woman, went from supporting cast to team leader as the story of Posthuman evolved. It was natural progress for her character. Her powers make her the most fit to lead, so she does.

Intersectional representation is also essential to me now. Disabled people are queer too, and vice versa; many writers are afraid to explore what that actually looks like. And I try to write the world I see around me, which is more than a cast of seven archetypes.

Finally: how are you celebrating Pride this year?

I’ll probably go see some queer art and make some donations to causes I care about, but mostly stay home with my husband and our dog. One night of a raucous dance party is certainly on the agenda.

Pride isn’t just for a month! All year, we work to bring you games that offer a diverse and expansive view of love, family, and identity. But we’ll take any excuse to celebrate, and so we’re putting games on sale every week of June that showcase and explore that diversity, and we’re featuring interviews with the authors of those games.

This week, we’re featuring two games by Evan Peterson. Drag Star! is now free! And Posthuman: Guardians vs PSION is 30% off until June 15th!

Posthuman: Guardians vs PSION — Choose from 20+ distinct superpowers to battle evil!
Drag Star! (40% off on Steam; free on all other platforms)— Slay the catwalk on TV’s hottest drag competition!

The pangs of nostalgia.

This is not your daddy’s Infocom

While it has pained me to say so, 1987 Infocom was a company in decline. I mean this is both artistic and commercial senses. Infocom’s best years in terms of revenue became more and more distant. Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which preceded Hollywood Hijinx, would prove to be their last certified “gold” game.

While I do not wish to disparage anyone’s personal favorite, Infocom would release only one more great, groundbreaking game: 1987’s Plundered Hearts. The rest are not all “bad,” of course, but we must concede that Infocom was no longer a driving force in the evolution of narrative games. Let’s not argue about Beyond Zork today: it will get its own series in due time. Even if one does believe that Beyond Zork represents an important moment in the history of narrative games, the difference between ten out of twelve and eleven out of twelve does not meaningfully change the character of Infocom’s final two years. Playing Infocom games had become a nostalgic experience, a remembrance.

Unlike Infocom, Sierra had diversified, publishing games from other studios, including historic titles like Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress. A shortcoming of Infocom’s leadership was that many members almost certainly did not keep up with the wider world of video games. These were businesspersons and computer science professionals that did not understand the shifting realities of the market. It isn’t even clear how many implementers played computer games.

A shortcoming of Infocom’s board was that, is that many members almost certainly did not understand the wider world of video games.

Infocom’s reliance on the Z-Machine, which once afforded considerable market advantages became limiting as microcomputer diversity diminished. The Z-machine additionally hindered Infocom’s ability to port advanced graphical and audio features across platforms.

The most common narrative regarding the downfall of Infocom centers not only failed business project Cornerstone but also the mistaken priorities of Infocom’s leadership. We will return to that theory at the conclusion of the Gold Machine project, but for now it must be said that Cornerstone or not, a non-trivial number of players were buying games published elsewhere for reasons that Infocom was slow in addressing.

We all like a good parser game. Were that untrue, I wouldn’t have written this essay, and you wouldn’t be reading it! However, a critic must bear in mind that these games were made for a 1980s audience by a 1980s company. The arc of Infocom’s fortunes matters. The interests of customers matter. Bearing these factors in mind, the nostalgic nature of Hollywood Hijinx shines through. Emily Short characterizes it as “solidly entertaining entry in the basic genre of Treasure Hunt in a Relative’s Weird, Puzzle-trapped House.” Elsewhere, Jimmy Maher attempts to put a brave face on things: “…while his game is far from the best of the pack, Hollywood Dave Anderson is one of the vanishingly small number of people on the planet who can hold up an Infocom box with his name on the cover.”

We all like a good parser game. Were that untrue, I wouldn’t have written this essay, and you wouldn’t be reading it!

The worldbuilding (a tribute to b-movies across the decades), the mechanics (widget-centered treasure hunt), and the general background radiation (the Infocom equivalent of The Beatles’s “Get Back”) all recall better days. If this assessment sounds condescending and pat, then I have failed to cast my feelings into words. Hollywood Hijinx is a work that knows what it is, who it is for, and where it comes from. While it is not thematically rich in the way Zork is, it revels in Zork‘s legacy in the way Zork once paid tribute to Adventure.

Further Thoughts

As I mentioned in my introduction to Hollywood Hijinx, it makes sense to discuss it in terms of its historical conditions of production. Yes, Infocom’s diminishing prospects evoke nostalgic pains. We see that in its puzzles, setting, and worldbuilding. The Tinsel World magazine, with its black-and-white photos often feels, rhetorically, like something from an earlier age. A photo of 1980s action hero Buck Palace looks like one of a young Elvis Presley. The entire production, game and feelies both, connotes sentimental cheese from previous decades.

Mechanically, Hollywood Hijinx recalls the untroubled early years of Infocom. Perhaps its most notable example of this mood is an astoundingly large hedge maze of the sort that many players had come to loathe. A previous post discusses its play experience. Here, I draw attention to the fact of its existence. The maze is a throwback, or at least it feels like one. What seems like a “good old fashioned maze” is, in fact, not like Infocom’s older mazes, which usually involved interesting gimmicks rather than exhaustive mapping. Even Zork I‘s maze, which may boast Infocom’s lowest enjoyment-to-effort ratio, had a thief that interfered with our attempts at breadcrumbing through it. Nevertheless, the hedge maze feels like a relic of yesteryear. Whether such impressions are instances of the Mandela effect or not, they represent the subjective experiences of many players.

Regarding Hollywood Dave Anderson

But what of its author, Hollywood Dave Anderson? Jimmy Maher’s treatment of Hollywood Hijinx is, in significant part, about Anderson’s important role in creating and sustaining the corporate culture of Infocom in its best days. Only Steve Meretzky enjoys a similar place in the hearts of critics and historians. Anderson is first mentioned in Infocom’s company newsletter in issue 3.2, where he is credited as a “non-contributing editor.” Issue 3.3 features an article about Infocom’s softball league, which was organized by Anderson.

Among the heroic on the team was “Hollywood” Dave Anderson, product testing supervisor, who found more holes in the opponents’ defense than in the first version of Seastalker. HDA’s dress code (Hawaiian shirts five days a week) determined the team uniform, but his reputation as a swinger also applied to his batting, as he again took the Babe Flathead Award for the second straight season, with five homeruns.

Issue 4.3 contains an interactive fiction “transcript” about softball with Anderson as a “player.”

>WHO AM I?
You are “Hollywood” Dave Anderson, HDA for short, which you’re not. No, you tower over most trolls and second basemen. And, forsooth, you have a not undeserved reputation as a slugger, be it leaning over a bar or leaning over home plate. For the moment it’s the latter: You’re the batter. But this time something goes awry. Maybe it was the too-poor grip on the bat. Maybe it was a too-firm grip on the beer can. You sent a lil’ nubber up along the third base line. First base is northeast of here, and you can see the ice chest to the east.
Ok, Hollywood, what do you want to do now?

Looking back as we do, it must be said: recalling Anderson’s exploits is nostalgic by nature, as it is impossible to separate him from Infocom’s character which was, in many senses, gaming’s Avalon.

Conclusions

Reading back over this series, I find myself feeling sentimental. Could Infocom, in some other timeline, stayed ahead of the market’s curve? Infocom was filled with smart, capable people. What might have they done with Sierra’s board? It is hard to guess, but whatever the truth might be, Infocom had for a time an extraordinary corporate culture and fantastic QA and creative teams. Hollywood Hijinx, perhaps more than another Infocom game, is a reflection of its author’s place within Infocom. It is funny, likable, and filled with the sorts of puzzles that brought so many early players through the door. It is, if this makes sense, Infocom’s most Infocom game.

Hollywood Hijinx, perhaps more than another Infocom game, is a reflection of its author’s place within Infocom.

While this project has granted me many new insights, my general assessments of individual Infocom games have not changed much. I do not like, for instance, The Witness more than I once did. Sorcerer, Trinity, and Hollywood Hijinx are notable exceptions, as returning to those games did evoke new reactions and feelings in me. In this last case, my assessment is more positive than it once was. It is hard to fault an Infocom game for looking back in 1987, just as we look back, here, today. I like it as a critic more than I do as a player, but puzzle hounds will likely enjoy returning for one more treasure hunt.

A note: Liz Cyr-Jones is credited with creating the initial concept for Hollywood Hijinx.

Next

What happens when Steve Meretzky isn’t there to save a Douglas Adams game from development hell?

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Usually if you choose the longest dialog option, that’s the best option.

— Chris Avellone

Quite some years ago now, I briefly interviewed Brian Fargo about Interplay’s 1988 adaptation of the William Gibson novel Neuromancer. He was plainly busy and a little distracted with more modern game-development matters — this was in the midst of the Kickstarter-funded Wasteland revivals — but he was helpful and friendly enough during the half-hour or so that I spoke to him. Toward the end of our conversation, he mentioned that he had a box full of papers from his Interplay days gathering dust in a filing cabinet in his home office. Upon hearing this, I leapt immediately to make a pitch for my archivist friends at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. And lo and behold, a Brian Fargo collection showed up at the Strong within a year or so. I don’t know whether these two events are related, but I like to think that they are.

Regardless, the next time I made it up to the Strong, I naturally made it a point to go through the collection. And it was there, amidst a mishmash of other documents spanning the nearly twenty years that Fargo spent running Interplay, that I first stumbled upon the original pitch document for Planescape: Torment, the one that crossed his desk in June of 1997 and led to the project being formally green-lit. I found this document rather shocking at the time, in that its tone was so totally out of keeping with the hallowed reputation which the game had long enjoyed even then as the most credible claimant to the status of true Interactive Art that the CRPG genre has ever produced. Much of this pitch, by contrast, seemed to have been written by Joe Lieberman’s most stereotypical nightmare: by a sadistic, DOOM-addled teenager who turned it out in between dry-humping everything around him with an even vaguely feminine shape.

No more using boring swords, daggers, or bows to carve bloody swaths through opponents. Plunge scalpels into foes’ eyes, lace their food with poisonous embalming fluid, push them into man-eating pockets of ooze, sic them with sarcastic biting skulls, hurl them into razorvines, conjure burrowing rot grubs within a victim’s brain, cast spells that make them bleed from every orifice, or change a person’s scent so they attract packs of hungry rats. Deliver punishment in ways that will bring a smile to your face.

“Fireball” can go hide in the fucking corner when you unleash your arsenal. Jam your hand into an opponent’s body, rip out his soul, and tell it to kill its owner. Make a gesture and summon a blanket of crawling, biting insects to turn your enemy into a Happy Meal. Send your foes on a field trip to Hell without a permission slip. Taunt someone to death. Summon your darkest shadows from across existence and send them into battle to feed on your opponent’s physical strength. Your succubus ally can kiss your opponents to death — they die with a smile on their face.

This game will have lots of babes that make the player go wow. There will be fiendish babes, human babes, angelic babes, Asian babes, and even undead babes. Think babes. Then think more babes.

To which one can only reply, whoa… whoa. Settle down there, Beavis, before you rub that thing raw.

This document, which has long since surfaced publicly and made the rounds of the Internet, has become something of a problem for Planescape: Torment’s cult fandom, being so markedly at odds with what they wish the game to be. Some have gone so far as to claim that the juvenile profanity was nothing more than an elaborate ruse to get Brian Fargo and his marketing cronies to sign off on such an uncompromising piece of art, or that this is the only corporate pitch document in the history of the world to inhabit the category of satire. But personally, I’m not buying these pat explanations. I think that the finished Planescape: Torment that we know is a blending of the adolescent and the rarefied, the commercial and the idealistic. It’s not that the higher concepts and grander themes don’t exist. It’s just that they’re embedded into a licensed and branded Dungeons & Dragons computer game — made by, let’s face it, a bunch of nerdy twenty-something American men with the same predilections and blind spots as their peers elsewhere in the industry. We probably shouldn’t allow ourselves to get quite as precious about it as we often do.

For what’s worth, I suspect that Chris Avellone himself might more or less agree with this assessment deep down in his heart of hearts. In every interview I’ve seen him give on the subject of Planescape: Torment, he’s been distinctly reluctant to take on the persona of the auteur creating timeless art for the ages. He tends to speak more in the terms of a creative professional who was given a job to do: “Like just about every game I’ve worked on in my career, the franchise or premise was mandated, and then I worked within the parameters given.” He prefers to frame the protagonist’s journey to self-knowledge more as a way of flattering the typical gamer’s sensibilities than a conscious artistic masterstroke.

It is a very selfish game. After about ten years of game-mastering players… that’s really all they care about. They want the entire adventure to revolve around them. Players want to hear people talking about them. It’s the ultimate ego stroke.

Again, this is not to say that Planescape: Torment doesn’t resonate in certain places with the proverbial human condition. It’s merely to say that it’s a complicated, piebald beast. Is it art? Maybe, depending on how you define such things, since art is always in the eye of the beholder. Is it a penetrating work of moral philosophy? Maybe, to some extent, but maybe not quite so much as some folks want it to be. Is it well-written? Intermittently, although seldom on a sentence-by-sentence level. Is it brave and groundbreaking in the context of its time and circumstances? Absolutely. Is it a great game, full stop? Eh…

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Fair warning: a considerable number of Planescape: Torment spoilers follow!

Baldur’s Gate, the only Infinity Engine game to precede Planescape: Torment, attempts very explicitly to recreate the pleasures of playing tabletop Dungeons & Dragons with your friends. The companions whom you collect around you could easily be the avatars of said friends. Each of them is an archetype — fighter, magic user, cleric, thief — which constitutes one part of a Gary Gygax-approved well-balanced adventuring party. The game employs the classic “a group of adventurers met in a bar and went questing” setup. There’s an overarching plot, but it’s really just an excuse to explore more terrain, fight more monsters, and grow steadily stronger.  If you want, you can even play Baldur’s Gate together with your real-life friends, with each of you taking control of one character (although it’s rather clunky in practice, being subject to the technological limitations of the late 1990s).

Whatever else it happens to be, Planescape: Torment is nothing like that. It’s the very specific story of one very specific character, presented it a way that would never have worked with a gang of others sitting around the tabletop. Companions do arrive to accompany him, but they are always peripheral to his central psychodrama. There is no multi-player mode here. Having one would make no sense.

The protagonist of Planescape: Torment is the appropriately named Nameless One, a zombified shamble of flesh and bone who wakes up at the beginning of the game on a mortuary slab in Sigil, the city of inter-planar doors, with no idea who he is or how he got there. So, he sets off to try to find out. Along the way, he meets the aforementioned companions who join him on his journey. One or two of them he even meets in a bar, but these are not your typical happy-go-lucky adventurers with mercenary stars in their eyes. The fact is that each of their stories has long ago become interwoven with that of the Nameless One himself, generally to their detriment, and even though he can’t remember any of it. His own backstory will prove to be far longer and stranger than you or he might ever have thought possible, encompassing hundreds of lifetimes lived out all over the planes of existence, during which he has been good and evil and everything in between. His true quest, it will gradually become clear, is not merely to find out who he really is. Doing so is just a prerequisite to stopping the cycle of rebirths, owning his sins, and finally bringing his story to an end.

Not only does Planescape: Torment subvert the traditional plot outline of a CRPG by turning a triumphalist power fantasy into a tragic journey of self-discovery, but it subverts many of the standard CRPG mechanics to serve its agenda. The Nameless One is immortal, which means that defeat and “death” in combat is a minor inconvenience at worst; he will always wake up once again on his mortuary slab, with all of his inventory, companions, and experience points intact. (In some places, he is even required to “die” in order to advance the plot.) With physical threats being thus robbed of their menace, a clever dialog response is almost always worth more experience points than defeating the same interlocutor in battle. Swords, armor, and most of the other usual trappings of heroic adventure are seldom seen, replaced by stranger concoctions, like a floating skull who can upgrade his attack by acquiring sharper teeth. Planescape: Torment is not your parents’ CRPG.

To wit: if you come to this game expecting a plane-skipping roller-coaster ride through a wide variety of environments, I’m afraid you’re destined to be disappointed. Most of it takes place within Sigil. You start out in the slums and eventually make your way to slightly posher districts of the city, but the general atmosphere remains one of futility and decay from first to last. I’m frankly not sure how to respond to this. My wide-eyed inner child, the one who used to consume pulpy sci-fi novels by the dozen, thinks it’s false advertising to promise us a city of doors to infinite possibility and then deliver only this sad-sack assemblage of run-down mundanities. My more mature incarnation, the one who studied (or in some cases suffered through) the literary classics at university, thinks it might be an admirable case of a game sticking to its guns. But even he begins to feel crushed under the sheer weight of misery on display here, begins to wonder what pathetic excuse for a multiverse this is that has such a squalid, nihilistic centerpiece.

In practice, much of your time in Planescape: Torment will be spent wandering through each new district of Sigil as it opens up, clicking on every character who has a name or otherwise non-generic description in order to initiate conversation. Make no mistake. These people like to talk… oh, my God, do they like to talk. A minority of them have information or assistance to offer that pertains to the main quest, or at least to one of the many side-quests. Most of them, however, just “rattle their bone-box,” as the Sigil lingo goes, for the sake of hearing it rattle, telling you all about their hardscrabble lives in paragraph after paragraph of text. I find that it becomes numbing after a while, a symphony of despair that just keeps hammering away on the same relentlessly grim note. It’s Down and Out in Paris and London, except an order of magnitude longer in a different dimension.

The Cant — the Cockney-inspired lingo of Sigil — is striking, even if it is lifted from TSR’s Planescape boxed set rather than being an innovation of this development team. All the same, the writing has a rough-draft quality to it that includes but is by no means limited to the typos and minor grammatical errors that are strewn fairly liberally throughout, the well-nigh inevitable result of laying down so very much text in a relatively short span of time. It’s enough to make you long for the days when computers were primitive enough that even text was expensive, such that developers had to choose their words with care, had to make sure that every single one of them counted. Failing that, we might wish that someone in Interplay’s marketing department had insisted that the whole game be voice-acted, which would have served the same purpose of forcing the developers to include only those words that really matter. (As it is, only the occasional line or two is voiced.)

Editing, in any sense of the word, was clearly not a priority here. Back in the 1980s, Infocom employed a full-time editor from the book-publishing world to polish and tighten the prose in its games. But alas, such work was far beyond the core competencies of a 1990s studio like Interplay. The only guiding principle here seems to be the more words, the better. Matters reach a kind of absurd climax when you wander into a bar in which the patrons spout verbatim paragraphs from the old TSR Planescape campaign setting, copied and pasted into the computer game. One can easily imagine that the developers must have been paid by the word, the way people like to say that the similarly verbally incontinent Charles Dickens once was. Whether they were or not, talk is way, way too cheap in Planescape: Torment.

At times, you can almost palpably sense Chris Avellone and his friends straining to put words in the mouths of so many superficially indistinguishable characters in ways that might make them stand out. You want to tell them that it’s okay, give yourself a break: literary merit is not measured by the kilogram of verbiage. Occasionally the writing surrounding the many bit players of Sigil can surprise you with a clever metaphor or a flash of insight or compassion, but more often it just wallows in the squalor. Many of the grotesques you meet are gross just for the sake of being gross, thus revealing that the sniggering lover of blood and boobs who wrote so much of the pitch document remains a part of the development team’s collective unconscious if nothing else.

A man is looking at you with a strange, bug-eyed stare. His eyes are huge… so huge they look ready to pop out of their sockets and roll across the cobblestones. He nods eagerly as you approach, bobbing his head like a bird… and as you near him, you suddenly notice the smell of the urine and feces surrounding him. The man sniffles, wiping his nose on his sleeve, then opens his mouth to reveal blackened, rotted gums…

Reekwind coughs, his eyes almost popping out of his skull as he does so. His cough seems to loosen his bowels, for he breaks wind loudly, as if to accentuate his point…

The companions with whom you hack your way through this forest of words instead of monsters are a mixed bag. Morte the talking skull is your first party member, already at your side when you wake up on the mortuary slab for the first time, already seeking to make up for having betrayed you in one of your earlier lives. His redemption arc aside, he’s clearly meant to provide a note of comic relief amidst the cavalcade of misery you encounter, even if in practice his humor misses rather more than it hits; the necrophiliac jokes about every female ghoul and zombie you meet get pretty old pretty quickly.

Your companion Dak’kon belongs to the githzerai, a planar race of ascetics who prize order and harmony over all else. Unfortunately for him, a crisis of faith has led to him being cast out by his own people.

Nordom is not so much cast out as dropped in from what feels like it ought to be a different game entirely. Recruitable only via a lengthy side-quest that’s disarmingly easy to miss completely, he’s a robot who has evolved into sentience and is trying to figure out what to do next. He’s essentially WALL-E nine years before Pixar came up with him; he’s even drawn in a cartoon style, a jack-in-the-box with big, sad eyes and way too many gangling limbs.

And then we have the two female companions. They are defined by their gender and sexuality in a way that their male counterparts are not, occupying an uncomfortable liminal space between adolescent wish-fulfillment and earnest character-building. The pitch document tells you most of what you really need to know about them when it promises “to fill the game with deep, meaningful interactions with characters that happen to have swaying, pendulous breasts.” Both Fall-from-Grace the reformed succubus and Annah the reforming tiefling thief look like your standard videogame hot chicks. The way they’re written, on the other hand, arguably provides less fodder for students of literature or philosophy than it does for psycho-anthropologists who happen to be studying a certain subset of turn-of-the-millennium young men.

Fall-from-Grace runs the embarrassingly named “Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts.” This establishment is full of hot chicks just like her, who invite their male customers in to… well, just to talk to them about all the nerdy interests that cause other comely young women to roll their eyes and start sidling toward the nearest exit.

Annah is an apparently jaded girl of the streets who, it will eventually turn out, has never known the touch of a man (because of course she hasn’t) and thinks that The Nameless One might be the right one to finally teach her the ways of love (because of course she does).

Now, I don’t want to jump all over Chris Avellone and his friends for this. I believe we should weigh intent at least as heavily as effect when passing judgment on anything, and the intent here is as sweet in its way as it is perchance inadvertently revealing. If the “babes, babes, and more babes” guy from the pitch document is the person these lads were with their peer group, then the wide-eyed romantic who came up with Fall-from-Grace and Annah was likely the person they became alone at night after their buddies had gone home. I remember seeing the girls I crushed on — the ones I really crushed on, that is — in much the same way when I was their age or only a little younger. To my teenage eyes, they were well-nigh celestial beings whom I wanted to shelter from the ugliness of the world (not least all those other guys who were better at sports than I was) and commune with in a way that transcended sex (not least because I was none too confident in my own abilities in that department in comparison to those other guys). It’s a phase a lot of us go through, but also one that we hopefully outgrow. The problem with such attitudes is that they still preclude one from seeing the object of one’s fancy as a fully-realized human being with a full measure of agency in her own right. Men have been using these velvet cages, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, to hold women down since time immemorial. The women of Planescape: Torment contribute to the sense of a writing team who are punching a little too far above their own weight — or, maybe better said, their life experience.

The overwriting and the gawkiness are present in the main plot line as well. Below is a short extract from the game’s turning point, a long-sought-after and predictably prolonged dialog with Ravel Puzzlewell, a witch who knows much about The Nameless One’s real nature.

“A shadow with substance, a-seeking that which casts the light. I know you more and no… know…” Ravel pauses, her eyes dimming. “No more than I know the nature of ANY man. Crossed pasts have we… a man tainted with un-death, still feeling the pangs of separation, and an old withered crone, now all-imprisoned. Seems it that we are a-meeting for the first time? No, no, not, not… knot?” Ravel seems confused for a moment, then shudders, as if throwing off a weight. “Knot at all. An echo of a future meeting this is… or a past meeting, depending on which way time is facing.”

The first thing we notice here is the inverted sentence structures of Yoda-speak, a kind of default setting for mysterious and profound characters in way too many games. It serves to remind us that, for all their aspirations toward Philosophy, these writers are better versed in the works of George Lucas than Aristotle or Nietzsche.

Meanwhile all this punning on “know” and “no,” “passed” and “past,” “not” and “knot,” is the sort of thing that clever and ambitious young writers often turn out, and grizzled and remorseless editors draw a line through just as quickly. For it works only on the page (or the screen, in this case); if it was spoken, as we’re supposed to imagine dialog being, it would all fly right past the interlocutor. In the end, then, the only purpose it serves is to point out the cleverness of the author, which isn’t — or oughtn’t to be — the purpose of writing anything. If we keep at it long enough, most of us writers learn to nip such cherished little darlings in the bud before they can pull our readers out of the story we’re trying to tell.

And now, looking back on what I’ve written, I see that I’ve been hard on Planescape: Torment, harder than I really intended to be. And yet there are criticisms I haven’t even gotten to yet. For example, I haven’t mentioned how unsatisfying and annoying the combat is — yes, it does exist, and is actually quite extended and extensive at times, such as when you have to leave the streets of Sigil to delve into its tombs and sewers, or when you leave Sigil’s dimension entirely during the last quarter or so of the game. (Never fear: the other dimensions you visit are if anything even bleaker than this one.) Ironically, the same changes to the Infinity Engine that make this game feel more personal than the likes of Baldur’s Gate also serve to explain why Bioware made the choices they did for their own, more conventionally combat-oriented CRPG. Here, the close-in camera makes it harder to keep track of what is going on during a fight, even as the other interface changes make it harder to micro-manage your party when you really need to. Most of the standard CRPG elements — character levels, ability scores, spell books, etc. — feel like phantom limbs here; tragic psychodrama makes a strange fit with the power fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons. The final impression which I just can’t escape is that of an engine and system of rules which are badly out of sync with the game they’re being asked to present. If you want to call that further evidence of subversive intent on the part of the development team, be my guest. I just call it unfortunate.

For all that, though, I don’t want what I’ve written to read as an invalidation of the experience of those who have played Planescape: Torment and felt a wind of profundity blowing through its dreary environs. I’ve felt the same wind myself. (And no, I’m not talking about our friend Reekwind.) As you learn more and more about The Nameless One’s endless cycle of pain and suffering, both caused and endured, themes and ideas that games seldom touch on begin to emerge. One particular question is brought up again and again: “What can change the nature of a man?” To its credit, the game never offers a definitive answer, but two possibilities come to the forefront: “Regret” and “Belief.” As Saint Augustine tells us, these are two sides of the same coin: the weight of Regret engenders Belief, while our Belief fills us with Regret for all the ways we fail to live up to our moral potential. Thus the need for Confession to cleanse our souls and be worthy of that which we believe in… and so the cycle continues.

In a revelation that genuinely shook me, you learn near the end of the game that resurrection isn’t free, that every time The Nameless One is brought back to life on his familiar mortuary slab after a failed combat or some other misguided escapade, the life of some other poor mortal schmuck is taken in compensation for his rebirth. The “best” ending has him breaking that cycle by recognizing, acknowledging, and internalizing the suffering he has caused, looking that unwanted self-knowledge and its terrible consequences straight in the face. What follows is by no means conventionally happy, but it is the only fitting way to bring his story to a close. Kudos to Chris Avellone for not chickening out at the last minute, as other game designers have done.

Planescape: Torment is the first game of any stripe that I know of since Infocom’s Trinity to unabashedly don the mantle of Tragedy in the classical sense. Although Chris Avellone’s understanding of what that means is perhaps less nuanced than that of “Professor” Brian Moriarty, the author of Trinity, his take on it is more searingly immediate. For Trinity is the tragedy of an entire civilization, bereft of any characters at all who aren’t bit players, while Planescape:Torment is the tragedy of an individual whom we come to know all too well. Regular commenter P-Tux7 asked in response to the first article of this little duology of mine whether “it is right to punish someone who doesn’t remember doing the crime,” whether “someone can ever become not the person who did the crime,” and whether “justice demands an equivalent amount of suffering.” Such questions constitute the essence of tragedy, which writers have been struggling with as long as the written word has existed.

Despite all its granular failings of execution, then, Planescape: Torment leaves us with much to ponder, regarding both the nature of a man and — on a slightly more plebeian note — the nature of game design. Some of the themes that this game broaches are among the most profound we can wrestle with as human beings. The story of The Nameless One rhymes with the myth of Oedipus, who also looked terrible self-knowledge right in the face and had his soul shriven to the core. Or we might choose to read The Nameless One as a Christ figure, who redeems his fallen companions through a supremely unselfish final sacrifice. But there are likewise obvious parallels to Eastern religion and philosophy, which stress the need to escape the very same eternal life that Christianity purports to offer us. Meanwhile the existentialists among us must ponder whether a Nameless One who can’t remember the actions of his previous incarnations, who possesses no obvious continuity with his previous selves, can be said to truly be the same man at all. In fact, can any of us be said to be the same person we were when we were younger? After all, time is a river that changes all of us second by second, and, as Heraclitus told us almost 3000 years ago, it is impossible to step into the same river twice. Any game that can make its player ponder such thoughts as these is not to be dismissed lightly.

At the same time, though, Planescape: Torment belongs to a category of critic’s darling that always seems to get my curmudgeonly dander up (and tends to land me in hot water with some of my readers): games which are said to be so ridiculously effective as stories and settings that any gameplay inconveniences that dog them pale into insignificance by comparison. Grim Fandango is one of these: we’re told to forget the clumsy interface and nonsensical puzzle design and just enjoy the ride with a walkthrough by our side. Final Fantasy VII is another: forget the endless cavalcade of tedious random encounters and the fact that you can win all of them just by pounding the “attack” button over and over and enjoy the story. No matter how hard I try, I can’t see my way to giving games like these a pass. I love a good story and setting, but the fact remains that interactivity is the defining attribute of a game. It seems to me that it needs to work well too if we are to start throwing around accolades like “masterpiece.”

Much of what strikes me as flaws in this particular would-be masterpiece could have been fixed with a little more time and some more judicious oversight. The writing could be pared down at the same time that it was polished up; 800,000 words are not needed to convey a vivid sense of place and atmosphere, only a subset of the right ones. The tedious combat could be overhauled or perhaps eliminated entirely. Indeed, I sometimes think that my ideal Planescape: Torment would be a ten-hour point-and-click adventure game that doesn’t waste my time with unneeded mechanics or unnecessary talk, that makes every moment count. I doubt that Chris Avellone would go that far, but, again, I sense that he may just agree with me about some of the game’s infelicities. It’s just that he would prefer to improve the other systems rather than narrow the focus to the core story. “If the moment-to-moment gameplay is lacking,” he says, “then you’ve failed as a game designer. The combat was pretty weak, and I did feel it could have used more dungeon-crawling areas for players to explore and have fun in in addition to having fun exploring the conversations in the game.” Who knows? Maybe that would work too.

For when it comes right down to it, I still don’t know quite how to feel about Planescape: Torment; when I called it confounding at the start of this pair of articles, I meant it. I first tried to play it not long after it came out, only to give up after a few hours, bored by the depressing setting and all of the people there who never shut up. I returned to it in order to write these articles, and my sense of professional duty carried me all the way through this time around, even though I was once again bored for much of the time. Still, I’m glad I stuck it out, glad to truly know one of the most celebrated computer games in history. Yet I must confess that I’m equally glad to be done with it. I am of the opinion that the most fundamental responsibility of a game, before theme and meaning can even enter the discussion, is to entertain or at least interest its player. Planescape: Torment failed that test too often for me to call it a great game. If you want me to call it a brave and intriguing one, though… well, that I can definitely get behind. Seldom has any group of creators in this field challenged the expectations of their audience so thoroughly. And that in itself is a brave feat well worth applauding.

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Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

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Sources: The book Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs by David L. Craddock; Computer Gaming World of March 2000 and April 2000; the 2015 Games^TM special issue on “controversial” games; Retro Gamer 113. Plus the materials found in the Brian Fargo Collection in the archives of the Strong Museum of Play.

Online sources include Soren Johnson’s interview with Chris Avellone for his Designer’s Notes podcast, a Last Game Standing interview with Avellone, and Guido Henkel’s pictures and memories of posing for the Planescape: Torment box cover.

Where to Get It: Planescape: Torment is available as digital purchase from GOG.com in an “enhanced edition.” Buying it also gives you access to the original version.

The Boston IF meetup for June will be Monday, June 22, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Google Meet link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.  

We are considering an in-person meetup at MIT later this summer. Check out the mailing list for information on that.

(Continued from my previous posts.)

Before getting into the puzzle solving, let’s tour the last part of the map, where “there’s less hustle & bustle”.

This is just past the main town, to the south. Just west of the room above are the stockade (with the scene I discussed last time) and the jousting.

Just like with town, the various rooms have random encounters. It isn’t nearly as bad as it could be, and I’m guessing they’re programmed in a way that forces a rotation rather than hoping the random number generator doesn’t make it so you might have to test each location 10 times. In the location just past town, you might see nobody, or you might meet a Bolshevik.

TALK here gives SOFT–AND CARRY A BIG STICK. Some of the characters give random hints (like talking to random town members in a JRPG) although it is also possible to try to GIVE items, so I don’t know if any of them represent puzzles. This isn’t the only encounter you can have here!

TALK gives a more active clue, about an NPC I had gotten lucky with and met on my first visit to the room in question.

Let’s just hop all the way over there — it’s on the far east, marked Near Forest of No Return on my map.

Trying to TALK gets the response HE GESTURES IN SIGNS YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND; we’ve also had the sign language reference given by Alice at the hovel, but I don’t know how to learn the sign language yet. My suspicion, based on Alice’s hint about sign language at the tavern, is that someone hanging out in the tavern (where the pickpocketing happens) knows, but that’s one avenue I’m still dead-ended at (talking isn’t useful, nor waiting around, nor coming back and forth a bunch of times).

Let’s zip back to Outside Town and take a path by a graveyard next.

The graveyard sometimes has a ghost. The ghost makes a reference to digging.

Last time I had found a solving path (release person in stockade helps get the candlestick, candlestick gets bellows from the alchemist, bellows go to the blacksmith who gives you a shovel) that gets a shovel, so I tried it out and got some bones. Unfortunately, I don’t know what to do with the bones yet. (Giving them to the dog, the dog says — yes, it talks — that it prefers steak.)

Heading north, there’s another multi-character room, a crossroads. Encounters include a talking horse that lets you know again about the ring-forest connection.

There’s also someone who gives out elixirs for health that can sometimes appear and I think he may be there purely for color.

With that done, let’s swerve east which turns out to go into a house, the residence of Lady Vainly. (Some games, architecturally, will always put “boundary” rooms to set up transitions between outdoors and indoors; here this game is being a little more freeform.)

The dialogue above is the result of using TALK, and it is meant to hint that if you go east…

…you can GET GRAIN. Nobody says a peep about stealing or the like, the game just says OK and it lands in your inventory. We’ll be using the grain somewhere else shortly. First, a visit to a fairy.

Heading north from the grain is a well, with a bird in a nest. Again, I think the nest may be just “for color” — I’m still unclear how much content in this game is meant for pure atmosphere — and going down leads to a fairy.

The fairy asks you to find her glasses. I’m not sure where to even begin to look so this is one of those puzzles that will eventually solve itself.

Swerving back to the intersection with the talking horse, and going north, there’s a door in a hillside (locked) adjacent to a jug (which I have yet to use anywhere, and trying to take it to the tavern just gets it stolen). Going north from here is where the fishing is, which I will talk about (along with the jousting) in more detail later.

Finally there’s an inn. There’s a hint elsewhere (given by a woman randomly in the town) that the innkeeper likes to receive grain.

I guess he’s so keen on grain he gets kicked out if tries to go for Lady Vainly’s fields so can’t just walk over and grab it himself.

The reason he wants the grain is to feed his beloved bull; you can enter the door and see the bull assuming you’ve handed over the grain. There’s a rope in the room you can then take.

I did finish the mini-games but with a lot of save-state abuse. Starting with the joust, you have a series of clashes where you control your lance with A and Z (high/low) your shield with semicolon and period (high/low) and press SPACE to charge.

There are two issues, one likely with the emulator. The first is that the game simply moves too fast at default settings, and I had to change the computer to be half speed. (Nothing else in the game, including the fishing, has this issue.) The other issue is that I don’t understand when you win or lose. The scene above looks to me like the right-side lance hit the opposing knight and the shield is placed correctly to block, but the scene shows a LOSS. I never could figure out a pattern and just kept reloading a save state and hitting buttons randomly until I won a match. Four wins means you are through and done with the game.

I assume the ATHLETIC PROWESS works to defeat another puzzle I haven’t seen yet.

The fishing is at least comprehensible, although still finicky enough that I resorted to save states again.

A and Z move the hook up and down, and the fish swim left to right, and you try to hit SPACE when the hook and fish match places. Your goal is to catch 14 fish before running out of time; time is not “real time” in a normal sense, but rather, the hourglass counts down by 1 if either a fish is caught or a fish is missed. You’ll notice I was cutting things tight above (goal of 14, 17 hourglass ticks) but I already knew from previous tests I was going to do save state abuse, and I was trying to fit both the jousting and fishing in one trip (without using up a bribe in order to increase time).

(Speaking of bribes: the only treasure I’ve found is still that necklace from the start. Given how long certain sequences take, I’m paranoid if I use the bribe early, I might get some later section that I won’t have the time to do on one jaunt before getting yanked back to the dungeon with the mirror shards.)

The main issue is the hitbox on correct presses of SPACE; there were many times it looked like a fish was properly being caught but it got away. I think there’s a slight offset (the fish maybe should optimally be a little below the hook?) but I never could figure out a pattern that worked consistently, so save state abuse ahoy.

After winning at fishing, the game informs you that you’ve obtained enough patience / quietude in order to stealthily read the Abbott’s book without getting caught. It’s nice when a puzzle solve is so direct! The book also quite directly tells you that one of the pieces of the Coveted Mirror is in the church at the castle.

This is definitely a case where you need to see the information before the mirror gets registered (so it isn’t like we did the mini-game for nothing). I know this because there’s a similar situation involving another mirror piece that I did find, which you’ve been seeing on some of the screenshots, one in the shape of a rectangle. To find it, bring the horseshoe to the jester (who wanted luck) and he’ll give a poem explaining there’s a mirror shard right in the dungeon at the start.

Once you know that, going back to the Dungeon is enough to trigger the mirror piece showing in “inventory”. (You can’t even refer to it in the room! It just has the picture appear.)

I unfortunately have yet to make it to the castle’s chapel so I can’t get the third piece marked down yet.

I managed to eke out one more puzzle solve, by taking the fish from the kitchen (only available via trapdoor, and you have to get caught right after, but you can retrieve the fish from the treasure room in the maze). I took the fish over to the sewing shop. I knew the woman there wanted a fish because I tried GET COAT and she’d indicated she would trade.

I do not know where the coat goes. I can’t USE COAT so I assume I give it to a person. There’s no obvious candidates. At least, there are custom messages when you give it to the wrong person, which is a very nice touch that makes the whole situation less frustrating.

To recap my issues, some which carry over from last time:

a.) two locked doors, one in the tower at the castle and one outside town at the hill

b.) I still need invisibility

c.) the people at the tavern (and the cryptic mention of sign language); relatedly, learning sign language for understanding the man at the forest

d.) the astrologer who pines after the fortune teller

e.) the “moose” ingredient

f.) the glasses for the fairy

g.) does Lady Vainly need anything or was that whole scene just for the grain?

h.) what to do with: bones, ax, coat, broom, and rope.

The game is keen on USE X so I may just need to start grinding (check every room for use of bones, ax, coat, broom, and rope).

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It has been a pretty long time since there was a post here but some incredible work by Huw Williams has promoted me to dust off the old email account and share the following. Huw relates the following:

Recently an old box of assorted floppy disks auctioned off at eBay revealed a hidden treasure: three previously unknown Eamon adventures that had eluded the clubs and the official catalog for nearly 45 years! The unearthed adventures are titled Castle Danger, The Jester's Court, and The Trapster's Maze.

(Continued from my previous post.)

I’ve got most of the map laid out, and things are open enough that I’m not really “stuck” but I wanted to report in anyway.

To clear one thing up right away, regarding the mirror pieces: you don’t pick up the ones you find. You instead just see them and remember their shape, and trying to pick one up mentions a “protection spell” (I’ve only found one of them so far, but it clearly is consistent across the game). This at least partly explains the setup: Voar doesn’t need to be near the mirror shards to use them, isn’t worried about sabotage, and probably doesn’t even know seeing what they look like would be necessary information to find the fifth missing shard (given he hasn’t been able to locate it).

I also think the original wizard is still alive, despite the original manual indicating he wasn’t. There’s also reference to a Queen so maybe that’s who Voar pushed out?

The player starts “locked” in the first floor of the castle in the Dungeon (not really that well locked), can travel to a second floor, can leave to go into a town, and a little past. There is a timer on each trip out of the starting room. After the timer runs out, you get teleported back to the start, and lose any items you are carrying to a holding room on the second floor.

You can bribe the guard that checks the room for extra time. This required first having the bribe — there’s a necklace you can find early that works — and then typing WAIT while hanging in the Dungeon. Then you hand the item over and the guard gives you extra time.

I’m honestly not fully sure on the formula here, but I think the more valuable an object you give, the more extra time you have. It may be possible to not bother at all with this mechanic but since getting deep into (and past) the town does take a decent chunk of clock, it may instead be impossible to win without resorting to at least a little bribery.

I incidentally say (GUARD) for all the red rooms but some of them are courtiers or other hangers-on of the evil Voar as opposed to proper guards. Any run-in will send you to Voar then back to the Dungeon (and one of your 25 times you can get into trouble gets used up).

From the Dungeon you can just move a bed to sneak your way out (through a dark room that I later managed to light up). Going south leads to a staircase, going up then leads to a mysterious locked door (and that necklace that helps with bribery).

One element to highlight (as touched upon in my last post) is that text is extraordinarily sparse and sometimes doesn’t try to describe the room at all (as in the above scene). The game is dependent on you looking at the picture and figuring out not just what to interact with but what nouns to use. Here “door” and “necklace” aren’t that hard to come up with, but later there are multiple items in a scene where I had to guess if the game would let me pick up something in particular.

I incidentally have no idea yet how to unlock the door. You can ignore it for now and go south or east, which leads to a maze which takes up the second floor of the castle.

The “twisty maze” aspect isn’t done in a classical Crowther/Woods sense, but rather in having trap doors which will shoot you back to the first floor.

These trap doors correspond exactly with the yellow rooms from the earlier map. This can be helpful as a way of jumping past the rooms you can get caught in. Before trying that, I should also point out:

a.) Going E-S-E-E-N-N-W-W from the necklace drops you in Voar’s treasure room; if you get scooped up back to the Dungeon while holding items, this is where they go. Unfortunately, that’s a lot of steps to start a run, so that already runs a fair amount of the hourglass out; I think the game intends you to time things out, storing items safely so you don’t have to deal with this.

b.) One of the pieces of the Coveted Mirror is in the maze.

Dropping into trapdoors, you can make it into a kitchen…

…and also a Great Hall.

This seems like a good moment to remind you that many of the scenes are animated; in this case the dog’s tail moves. I haven’t been able to interact with it but I assume some kind of food or bone would be appreciated.

The Great Hall is connected up with Voar’s throne room if you feel like getting yourself caught directly, and two rooms which have a random chance of encounters. This mechanic shows up much more in the town, but I’ll mention now there are a fair number of rooms where you may or may not meet a character.

South of the dog is the jester.

East of the dog is a bard (which, again, shows up at random — the hall may be empty).

Doing TALK here gets the response:

SO MUNJISTAN & HIS SILENT FRIEND FARED LONG AGO TO THE MOUNTAIN BEND. IF YE ASPIRE TO ASCEND, WAIT WITH THE RING AT THE DARK FOREST’S END.

I don’t think any further puzzle is here (although if a music sheet shows up it would be worth taking to the bard). North is where Voar is hanging, and to the east is a room with nice art and not much description.

Time for an escape! Fortunately back at the staircase you can just go south, and there’s a window you can open.

To the east of the “main entrance” you pass by is a “good place to hide loot”; I haven’t experimented with if there really is a problem dropping objects in random places and you have to be strategic to avoid things being yoinked.

Here’s my map of the town:

There’s a lot of content, and I’ll mostly take it north to south. At the far north there is a tree where going UP lets you climb and find an AX.

The next east-west row has a tavern on the far west, where you get something stolen when you enter. I haven’t noodled here at all nor worked out if the game is softlocked once an item is stolen.

There’s a gate where “Starina” (optional encounter) tells you IN THEE LIES THE HOPE OF ALL STARBURY. GREAT HOPE MAKES THEE GREAT! and I’m again wondering what the biographical context of our main character is, and if it matters for any puzzles.

Past Starina to the east is an astrologer, who is pining after a fortune-teller, and the fortune-teller right next to him.

Going back to Starina and heading south, there’s a blacksmith (who needs something to help with his fire) and a hovel.

South even further is a “town square” with multiple possible encounters, including “Granny Garbled-Marbles” who lets you know a candlestick of hers was stolen by an Abbott.

To the east is a church, with Brother James (and the aforementioned candlestick) and the Abbott’s room.

To the west is a glassblower place, where you can find a crystal ball. This is the ball you need to take to the fortune teller (mind you, the fortune teller seemed to indicate she had lost her ball and you’re finding it … this seems like you’re getting a new ball?) When trying to GET BALL the glass-blower first quizzes you on what a picture is, showing it piece by piece; you need type MERMAID and you can go ahead.

Just to jump ahead a bit, if you take the crystal ball back to the fortune-teller, you get told about a magical vase:

Resuming our north-south walk, on one side is an alchemist.

Across from the alchemist is a bakery, where the person inside needs an ingredient for chocolate “moose”.

Reaching the outskirts of town, there’s a path passing by a pig, chicken, and goose (at various moments, their appearance is random); there’s also a horseshoe lying around which I believe is the lucky item the jester wants.

Further on is a shop where you can “appraise” items. It will determine which items are considered valuable as bribes (this is quite directly given in the text — something is listed as valuable or not “TO GUARDS”).

Also, there’s someone sewing with a cat.

There’s still more map south past the town, but I’m just going to highlight a couple things. First of all, you can find a joust minigame. You are informed you need to win four times in a row. You can move a shield and a lance independently, and it is possible to win, lose, or tie at any clash. I don’t know what you get if you win.

(The game also keeps track of your hourglass time and you will get booted back to the Dungeon once time is up.)

Similarly, you can also find a fishing minigame nearby. Again, I’m not sure what the reward is, although I found this easier than the jousting. Again, hourglass time will pass as you fish, so it is possible to lose by getting booted back to the Dungeon.

Finally, there’s a stockade just outside of town. If you talk with the criminal within, they let you know they have a lockpick out next to the tavern. You’ve actually seen the lockpick!

That little dot and line in the bottom right is the lockpick! (This, plus the minigames, plus the emphasis on parsing the world visually rather than reading text, plus the people appearing at random, make me think of later Sierra games.) You can just GET LOCKPICK, even if you hadn’t heard about it previously from the criminal.

With the man free, head over to the church, and he’ll cause the Father to chase him so you can grab the candlestick. You can then take the candlestick over to the alchemist who will take some of the metal for alchemy (not the whole thing) and he’ll give you his bellows. You can then take the bellows over to the blacksmith who will trade you his shovel for the bellows. I have yet to be able to dig anything up with the shovel.

That’s mostly it for this update, but one more thing: I was captured with all the aforementioned items, retrieved them, dropped down the trapdoor to the magician room, and then lit the candle using the fire at the flask. I could then open the cupboard and go in where it was dark, finding an item.

Just to recap the obstacles remaining, I need to deal with

a.) the jester (just need to get the horseshoe over, most likely)

b.) the locked door

c.) the various people in the halls (likely need the invisibility spell, likely meaning I need to find a witch)

d.) the people at the tavern (and the cryptic mention of sign language)

e.) the astrologer who pines after the fortune teller

f.) the Abbott and the book

g.) the “moose” ingredient

h.) something at the sewing shop (nothing seems to be requested?)

i.) winning the joust

j.) winning the fishing

k.) some exploration past the town which I’ll save for a different post

l.) probably at least one thing I’m missing because of the random appearance of characters and also the fact exits aren’t mentioned, so I have to test N/S/E/W/U/D in every room and I likely missed one by accident

I haven’t had a game split in this many directions in a while. The time-limit part is interesting in keeping each expedition “directed” (for example, jousting and fishing take enough time that they likely each need their own individual journey, without any extra stops). I certainly don’t need any hints or suggestions yet, so please save those for if I later get stuck.

I posted a couple of weeks ago about Infocom tie-in novels, with a bit of a digression on the work of George Alec Effinger. It turns out that I have a response from Effinger to relay!

Not a response to my 2026 post, obviously. Effinger passed away in 2002. But his books were mentioned on Usenet in 1997. It was a thread about the "Groundhog Day" trope, which brought up Effinger's books The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time. (The first Effinger that I read, as it happens.)

Anyhow, someone made a rather dismissive comment to the effect of "...before Mr. Effinger ran out of ideas and was reduced to writing things like 'The Zork Chronicles'." And guess who showed up to riposte?

I regret to say that I had also posted to that thread -- agreeing with the original poster. Although, in my defense, I added that I was a Glorian of the Knowledge fan. Still, embarrassing. And not just because I totally forgot that this exchange happened! Thirty years ago. Yikes.

You can read Effinger's entire post here. If Google Search goes ass-up, as it keeps threatening to, you can also find the post archived in this Usenet thread collection (unzip, search the text file raif970828).

However, I need to quote more of Effinger's post. It gives valuable context for those days of 1989 or so. And, well, it trashes a lot of the assumptions I made in my earlier tie-in post. Further embarrassment! At least I tried to label all my assumptions as assumptions.

I wrote that Effinger might have written The Zork Chronicles "as an on-ramp to the videogame industry". Turns out I had it backwards:

That bit shows up another of my mistakes. I asserted that Effinger was not a gamer or a computer nerd. I was going off this interview, recorded in 2020. There, Mike Legg says that Effinger "...didn’t have a PC, he didn’t have a word processor; at least I don’t think he had." Oops on both of us.

Jumping back, and relevant to the topic of my original post, Byron Preiss:

Preiss was referred to as a "book packager" in this 2019 article. It's good to see the use of the term validated.

I do get to correct Mr. Effinger in turn on one trivial point: The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time were published in paperback editions -- in the UK. I only know this because I picked up a second-hand copy. (Possibly at the Toronto Worldcon of 2003.)

Effinger goes on to defend the practice of writing licensed works, and to deny that they're inherently crap. He is polite but clearly annoyed that he has to do this. I won't quote because we've hopefully grown out of making such attacks.

On to more interesting details:

The legal situation is mentioned in Effinger's Wikipedia entry: a medical bankruptcy which could have stripped him of his ownership of his own work. Happily, that didn't happen. He went on to publish those two sequels, A Fire in the Sun (1989) and The Exile Kiss (1991), to acclaim.

But what about that game "Aeon"?

ÆON, an ambitious sci-fi RPG, was released by White Wolf Publishing in late 1997. They promptly got slapped with a lawsuit from MTV's animated show Æon Flux. One hasty press release later, the game was retitled Trinity.

RPGs aren't my field, so I won't try to summarize the history of Trinity or Effinger's connection to it. It seems to still be in print (now from Onyx Path). Hopefully Effinger got his promised royalties.

One can peek at the original Æon/Trinity rulebook. (A true monument to the '90s trend of hyper-greeblied page layouts!) The book opens with the promised Effinger short story. It's titled "The Honored Dead"; it's literally the first twenty pages of the rulebook, before the table of contents.

...I just sat down and read it. It's a decent bit of sci-fi thriller. Tough Guy and Mysterious Lady smuggle some valuable biotech across the Alps. Which cup is the Maltese Falcon cryovial under? It's got character backstory and an intro to some big-shots of the Æon setting. (As promised, their names appear in the background material of the rest of the sourcebook.) What it doesn't do is give a sense of the setting as a whole. There's supposed to be aliens, space colonies, a world reshaped by psi-wars. What we see is a few miles of Switzerland. Fine for a story, questionable for an RPG intro.

Also, as I said, I prefer the whimsical Effinger. White Wolf hired the gritty one.

But what about those novels? Sadly, they never appeared. Wikis mention the titles as Æon 1: Dawn and Æon 2: Meridian -- both cancelled in 1998. Effinger says they "happened", which sounds like manuscripts got written. If so, they presumably got stuffed in a drawer and remained there until his death.

Of course, I've gotten myself into trouble with assumptions before...

I should note that the Onyx Path Æon page lists stories titled Dawn and Meridian. However, if you click through, they're shown as novellas (not novels), written in 2021 by Lauren Roy and Chris Allen respectively. Written from scratch from the original 1997 outlines? Or just borrowing the titles? I have no idea.

Well, that's all I've got on this particular path. My very belated thanks to Mr. Effinger for dropping in on our discussion, and my very belated apologies for my mostly-dismissive attitude back then.

Although... Huh. One of the designers of Trinity, after Andrew Bates, is a guy named Richard Dansky.... who's giving a talk at NarraScope in less than two weeks. Maybe I'll corner him and ask him about Effinger.

The text of Infocom’s Hollywood Hijinx

Paratext and Worldbuilding

The pack-ins for Hollywood Hijinx include an issue of Tinsel World magazine, a leter from the protagonist’s Aunt Hildegard, and a postcard from Uncle Buddy. It’s a likable assortment. The copy protection doesn’t disrupt the reading experience, and the documents effectively evoke the mood of a b-movie about b-movies.

The pleasantly ludicrous magazine features black and white photographs and parodic advertisements. In one passage, it advises readers that “Dill pickles can add years to your life!” Elsewhere, in an article titled “Gerbil Terrorizes Gramps,” we read that “the crazed rodent sprang out and began racing wildly around the house, clawing and biting at curtains and furniture and severely maiming Mr. Veldran’s pet lizard.”

“Dill pickles can add years to your life!”

These are garnishes to the practical purpose of the magazine, as the current issue observes the recent passing of Aunt Hildegard and remembers her collaborator Buddy Burbank. Her passing is the inciting incident of Hollywood Hijinx. Her will (and Buddy’s before her) states that her entire and substantial estate will go to their favorite niece or nephew (the game never assigns a gender to the protagonist) if they can complete a treasure hunt in twelve hours. Other nieces and nephews will get their own chances, should the protagonist fail.

The magazine fills in details of the world and contextualizes Hollywood Hijinx‘s protagonist. It reviews—humorously—Buddy’s career as a studio owner and b-movie auteur. His body of work includes films like The Seven Dwarves Do Dallas and Buck Palace, the Fighting Mailman. We learn about the marriage between Buddy and “Hildy,” as well as their close relationships with their nieces and nephews.

Hollywood Hijinx is the very rare Infocom game that makes a substantial investment in the backstory of its protagonist. Many Infocom characters have undeveloped backgrounds, as this series demonstrates. Moonmist‘s detective is a “famous” sleuth, for example, but we are arguably meant to fill in the blanks with whatever we know about Nancy Drew. The precocious inventor of Seastalker doesn’t have a story so much as they do a resume. Only Infidel makes this kind of commitment to background and character, and, as we will see, the playable game itself performs even more of this work.

Hollywood Hijinx is the very rare Infocom game that makes a substantial investment in the backstory of its protagonist.

Both the postcard and letter illuminate the relationships between the main character, Hildy, and Buddy. Both are addressed to the protagonist, and their authors obviously care for our avatar. The postcard consists of a rather ridiculous series of heroic couplets exhorting the player to learn from the examples set by characters in Buddy’s films. It additionally serves as copy protection, and those clues blend in well with the poem it contains.

The letter from Hildegard provides the main dramatic question of Hollywood Hijinx. It establishes the stakes, that of a treasure hunt in which the rewards are all-or-nothing. The letter further details the goal and rules of the hunt. Hildy’s voice is distinct and gives insight into who she was and how she feels about the protagonist.

Considering the thing in total, it is clear that the paratext of Hollywood Hijinx is excellent because every element extends our understanding of the game’s world both in terms of history and geography. I have always said that the best feelies are essential to the text of their games, though few cases truly achieve this ideal. While I always suggest that players read all Infocom pack-ins, I do so here with extra emphasis.

The Treasure Hunt

Despite—or because of—the frontloaded vividness of its setting, Hollywood Hijinx sometimes feels like a loose bag of puzzles. That isn’t necessarily a problem. The wacky nature of the house and its former inhabitants mandate a certain level of incoherence. Critiques of mimetic infidelity neither can nor should apply here. If we find ourselves moving from computer punch cards to fireproof matches to an automaton “atomic chihuahua,” so be it!

The wacky nature of the house and its former inhabitants mandate a certain level of incoherence.

My critique of the puzzles is that they don’t all lean into the zaniness enough. While the casual relationships between puzzle elements feel fitting, as a player I would have enjoyed more puzzles embracing the wacky nature of Buddy’s career. That’s what makes the atomic chihuahua puzzle stand out as the game’s best: we are, for a moment, inhabiting a world of Buddy’s imagining.

>east
The Atomic Chihuahua, in its best prehistoric prance, moves further east, then comes to a stop.

The Atomic Chihuahua continues to take hits from the tiny tanks. The planes, only a block away, begin firing as they move within range. As bullets pierce the dazed dog's scales he pauses momentarily, remembering his younger days with Xavier Cugat.

>push black
The Atomic Chihuahua lifts its hind leg and, just as you thought this game was going to become even more base, stomps its clawed foot down on one of the tiny tanks, crushing it.

The Atomic Chihuahua continues to take hits from the tiny tank. The planes, spewing bullet-shaped death, reach the radioactive reptile and begin circling around it. The Atomic Chihuahua takes two rounds in the throat and gasps. (Two rounds to you and me, but that's 14 rounds to little scale-face!)

The scene, we realize, is a riff on old Godzilla films.

Compare this to a more generic widget puzzle that could easily appear in any game.

>south
Closet
You're in a small closet. Mounted at an angle on the back wall of the closet are three coat pegs. To the left of the first peg there is a hole the size of a peg. To the right of the third peg there is a peg which has been sawed-off, flush with the wall. The door to the north is open.

>push first peg
You pull the peg down to a horizontal position.

As you release the peg, it pops back into its original 45-degree position. The closet begins to shake and rattle a bit as the door swings shut. You feel your stomach rising to your throat as the closet moves down, then stops.

Elsewhere, a genuinely unpleasant hedge maze puzzle, which could easily be dropped via helicopter into countless other games, will likely frustrate and annoy many. Procrastinators will be rewarded by a map that can only be constructed later in the game.

Such puzzles are never bad as puzzles in isolation, and many players will like them quite well, but in many cases we find an out-of-place dryness that falls short of the highs of game and feelies alike.

The most notable feature of the game’s text is a recurring emphasis on the protagonist’s history with the house, Buddy, and Hildy. A later essay will discuss this element in depth, but for now I call attention to Hollywood Hijinx‘s remarkable commitment to worldbuilding and character development. The practice dovetails incredibly well with the feelies themselves. Some—myself included—might overlook this practice because of the unsubtle silliness of the work, but Hollywood Hijinx makes novel moves in terms of craft and narrative.

While it will likely retain its reputation as a lesser work, we see here a game that does what other Infocom games have not yet done, and in this, its detractors must concede, Hollywood Hijinx excels.

Next

The Gold Machine treatment of Hollywood Hijinx concludes with a(n) (a)typical treatment of themes, context, and reception. Don’t miss it!

We’ve featured companies here before (like Adventure International and Sierra On-Line) that started their main development in games, with a few extra utilities being sold on the side. When Mark Pelczarski formed Penguin Software, their initial core product was (rather than a game) their Graphics Magician, which held them steady through their early years. However, they eventually became prominent for their adventure games: Transylvania, Crimson Crown, The Coveted Mirror, The Quest, and their re-published version of Oo-Topos (originally without graphics at all). Considered across multiple platforms, the adventure games are what sold the best for Penguin, but it took The Graphics Magician existing in the first place for those games to appear.

Their first adventure game, Transylvania, came to them essentially by accident and didn’t originally have graphics. They got the author (Antonio Antiochia) an early copy of Graphics Magician to make it a flagship product alongside The Graphics Magician.

After The Graphics Magician was published, they got a call from a programmer named Eagle Berns at Stanford. Burns had been there as a programmer since 1959 (and their IBM 650), overlapping with the early computer science great Donald Knuth. Close to when he started his Apple II journey (1980) he worked some on LaTeX (one of Knuth’s projects) as well as Foreign language processing at Stanford.

Importantly for us, he decided to pivot to personal computers and specifically the Apple II, and using The Graphics Magician he had written a game using the tool with Michael Kosaka. (Michael Kosaka only has a small part to play in today’s game, but as an aside: of the people I mention today, he had the deepest involvement with later games, working on Skate or Die, Madden NFL ’94, and an unreleased Sonic game for 32X which would require a several-thousand word essay to adequately explain.) Quoting Pelczarski on Burns:

A great, creative person, he went on to make his mark at Apple Computer (on the Macintosh team), Micro Focus, and Oracle. But first and foremost he turned into a good friend who also happened to write, with Michael Kosaka, the first game with Graphics Magician: Pie Man. The game was loosely based on an I Love Lucy skit, with pies coming rapidly off a conveyor belt while you try to put whipped cream and a cherry on top and put the pie in a rack, while avoiding grease spots and obstacles. (Remember that these were the days when state of the art was Break-Out, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man.) A non-violent game with a bit of personality was very unique and new.

The non-violent part is worth highlighting; Scott Scram started writing games for Penguin with Crime Wave, and wanted to follow up with something “completely non-violent”; Mark Pelczarski suggested porting Pie Man to Atari.

People who play violent games excessively may do so for psychological reasons. Perhaps they seek a jolt of self-medicating adrenaline, or they need to feel powerful in the game world as opposed to feeling powerless in their real lives … I enjoyed porting the game, and it turned out well with the use of some Atari additions such as a 4 part musical soundtrack.

Unfortunately, the world was not ready to give up the really cool violent games that were coming out at about that time, and the game did not sell well. But, the popularity of Tetris, solitaire and others prove that there is a market for non-violent games and puzzles.

A video of some of the Atari version below:

Eagle Berns followed up Pie Man with an adventure game, The Coveted Mirror, working with his friend Holly Thomason (and a small contribution from Michael Kosaka, which I’ll highlight when I eventually reach that part of the game).

The story is set in the “Faraway Land of Starbury” where “people were happy and life was good”. However, there was a “villian” named Voar with a “heart of black poison” who sought to rule the kingdom as his own; however, he was stopped by the Wizard Munjistan who had a magical Mirror who could see all “troublemakers” who would cause destruction to the land. One night, Voar entered the realm of the wizard in a forest and tried to steal the mirror, but it broke into five pieces, and he was only able to steal away with four (how it got to the mirror in the first place without being spotted is unclear).

Thus it befell that with most of the pieces, Voar’s power waxed and overshadowed that of Munjistan’s. However, without all the shards of the Mirror, Voar’s power was yet incomplete. Munjistan knew he had very little time to secure the last piece against Voar’s craving, so he desperately searched his magic books for a spell to save Starbury. Alas, to no avail! The best he could find was one which required he hide the piece and wait for a champion born beneath future stars. If the champion is pure of heart and bests Voar in the race for the piece, the evil one’s power will be shattered.

Voar in the meantime learned to wield the other four pieces in order to spy on citizens and send people to the dungeons, but he could not find the fifth piece. The wizard managed to disguise himself as a court magician to stay close to Voar but has since passed away. This is where you come in. You (no biographical background) have been captured by Voar, and the action starts in the throne room.

The essential gimmick of the game is that you’re a prisoner and get started by being sent into a dungeon, but it isn’t hard to escape; however, Voar “can generally find you easily with his mirror pieces” meaning you aren’t really free. A “prison guard” will “check on you regularly but you may find a way to cope with that.” Additionally there’s a time limit (given by the sands) where the guard will return to check on you.

Whilst you are doing all this, your job is to find various mirror pieces and assemble them into a rectangle.

This is all summarized directly from the manual and I admit I haven’t been this baffled by the premise of a game in a while.

a.) If the mirror let the wizard watch for trouble, how did Voar get close enough to steal it?

b.) Who was ruling over the kingdom before Voar? The Wizard? Maybe it was some sort of collective and the wizard was just keeping the peace? Is the wizard’s disguise going to be an important detail later, even though the wizard is now dead?

c.) If we’re aiming to find the fifth mirror piece, but Voar can always just watch what we’re doing, couldn’t he watch us going for the fifth mirror piece and stopping it?

d.) But if Voar has the mirror pieces, how are we able to find them around the castle? How are we able to keep them given the whole process of getting tossed into the dungeon?

e.) If we’re under surveillance, why is there a regular guard appearing with a timer? Why doesn’t the guard immediately know when we’ve escaped?

I ended up checking the later (1986) version of the game which has its own story book, and at least one of the holes gets filled up: Voar starts a crime wave in order to distract the Wizard, which is why he’s able to sneak to the location of the mirror. One other slight change: the wizard shares the secret of the fifth shard’s hiding place with “one other soul”.

This still doesn’t address how we are picking up mirror pieces despite Voar tracking us, or the setup behind the guard regularly appearing. With most media I am pretty tolerant of “plot holes” as simply things a story hasn’t bothered to explain but likely has some explanation; unfortunately with an adventure the interpretation of the plot can be important in puzzle-solving so I find the confusion more of a problem.

The king’s face is incidentally animated. Many scenes are, and it adds a feeling of polish to the game that makes it seem more like later-Apple-II graphics rather than depths-of-early-Sierra. (You can also contrast with The Hobbit. That game was made by four computer scientists with interests in systems and languages; this game was made by two people — with minor help from a third — that were more graphics-oriented.)

No matter what action you do (at least any action I could find) there’s the response…

I’LL HAVE THEE BEATEN FOR THY INSOLENCE
OFF TO THE TOWER!
(THAT’S 01 I’LL ONLY ALLOW IT 25 TIMES.)

…and then you appear in the dungeon. (The first immediate issue with the plot being sketchy rises up right here: are we supposed to do something at the king? Or was getting thrown into the dungeon just a “cutscene” so to speak?)

There is no more text than what you see (“YOU ARE IN THE DANK, DESOLATE, PRISONER TOWER.”) The game expects you to see items and refer to them by name from the picture, not from the text. It took me a while to realize the item to the right is a PITCHER (not a JUG) and even when I realized it the game told me that it’s just scenery when I tried to pick it up.

You can move the bed to find a hole, then GO HOLE into darkness.

Going west from here leads to the magician’s room with “mysterious odds & ends”, except all that’s visible is a flask which is too hot to touch and some books.

You can’t take the books (“THEY’RE NOT YOURS TO TAKE”) but you can READ BOOK, find a diary of the magician, and read multiple pages which give hints.

IF THAT OLD WITCH DOESN’T GIVE ME HER INVISIBILITY SPELL SOON, I’LL CHANGE HER INTO A STARBURY STRAWBERRY.

I thought the wizard was supposed to be the good guy?

I WONDER IF VOAR KNOWS BORIS LETS THE PRISONERS ROAM IF THEY OFFER HIM THE RIGHT THINGS!

I’m wondering if this means you leave a present in the room that the guard finds while you’re out. Otherwise there isn’t a reason for a gift (if you’re physically there, nothing bad happens).

BORIS KEEPS CLOSE WATCH ON THAT HOURGLASS, BUT SOMETIMES HE FALLS ASLEEP & PRISONERS GET EXTRA TIME.

IF BORIS WAKES TO FIND THEIR TIME IS UP BUT THEY’RE NOT BACK IN PRISON, HE REPORTS THEM TO VOAR.

SO VOAR USES THE MAGIC MIRROR TO WHISK THEM BACK & GLADLY PUTS THEIR BOOTY IN HIS TREASURE ROOM.

I’m guessing this is the sort of game where you can simply avoid this happening, but we have had some games where you have to hit the fail-state at least once (including how you need to have the pirate steal your treasure in Crowther/Woods before the pirate chest shows up).

BUT EVEN VOAR CANNOT SEE BEYOND THE IMPENETRABLE MIST.

Is this another way to hide from getting teleported away, or just a hint where the fifth mirror piece is?

I’m still trying to get a hang of the game’s norms (which seem to vary quite a bit from what we’ve had here before) so I’ll try to get a fair chunk of the map made before reporting in next time.

Happy Pride! Choice of Games is proud to be gender-inclusive and LGBTQ+-affirming all year round, but during the month of June, we’re featuring writers whose work connects especially closely with those themes.

Today we’re sitting down with Nebula award winner Natalia Theodoridou, author of Rent-A-Vice, An Odyssey: Echoes of War, Vampire: the Masquerade–Sins of the Sires, and Restore, Reflect, Retry.

First, congratulations on being a Nebula finalist again! This time it’s for your debut novel Sour Cherry, which takes on the Bluebeard legend: a story with toxic masculinity, gendered power dynamics, and abusive relationships running through it. There’s also a fascinating theme of silence and namelessness in your adaptation. Can you tell us more about how you wove those themes in with the gender dynamics?

Thank you so much! It’s always so weird to be upbeat about the reception of this dark, dark book, but I’m really touched and humbled that it seems to be resonating with readers. Much of the violence in Sour Cherry is male violence, but my hope was to capture some of the complexity of gender dynamics beyond a clear-cut “men have power and are bad, women have no power and are silent victims.” The patriarchy hurts us all; having the range of the stories your mouth can speak and your mind can conceive reduced down to this single story is a kind of silencing. It is a kind of violence.

Losing one’s name is a kind of silencing, too. People caught in webs of oppression can lose their names in so many ways: by not having their true names accepted; by having names palatable to authority or cultural lines imposed on them; by having their names struck from the record of history; by becoming known not by the individuality of a name but by a function—a Cook, a Shopkeeper, a Nurse. At the same time, there can be power found in that flattening; names can be shackles, too, and sometimes, when people shed them, they are finally free to sit in the power of their voice (think Anonymous, who was, as Virginia Woolf would have it, a woman). Namelessness can also birth a kind of solidarity: we can become one in our namelessness and so, like the chorus of ghosts in Sour Cherry, negate silence.

Turning to last year’s Nebula win, A Death in Hyperspace: you were one of a large team of authors on that. How did you find working in a large group? What distinctive elements did a team effort bring to this project?

It was delightful. I’m constantly amazed by how differently people can come at the same creative question, and I think the project was so much fun because of the diversity of voices and approaches that were woven through it. This is also what made the characters feel and sound so authentically different. I particularly loved (and this is where Stewart C Baker’s genius clearly shone through, because he was the one who made the project cohere) the way the creative process of putting the project together as a puzzle—each of us writing for one character and slotting clues into someone else’s piece—mirrored the playing of the game-puzzle for the reader. In a sense, writing the game and playing the game are the same process, except in reverse.

Of all your many short stories, the one I just have to ask about is “Cursed Moon Queers”, which first posits a queer colony on the moon and then asks “What if those TikTok witches who cursed the moon actually had an effect?” What was it about that pop culture moment that sparked your imagination?

(I mean, are we sure they didn’t? Look at the state of things.)

It’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly what it was that did it because there are always so many disparate elements that come together for me to make a story; it’s never just one thing. But I guess it was something about the anxiety and pain behind an idea like cursing the moon. To me, it speaks to the desperation of the most powerless. A struggle to claim some agency, impossibly, when everything feels out of control. Except it’s usually other marginalised folks who feel the consequences of grand-scale things first. So the story was in a sense saying, okay guys, you’ve done it; now what? What exactly did you hope to accomplish? As if we weren’t all cursed enough already.

We’re asking all of our authors this: How has your representation of LGBTQ+ themes in your writing evolved over the course of your career?

I used to be very anxious about representing LGBTQ+ themes and characters because I worried I would inadvertently cause offence, say the wrong thing, fail to include absolutely every queer point of view, and end up hurting my community. Now, more than a decade later, I know this is not only an impossible task, but the wrong task altogether. LGBTQ+ people are not a monolith, and we do not agree on everything (maybe even most things). Nor should we want to. I have no intention of flattening us all into an inert, non-threatening, smooth mass. I think it’s healthy to disagree, and it’s desirable to have loudly different opinions on things, including on what constitutes harm. Writing defensively to avoid what I imagine might cause someone discomfort simply results in writing inauthentically and not saying much. Now I aim to write truthfully and courageously about things that matter to me. Of course not everything will land with everyone, and their response will be their response, just as my thinking is my thinking. I cannot claim to represent anyone but myself, my context, and my own understanding of things. Or actually, my current understanding of things. I hope that my understanding has and will keep evolving; I hope to keep changing my mind, or to keep being able to. Of course I have made mistakes, and I will make more. Failing and failing again is the only way to grow. Mistakes are how we learn. All I hope is that, when I make my next one, it will be in a space and time where we can afford to listen to each other. Listening when you’re in pain is the hardest thing. But we can work at it. Like Kai Cheng Thom said, I hope we choose love, you know? And that we keep choosing it.

Finally: how are you celebrating Pride this year?

By surviving in the face of blatant, widespread, normalised transphobia.

Pride isn’t just for a month! All year, we work to bring you games that offer a diverse and expansive view of love, family, and identity. But we’ll take any excuse to celebrate, and so we’re putting games on sale every week of June that showcase and explore that diversity, and we’re featuring interviews with the authors of those games.

These four Choice of Games titles by Natalia Theodoridou are up to 40% off until June 8th!

Vampire: The Masquerade—Sins of the Sires — In this elegy of blood, Athens is burning!
An Odyssey: Echoes of War — Fight Poseidon’s wrath to reclaim the throne!
Rent-A-Vice — What doesn’t kill you…kills someone else.
Restore, Reflect, Retry — This haunted game remembers you. Play again?

Creating or specifying custom adjectives.

using adjectives to describe the worlds of our games

adjectives in general.

In everyday spoken English, we use adjectives to describe and specify nouns. We might refer to a tall building or a lovely song. A bird might be blue or black. Adjectives are frequently discussed in Inform’s Standard rules, and why wouldn’t they? If we are programming with natural language, it only makes sense that we will sometimes need to characterize the things populating the worlds we make.

The use of the word “adjective” in the Inform documentation is not always technical. Here is its first use, which reasonably assumes that we know what the English word “adjective”means:

WI §3.6 Either/or properties

Some containers, like bottles, can be opened: others, like buckets, cannot. If they can be opened, then sometimes they will be open, and sometimes closed. These are examples of properties, which can change during play. The following source sets some properties:

```
The cardboard box is a closed container. The glass bottle is a transparent open container. The box is fixed in place and openable.
```

There are only four different properties referred to here. Closed means not open, and vice versa, so these two adjectives both refer to the same property. (As might be expected, when a container is open, one can see inside and place things within, or take them out.) The glass bottle and the box being containers is a matter of their kinds, which is something fundamental and immutable, so "container" does not count as a property.

This is not a technical usage of the term “adjective.” Rather, we see here that properties (a technical term) can be used as adjectives within our phrases and sentences. For instance, a box with the open property can be identified as such:

if the box [a thing] is open
...
if there is an open box [a kind] in the location
...
repeat with B running through open boxes [a kind]

The designation an open box (used as a kind) is what Inform calls a “description of values.” While this terminology might seem confusing at first, it is straightforward enough.

• “description” = described by an adjective
• “values” = while we might initially think of values as abstractions, kinds of things (in this case, boxes) are values, too.

defining new adjectives

Creating a property is one way to make adjectives that we can use in our code.

a thing can be red or blue.
...
a thing can be red.

In both cases, Inform will assign all things a default property. This will always be the second value (if no second value is stated, the assumed second is, for instance, “not red” or the absence of red).

after examining the box:
	now the box is red;

In other words, creating a property has implications for all things of the world, and that property can be assigned (or not) by default or else by specific code.

Sometimes, it will be desirable—perhaps very desirable—to let inform decide whether or not an adjective applies to something. Things that are carried by the player—not stowed in a bag, mind you, but carried “bare-handed,” so to speak, can be referred to with the adjective carried. Under the hood, the adjective carried is not assigned in the way that red (above) is. Instead, it is derived from a relation.

From the Standard Rules:

The verb to carry means the carrying relation.

We don’t need to be experts in relations to take advantage of this. We can make sentences straight away. For instance:

lab is a room.

the player carries the wallet.

instead of jumping:
	if the player carries the wallet, say "The player carries the wallet!";
	if the player is carrying the wallet, say "The player is carrying the wallet!";
	if the wallet is carried by the player, say "The wallet is carried by the player!";

This yields

>jump
The player carries the wallet!
The player is carrying the wallet!
The wallet is carried by the player!

That’s all quite handy, and, once we’re used to working with relations, we can write such sentences with ease. However, Inform offers ways for us to write other phrases and conditions based on these relationships. Using “definitions,” we can craft adjectives to use in our phrases and sentences. Again, from the Standard Rules:

Definition: a thing is carried if the player is carrying it.

Initially, the significance might not be clear, as there doesn’t seem to be meaningful difference between phrases like these:

if the player carries the frob
...
if the frob is a carried thing

In fact, the one with the adjective seems to be the more awkward of the two. Let’s try again.

repeat with T running through things:
	if the player carries T:
...
repeat with T running through carried things:

In that case, the second one requires less typing and is more readable, too.

after stumbling:
	try dropping a random carried thing;

We need not limit ourselves to relations, though. We can devise custom adjectives based on any number of considerations.

a diving board has a number called height.

definition: a diving board is high if the height of it is greater than 10;

Definitions always begin with “definition:” What immediately follows is our adjective (“high”). Next comes a condition. Note that we can use “it” freely here; Inform knows that we refer to the thing defined.

We can use it straight away. Perhaps our protagonist is afraid of heights:

does the player mean climbing a high diving board:
	it is very unlikely;

or

before climbing a high diving board:
	say "Gathering your courage, you make your way up the tall, narrow laddder.""

Sometimes, we might incorporate both an affirmative and negative adjective in our definition.

definition: a diving board is high rather low than if the height of it is greater than 10;

Using the “rather than” construction allows us to name a second, opposing adjective.

At least, sometimes we can. Some definitions are too complex to allow a negative counterpart in-line. Consider this familiar-looking construction:

definition: a person is frightened if:
	if it is on a high diving board, decide yes;
  decide no;

In such cases, we might want to define the negative ourselves using the definition we just made.

definition: a person is sanguine if:
	if a person is frightened, decide no;
decide yes;

If you read last week’s post, then you’ve likely noticed how similar this practice looks to a phrase defining a new condition. Both push toward a yes or no question: the conditions have been met, or they haven’t. The board is high, or it isn’t. The main difference comes down to application: defined conditions can be used broadly to talk about just about anything. The condition is whatever we name it. Defining an adjective, on the other hand, modifies something more specific. “definition: a frob is…” can only compile if there is someplace within our code a frob to describe.

Perhaps we need a list of things the player left in the opening section of the game.

lab is a room.
	
starting area is a region.
the point of origin is in starting area.

the widget is in the point of origin.
the frob is in the point of origin.

definition: a thing is left behind if it is in the starting area and the player is not in the starting area.

after jumping:
	say "You have left behind the [the list of left behind things].";

In this case, a left behind thing is anything that is in the starting area when the player is not. However, we may have been a little too loose with our definition. Let’s make sure we aren’t talking about scenery, since players can’t bring that with them:

definition: a thing is left behind if it is not scenery and it is in the starting area and the player is not in the starting area.

alernately:

definition: a thing is left behind:
	if it is scenery, decide no;
	if the player is in the starting area, decide no;
	decide yes;

There! Applying the scenery adjective gives us the specificity we need. If we wished to only include things the player has carried, we could specify “handled” instead.

These most recent examples are computed. This is an important distinction! We never need to tell Inform that the frob is left behind, because it can work that out based on the definition we have provided. This differs from the adjectives we’ve discussed in the past: those are assigned via either defaults or else more specific code.

In both cases, though, we are using adjectives to designate something in the world of our game, and, like phrases defining new conditions, adjectives can empower us to write more effective and readable code.

Further reading: WI 11. Phrases

Welcome to June. The latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Deadline!

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

Deadline was Infocom's first non-Zork game, and they pulled out all the stops to make it feel like a new and different thing. Which made my job a lot more interesting!

For a start, Deadline's "feelies" were absolutely integral. When I bought Zork 2 and Zork 3, back in the day, I was basically able to throw the manual aside and jump straight into the game. (I'd already learned how the parser worked, and what else was there?) But Deadline came with a full police dossier introducing the murder scene: the coroner's report, interviews with the suspects, a little envelope containing a "sample" of the pills that did for Mr. Robner.

Visible Deadline wouldn't make sense without these documents. So I've included images in the "Feelies" tab. These are scanned directly from the copy of Deadline that I played as a kid! Except that my pills have crumbled to moldy crud over the decades.

I've posted the original, high-resolution images from this scan session on the Internet Archive. I'm not the first person to do this, of course; here's a set of scans from the Atari Deadline package. However, that's missing the interviews, and also I was able to do full 600dpi scans. So now you have both.

On the technical side, Deadline made an enormous leap: all of the game's NPCs were autonomous agents. Over the game's twelve-hour timeline, each character moved around the mansion on their own schedule. They could also react to your investigation. Certain questions or revelations would send characters running off to confer, conspire, destroy evidence, or (in the worst case) commit another murder. (When will these people learn that crime never pays?)

All of this required a pile of brand-new NPC navigation code. I've exhibited this in two ways:

• The "Schedule" tab shows each character's current movement goal, as well as the daily schedule for the whole crew. It's a pretty complicated system. I've included a full explanation as I understand it.
• The "Map" tab shows NPC routing paths and sightlines. The blue paths are internal tables which allow a character to move to a desired destination. The pink lines allow you to see a character in adjacent rooms down the hall.

(The routing logic is referred to as the "T system" in the source code, after the transit system that serves Boston and Cambridge. Infocom will always have its home-town in-jokes.)

Other than that stuff, this game runs pretty much like the previous Visible Infocom titles. Objects, functions, global variables, verb grammar. Enjoy browsing!

I guess I should also note that Deadline has not been licensed as open source by Microsoft. So I am somewhat jumping the gun by taking the Visible Zorker to this milestone. But it's where I started, and it's what I said I would do. So we're doing it. I don't really expect problems; we're all fans here.

More readings on Deadline:

• The Digital Antiquarian
• Drew Cook
• Jason Dyer

---

Upcoming work:

Visible Starcross will be the next public release on July 1st.

Patreon supporters got access to Visible Starcross a month ago, and Visible Suspended today.

Speaking of which, here's my recreation of the Suspended map. And my high-res scans of the original map and manual.

I've decided not to skip June after all. NarraScope is coming in on schedule; it hasn't required the last-minute burst of emergency work that I feared. So the monthly releases will remain on track. I'll tackle the next early-access game, The Witness, as soon as the conference wraps up. Patreon supporters will see it on July 1st.

See you next month!

A musical city, a record store, and a 90s soundtrack album! Okay, and a Lovecraftian adventure game.

• Phonopolis
• Wax Heads
• Mixtape
• Call of the Elder Gods

Now that I think about it, the Lovecraftian adventure has a puzzle where you control alien technology through musical resonance. See. It all fits.

---

Phonopolis

• by Amanita Design -- game site

An adorable animated puzzle-adventure game about a city ruled by sound.

I almost said "tiny adventure game", because of course Amanita games are tiny. It's part of their charm, right? But in fact Phonopolis is pretty substantial. I mean, it's not gigantic, but it's comparable to Keeper or Mind Diver (to name two games which I played recently and didn't call "small").

I'd say Phonopolis leans more towards the "puzzlebox" side of the genre than to puzzle games per se. The aesthetic is machinery that you don't know how it works. You play with the controls until you've done the right thing. Very often that's "make the machine explode messily and satisfyingly all over the place." Then you encounter a new weird machine.

I'm not saying it's not puzzly. You definitely have to pay attention to the game's reactions, think about where you're going, and put together consequences in the right order. And there are some mechanical puzzles that would be entirely at home in Riven. It's a mix.

What I'm saying is that (a) if you feel stuck, it's because you haven't played around enough to see everything the machine can do. And (b) fairly often, when you discover the new thing it can do, it will complete the puzzle right there and leave you saying "Hey, what did I just do? Why did that explode succeed?"

Usually that's a bad reaction! You always want to understand the puzzle after you solve it. But in Phonopolis it didn't bother me. The fun is exploring all the weird little animations and reactions. If a scene wraps up unexpectedly, so what -- you get new toys to play with. Win!

The toys are all modeled and hand-painted before being animated. It's a different style than Harold Halibut -- krunkier, in a word -- but watching everything move is a joy. And everything moves. The main menu rattles as you move the mouse and collapses in a heap when you quit. It's all like that. Wonderful.

Wax Heads

• by Patattie Games -- game site

An adorable deduction-ish cartoon game about working in an indie record shop somewhere in Middle England. A customer comes into the shop and tells you what they're looking for, and then you flip through the stock and give them what they want. Or what they need -- not always the same thing.

This isn't a iron-brained deduction game like Golden Idol. Really, it's lighter than Strange Antiquities was, and that wasn't particularly heavy. But it's not simplistic either. You'll find you need to think all over the record shop: sleeve art, reviewer comments, social media, the indie zine shelf. You wind up absorbing the backstory of several local bands, and then that turns out to matter.

(The riffs on band and performer archetypes were all dead-on. They weren't send-ups of specific names like in Birch Tree Theater, but they're still recognizable. I laughed.)

In the end, it wasn't even about the puzzles. I was there for the character stories. Wax Heads is staffed by a coterie of queer nerds and alt-music-heads. They are all beautiful and I love them. The owner is an (equally great) cranky old lady, a refugee from a burned-out-not-faded-away 80s rock band. That turns out to matter too.

I could have done without the Spotify subplot (on-the-nose but too easy a target). But the big finale show brought an unwonted tear to my eye. A bit of Stray Gods-style dynamic musicologue, even, just to cement the game's place in my heart.

Mixtape

• by Beethoven & Dinosaur -- game site

A reprise of 1990s high-school life as perceived through Stacey Rockford's headphones.

Just like Bloom and Rage, and for that matter The Artful Escape, this is set in an era that I never visited, with a musical idiom that I don't know a thing about. I have never inhabited a world where "Wanna go sit under the power lines and get blackout drunk?" was a question that people asked. But now I have some idea what it was like.

Our protagonists are a tide-locked trio of extremely different teens: the music devotee, the rebellious coddled kid, the stoner artiste. Not that they're limited to those cliches. The joy of the game is seeing their future selves flicker through the self-centered adolescent burn.

Rockford, as she tells the camera up front, is on a beeline to New York to transform her musical hyper-consciousness into a career as a hotshot music producer. Her friends are not entirely keen on being thus ditched. But they are entirely united on the need to find some alcohol to bring to Camille Cole's illicit summer beach party. Can't roll up without booze, man.

The game is -- yes -- a mix: a series of vignettes, each with its mood, mechanics, and (of course) soundtrack. (Rockford introduces each track to the viewer with the elan of a born radio-host-to-be.) Just like in Artful Escape, the music underpins your acrobatics and puts you in the groove. But where Artful Escape had a single move -- the high-flying guitar riff -- Mixtape gives you everything from nighttime sneaking to a lazy day skipping stones to a furious rampage. You're never doing the same thing twice.

Really, Mixtape is the same plan as What Remains of Edith Finch. (Did I really never review that one?) Except instead of recounting generations of Finches, the scenes recount a single (triple) high-school existence, disordered, in flashback. Even the "present" scenes are rendered in the exaggerated colors of memory; surely this is Rockford's adult reflection how How It Was. Kids on skateboards, outrunning cops and their onrushing future.

The art is stylized and generally great. (Photorealism has been ruined, it just means slop now.) I admit that I'm getting tired of the low-frame-rate stop-motion effect. "Animation on twos" made me look smart the first time I mentioned it, but I can't keep doing that, can I? Anyhow I think this one is on threes. Just jerky. However, the portrayal of the glow in a Sharper Image plasma sphere was dead on, and I have to admit that's what counts.

Usually when people refer to a game as "cinematic", they mean that the game knows the camera can move around during cut-scenes. Mixtape is cinematic in that it's keenly interested in what the camera is showing you. And how, and what the soundtrack (of course) does alongside. I can't remember the last time a game made me laugh at a camera cut and Mixtape does it twice. Okay, now it's Virginia, except instead of Twin Peaks it's doing a 90s music-nerd Sixteen Candles.

(Non-romantic candles. Crushes lurk, unvoiced as deep-sea magma, but this is not a kissing game.) (When you get to the kissing scene you'll see what I mean.)

Anyway: I laughed, I cheered, I gasped. I pushed the buttons and did all the things. I made a horrified noise when Rockford said Brazil was the best movie of the 80s and her friends hadn't seen it. That much was true to my life. As for the rest, it's still palpably awesome. Go play it.

I don't think anybody names a year beyond "the 90s". Since this is my schtick, I choose to believe that it's 1995, and the planned summer road trip (of course there's a road trip) will pick up two teenage hitchhikers in Northern California. And then, you know, whatever happened to Kat.

Call of the Elder Gods

• by Out of the Blue Games -- game site

A followup to Call of the Sea, a Lovecraftian puzzle adventure that I quite enjoyed. Sea wasn't the deepest-rooted exploration of cosmic-horror-minus-the-horror, but it landed the vibe. I enjoyed Elder Gods too. It introduces two new viewpoint characters, both connected to the previous story, and sends them off to explore a mysterious jungle island, overwrought cultic basements, an alien city lost to the depths of time. And more!

Early on, Game 2 lets you choose which of Game 1's major endings you got... or prefer. The story proceeds from either starting point. It's ballsy way to avoid the classic Soul Reaver fumble. Norah, the protagonist of Sea, is absent either way (for different reasons). But she is still palpably present, both as backstory and as the offscreen narrator.

Mind you, she narrates the game with an ironic tone which I found a bit distracting. I kept expecting her to refer to the current protagonist as "Stanley". Maybe that's just me.

As with the previous game, the puzzles are numerous but consistently light-weight. They're meant to pace the story, not deadlock you. On the other hand, a lot of the story they're pacing is that you explore a place in search of the clues you need to solve the puzzle. (And absorb story background along with the clues.) So, a collectathon, when it comes down to the foundation.

This lands a bit off-key sometimes. In several scenes, you reach a "Leave or continue exploring?" choice. This sort of winking fourth-wall break usually indicates a story's finale. I don't expect to see it at the end of a scene. Here it doesn't mean "Finish your side quests", because this game has no side quests. It's a bare admission that they couldn't work all the background info into the story progression. They've just scattered it around the room. If you don't read it all before you leave, tough.

(The Invincible did something like this. But that had multiple story threads, past and present, so it felt okay to focus on some of them and not bother journal-scraping for the others. Elder Gods isn't as successful; you really do want to read everything.)

And the story? Not as satisfying as Sea. Pretty good though.

I think Harry and Evie were less palpably connected to cosmic strangeness. They had both been touched by weird stuff, but their real involvement was second-hand. (Harry's wife, Evie's father.) Their stories didn't have the element of cosmic self-discovery that gave Norah's story in Sea its kick.

Still, there's plenty of weird stuff, rooted in Lovecraft's mythos but building in interesting directions. And plenty of ambivalence in the ending. In Sea I was committed to one interpretation of Norah's story; the ending choice was an easy one. Elder Gods, in contrast, gave me pause. And then, once I chose, it didn't try very hard to reassure me that I'd chosen correctly. A happy ending, to be sure, but just that little bit too pat.

Maybe a trace of cosmic horror after all. But only if you want to see it.

Content warning: literal Nazis. I am not 100% off games where you take down Nazis. (Obviously!) But I don't need a lot more Nazi imagery in my life. Times being what they are. ("...Indifferent.")

I’ve finished the game, and you’ll need to have read my previous three posts to understand this one.

Last time I was thinking about the bug I had run across with the rod becoming two rods when entering the pool.

Despite the glitch here, some further mucking about confirmed the rod is the only item that this happens with, and the special coding indicates that it is meant as a puzzle to get the rod into the cave. (This type of logic I’ve called “structural solving”, although there’s two kinds. One is where there are restrictions based on the structure of the game that force certain things to be true, like an exit closing off meaning a puzzle behind the exit has to be solved first. The other is the “author suggestive” kind where they put work to incorporate some element to the map or plot sequence which doesn’t make sense unless it gets used in a certain way. The first type of solving is almost ironclad, the second relies on the author not leaving any loose pieces. Here, Leduc wouldn’t special-code the rod getting foiled by the dense pool unless the rod needed to get by.)

I realized I hadn’t tried xenoshifting and putting the rod into the hole at the ledge both in the same saved game, so I went ahead and tried it: start with the regular space suit and the boots, wear them both, take the rod to the ledge, PUT ROD / IN HOLE, go back in the ship, dump the boots and suit (you don’t need them any more the rest of the game), xenoshift, then go past the pool into the cave.

Oho! So I was in the same situation as before (nitrogen stream, cube) except with the rod. Given it could extend for very long I tried various ways of dropping it and applying CROSS ROD. Unfortunately, the parser hard-code interprets that as CROSS STREAM without the player attempting to use the rod as a plank. (The game never describes if the rod is thick or thin, so I don’t know how reasonable an ask this was anyway.)

The extreme restriction here — for structural solving reasons, the obstacle has to be the stream, and the rod has to be important somehow — led me to tread through the entire verb list but still no luck. However, that doesn’t mean every verb is accounted for! (Especially in a game with REPROGRAM.)

Fiddling with the 11 foot pole, I suddenly recalled a very different game, Terminal City. The developer Powerhoof (who recently published The Drifter, one of the best adventure games I’ve played in the last few years) made as a gamejam project an endless runner that’s also a Sierra-style adventure game, and it’s as harebrained as that sounds.

As part of Terminal City, I remembered a particular moment where you need to take a long pole and type VAULT. Well, it is a particularly long pole in Epic Hero 3:

This is a rare verb. We had it in Earthquake San Francisco 1906, but I can’t come up with any other games in the Project that have used the actual verb VAULT. I found out after the fact both CROSS and JUMP work, but you have to be holding the long pole (and the game makes you have some intentionality since you have to TWIST RIGHT three times to get it at the correct size).

The creature attack is the worst part of the design. It merely happens at random: it’s just like the vampire which can follow you all the way to the sunlight in Epic Hero 2 and not be affected. My first two times through it attacked right away, so I thought I was supposed to be solving some sort of puzzle, but no: you’re just supposed to do things quickly and ignore it.

You are in a subterranean cavern.
Objects you can see are: Narrow crevice ■ Large reptilian creature ■ Wide Stream ■

Regarding the narrow crevice, the idea is to widen the crevice so you can pass through (the creature won’t stop you). I didn’t know that at the time so I first was thinking about fighting the creature off. I didn’t have anything that suggested violence other than the bomb, so I dropped it, vaulted back, and used THINK to set it off. (The only catch is, as I pointed out last time, the rod needs to be set to 12 inches to be used as a relay. So you need to TWIST LEFT twice to restore the rod to a short size, do the explosion, then TWIST RIGHT twice to get back to vaulting size.)

Fortunately, this accidentally wanders into the solution of expanding the crevice to a “wide crevice” you can enter, and the creature doesn’t stop you if you saunter on by.

Past the room is the last room of the game, a silvery mist room with an alien. Remember earlier the alien had said they wanted to ask a question.

You are in a greyish coloured nest.
Objects you can see are: Alien
Possible exits: EAST⠤

Alien says “ZRVZYWQ AVZTRXHG”

Unfortunately, the alien speaks alienese, and if you don’t respond correctly here, you will get blasted.

Alien raises its hand and
fires a strange weapon at you !!

This final(-ish) puzzle required a lateral mental leap. Remember the rod has multiple functions: in its smallest size, it can fit into the small hole, in its largest size, it can be used as a pole vault, and at 12 inches specifically, it works as a “relay” for the bomb. I realized it might help communicate with the alien, so I tried all the sizes before hitting a result.

The egg from the previous room, the red furry cube, and the triangle all appear to be alive (when applying EXAMINE). But which one is sentient? Hiking everything back to the lab and turning back to human, I did SCAN on all three of the items.

It took a little parser struggle after to work out what the game intended with storing the triangle in life support. Dropping or placing gets special parser treatment here to be interpreted as the item being put into the right place, and PUT doesn’t work.

There was one last catch: I somehow messed up getting the Identi-Comp set correctly on my transformation back to human, and the pad wasn’t recognizing my touch. This made me wonder if possibly I could do a City of Alzan style ending.

I dropped everything, switched back to alien in the medi-unit, held my breath, and made a beeline for the main control room. Then I pressed the red button to take off, whilst HOLD BREATH was still in effect.

This game unfortunately did follow the pattern of increased difficulty pushing against the technical capabilities of the author, specifically here the capabilities of the parser (especially the weirdness of PUT being inconsistent, and the two part PUT ROD / IN HOLE applying itself to the rod even if you try to PUT some other item). However, the game still handled the various conditions far more skillfully than your average text adventure author of this time; Leduc deserves to be known at least as much as Brian Howarth.

The reason for obscurity, other than the first three games being trapped on TRS-80, is that his remaining games ended up on the ultra-obscure Colour Genie. Leduc’s Colour Genie club was nearly the only reason for activity in the UK at all on the system, so the games he wrote were restricted to a very small crowd. Which is exciting, in that we may have some gems coming up that hardly anyone knows about! However, we’re going to take a breather from Leduc for a while, as we have coming up: The Coveted Mirror, for the Apple II.

(Continued from my previous posts on the game.)

I was trying to push to the end, but I still must be missing something fundamental. At the least, I can say (checking the list of rooms in the machine code) that there isn’t much more for me to explore; this is intended to be a “tight” game like Savage Island Part 2, and the way the alien-transformation works makes me think the author even had Savage Island Part 2 specifically in mind.

Progress hinged on two relatively obscure parser actions (one is from Savage Island and I really should have thought of it, I needed spoilers from Alastair). First off, the Identi-Comp.

What will you do now? EXAMINE COMPUTER
Notice on Identi-Comp: “Speak Clearly”

You
see numbers 1 and 2
A switch is set to
1
What will you do now? TO TWO
Okay

What I was missing (sleuthed out by Rob) is the verb REPROGRAM works on the system.

What will you do now? REPROGRAM COMPUTER
Identi-Comp: “Reprogramming commences after
second medical
usage”

The one-or-two part is setting whether the “reprogramming” happens after one or two medical uses (I’ll explain what that means shortly). I’m still not sure what “speak clearly” is all about; that may be the fundamental thing that’s keeping me from winning the game.

It’s a bit of an exhausting moment not only because this is the first time the verb has shown up anywhere, but it’s unclear what action the player is even doing. There was a moment in Seiko’s Adventure where you needed to “close hatch” while looking at a lot of buttons, essentially jumping over the first-layer interaction (which buttons are getting pushed, exactly) straight to the second-layer interaction (the hatch gets closed). Most classic text adventures stick with first-layer interaction and will come up with interfaces with five buttons that all happen to coincidentally be different colors to facilitate this; in Epic Hero 3, to launch the spaceship back off the planet you merely press a red button, as opposed to typing LAUNCH SHIP and letting the avatar in the world figure it out.

So what, exactly, is the avatar doing when the player types REPROGRAM COMPUTER? How do we even know (from the minimal description we get) that it’s got enough available parts to do that? I admit I visualized it smaller-scale with just the one-two switch, and was instead focused on potentially breaking the system open to fiddle with some wires. (For all I know, maybe that really is what the player-avatar is doing! Or maybe the “reprogram” action is actually a command spoken out loud?)

The second obscure command — the one from Savage Island — is HOLD BREATH. Back at the medical unit, you can transform yourself into an alien (made clear by the fact your space suit no longer fits based on your shape). Unfortunately, this means you breathe Venus-atmosphere but not ship-atmosphere, so opening the unit kills you.

With HOLD BREATH, you can safely hit the button.

There’s no apparent way to unhold, just after enough time your face will start to “turn red” and after “Gasp!” you’ll start breathing again. In alien form, you should be on the planet when this happens.

One last catch before going there! If you haven’t gone through the Identi-Comp reprogramming, specifically with the setting on TWO, then you will no longer be able to operate the door in alien form.

You are in a Medical and Genetic Engineering compartment.
Objects you can see are: Auto-Surg Unit ■ Scanner ■ Brown Pad ■ Closed Brown Hatch ■ Life Support ■

What will you do now? PUSH BROWN
Okay
Nothing happens

I think pressing the orange button and closing the unit counts as one medical operation, and pressing the black button to convert counts as the second; once we are xenoshifted, the ship changes the controls to allow us to use them in our new (non-described) form.

Non-described protagonists are nearly 100% the norm for this era, but it’s absolutely fascinating to have this then extend to where we clearly aren’t “ourselves”. Do we have tentacles? Multiple eyes? A large hump on our back used for breathing? This is not purely theoretical since it extends to our body’s capabilities in the world (for example, it wouldn’t immediately occur to me that we still have the kind of body where holding our breath makes sense). Neither the suit nor the boots fit anymore, although the headband does still fit and work.

One small … step? … tentacle glide? … for xenokind.

No running out of suit air at least! We can still go over to the alien statue and SHAKE HAND to get a message, although we need to be wearing the headband to do so (this is true in either human or xeno form).

“Enter my domain. I have a question for you.”

We are now dense enough to go in the pool, HOLD BREATH, and DIVE DOWN (my problem before was not putting DOWN there, this is not nearly as smooth a parser experience as Epic Hero 2).

The purple plants glow and you need them in your inventory before going into the hole, leading to a small new area.

It took me a few beats to realize that the hole beneath the pool liquid does not lead to more liquid, but rather is an “open air” (in terms of alien atmosphere) room. There are circumstances where the tunnel winds in a way that this makes sense, but I was visualizing something entirely different at first.

To the north is a stream which is smoky (it turns out to be liquid nitrogen) and a furry red block, which “contains something alive”.

You can break the block, resulting in just “red bits”. It doesn’t count as sentient though; if you take it back to the lab, and SCAN BLOCK (another new thing I discovered) the game informs you of this, meaning it isn’t our ultimate goal. I would expect that given this particular path hasn’t used either the explosive or the weird ledge found by jumping with boots.

I’ve tried taking the thought bomb into the hole and placing it either at the stalagtites or the nitrogen stream, but in both cases there’s a “crater” and no other result. The funny side result is I had the 12-inch rod with me, and when trying to dive it “floated up” and turned into a 9 inch rod and a 12 inch rod.

It turns out the thought bomb only blows up if you are wearing the band and holding the rod while in 12 inch form. (Without the rod, the game indicates a “relay” is missing.) The rod only goes in the ledge-hole if you have it in 9 inch form. This weird duplication bug means you can both have the rod deposited in the hole at the ledge and blow something up after, but clearly the intent was to have the rod be inaccessible (meaning the blowing up should happen first). I have not tested every single room but I have tested most rooms, and I’m worried there’s some special way to put the bomb in place that I’m missing (but is special coded for a particular room).

Any suggestions from this point (even guesses) please put in ROT13; I’m still going to try pushing to the end on my own.

On Friday, May 29, 2026, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.

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The White Bull (2012) by Jim Aikin

In this mythological game, you play as a young man named Matt. You, your archaeologist girlfriend Julia, her fey-like best friend Fawn, and Fawn’s dirtbag boyfriend Leo came to this remote Mediterranean hunk of bleached rock because Julia hopes to find King Minos’s palace, later called the Labyrinth, here. You just plan to poke about and have a great summer vacation.

This game was an entry in Spring Thing 2012 where it took 2nd place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

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Adventures of Helpfulman (1999-2000) by Philip Dearmore

In this large but flawed superhero game, you play as Helpfulman, one of Porthaven’s newest heroes. Your girlfriend, Aquagirl, just ditched you at the graduation dinner, and soon, your professor urges you to leap into action. Which heroic deeds will you perform to earn your cape, win back your girl, and save all of Porthaven?

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

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The Thief of Woven Woods (2011) by Arielle Shander

In this game, you play as a masked thief waking up in the quiet hours of the morning in your damp wooden crate. You need to get going and steal eight food items, eat them, then nurse your growing children. Soon they will have to learn to be as excellent a thief as you.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

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The Time Machine v2.0 (2021-2024) by Bill Maya

In this fantasy inspired by H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, it’s 1895. You play as Wells’ friend and attorney, and watch helplessly as Wells is forced into the horse-drawn ambulance on Dr. Humboldt’s orders. Unless you can find evidence that Wells’ fantastic story about time travel is true, he’s doomed to be committed into an insane asylum.

An earlier version of the game was entered in ParserComp 2021 where it took 6th place. This new version was enhanced in various ways and entered into Spring Thing 2024’s Back Garden.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

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Ransack! (2026) by Charles Moore, Jr.

In this adventure game for beginners, you play as a back-alley amateur archeologist. You even got a fedora like that guy in that movie. Your plan is to find (steal) an emerald skull from a maybe-haunted maybe-booby-trapped maybe-Mayan pyramid, smuggle it out of this stupid country, sell it, and never work again.

This game was written in Dialog and was an entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam of 2026.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

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Loadstone (2025) by rosetinted

In this short fantasy, you play as a diplomat visiting the Crystal Valleys, the first of your people to do so. After days of meetings, you’re finally free to explore with both Learis, a guardian of the city, and a very illegal loadstone you acquired. You must get rid of the stone as soon as possible, but it’s cursed: you can’t drop it or put it anywhere or even talk about it.

This game was an entry in SeedComp 2025.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

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The Missing City Council (2026) by Solarius

In this first-time effort, a severely-underimplemented slice-of-life mystery, you play as someone visiting Loimijoki City Hall, at night, in Finland. Although never stated in the game itself, you’re here to attend a council meeting about zoning. But apart from two taciturn British guards in the basement, the building seems empty. Where is everyone?

This game was entered in Spring Thing’s Main Festival.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

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A Potion Labeled ‘Time’ (2020) by Finn Fabish

In this short game, you wake up in an ugly room with no memory how you got there. You have a potion labeled ‘time’ and a watch. The room itself has an ugly door, an ugly key, and an ugly mailbox. Escape this series of meaningless puzzle rooms until you reach the end, then quit.

This game was written in ZIL and was a participant in the unrated Infocom Tribute Jam.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

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Window Washer (2025) by Galvan

In this short, strange, and disturbing game, you play as a man who wakes up in the middle of the night. Your wife, Melinda, and your daughter, Jess, still sleep, but little details about your high-rise apartment seem off or wrong, somehow. And why is there a window washer on a platform at this time of night?

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

ifs, ands, and otherwises

reintroductions.

Hi all! It’s been a while. At some point, it will probably make sense to work through specific chapters in the documentation. Starting at the beginning would be the most logical approach, so let’s not do that. I’ve been thinking about what Inform calls “phrases” a lot, specifically ones used to create new conditions and adjectives.

using conditions to assess the state of the world.

What are conditions? They are used to form conditional statements. Chances are, we use them all the time. For instance:

if the secret number is five:
...
if the location is the winding staircase:
...
if the player carries the frying pan:
...
if the second noun is scenery:
...
if the turn count is less than 20:

…and so forth. A condition follows the magic words “if,” “when,” “while,” or “unless.” We can specify what code will run based on whether a condition is met or not. Consider the following preamble (the opening line of an Inform rule):

every turn when nothing is on the oaken bench:

We could “tree” things out, so to speak, using a shorter preamble:

every turn:
	if nothing is on the oaken bench:

Another option would be to formulate a negative case:

every turn:
	unless something is on the oaken bench:

What’s the difference? Since performance problems are rare (though we might talk about some common cases someday), it probably won’t matter whether a rule is processed as applicable on every turn (“every turn” preamble) or processed only when conditions are met (“every turn when nothing is on the oaken bench”).

It might matter, though, that Inform processes more specific rules first (the one with the “when” clause) and less specific ones later. By adding conditions to our preambles, we assign rules priority over the ones that don’t.

too many “ands” for my taste.

Wherever we put our conditions, though, we will want to make sure they are readable and applied consistently. Here’s a barely functional project that contains a lot of properties and values.

lab is a room.
closet is a room.

a cat is a kind of animal.

coat is a kind of value.
the coats are orange and black.
a cat has a coat.

a cat can be hungry.
a cat is usually not hungry.

food is a kind of edible thing.

the hat is in lab.
the ball is in lab.
the kibble is food in lab.

the evening jacket is a wearable thing in lab.

Marbles is a female cat in lab.
Carrot is a male cat in lab.
the butler is a male person.

feeding timer is a number that varies.
feeding timer is 20.

every turn when feeding timer is greater than zero:
	decrement feeding timer

With this imagined example, we could write out some pretty complex conditions. Consider:

every turn when food is in the location and the butler wears the evening jacket and feeding timer is less than ten and the player holds the ball and an orange cat is in the location:

under one condition.

This isn’t terribly easy to read, is it? What if we needed to use these same conditions elsewhere? Given the complexity, we might forget an ingredient or get it wrong while retyping it. That makes for two concerns: readability and consistency. To make things easier for ourselves, let’s use a “to decide” phrase to create a single, more readable condition that we could use again and again.

to decide if the very specific conditions are met:
	if food is in the location and the butler wears the evening jacket and feeding timer is less than ten and the player holds the ball and an orange cat is in the location:
		decide yes;

With this custom condition, we can write a much tidier preamble. These two are functionally the same now:

every turn when food is in the location and the butler wears the evening jacket and feeding timer is less than ten and the player holds the ball and an orange cat is in this location:
...
every turn when the very specific conditions are met:

Much better! We could use a different organizational strategy we find it more readable. Choose what works best for you.

to decide if the very specific conditions are met:
	unless food is in the location, decide no;
	unless the butler wears the evening jacket, decide no;
	unless feeding timer is less than ten, decide no;
	unless the player holds the ball, decide no;
	unless an orange cat is in the location, decide no;
	decide yes;

This tactic is referred to in the documentation as defining a new condition by using a “to decide” phrase. Such phrases don’t just apply to things in the world. We can make custom criteria based on numerical calculations, table values, or anything else we can check in code. I’ve talked about this practice before because I use it all the time and I am still discovering new uses for it.

CF https://zedlopez.github.io/i7doc/WI_11.html#section_16

next.

Let’s discuss definitions next, which we can use to create new adjectives.