A Smörgåsbord of Pain

[Full disclosure: I know the author of this work personally, and I helped with beta testing for this game.]

I have to admit that I find the yin-yang of seriousness and silliness at the heart of Anastasia the Power Pony very endearing, and I've been a fan since the debut of the first installment, A Matter of Heist Urgency, in 2022. Sequels are dangerous territory for any series; with players seeking both familiarity and novelty at the same time, the challenge to the author's creativity rises exponentially with each installment.

In the case of Anastasia, with its implicit Land of Make Believe setting, that burden is lessened somewhat. Author FLACRabbit has cleverly reserved the right to change things up at will, following whichever flight of fancy seems the most fun at the time. As with the first episode, there is an offbeat blend of tropes, though this time the main style being presented is noir. The impact of this is limited, though -- there are still many tropes from other styles tossed in, as befits the playful tone that infuses the series.

Anyone who enjoyed the original will certainly have fun with this one, which continues its experimentation in creating compelling combat scenes. Here I must salute the author for making each fight in the series a novelty that feels very different to play. However -- as fun as the combat scenes are -- the aspect of this work that most commands my attention is the music.

FLACRabbit is a musican at heart, with a strong talent for composing. A Matter of Heist Urgency incorporates music successfully, using it to set the mood for each scene and as accent to the highlights of in-game action, and also as the backbone of a cinematic flashback sequence that was added to the post-competition version. In A Smörgåsbord of Pain, the development of craft with respect to music continues, and the author finds ways to use it that I've never seen before in interactive fiction.

There are two scenes in particular for which the musical accompaniment is worth calling out. The first is a one-versus-two fight sequence near the start of the game. (Spoiler - click to show)As the fight begins, so does a dynamic soundtrack that loops, but with variants that keep it from sounding repetitive. Surprisingly, as the fight progresses, the music changes in response to the game state, an effect that keeps the music fresh throughout and undergirds the player's mood. The second is the game's climax battle. (Spoiler - click to show)In the food fight sequence, each zone's cuisine gets a background track that's complementary to the culinary style, and there's a Muzak-style tune for the central aisle -- the first one that you hear when the fight begins -- that cracks me up. Since the most effective fighting style involves moving around a lot, this helps to keep the player grounded in the imaginary space while also amplifying the general chaos of the scene a la Looney Tunes. Both scenes are written in a fast-paced style that makes it difficult to remember that you can spend as long as you like between commands.

Outside of those scenes, music is still effectively used in the same manner as the first episode, both to set the mood for each part and to act as stings for certain beats. The quality of the music has jumped significantly, however -- while the first episode largely stuck to simple 8-bit style tunes (excepting the new scenes added for the post-comp version), the tracks composed for this episode are much more sophisticated. (Spoiler - click to show)(The introduction to the scene with the Old Camel, who is probably my favorite character, really stands out here.) The overall effect of these various approaches is to create the impression of a true soundtrack for the game, not just as companion sound but at a level of genuine integration comparable to that seen in cinema.

Not content for innovation to be limited to music alone, FLACRabbit also added an eyebrow-raising multimedia effect (Spoiler - click to show)(the animated news broadcast seen in Anastasia's apartment) that almost seems impossible. Although Erik Temple's Glimmr extension demos showed similar savvy at exploiting Glulx's graphical capabilities, the code driving this effect is an independent innovation.

Pioneering works that hit their targets get special attention in my worldview, as they tend to open up new vistas of exploration that inject new vitality into the art form. It's great to see the latent capabilities of the Glulx virtual machine pushed to their limits as this work does. My hat is off to FLACRabbit for what's been accomplished here. Keep up the amazing work!

I have to start this review with a confession: according to IFDB, I did play this game’s predecessor, A Matter of Heist Urgency, but I have barely any memory of it. This is not the game’s fault; my “IFComp 2022 reviews” document is conspicuously lacking any actual reviews and I seem to have stopped even recording my scores there after the first few games, so clearly I was going through something that year, although I also don’t really remember what.

So due to this mysterious IFComp 2022 amnesia, I approached A Smorgasbord of Pain as one unfamiliar with the ways of Anastasia the Power Pony. The first scene, in which you seem to be talking to some work friends about the events of the previous game (while not letting on your role in them, of course) had me a bit at sea, but whatever else one can say about the game, it moves along at a brisk pace (a canter, at least, if not a gallop) and soon I was being chased through a buffet and learning a bit about the combat system by fighting thugs in an alley. I had to redo the fight a couple times, but picked it up relatively quickly.

After a quick breather in which you get more coaching on the combat system and a little more background on the heroine, there’s a trip to a warehouse in which you rescue the heroic but hapless fellow superhero Ponyheart, and then it’s back to the buffet again for an all-out brawl with many members of the llama mafia that appears to be Anastasia’s main foe.

I had gotten into a decent groove with the game at this point, but the second buffet fight pulled me up short. See, instead of relying on the combat system that’s been used up to this point, you’re expected to take down the llamas with food-based puns (the example given in the tutorial for this bit is RAM WITH RAMEN, although it also seems to consider rhyming to be sufficiently punny). I don’t know if it’s a matter of being unprepared for it, having too different an accent to the writer, or just being really bad at puns, but although I’ve done a creditable job with many rhyme-based wordplay games in the past, my performance here was abysmal. I came up with one (1) pun and was thoroughly beaten by criminal camelids. (You can just use normal attacks in this scene, but as far as I could tell they were much less effective.)

I wanted to replay the fight, as I had done with the alleyway thugs earlier, but the game threw an error when I tried. Fortunately, it’s also an option to move on while accepting your defeat, and the suboptimal ending I got still seemed to be classed as a winning one even if the llamas got away.

Action is hard to do in IF, and I think this game does a surprisingly solid job with it, between its vivid writing, simple but engaging combat system, and refusal to let a scene go on too long. And I recognize the pun combat as a way to spice up something that might get a bit stale if you have to do too much of it (since, as mentioned, there’s not too much complexity to the combat), and if it had clicked with me I can imagine having a great time with it. Maybe that would even have happened on my second go-round if I’d gotten one. As things stood, the frustration of the food fight knocked my enjoyment down a few notches. But the premise is entertaining and ambitious and the series does do some things especially well, so I would certainly try a third installment—hopefully with my memory of this one intact this time.

There have been a lot of lessons to be drawn from the explosive growth of superhero movies over the last decade and a half, one of the more positive of which is the way they can escalate. You introduce a hero, maybe a half-sketched-in sidekick, they mostly fight mooks before the last set-piece kicks things up a notch – nothing wrong with that! But then soon enough you’ve got a team of dozens, with factions, betrayals, time travel, multiverses, romances, deaths, MacGuffins upon MacGuffins…

A Smörgåsbord of Pain is a sequel to 2022’s A Matter of Heist Urgency, and if it doesn’t quite speedrun the entire Iron-Man-to-Endgame progression, it’s dramatically more ambitious. The first game was largely an exercise in trying out some ideas for designing fight scene in a parser game, with a memorably off-kilter premise (anthropomorphic super-hero pony fights pirate llamas) and a final scene where you could leaven the simple punching and kicking with some environmental swashbuckling. But Anastasia the Power Pony’s second adventure is no mere proof-of-concept – we get to see her in her secret identity, there’s a chase, a much more assured combat sequence, some investigation and infiltration, revelations, and a gonzo climax featuring half a dozen combatants, an optional sidekick, and more buffet-based mayhem than you can shake a hoof at. I haven’t gotten to Murderworld yet, so I suppose it’s got competition in the best-superhero-adventure category, but it’s definitely an impressive showing.

The humor is a big part of what makes the game so enjoyable. Smörgåsbord makes the genius choice to play its bonkers setup completely straight, never acknowledging that there’s anything inherently funny about a pony with an office job and super-strength. Instead, jokes are made at the expense of overly-pretentious martial arts (“Many martial arts emphasize ‘philosophy,’ ‘understanding,’ or even ‘learning how to fight so one does not have to fight.’ Such ideas betray a true lack of enlightenment and deserve no attention…. Remember, we are here to learn how to beat people up.”), default Inform responses (“When you conclude that violence is the answer, simply >ATTACK, >PUNCH, >KICK, >WHAP, or even >CLONK the source of your problems”), Scandinavian cuisine (there is a lot of lutefisk at the titular buffet), and banal chit-chat with coworkers you despise (the opening dialogue about whether there are usually waiters and menus at buffets could work as a scene from The Office). I laughed very hard when Anastasia’s sensei noted that “wordplay is almost 89% of swordplay” (yes, there’s a pun-based fighting style), and harder at the dialogue options when I stormed into the eponymous restaurant bent on justice:

“D-Do you have reservations?” [the host] inquires, trying to maintain his composure.

1. “Not about using violence.”

The production values are also absurdly high. There are great feelies, two maps and a martial-arts how-to that contains some of the best jokes in the game. The implementation also feels deluxe, with social interaction feeling especially rich – there’s a menu-based conversation system, but you can also interrupt that to ASK/TELL about an impressive array of topics; I don’t recall getting a single generic response, though admittedly this is more a game about action than talking. And there’s a newscast sequence midway through that’s one of the most impressive visuals I’ve ever seen in an Inform game; I think I can kind of guess at how it’s put together, but I can only applaud the audacity to even attempt such a thing, much less the chops to pull it off so well.

It’s not entirely rainbows and unicorns, though. Another lesson of superhero cinema – and one it shares with buffets – is that that’s possible to have too much of a good thing. While I was initially delighted at the prospect of a throwdown in the restaurant, since I was looking forward to a food fight from the first scene where the location appeared, in practice I found this sequence way too involved and fiddly to be as fun as I wanted it to be. It’s set in a big, 5x5 region, with half a dozen enemies across multiple waves of reinforcements moving around to pursue you, so I found it very difficult to keep track of where everyone was, even when referencing the included map. There’s also a high degree of randomness that governs when your attacks, and those of your enemies, land, which meant that some of my attempts petered out much quicker than others. Meanwhile, success largely depends on coming up with pun-based uses for the buffet’s food, which is a great idea, but in practice slowed things down as I tried to come up with the appropriate joke, which was often frustrating: it’s great fun to WAYLAY an enemy WITH HAY, but I couldn’t TICKLE with PICKLES, or ROUT with SPROUTS, HARRASS with GLASS, or NAIL WITH SNAILS… given the significant number of food items in the buffet, and the large number of dumb jokes you can make with the English language, it’d be unreasonable to ask that all of this stuff work, I suppose, but the difficulty of this sequence is tuned hard enough that I felt like I’d have needed to figure out a lot of the trickier puns, not just the obvious ones, in order to win, not to mention getting lucky with the RNG.

Fortunately, the game lets you proceed even if a sequence proves too hard, and the actual final bit is much more forgiving, and wound up playing to my strengths (let me just say that as the parent to a science-oriented almost-four-year-old, my practice making baking-soda volcanos stood me in good stead). And everything up too that point had a well-judged curve of escalation, especially the stealthy bit at the end of act 2, which has some really good puzzles. If Smörgåsbord gets a little top-heavy towards the end, well, at least it’s never anywhere near as ponderous as the MCU’s worst excesses. For all that I’m definitely suffering from superhero fatigue at the movie theater, I’m definitely down for more Anastasia – maybe just don’t demand such rigor from a silly food fight next time?