Once and Future

I discovered Once and Future when looking at old XYZZY awards. The author of this game worked on it for 5 years in the 90's, frequently posting on forums about it, building everyone up to a huge excitement. It was released as the first big commercial game in years, and a whole issue of SPAG magazine was dedicated to it.

How does it fare? It is a fun, well-polished Arthurian game. An American soldier dies in Vietnam, and is taken to Avalon, being charged with a mission by Arthur to stop a terrible event in America's history.

Many reviewers noted that the writing is uneven, with the author having written it over 5 years and improving it in that time. Parts of it, like those with the (Spoiler - click to show)Straw King, are stirring and powerful. Others just seem like the author gave up; for instance, at one point your character openly complains about the endless scavenger hunts, and it is just laughed off.

This is a puzzle-heavy game, with two exceptionally hard puzzles. Fans of Mulldoon Legacy will get a kick out of this.

It is very long; following the walkthrough, I beat it in 1338 turns.

I believe I actually prefer Eric Eve's Arthurian epic, Blighted Isle, to this game. Eric Eve has more and better NPC's, more optional quests, lighter puzzles, and a better (though similar) backstory. My only quibble with Blighted Isle was its treatment of women, but Once and Future suffers from similar issues at times. However, Once and Future is more poetic/trippy than the prosaic Blighted Isle.

This all sounds negative, but I recommend this game to everyone. There is scattered strong profanity (mostly by soldiers in life-or-death situations), as well as a few mild sexual references.

I experienced this game in an environment far different from its original release in 1998. More than two and a half decades have stripped it of the mystique that it held after years of pseudo-existence as presumed vaporware, and months of hopeful speculation about the return of commercial IF in the form of Cascade Mountain Publishing, a short-lived endeavor by none other than Michael Berlyn of Infocom fame.

This is a work of truly epic scale in terms of play time, and I admire author G. Kevin Wilson simply for the massive size of the effort put into it. Once and Future is easily two or three times the length of a typical long-form work, requiring substantial time at the keyboard even if one makes frequent use of a walkthrough. It's not just a matter of puzzle solving and navigation across the extensive map, it's also a matter of just plain reading; in SPAG #16 Gunther Schmidl notes that a printout of his transcript was 128 pages of 10 point Times New Roman. This is perhaps the only work of IF I've ever gone through that truly felt like reading a novel, and I'm not alone in that impression; in that same issue of SPAG -- which was dedicated in its entirety to this work -- Magnus Olsson compares Once and Future to the Great American Novel in IF form.

Olsson also notes that Once and Future is "a very American game." Its central preoccupations are with matters that had significant impact on American culture in the latter half of the 20th century. From its opening set in the Viet Nam war to its conclusion at (Spoiler - click to show)the site of the Kennedy assassination, American sensibilities dominate. Good guys are good guys, bad guys are bad guys, and where they meet violence is a foregone conclusion. This Manichean worldview translates easily to the world of Arthurian legend, where the majority of the action takes place, but other aspects of this mix of tropes only go together about as well as oil and water. The mishmash of tropes seems to originate in something personal for Wilson; to me the connections between the various categories seemed tenuous at best. (Spoiler - click to show)It was hard enough to try to reconcile the fairy tale atmosphere invoked by King Arthur with the gritty mood of the game's opening scene in a post-propaganda portrayal of the Viet Nam war, but adding (Spoiler - click to show)a literal demon to tempt Lee Harvey Oswald into being an assassin was ultimately stretching things too far for me.

They say that a cynic is just an idealist minus the hope. Wilson's magnum opus blends idealism and cynicism, leading to jarring tonal shifts in many places. The plot is undeniably escapist from the outset, but the protagonist's happy ending (Spoiler - click to show)(achieved when he escapes from our world into one in which JFK was not assassinated) is muted and not in keeping with a typical Hollywood ending; Wilson does not let idealism win at the end, at least on the individual level. (Spoiler - click to show)It seems that even the good endings are linked to a horrible future in which the protagonist is possibly the last person alive in a ruined world, waiting for the arrival of his past self in a scene that you must play through earlier in the game. The treatment of Snookums, an NPC that was much celebrated in contemporary reviews, is ambivalent in this context. It seems to be very vaguely hinted that her simplemindedness is the result of (Spoiler - click to show)brain damage received when she was drowned for being a witch in the real world, but similar logic does not seem to apply to the harm that the PC received in the process of dying, which leaves the portrayal of her interaction with the PC a little disconcerting.

The work's writing has both highs and lows. There are definitely memorable parts, and portions of the writing and craft on display show skilled shaping of the player's experience at the local level. It's at the macro level that it breaks down; although the work holds together well enough in terms of prose style, the story unfolds itself irregularly in a manner that isn't very satisfying.

As is relatively common in "old school" works, there are various distinct areas, each with its own feel to it. In an interview found in SPAG's dedicated issue, Wilson estimated the work to have 300 rooms, 1300 objects, and 35,000 lines of code (in TADS 2). (By comparison, Scavenger has about 15,000 lines of code, and Uncle Zebulon's Will has about 5500.) When you do the arithmetic, you might be surprised that this averages to about 115 lines of code per room, those lines also being spread across the objects within them. This leads to a rather sparse world, with a mostly empty map of rooms containing only limited description. Similarly, the estimate of 600 topics and 40 NPCs implies an average of around 15 distinct topics each, leading to largely uninteresting ASK/TELL interaction with them.

The attention to programmatic detail and game design is sometimes lacking. For example, the protagonist has a (Spoiler - click to show)suit of armor that, when carried, reasonably prevents entering a lake due to its weight and the possibility of damage. However, it is possible for the the PC to be magically transported into the lake while in possession of that object without negative consequences. To get the maximum score, the player must do some mind-reading, such as somehow deducing that all of the wrong pieces for a certain puzzle (Spoiler - click to show)(the planks in the mole tunnel sequence) must be broken instead of just determining which is best to use. Certain puzzles are just arbitrarily-included logic games that do nothing to support the central theme; this was still relatively common at the time when coding for the work began.

This game is historically notable, but I'm not sure how much the average modern player will appreciate it. Overall, Once and Future seems too late for its own time, and much too late for today. I would advise anyone trying it to keep a walkthrough handy and not to hesitate to make liberal use of it.

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"She is not any common earth
Water or wood or air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye
Where you and I will fare."
[T.H. White, The Once and Future King]

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>\>LISTEN
You hear the hiss of the kerosene lamp and the quiet chatter of your friends.

Frank Leandro and his fellow soldiers are playing cards in their barracks, winding down from a day patrolling the Vietnam jungle.

>The pale lamp casts dark shadows across the room and onto your faces, even as this war does the same to your souls.

After saving his friends from a surprise attack in a particularly heroic (and lethal) manner, Frank is intercepted in the afterlife by King Arthur and sent to Avalon. Unimaginable dangers threaten the world, and to ward them off, a Quest on this dream-like isle must first be undertaken...

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Thus, right after the brutal prologue of Once and Future, you are transported from the realities of the Vietnam War to an idyllic fantasy-setting. This contrast is repeated further in the game, and it's what gives it its own personal feel.
Fantasy adventures, no matter how serious the threat, always retain an escapist feeling of relief to me. The distance in time and space and plane of existence of the imaginary world lessens the urgency of the need to act. Sure, there may be an Evil Warlock threatening to lay waste to the Land, but in the meanwhile I'm strolling through the forests and mountains, gawking at the wondrous sights, secure and far away from the real world.
Once and Future shatters this escapist solace on multiple occasions. These intermezzos not only impress upon the player the immediacy of the horrors of war, they also serve to load the larger fantasy-side of the story with a more weighty significance.

Having pointed this out, I hasten to add that, in itself, the Isle of Avalon is indeed all one could wish for in a fantasy game. Forests, lakes, and mountains, with mythological references and fanciful creatures, diverse areas with their own moods, from oppressive to playful, blinding fog-filled vales to far-reaching mountaintop views.
Unfortunately though, the entire island is mapped onto a rectangular grid of NESW-connections. The artificiality of this layout, which was emphasised by drawing my map by hand, clashes painfully with the unpredictability I associate with exploring the wilderness.

The game does partly redeem itself in later stages. The Isle of Avalon is a sort of "overworld", reminiscent of the Sundial Zone in Trinity. While the objectives of the several subquests are to be found here, obtaining the information and objects to even begin contemplating their solutions requires travelling to other realms, which do have somewhat more adventurous geographies.

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>\>LOOK

---Old Woman's Laboratory

Strange brews burble and froth in cauldrons scattered around this room. Ancient alchemical devices are intermixed with more modern chemistry equipment. The shelves are stocked with bottles of all sorts and sizes. A podium fills one corner of the room. To the east is a formidable looking door.

Location descriptions are ebullient and evocative. On several occasions after reading a paragraph, I found myself closing my eyes to paint the room in my mind. Many memorable images and colourful impressions found their way to my imagination while I was going over my progress in the game during those not-quite-dreaming moments right I fell asleep.

>---Fantastic butterflies laze their wobbly paths through the air with tiny artworks on their wings. One flits past your face and you are left with a brief flash of the Mona Lisa, while another lands on a flower, giving you a clear view of Whistler's Mother

Every once in a while, a cut-scene or conversation dumps a page or two of continuous text. I found these interesting and entertaining each time, a welcome pause from my investigations and a chance to savour the writing without plans for my next commands taking up space in my head.

While these descriptions are a joy to read and visualise, that joy is layered and muddied. There is always a menacing undercurrent of dread, caused by the player's memories of the harsh and gruesome war-scenes.

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>\>
You freeze for a second, startled by a sudden noise.

I love how even an absent-minded stray press of the ENTER-button without typing a command first is incorporated into the flow of the story. As this example shows, the implementation is mostly deep and detailed. SMELL and LISTEN almost always give location-specific responses, and XYZZY is approriately dark and gloomy.
More importantly, there is an abundance of synonyms and alternate commands, and many failed attempts at a puzzle-solution do give a veiled explanation of why it didn't work, nudging the player's problem-solving faculties along.

Most puzzles and obstacles, especially those involving object-manipulation or the timely application of magic, flow naturally from the setting, their solutions intuitive from within the perspective of knightly tales and Arthurian Legend.
There are also several logic-problems, one of which became a bit of a tedious excercise because of the length of the chain even after I had deduced the basic mechanism.

The most difficult are the puzzles where assistance or information from NPCs is required. The ASK/TELL-mechanics (without TOPICS) are not up to the task of ensuring the player happens upon the correct conversation branch with the right NPC, which left me flailing in the dark quite a few times.

And while I'm on the subject of talking to NPCs, here's an excerpt of my notes scribbled furiously while in the middle of an important conversation with Merlin:

>Damned conversation bug!
Each topic triggers twice, and a dismissive response is slapped onto that for good measure. And some other stuff. Depending on the question, the character I'm asking , and the precise dismissive response, I've smacked into a list of no less than four "Dingledoofus doesn't have anything to say about that," in a single reply to ASK DINGLEDOOFUS ABOUT TINGALING.
Then I go exploring a breathtaking new part of the map, everything is interesting and moody and intruiging... I forget all about my conversational annoyances...
"Oh, here's Donglebupkis! I'll ask Donglebupkis about the Tingaling."
And then Donglebupkis does have important things to say about Tingaling, but still her response is followed by "Donglebupkis grunts dismissively."
Bang! Right back to gritting my teeth.

But as play went on, and as I grew accustomed to this idiosyncracy of the conversation system, my annoyance subsided to the point where I just skipped over the redundant final dismissive response to my questions altogether.

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From what I've read about Once and Future before I started playing, this game was made over several years, all the while debated and eagerly awaited by the community.
Although I think it largely succeeds at fulfilling its ambitious potential, here and there it feels like the author overreached a tad. Or, by the end of the development period of years, the final push was a bit too hasty, leaving some burrs and sand where it should have been smoothed out.

An engaging puzzle-heavy Arthurian story, with added gravitas through its references to the real-world Vietnam War.


Very, very good.