The Missing City Council

The author's comment from the STF website: “My first piece of interactive fiction. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?”

Yes! And this is an amazing place to start.

While I didn't get practically anything, I did learn that saunas are (supposedly) a common sight in Finnish buildings.

To win, and I'm basing this off of the walkthrough since I couldn't finish it myself: you have to (Spoiler - click to show)infuse a cup with the putrid stench of (?) oil, make the two guards of a prison cell holding some political leaders/councillors/long-dead heads of state inside sniff it, making them sick, while you free the guys inside.

10/10 idea, (but) flawful execution.

Before that though, you have to perform a strangely specific set of seemingly random actions that the average player would obviously never arrive to without being high on LSD. Just look at the walkthrough to see what I mean.

And speaking of the walkthrough. The game seems to have been updated since then, so the walkthrough's outdated, atleast in my experience, cause when I tried (Spoiler - click to show)giving the left guard and the right guard (I love it) my bewitched cup, they sniffed it and promptly returned it to me... I feel inadequate...

This transcends from one-star to two-star territory purely because of the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)the lift "makes some regular lift noises" while lifting you through all the lifting places. I LIFT IT.

And the politicians... say some confusing stuff right after (Spoiler - click to show)being released... before George V runs off to a (World War 1 Era — I looked it up — bi-) plane conveniently parked in the basement, and flies off... "Crisis averted", though I have no clue what. (Spoiler - click to show)(an invasion on Finland? Rereading it right now, I feel like I get it a bit more...)

Yeah, title of the review.

EDIT: I completely forgot to mention (Spoiler - click to show)Untitled. Untitled is an enigma. Behold the in-game description: "175 lbs of hard-boiled sweets, of many flavours. They seem to have mostly melted together because of the heat."

Weird, right? But this hits the perfect itch for me, one that I didn't even realise was there. Gives (the utmost vague) vibes of stuff like (Spoiler - click to show)MissingNo. from Pokémon or the Far Lands from Minecraft; it's like the start of a creepypasta or an ARG.

What you gotta do is (Spoiler - click to show)"hit" Untitled, whereupon you receive a drop of (randomly flavoured, I tested this unwittingly) "boiled sweet".

Yeah, it was probably never intended as any of those things, and I'm stretching it a bit, but it makes you wonder... An IF where you solve an ARG as the player would be epic. Even better if the IF itself is just one piece of the puzzle, and you gotta play a bunch of them to figure it all out.

I'd settle for either, honestly (seeing other people solve ARGs is entertainment enough for me), though the former would be more accessible for more people.

3 stars for inspiring me.

I believe this game hasn't been beta tested. (No beta testers are credited.) That means the game is incomplete.

Room exits are unlabeled. The primary puzzle of the game is inexplicable. Even playing through near the walkthrough, I couldn't make sense of what the game's objective was supposed to be, or how to solve it.

The main puzzle puts you in contact with an item called "Untitled." Inexplicably, you have to (Spoiler - click to show)hit untitled to win the game.

I don't think this game can be solved without reading its walkthrough.

Local government is weird. In my career I’ve done advocacy at the federal level as well as the state level in California, working on bills that would raise and spend billions of dollars or make substantial changes to major sectors of the economy. But I’ve also done work in cities, counties, and other local governments, and while a lot of the dynamics are exactly the same, just with smaller numbers, I’ve also come across irruptions of pure chaos that are impossible to explain without just saying “man, this is weird.”

Like, one time I was supporting a community group that was pushing for expanded weekend burial hours in a rural public cemetery district – they were Hmong, and had a tradition of doing Sunday funerals – which seemed pretty straightforward. They’d gone to the district superintendent, who was an old guy who didn’t much like changing the way things were done, and he’d said he wouldn’t do it, so they went to a sympathetic board member who said he’d be willing to push for it if he could get a sense of what it would cost. The superintendent wasn’t going to be helpful, so I worked with a colleague to analyze the district’s budget, made some estimates, and concluded it would cost maybe a couple thousand bucks wouldn’t really impact the bottom line. We were feeling good about things when my colleague went out to one of the district’s board meetings to share the analysis – except instead of greeting her presentation with a “huh, cool, glad this won’t be a big deal after all,” the superintendent freaked out at the idea that someone else was looking at the (publicly available) books. Even more unlikely, it turned out that one of the attendees at the meeting was a woman who’d decided to spend her retirement going to every single cemetery district meeting, and she tracked down my colleague’s phone number so she could leave a rambling three-minute voicemail in which she expressed how upset she was about… something, it was very hard to tell. Everyone got angry at everyone else, the county supervisor had to pull some strings to get people removed from the board, and the superintendent eventually decided this was all too stressful for him and retired. It was an enormous mess that took hours and hours to deal with, a gigantic fight over the smallest imaginable iota of policy. Like I said: weird!

But not as weird as what’s going on in the Missing City Council (ha, managed to get around to it before we hit the 500 word mark!) The premise of this debut parser game is that you’re a Finn at City Hall for a hearing about a zoning dispute, but when you arrive, the building is almost deserted: nobody’s in any of the offices or meeting rooms, except for a pair of British guards inexplicably hanging out in the basement. So your task is to explore the building, get through some locked doors, and solve a multi-step puzzle to find out what’s happened to the misplaced aldermen so they can rule in your favor.

At least, that’s what I think is going on, based on the title and blurb; the game itself doesn’t provide any direct context or motivation, so this is really one of those fumble-around-with-everything-that-looks-like-a-puzzle-until-you-win affairs. And fumble I did, because Missing City Council makes a bunch of idiosyncratic interface decisions, like eschewing compass directions in favor of having you ENTER or go IN various doors and passages. The contents of rooms are also often listed in a jumble at the end of the sparse location descriptions, which lends a bizarre air to proceedings:

"You can see a staircase up, a door to the lift, a left guard, a right guard, a door to the toilet, a door to the shelter and a door to the garage here."

There are also a lot of the usual infelicities of a minimally-implemented game that didn’t receive any outside testing – many objects (including the player) have default descriptions, there are locked doors that open only by PUSHING and items mentioned in descriptions that aren’t implemented, and so on. The puzzles also seem like they must only make sense to the author – while I dimly intuited that I needed to make some tea to distract the British guards (points for knowing national stereotypes), the steps required are so Byzantine that I can’t see how a player would make progress without going to the walkthrough. Like, the first step major step is to intuit that an avant-guard art piece described as being made of boiled sweets would dislodge some of its hard candies if you hit it, then hitting it enough times to get a lemon drop to pop off so that you can put it in the tea to make lemon Earl Grey.

Usually try to say at least something nice about authors’ first games, no matter how much I’ve complained about their rookie mistakes, and that’s actually easy to do here: this is a charmingly zany premise, some of the scene-setting, like the art collection crammed into the upstairs sauna, is memorably silly, and the ultimate explanation as to what’s going on made me laugh. So this is an author with a unique comedic angle, and we could always use more farce in parser IF – hopefully their next game will get some more testing, and sand down the weirdness so that it’s quirky rather than completely impenetrable.

(Oh, and there’s a happy ending to the cemetery district story: a new superintendent took over, and confirmed that yeah, they could extend the hours for just a couple thousand bucks, no big deal. I’m not sure whether that lady kept going to the board meetings, but I like to think she does, and finds something new to get incredibly upset about every month).

I played this game as far as I could by myself, then I had to use the Walkthrough to proceed from there. My first note is that the puzzles seem quite far-fetched in terms of knowing what to do next. I’d be surprised if anyone got some of the puzzles, but that isn’t to say I admire the commitment to the small scope of the game (which is a thing I really struggle with). I also think it’s worth noting the idea of the entire game is very simple and yet, uh, not so simple. I found the ending quite funny and it certainly surprised me!

…That said, the game mainly struggles with interaction/implementation. By this, I mean there is very little room description and all the implemented objects are in a list at the end. However, all the doors for instance could be made undescribed (or however it is done in Inform 6) and then mention them in an extended version of the room description, so that the player feels more part of the story than simply a robot scanning all potentially usable items (I don’t know if that makes sense)… And again, maybe synonyms for objects (eg. plane for aeroplane); finally, objects in room descriptions need to be implemented, such as a desk in the office, or a sink in the bathroom. Even if not really described in much detail, just an acknowledgement that they exist is worth a lot to a player. I was testing a game a year ago with these incredible descriptions of the objects, and I really enjoyed them, but nothing in the object descriptions were implemented, so I went through the start of the massive game and just pointed out all the missing objects. Sometimes, just a “that isn’t important to the story” (or, better, a ~15 word description of what the object is) is enough.

Anyway, the game is a promising first start, and I’ll be interested in seeing Solarius again!

Originally written on the intfiction forums. Some edits were made.

The emphasis on “perfectly normal mystery” is a dead sign that we are not, in fact, dealing with the mundane here. Something, or rather, some things are missing when the protagonist ventures inside City Hall. It was at this moment when I knew for a fact that the initial premise was mainly an excuse to go through the building and deal with item puzzles rather than do some social deduction with city officials. I had to use the walkthrough for many puzzles I considered unintuitive. I am also, admittedly, Bad At Puzzles, but most people were in the same boat from comments made on intfiction and the Neo Interactives Discord.

Functions such as ABOUT/CREDITS, UNDO, and TALK TO are unimplemented. While there are some grammatical errors around objects that I assume, to my Inform-illiterate mind, are related to how items are created and treated by the development system, I did not find any other typos nor did I find anything that was outright bugged.

Finishing a game, especially your first, is a milestone to be celebrated and I am glad to sample the content and the thought put into it. If the author makes more creations with the lessons they learned from The Missing City Council, I’d love to experience them.

(the following paragraph spoils a puzzle solution)