Reviews by Mike Russo

Conversations are the central part of (s)wordsmyth – hang up, we’re not doing this.

Conversations are the central part of wordsmyth (the s is in parentheses so it’s silent, and besides “word” is a better fit for the themes of the game than “sword”). Where other games might have set-piece battles or a fiendish puzzle, this one is paced around a series of one-on-one or two-on-one (and even a single one-and-a-half-on-one) dialogues between the main character – a swordsperson-in-training seeking vengeance, or at least closure, after the death of their mentor – and those who lie in the path of the journey. Each one requires a different approach, and to pick out the course to a successful resolution from the thicket of options requires empathy and attention to detail. It also requires a large dollop of luck, so you’ll be replaying some of these sequences a lot.

The world is only thinly sketched-in, but it’s clearly a mystical take on an Asian milieu (I’m not familiar enough with the tropes to be able to resolve it with more specificity than that). These tropes, as well as the nature of the character’s quest, set you up to expect the main character to be a warrior-monk, or dedicated swordsman. Refreshingly, though, the focus is on confrontations that must be resolved with social skills, rather than resorting to violence. The backstory here, and the big bad at the end of the path too, don’t stick to the typical notes, and seeing my presuppositions shift as the game went kept me engaged in the fairly standard hero’s-journey narrative. The writing doesn’t try for anything fancy, but is largely solid and typo-free, while succeeding at differentiating the voices of the various characters.

There are two aspects of the way the story is told that undercut my enjoyment of wordsmyth, though. The first is the presentation: the game is set up in visual-novel style, with dialogue delivered sentence by sentence, necessitating a click to advance after each. This is not my favorite format for a game, but in a visual novel the tradeoff is that you get a lot of screen real estate given to the art, which hopefully helps evoke the scene or communicate the mood of a character or what have you. Here, though, there’s no art, so most of the time three quarters of the screen is completely black, and you're staring at a small text box at the bottom (when choices come up, they fill the screen). There’s also no skip-text option that I could find, which made replaying sequences to make different choices a slog.

This is no minor issue because of the second thing: the author says they tried to make a choose-your-own-adventure game, and they certainly succeeded to the extent that there are a LOT of ways to die. You can die by picking the wrong one of two dialogue choices that seem indistinguishable (when confronting a hungry monster, you can ask what it wants to eat, or tell it you can get it anything it desires. One of these allows progress, the other puts you on the menu). You can die by saying you want to go back, when you should say you want to go home. You can die by asking to take your turn hiding after a round of hide and seek. You can even die by going the wrong way a crossroads.

There’s no manual saving, so each death means rewinding to the beginning of the encounter and trying again. Many of these conversations go at least ten options deep, so this can be a long, slow process of trial and error that becomes an exercise in exhausting all the choices rather than trying to engage with what’s happening and weigh the right move. It could be that I just wasn’t paying enough attention, but too often I felt like my ability to progress was arbitrary, and by the time I got to the second half of the game, at least 80% of the choices felt like they had one right option and one or more that led to an instant game over.

This is a shame because there was some fun to be had along the way – I liked meeting the (Spoiler - click to show)ghost child, and some of the fencing with the (Spoiler - click to show)cat spirit, and there are a few neat twists around the final encounter that are clever and sit nicely with the quiet theme of nonviolence that runs throughout. I’m glad I suffered through the punishing gauntlet of choices to get there, but really wish I hadn’t had to.

This is one of only two games in the 2020 Comp with the “educational” genre tag and credit where it’s due, it lives up to the billing. #VanLife is ship’s-biscuit dry, and while I can see the appeal of a rigorous, math-y renewable energy simulator, some implementation wonkiness and punishing difficulty spikes make the experience hard to enjoy.

The setup is a bit odd, but fine as far as things go: you’ve decided to live in a solar-powered van, so have to spend your days balancing power usage, purchasing upgrades for your power-generation system and your appliances, and occasionally posting inspirational quotes to Twitter, while hopefully making enough money from photography and freelance work to repay your #VanLoan. The gameplay is highly regimented: you start each day with social media, then you’re given two or three choices about how to carry out your daily tasks, usually involving some tradeoff between your mood and your batteries: you might need to decide whether the heat the water before doing the dishes, or see your mood decrease as your hands turn blue. Occasionally you get the chance to buy a new tea-kettle or oven. In between decisions, you’re often asked math and physics questions – it felt like 80 percent of them were simple variants on Ohm’s Law, though, so I didn’t find them very interesting, and it was unclear what effect, if any, getting the quiz questions right or wrong had on the game systems.

The implementation definitely feels wobbly. There are numerous typos, including one (“millage” for “mileage”) in the first game passage, followed quickly by a “you’re parents”. The interface is a bit obfuscated, too – I was confused by references in some of the pop-up hits to a side menu, which turns out is concealed under a pink arrow that’s only intermittently visible (it leads to a hideously complex series of menus and shopping options that’s pretty unfriendly, so maybe this is a mixed blessing). And while you can always see your mood and battery levels as a percentage, for the battery that’s not that helpful since you need to know the specific Watt-hours you’ve got in order to make good choices (in most of the decision points, you get told the current and voltage the appliance uses as well as a duration, rather than “running the water heater will use 10% of your battery’s capacity”). And there are flat-out bugs – after I restarted from my first failed run, the game started playing itself, automatically clicking options and shuffling through the choices faster than I could read them (a second reset fixed things, though). Plus the math on the loan repayment seemed off to me – I could only choose to repay a few cents per day, when actually I needed to pony up several orders of magnitude more to stay out of the red.

Compounding the unfriendliness of the game, some decision points are real widowmakers. Typically you’ll face choices that can impact your mood gauge by maybe 10-30%, but there are some that can drain you by almost half the gauge. These mood-killers require huge tradeoffs on the power-management side – having to run fans overnight to stay cool, or keep a laptop on for eight hours of work, seem to impose a ruinous toll on your batteries. And there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason behind when you’ll get socked with one of these spikes, meaning that you can’t even prepare for them by prioritizing mood or power in the run-up. As a result, even playing at the easiest difficulty level, I never made it more than four or five days in.

This is very negative, unfortunately, but that’s an accurate reflection of my time with the game – more focus on making the game parts fun, and a bit more forgiving, would make #VanLife a better pedagogical tool.

This review is republished from r.g.i-f, where it was posted at the conclusion of the 2002 IFComp.

My favorite game of the comp, hands down. Presented as a series of vignettes, each with a central idea revolving around (funnily enough) constraint and paralysis, the game uses the IF format to masterful effect in exploring different aspects of the central problem; in format and theme, it recalls Joyce's Dubliners, and amazingly enough fails to suffer
from the comparison. Inevitably, the parser that one uses to interact with a gameworld is limited to a certain set of responses, and while this
limitation is usually seen as a hurdle to be overcome in creating a
wide-open simulation, Constraints employs it as a devastating tool, drawing the player's attention to how little control they really have.

The high concept behind Constraints is wonderful, but what really makes this game work, and work brilliantly, is the depth in each of the vignettes. The first two could have easily become exercises in boredom, as the player guides a character who cannot affect his/her/its environment in any real way. But the range of actions the game recognizes - in the falling scenario, obvious things like listening or flying, but also screaming and thinking - allows the player to push against the edges of the box, able to feel and perceive, but ultimately unable to act. The second vignette one-ups the first, as a similar (but ironically reversed) sense of impotence is presented against a rich background. A story is unwinding before the player's eyes, but no matter how much the viewpoint character wishes to become part of the narrative, it negates any attempt the character makes to impose itself. The sequence acts as a clever statement on IF in general, and the nested narratives - the story is about two lovers discussing a play - adds a complementary sense of post-modern vertigo, underscoring that it is not only the player character who is powerless to assume the author's role, but the player as well.

The third scenario is perhaps the most conventional bit of IF in the work, but again, expectations are subverted. There are no external directives or obstacles; the player character takes it upon himself to do something, and then neatly prevents himself from acting at all. Again, what could have been an exercise in frustration is rendered compelling through a painstakingly deep simulation, which allows the player
to attempt perhaps a dozen different acts of protest. While those who
disagree with the character's beliefs and politics might find the scenario a chore, it nonetheless functions as a compelling examination of a single character's personality, an element in a larger work that highlights self-imposed paralysis, a discussion about the role of the individual in the modern world, and a fun bit of puzzling.

The final bit of Constraints is a non-game; the player is presented with a Nethack-style dungeon, with an impressive array of possible actions listed along the side of the screen. But there's nothing to listen to, nothing to pick up, no map to read, no wand to fire, no food to eat. All there is, is the dungeon, corridor after featureless corridor, with an occasional staircase down to a lower level. Indeed, the staircases are the most brilliant part of the design - after some experimentation, I found that the stairs down would only appear after about 90 percent of the map has been explored. The very act of exploring, of pushing against the surrounding darkness, itself creates another level of dungeon below, expanding the unexplored regions and keeping the player farther from the goal of reaching the end. The sheer emptiness of the dungeon acts as a sort of goad - the player races from level to level, sure that there must be something around the next corner, some end in sight, some point to it all. But the only possible action, as in the third scenario, is the non-action of quitting the game.

I seem to be on the same wavelength as the author, which probably aided my enjoyment of the game; in fact, I finished reading House of Leaves (which the author credits as an inspiration for the design of the final maze section) only hours before playing the game! But by any measure, Constraints is a masterpiece, fearless and innovative, meriting comparison to the best static fiction in its brilliant integration of format and substance into a elegant whole. I'm quite literally running out of superlatives; this is perhaps the best thing I've seen anyone do with IF.