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Bite-sized Gilgamesh, August 14, 2012Every word of this tiny game evokes pre-historic mystery, painting a dark and grim vision of the mythic quest. The writing is terse but poetic, and above all, pointed. Alliterative phrases, vast imagery, and clever but easy-to-understand wordplay elevates the tone and style to that of the epic. The personification and wordplay remind me of For a Change by Dan Schmidt.
This is a dark epic, a gothic tragedy. The story is unclear. I wish I could report that I had figured out what really happens, but I failed to understand. The protagonist is searching for something that means everything to him. Given the atmosphere of the ancient epic, I would think the object of the Quest must be something of great metaphorical significance. Figuring out the plot is by far the most difficult part of the game. Except for one easy puzzle, the game consists of choosing from conversation menus and advancing through stages by repeating the same action. The parallelism of these stages gives the game a sort of poetic construction that works well with the writing style.
The TADS 2 gamefile is named "darksong.gam"; this caused some confusion for me when I was looking for this game after downloading the SpeedIF zip archive. (I want to note that the conversation system doesn't display correctly in Gargoyle.)
I realized that something like "Darksong" or "The Dark Song" could have made a good enough title for this game. Instead, it is named after a figure that appears more or less as a background object, a character that has no bearing on the plot and no effect on the game simulation. The Yellow Dog could have been omitted with no objective loss. But this game is driven by atmosphere more than anything else, and the mystery conjured by the figure of the Yellow Dog, and the importance that is attributed to it by its place in the title, makes the epic style deeper and more real. Even the setting ultimately doesn't need to be taken all that seriously; the setting is just real enough to preserve the mood. There is some attempt to cast the player character as a real person from a real mythological world, but there is also the anachronism of mentioning a "cigarette." I felt that the ending text was a little weak and anti-climatic, but it may have been more effective for me had I figured out what the story was all about.
As a SpeedIF entry, this game is under-implemented. There would have been a lot of room for more messages to reinforce the tone. Only the actions and objects that are absolutely necessary are implemented. However, the implementation is strong enough for the sparseness of the game world. Although I'm confused about the plot, and I'm not even sure if the game is entirely successful in producing a sense of horror (if that was its goal), the haunting sense of mythic grimness that flows from every delightful phrase is very satisfying. I don't think I've seen any other IF work accomplish so much with so little.