GET MANIFE$TO

GET MANIFE$TO is a small-to-mid-sized sci-fi/fantasy/comedy/surreal parser adventure set in an energy research compound which has gone kablowie. It's not a game which makes a lot of sense, aesthetically or plot-wise. The blurb says the PC is an investigator of the kablowie incident, but the PC starts the game trapped in the compound, seemingly not having experienced the explosion. Since they're locked in, and wondering how to get out, and not an amnesiac, how did they get in? And when? And why is the S in MANIFE$TO a dollar sign? If you don't ask such questions and are prepared to take in your stride features such as wisecracking skeletons of the dead, the utter uselessness of NPC Larry the (talking) Lizard, or the presence of a supersoaker full of radioactive piss, you may be in the right mood for MANIFESTO's brand of regular adventuring, which takes the player on a satisfying, if somewhat strange, romp through a post-disaster lab.

The game does suffer from a lot of first IF implementation oversights: interesting-looking stuff that's not there, plurals vs singular vs synonym oversights, and an undersized catalogue of responses. The game mentions the TELL / ASK system (me personally: ARGH!) for communication in its HELP, but I don't think these commands are required to complete the game. The main NPC, Larry the Lizard, had nothing to say about anything which might have helped me win. Regarding the one topic I got him to respond to, I must admit to having pulled it from a disassembly of the game after I became completely stuck. I feel okay about my stuckness and can give readers of this review a non-spoilering hint which will prevent them from hitting the same problem: Know that READ and X are not the same in this game, and that the most important props in this game won't do their tricks if they aren't READ.

I got a few ad-hoc laughs from MANIFE$TO. It hails from the school of random-leaning wack which can miss as often as hit when things aren't all sewn together somehow. Some of it hit for me, some didn't, and some of it made me raise an eyebrow and ask, 'Why?'. The game does, however, have a meta tilt to it regarding creativity and rules, which has a payoff if you get to the end. One thing's for sure – nobody's going to be able to say this game heeded a bunch of rules. It's more of a Why Not game.

I’ve said before that one of the nice things about the ‘thon is that it enables you to engage with games without necessarily having to be confined to the context of their original release: the focus is reviewing, so if the most interesting way to look at something is as an entry in Thematic Game Jam X, knock yourself out, but if another interpretive lens better strikes your fancy, that’s totally fine too. GET MANIFE$TO, though, is pretty hard to divorce from its intended target context: in the event, it missed the deadline for this year’s Manifesto Jam, but given its title and its content, the only real way to assess the game is as a vector for delivering, yes, a manifesto.

Interestingly, this isn’t just a screed masquerading as a game; there’s a reasonably-sized parser game with plenty of puzzles here, it just happens to be the case that you regularly run across items that, when examined, give you some points and feed you a sentence or two of the full manifesto. The kindest thing I can say about its virtues as a game is that it leans into the DIY punk ethos that manifesto-penning seems to invite: the puzzle design is unremarkable, and the under-explained premise (you need to an escape a lab where… something has gone wrong, which you’ve found yourself trapped in for… some reason or other) is at least enough to motivate exploration and set up some fun set-pieces like water-gunning a fed with radioactive fluid and drinking a strange concoction so you can see Cthulhu. Unfortunately, the connection between what the protagonist is up to and the game-design manifesto that’s the point of the proceedings is obscure. Worse, this is definitely the kind of game that when you check the credits and see that there are no testers listed, you nod and say “yeah, I could have told you that.”

My transcript flags a long list of implementation infelicities, from missing synonyms to guess-the-verb challenges to misleading responses. There are some neat bits, don’t get me wrong, including an elegant use of text colors to highlight information, and a broad range of items and systems to play with, but I’m glad the game came with source code included because I needed to check it once to get through a puzzle that was either underclued or oddly implemented (I also checked it to see why I didn’t get all the points when I won – turned out that’s because when I saw there were lizards on a tree, I typed X LIZARD and when I got a default you-don’t-see-that error I assumed it was another piece of unimplemented scenery, rather than an indication I should try X LIZARDS instead). It’s not unplayable by any means, but GET MANIFE$TO is definitely a game best played by someone familiar enough with parser mechanics to suss out when a puzzle is hard because it’s hard, and when it’s hard because of first-time-author implementation challenges.

As for the content of the manifesto – well, it’s also fine. You uncover a list of numbered precepts laying out the author’s views on making games, and while I nodded along with each of them, I couldn’t help feeling that they were mostly anodyne. Like, here’s number seven:

"If you like playing your game, someone else probably will too; if you don’t like playing your game, try making it more fun or using fewer words."

“Make it more fun” is not super helpful; “use fewer words” is good advice; but either way, this is hardly a slogan you can scrawl on the rag you’re going to use to wick a Molotov cocktail. The best manifestos are full of fire, j’accuse’s leveled not at a faceless monolith but at the writer’s peers, urging them to do better – like 40% of the Communist Manifesto is pure score-settling with other German leftist factions, Marx was a hater (complimentary). Sure, some of the manifesto’s points sling barbs at AAA game development, but I doubt many of those folks are playing indie art-games, and even if they are, they’re mostly too busy getting fired to pay much attention. Like, what are we meant to do with precept five?

"Big studios need to fill their games with moviewatch because they perceive film as the most prestigious medium. You are fortunate to be unburdened by this convention: it means your games will be better."

I’m unconvinced that “prestige” is really the motivation for this phenomenon, but even leaving that aside, is the IF developer just supposed to congratulate themselves and move on?

Possibly I’m being overly hard here because I’m skeptical that the IF community is in much need of manifestos right now. We’re just over a decade out from our last revolution, and the insurgency and reaction have both subsided, after all the conflict, into a mature scene that IMO hasn’t yet tipped over into the decadence that would make us ripe for another upheaval. Still, if I’m going to be convinced otherwise, I think it’ll take a manifesto that pisses me off, that says stuff I don’t want to hear, that paints a vivid picture of a future I can’t get out of my head. Feel-good tips aren’t going to do it, much as I might agree with them on their own, and embedding them in a largely-unrelated puzzle game doesn’t add much to their persuasiveness either.