Trenchline

A trope in WWII movies/games that always sparks a feeling is, pinned down on the beach, the guy lugging along a bulky radio unit, screaming hopelessly to command, as if somehow there was a reason they put a telephone on Omaha Beach, as if there is anything you can say from the end of the line. The illusion of connection evaporating; you are on your own in metal shrieking.

Trenchline, a WWI/WWII hybrid with names changed to protect the guilty, dwells in the ambiance of this mood, dropping you off right amidst that loneliness: ““Mercenaries make easy money,” your army buddies said. “It’s all scowls and shows of force. It’ll never come to real fighting.” Well, they’re all dead now, and here you are. Stranded deep in a war zone, running from the fascist government, in a country you hadn’t even heard of two months ago.” Alone in a trench, watching “A memory of a forest, slowly being transformed by fascist artillery fire to a barren moonscape”, you scrabble around the rubble to find the pieces to fix the damaged radio to call in artillery support, so you can retreat from the position.

Wandering an emptied setting which is usually hectic with crowds, such as a trench in a war, creates that uncanny ghostliness that fogs over so many IF games, with piecemeal puzzling breaking up the implied reality into a jigsaw puzzle, but Trenchline manages to keep itself grounded through its rigorous focus on a single setpiece puzzle: fixing and working the radio. Salvage some wire, tie it around a tripod, get a signal, search out a page that gives you frequencies and callsigns, figure out how to read it, all these steps keep you hurrying from one task to another as “Your ears are hammered by a sustained rhythm, as if you were inside the drum of an angry god.” The puzzles solidify into the breathless tactility of the trenches, with your link to the outside world as tenuous as those no longer here to work it. Although the puzzles mostly work in this vein, for some reason the tripod seemed to move all around the map once I got it tied to the wire, and having two unrelated wires invited disambiguations that flattened the mood a bit.

Where the game works best is when, operating the radio, you get a chance to play in character. You can’t just start speaking on a military frequency, instead the game insists on protocols: ““>this is u71 over / “This is H43, go ahead U71, over.”” Here you get to meld into the war chatter, navigating a conversation puzzle which, while fairly straightforward to solve, offers many enjoyable deadends. Indeed, if you really get into character, you can elicit some colorful responses: ““H43 this is U71, merc unit devastated by enemy action, request…” / You are interrupted by an infuriatingly bemused voice. “Roger, U71, their attack held the Army’s attention as planned. Now we don’t need to pay the balance! Viva la Revolucion!”” But, if you think like a soldier, call in the artillery support you need, you can feel the machinery of war rumble to your rescue: “““This is U71, enemy artillery fierce, request suppressive fire, over.” / “This is G39, understood, checking fire priorities, break.” The silence is shorter than you would have guessed. “U71 this is G39, priority approved. Triangulating enemy battery location, over.” There is a much longer, pregnant pause on the line before it is finally broken by, “G14 this is G39 shot, over.” / A new voice, labored from exertion blares from the speaker. “This is G14, shot out.” / “Splash, over” / “hooo Splash, out. G39 this is G14, left 300, fire for effect.” / “U71 this is G39, time on target 2 minutes, you got 10 minutes of cover. Good luck U71, out.” / The close air of the bunker becomes charged in the sudden silence from the radio.” Ten minutes? You better start running.

If only to keep pace with Trenchline, which knows what it wants to accomplish and gets there quickly. It doesn’t quite mettle up to a mood as intense as its intent, but nevertheless settles amicably enough in its slyly semiserious style. For what I think is a debut, the author shows a lot of promise and craft, so one can only be thankful for fos1’s efforts to keep TADS vibrant having brought forth fruit like this.

Trench Line is a stealthy/actiony/parsery vignette that takes place on an active battlefield, a setting I’m not at all familiar with, either in life or in games. But it felt very real, both in the sense where a story immerses you in a life-threatening situation and also in the sense where you’re in an escape room being tasked with disarming a bomb when you have no idea how to do that in real life. But even though I needed a nudge to figure out how to use the radio, it was satisfying to get the hang of the protocol and make my way out of danger.

The writing was straightforward yet evocative. Even though it mostly just described the pertinent information for the current moment, it painted a larger picture of what must have happened to lead to this point. The random per-turn events and descriptions of the transitions between rooms added a lot of flavor. Occasional use of bold and italics commanded my attention (at least at first—once I realized the italic events were repeating, I started becoming desensitized to the battlefield, to my benefit, at least for the moment).

The choice to start in the middle of a battle was intense. I felt I had some info about the situation, but not enough to honestly assess my role in the conflict—which is fine. That might not be on the player character’s mind in a situation like this anyway. Especially not one who came here looking for easy money.

If this was the intro of a larger game (or, if not the very beginning, an early stage), I can see myself continuing to play and getting into the story. I’m curious about how I ended up in that place, on that side. But the game works well as a small action game with a modest goal, and it’s not like anything I’ve played before. That’s pretty great for a debut work!

I promised we’d be circling back around to this series, and so the time has come for another thrilling installment of:

Wait, Did I Beta Test This?

This time I’m pretty sure the answer is yes! My son was one and a bit during the 2022 holiday season, which was about when he started sleeping most of the way through the night, so while I don’t have perfect recall of those almost-four-years-ago days by any means, I went into this one pretty sure I remembered some of the high points from putting it through its paces – artillery fire, a satisfyingly complex implementation of a radio, a bunch of rigmarole with some wire. But sadly it turns out I’m 0 for 2 in this series, as per the in-game CREDITS it was actually some guy named Mark Russo who tested it.

Well, whoever that Mark dude is, he must have given some solid feedback because I had a lot of fun with whatever number run through the game this was! In my Edge Valley Bigfoot Society review I mused on the well-intentioned advice to newbie authors to focus on finishing a small game before getting too ambitious, and how despite agreeing with that advice I admire the hubris of those who choose to disregard it. Trenchline does a really good job of walking the balance-beam, because on the one hand it’s got a very manageable scope – the map has half a dozen or so locations, most with only one or two interactive objects, and there’s only one real puzzle. On the other hand, that puzzle has a lot of different steps, all logical and satisfying to solve without requiring excessive hand-holding (though the hints are a lot of fun, if you do have recourse to them). Meanwhile, the radio is a very ambitious bit of design – there are a bunch of different parts, all of which behave the way you’d think, and once you get it working there are multiple NPCs you can interact with. The implementation is tight, with lots of scenery implemented and logical courses of action anticipated, and good use is made of some of TADS’ bells and whistles, like hyperlinks for navigation and topic-suggestion in the ASK/TELL conversation system. About the only hiccup I noticed was that there’s a bit of disambiguation required when you’re juggling multiple parts of a long wire, but it only held me up for a few seconds.

Beyond the design, the writing is also nice and tight. The setup here is that you’re a mercenary (don’t worry, you were hired to fight fascists) whose company has been slaughtered, left to take shelter in the eponymous underground bunker to avoid a withering artillery barrage and hopefully find some way of escaping. I’m not aware of too many pieces of IF that center on modern-ish infantry warfare, and still fewer that present military matters with any sort of verisimilitude, so I was impressed by the game’s ability to present what felt like a well-observed, grounded setting without forcing the player to wade through boring gun porn. There’s even a bit of environmental storytelling in the laconic descriptions, like this bit that provides some hints about how and why the bunker became abandoned:

"A clearly professional job of smashing these crates was recently conducted. Few splinters are larger than a forearm and all of the ammunition the crates previously contained, now gone. Whether issued to PWM forces or expended in anger there is no way of knowing. The wooden debris is loosely scattered about."

Similarly, conversations with the soldiers on the other end of the radio are appropriately bureaucratic, but I always felt like I had enough context to understand what they were saying and how to respond.

It all adds up to a satisfying package – confidently written, cleanly implemented, with a single puzzle that’s satisfying to solve and doesn’t wear out its welcome. It’s about as assured a debut as you could hope for, so plaudits are definitely due to the author and the mysterious tester who backed him up.