A winter morning on the beach

The title and subtitle here are very cryptic. Lucky day? You're sixty years old! It all feels a bit sarcastic, really. What can you find on the beach? Wouldn't more moderate weather be luckier? You're not searching for treasure, or anything.

Plus, for the most part you seem to have bad luck, or a tendency towards it. You are simply walking along the beach, for your health, but not too fast, or you will get a cramp. But if you stay too long, a seagull "hits" you. Quite frequently. I was unable to figure out any pattern.

The mechanical object of the game is to make 3000 steps–you start around 7000, and you need to get to 10000. So, thirty moves, since the average is 100 steps. I reverted to save-scumming to avoid those pesky seagulls, because UNDO was disabled. This perhaps reinforced how getting around is that much slower than you get older, though I don't know if the author wanted quite THAT level of reinforcement. There were signs along the way I read, too, about the importance of not messing with nature. Fair enough. Were you watching for a rare seasonal animal? If so, where were your binoculars?

The game has five distinct endings, which is not bad for being fifteen minutes long. They're not too hard to figure out. I don't think the author wanted the best one to be hard, because they were just going for a general vibe, but you can poke around too to find them all. The toughest one (I think) is being a jerk.

While the lack of UNDO and random seagulls may be a dubious design choice, it is attractively laid out – you can click on hyperlinks to use your senses, though sometimes it has you TASTE the sand. The writer uses graphics well. The fixed-width green font gives a retro feel that fits in with being old, and it contrasts well with the graphics, too.

So while it's not a grand production, it's all very tidy, and I enjoyed the twist at the end. It made sense of the subtitle without feeling sentimental or too random and gave a new dimension to the walk, too.

Well, it was fun to load up this game and see the font adjust itself slightly. "Bisquixe does that too," I thought. And it turns out this game uses Bisquixe! And a lot of the features, too, like hyperlinks and CSS adjustments. So it was fun to see someone use my extension, it made my day.

The coding of the hyperlinks lets you examine different objects and try out various interactions with them (some of it reminds me of some sample code Drew Cook posted a while back with a list of sense you could use; that example crashed in one interpreter but that interpreter bug has been fixed since then). There are also some more tricky hyperlinks where the linked text is very different from the action that you end up doing.

So overall I'm very happy with the technical side of this game. On the other hand, the story is pretty thin; most of the game is either a sudden bird poop-induced ending or walking past several almost-identical rooms. There are some kind family moments near the end but there's not a big build up. So I'd see (from my obviously biased perspective) this game as a successful tech demo that could be the foundation of an even stronger future story, but it would likely take a while to develop such a story.

It’s by far one of the least-destructive elements of the patriarchy, but ever since I became a dad (four years ago yesterday!) I’ve been irritated by the absurdly low bar society sets for fatherhood. Like, in some sense I suppose it’s nice that when I’m at the park with my son and people see that it’s just the two of us and I’m playing with him, not just staring at my phone, passersby are visibly surprised, or when I’m chatting with one of the teachers at his day care and it comes out that it’s almost always me who makes his lunches and snacks, I get an “oh, that’s so nice.” It’s meant well, I’m sure, but it can feel almost insultingly condescending – these are bare minimum parental tasks, but because I’m a dad, not a mom, I get graded on a curve that would shame the Matterhorn.

But as annoying as that can be, A winter morning on the beach goes one step farther in the low-expectations sweepstakes. Initially, it doesn’t seem like it has much to do with parenthood, presenting itself as a meditative little parser game where you walk on a beach for a while (the protagonist is getting older and is trying to get more exercise on their doctor’s advice). I’ve played a reasonable number of these sorts of games, and found that I kept getting wrong-footed, feeling like it was sometimes undercutting itself: there’s not much scenery beyond the sea and sand, for one thing, and while the implementation of what’s there is fairly deep and engaging all the senses, the descriptions are relatively flat in a way that doesn’t provide much in the way of reward for trying to enjoy the environment:

">smell water

"It smells like nothing: water is notoriously odourless."

My experience is that beaches have a lot of smells, with the water in particular having a salty tang and sometimes the odor of seaweed, fresh or rotting – but even if that were a realistic response, it’s not a very interesting one. A sharper challenge to slowly taking in the sights as you stroll down the beach is the world’s most poop-happy seagull; if you spend more than a couple turns in any location, one shows up to ruin your jacket and end your playthrough, which is the grossest ticking clock imaginable. The aesthetics are also not conducive to a lazy stroll; the game’s played in Vorple, and displays in a retro font and color scheme that I found a bit jarring (in fairness, the Vorple integration does enable a convenient hyperlink-based interface, though I mostly played by typing rather than clicking).

The impetus to hurry, the lack of sightseeing, and maybe even the eyestrain-inducing interface are intentional, though, since as it turns out the game wants you to get to the story rather than linger and smell the roses. After a lot of walking through near-identical locations, you finally reach the end of the beach, and here’s where the plot kicks in, though it’s rather slight: you find a toy car, then one location over find the kid to whom the car belongs, bawling his eyes out over losing it. If you do the obvious thing, you muse to yourself that you’ve just proven that you have what it takes to be a wonderful grandfather, at which point you receive a phone call from your kid with news you’ll never be able to guess.

In some ways this makes for a nice ending; the protagonist seems legitimately happy to be a new grandfather. But at the same time, going back to what I said earlier it makes me shake my head that he appears to think this scenario constituted any kind of crucible: if as a grown-up you steal a toy from a child for no reason, the issue isn’t that you might not get a World’s Best Grandpa mug, the issue is that you’re a motivelessly-evil Iago figure. If the lost-car vignette had been one of several low-key encounters on a more crowded beach, I think the revelation at the end could have been more effective, recontextualizing what had come before in a way that had some genuine surprise. But since the environment and exploration elements are so thin, everything hangs on this one small moment, and just isn’t a big enough deal to bear even this relatively light weight.