The Bat

Playing this game was a whirlwind of associations, expectations, references, and laughs.

You play as the valet to Bruce Wyatt, billionaire playboy, who is undergoing a crisis of sorts at the worst possible time. He's acting, well, like a bat, fleeing bright light sources, screeching, and crawling around. All this is happening right when a fudnraiser party/gala is about to start!

The story is divided into an act/scene structure. And my expectations swirled around. Spoiler-heavy discussion:


(Spoiler - click to show)
At first, I thought the game would be a Verdeterre-style optimization game as we struggle to make enough money, a game that would be heavily replayable but relatively brief. I thought the story was a reference to Der Fledermaus, a comic opera I've seen a few times but have mixed up with Der Rosenkavalier at times.

Then I started thinking that the money changes weren't related to optimization, but rather a way to inject additional humor into a scenario. Having someone get injured or annoyed or amused can be mildly funny in and of itself but attaching a specific dollar amount to it is especially amusing.

Similarly, I realized that this was a Batman parody when I saw the names of Bryce Wyatt's parents, Thomas and Martha (or something similar). Soon guests arrived, and I saw versions of Two-face, Poison Ivy, and Catwoman.

But others eluded me. Then the game itself mentioned Der Fledermaus, and I looked up the wiki description to refresh my mind, and saw that it included other characters that were in this game! So it was referencing two bat stories at once (and I saw later, in the credits, another one referenced).


Pacing was shockingly smooth. On several occasions I began thinking that I would run out of things to do, when subtle nudges pushed me in the right direction or major events (like the doorbell ringing) took place. Conversely, at times I'd have so many tasks piling up I thought I'd have to miss some and replay the game to see them. I kept thinking, "Surely this can't hold up, the pacing's going to go all wrong at some point and I'll be stuck twiddling my thumbs or getting too frustrated," but it never happens.

Compass directions have an in-game explanation, which I found fun given that Chandler Groover has expressed his own struggles with the compass in other parser games and his decision to keep it out of most of his own games; so having its presence so carefully justified here makes sense both outside of the game as well as in the game as a kind of tutorial for new players. Perhaps the later parts of the game where (Spoiler - click to show)the compass serves as a tool for control and destruction serves as an unconscious metaphor for the community's over-emphasis and use of the compass and the pressure it puts on authors to do the same.

Overall, this game was well-made and enjoyable. It includes some sensual material and some puerile material with bodily fluids, but both are framed in such a way that they are not really objectionable and leave more to the imagination.

Given that a few characters resemble people from different sources, I wonder about those I couldn't place, like (Spoiler - click to show)the twins. Are they from another source, or new creations?

I think this game will join Eat Me and Toby's Nose among Chandler Groover's best-regarded games, and serve as both a good introduction to new players and a fun treat for the experienced. Great work!

In this substantially sized parser game, the player takes the role of the valet of billionaire Bryce Wyatt. Master Bryce is holding a soiree for charity, and of course it would be your job regardless to make sure that everything went smoothly, but now there’s an added wrinkle: your employer was recently bitten by a radioactive bat and now he’s acting… strangely.

The charming (if sometimes hapless) rich man and his devoted, efficient valet are well-established figures in pop culture, and the dynamic between them is generally supposed to be endearing. The Bat methodically dismantles the familiar archetypes, emphasizing the dehumanization of the servant (while the master is treated like a person even when acting like an animal, the PC may as well be furniture as far as the wealthy guests are concerned) as well as how fundamentally childish it is for a healthy adult to insist on having someone else attend to their needs in this way. (Dealing with Bryce often strongly resembles dealing with a toddler.)

“Attend to” (helpfully possible to abbreviate as “A”) is in fact the main verb you will need to use in this game as you try to take care of an ever-growing list of tasks. Your inventory is also limited to what you can carry in your two hands and your pockets. The item-juggling that this type of limitation requires can, in many games, end up feeling like busywork, but in this case it plays nicely into the farcical tone of the proceedings, and I was ultimately entertained by it even as I was asking myself where I’d left the goddamn drinks tray this time.

On the other hand, while limited verbs usually don’t bother me, I struggled somewhat with this one. If your one verb is, say, EAT, you can apply a certain amount of in-universe logic to what would be useful to eat in this scenario, but since ATTEND TO is vague and there’s an intentional lack of consistency around what ATTENDING TO something actually entails, it tends instead to turn guess-the-verb into guess-the-noun. (There is a reliable out-of-universe logic, which is that if something can be picked up or dropped, ATTEND TO has to do that duty, so if you’re trying to use something portable, there’s probably something else around you need to ATTEND TO in order to make that happen. But I had trouble keeping that in mind.) If I squint I can also see the PC repeatedly picking up and dropping the dustpan as he tries to figure out how to empty it as part of the farce, but for me it mostly created frustration in a way that didn’t feel entertaining or sufficiently diegetic.

I also found the puzzles in Act II harder to figure out, but I can’t tell if that’s because they’re actually less well clued or just because at that point my brain had burnt out on keeping track of everything (which is possibly fitting as well; I can imagine the PC also becoming increasingly frazzled as the evening wears on).

But all in all, it’s a polished, funny, and inventive game that blends farce, parody, and satire, filtered through the PC’s dry, circumspect commentary. It also draws on bat behavior in surprising detail; while the low-hanging fruit (screeching, hanging upside down, producing guano) is certainly present, I was tickled to see allogrooming as one of Bryce’s bat-related compulsions. And while I sometimes struggled with the parser, I thought the final command was just perfect. So I’m content to assume that my problems with it were mostly, well, my problems, and regardless of those, I do feel it’s one of the strongest games of the year.

(Litcrit BS side note: While I understand the role of the compass in this game to be a dig at the hold that convention has over parser IF, I couldn’t help noticing that it also serves as a locus of subversion of the typical power dynamic between master and servant, so if you felt like being a bit cheeky, I think the text would support an argument for The Bat as a pro-compass game. But I don’t feel like engaging in high-effort trolling at the moment, so I won’t take this any further.)

The guests are almost here, and the master is in one of his moods. You're his faithful servant, and there's much to do: a cook to fire, candles to light, and a special harness to locate, to say nothing of what you'll need to do once the party actually starts. It's enough to make anyone go... batty.

The Bat is, to date, one of the best things I've read this year, and it's no surprise given that this is a Chandler Groover production. I recently reread Toby's Nose to see if it still held up to my impression of it, and it did - but what Groover has achieved here has eclipsed it.

The limited nature of the parser and inventory didn't faze me - on the contrary, it only served to heighten the experience; even a talented valet has only two hands, of course, and attending to things is in their nature. The charm and personality in the writing is ever-present and never falters, each room and strange object and wacky goings-on described in just as much detail that it needs to be. I don't think I quite got all the clever references - there certainly are a lot of them - but they by no means overstay their welcome.

One mechanic in particular stands out, as has been mentioned in other reviews, and whether it was intended as genre commentary or not, it was bloody good fun to solve puzzles with.

Just outstanding work all round, really. Five experimental bats out of five.