Reviews by EJ

Excalibur takes the form of a fan wiki for a fictional ’70s science fiction TV show. The show itself is now completely lost to the BBC’s tape-erasing practices, but the fans have come together to assemble what information they can from their own memories and whatever ancillary materials they can get their hands on, documenting the content of the show and the behind-the-scenes dramas of the cast and crew.

I found this premise intriguing, given my own experiences with fandom. The relationship of a fandom to its source material is often less straightforward than one might think (especially if that fandom has been going for decades). Theories about a show or interpretations of ambiguous elements can become widely agreed upon as fact even though the actual contents of the show support multiple possibilities, and the popular theory/interpretation may not even be the best supported. Small details are given disproportionate importance—a joke that appeared two or three times becomes, in the minds of the fans, a running joke in practically every episode; something a character does or mentions once becomes a prominent character trait. Popular fan writers invent characterization and worldbuilding details that other fan writers adopt, and eventually everyone forgets those details weren’t in the show. In a very real sense, a fandom is not so much about the actual source material as it is about a version of it that lives in the collective imagination of the fans.

The concept of a fandom whose source material doesn’t exist anymore provides a great opportunity to explore this phenomenon: the fans are trying to reconstruct the show as accurately as possible, but does it really matter what was or wasn’t actually in there? Are these fans sticking around due to love of the show, as they profess, or is it more that they’re getting something out of the social aspects of the fandom? If Excalibur had been more focused on the dynamics between a work of fiction, its creators, and its audience (and among that audience), I would have loved it. Instead, however, it was trying for some grander themes (Do we place undue importance on memorializing things—or people—that are gone? At what point does “remembering” turn into “being stuck in the past”?), which didn’t quite work for me.

This may be a matter of taste; in general, I prefer exploring themes like this through characters rather than as philosophical abstracts. In this case, I would have liked to see either different characters grappling with the comforts of memory versus the benefits of moving on, with different results, or one particularly richly textured, well-drawn character’s personal journey. Instead, Excalibur mostly offers philosophical musings alongside characters who are caricatures of common fan types—including the central character, Ian, who is that guy who loves being a big fish in a small pond, and is perhaps so high on his own self-importance that he’s forgotten how small the pond actually is. The caricatures are well-done, and in a game that was more parodic in tone I would have no faults to find with them, but they sit somewhat oddly alongside the game's high-minded thematic concerns.

One section of the story that did work for me was the portion of the game focusing on VerdantKnight and HandOfBedivere, who, having met through Excalibur fandom, are working together to make a fan documentary and are also in a long-distance relationship. Then, after a visit to the main filming location, Bedi disappears from the internet. Did he fall victim to the show’s supposed curse, or has VK just been ghosted? Either way, it’s a tale of an obsession with the past that is at best relationship-destroying and at worst deadly, and VK, in his grief, reacts by clinging even harder to that obsession, insisting that he will finish the documentary on his own. And in that moment, I cared about how destructive that obsession was, because VK felt like a real person, not A Certain Type of Fan.

But then, “felt like a real person” is a slightly ironic thing to say here. On several occasions, Excalibur brings up the idea that the show never existed and no one involved in creating it ever existed. That’s all very well and good, but then it suggests that (Spoiler - click to show)the fans never existed, or at least that many/most of them are sockpuppets (that is, fake accounts) made by Ian. So if the show isn’t real, and the people making the show aren’t real, and their on-set drama and the mysteries surrounding the making of the show aren’t real, and the fans aren’t real, and their interpersonal dramas aren’t real… what’s the point of any of this? (You might, if you were being a smart aleck, point out that this game is fiction, so of course none of it is real. But emotional investment in a work of fiction requires some amount of suspension of disbelief, so it’s hard to make that investment in a work that doesn’t believe in many aspects of its own created world and doesn’t want the player to get too comfortable doing so either.)

The point, in fact, seems to largely be Ian’s personal psychodrama—can he bring himself to let go of this fandom, or will he be stuck in a spiral of unhealthy obsession forever?—(Spoiler - click to show)but then, that actually makes less sense to me under the “sockpuppeting” interpretation, too. If the other fans are real, then the reasons for his attachment to the fandom are obvious, but if this is all a one-man puppet show, then he’s not actually getting any attention or respect, so what is he getting? But perhaps the bigger problem here is that I don’t quite care enough to come up with interpretations of his motivations, because for most of the game he’s presented as an exaggerated, two-dimensional stereotype, which was funny, but didn’t really prime me to be interested in dissecting his psychology.

Despite this wall of text, I really did like Excalibur overall; the reason I’ve written this whole long review of it is that I almost loved it, but the “is this fake? Is that fake? Is it all fake?” kept distracting me from (what I felt was) the good stuff.

The visual design of the game is fantastic, and it does a mostly good job of wrangling Twine into the shape of a wiki despite Twine’s protests (although I did feel the lack of a proper back button). And I did think that the first two layers of the narrative, the descriptions of the show and the mysterious goings-on behind the scenes, were well-executed, with a nicely unsettling atmosphere, when leaving aside the repeated suggestions that they might never have existed. But with those suggestions in place, these two layers rely on the third layer, the goings-on in the fandom, to give them meaning, and Ian’s story didn’t do that for me.

[Pyg]malion* stars a deity who has been murdered and temporarily reanimated in order to find their murderer. The suspects are all embodiments of various societal forces—politics, celebrity culture, Big Data, capitalism—and despite your divinity, it rapidly becomes clear that you are the underdog here. (Presumably the allegory is that one or more of these forces has supplanted religion in modern society.)

The game’s visual presentation is very slick; I was impressed by the graphics, and I deeply appreciated the ability to swap out the retro game font for a regular sans-serif. The descriptions of the strange dimension the game takes place in and its denizens are inventive and striking.

But, all right, let’s cut to the chase, here: you can’t solve the mystery. The crime scene has been cleaned up before you get there, so there’s no physical evidence to find, and the suspects give a handful of pat responses about where they were and what they were doing that are impossible to verify. And ultimately it doesn’t matter anyway, because all of the suspects are above the law.

You could debate the merits of subverting audience expectations versus the disappointment of breaking the implicit promises set up at the start of the story; you could discuss how much value there is in upending the expectations of the rather conservative mystery genre, specifically. You could argue about whether undermining player agency in an interactive medium is a good way to make a statement or whether it’s more likely to annoy players enough that they’re not inclined to listen to what you have to say.

But I think the most salient point is this: such a narrative just isn’t very interesting. Once the player realizes that the mystery is unsolvable, which happens fairly quickly, there’s nothing else to be gotten out of the game. There’s no other plot, the PC is a cipher, and the social commentary is not deep. The interactivity only exacerbates this issue. By the time the night is halfway over, the player has probably seen all the dialogue, and not much really changes, so the only thing to do is to wander from mostly-empty location to mostly-empty location, running down the clock.

In its unusual concept, memorable descriptive writing, and appealing retro visuals, the game shows a lot of promise, and I would be interested to see the writer’s future works. But it’s unfortunately too static and too repetitive to be satisfying as a game or as a story.

In Cygnet Committee, the player navigates an abandoned military compound and learns the story of an AI based on Joan of Arc. The opening scene, swimming to a beach and then avoiding mines on your way to the compound, seems like pretty standard spy stuff. Then I reached the compound and found the beanstalks growing ears, and I realized this game was going to be much weirder than I first thought.

In general, the world of the game is strange, and some things are definitely meant to be humorous, but it’s not a farce. It strikes a tricky balance between the objective strangeness—ridiculousness, even—of the situation and the sense that this is all deadly serious within the universe of the game, managing to be thought-provoking and elicit some empathy for the Joan AI even though a bare-bones summary of the plot would seem like a joke.

The gameplay is innovative: you have four audio tracks, visually represented on the screen, that play when you mouse over them, and you have to select the one that plays the correct sound (listening for a “click” when you’re picking a lock, for example)—or sometimes no sound at all (as when you’re navigating a minefield and need to avoid the tracks where your detector is beeping to indicate the presence of a mine). Sound-centric gameplay like this is rare even in video games, and in IF, to the best of my knowledge, it’s never been done before. It’s certainly unique and memorable.

The problem is that, for me, it wasn’t actually fun. With a few exceptions (about which more later), every single puzzle is the same “listen to these four tracks and select the one that’s different” task, which offers little opportunity for increasing difficulty or complexity over the course of the game. I got some enjoyment out of figuring out the gimmick on the very first puzzle, but after that it got repetitive very quickly, especially as the player has to redo previous tasks every time they want to revisit an area.

It’s not that I require complicated puzzles in order to enjoy something. I frequently enjoy works of IF and video games that have no gameplay to speak of. I’m happy to play a walking simulator or click links to advance a linear Twine story, as long as it feels like interactivity is serving some purpose in the game. But when a game has gameplay elements that are nominally challenges, but are so easy that completing them gives no real sense of satisfaction, it ends up feeling like busywork to me.

The timed segments are, I think, a bit more challenging; I was extremely bad at them, because I have poor reflexes/fine motor skills, so I feel a little weird saying that I think the game would have been better if there were more of them, but I do think that a game focused more around the timed segments would have felt more rewarding. (Although these segments would have benefited greatly from having a timer on-screen, I think.)

I can see how much work this must have been on the technical end of things, and it seems very polished, without bugs or places where the essentially-custom system gets noticeably wonky. But in the end, while I appreciate it as a technical feat and admire the delicate tonal balance that the writing achieves, I didn’t really enjoy the game.