KING OF XANADU

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Choice-making in IF is the secret sauce that differentiates it from just-plain-F. Whether choice-select, parser, or some yet-to-be-invented interactive paradigm, the capability is ‘player/reader, you participate here.’ This is going to have an effect on the player/reader. Whether it is weighing between presented choices, deciding what to try at a cold prompt character, or just navigating the UI to proceed in the story, the player is digesting information and determining action forward. I am belaboring what every IF fan knows because every now and then, an IF work seems to not understand that. No, that’s too harsh. An IF work seems to underESTIMATE that effect.

By requiring player involvement, players become complicit in the story, required by the work to steer it in some fashion. Differentiating IF from straight-F is most effective when the work understands that impulse and integrates it into the narrative. This is not the same as ceding control to the player. The most successful of the thriving ‘choices are illusory’ themed works explicitly reward or punish player involvement in service of an artistic statement. The key is that the successful works directly engage player expectations and confound them in surprising and ultimately satisfying ways. Asking a player to engage a story, then repelling or rejecting their input at every turn is bad. Asking a player to choose from a wealth of unattractive options that are clearly bad is worse. Both push the player away from the story, but the latter requires their active complicity just to move forward. Unless there are other artistic avenues to keep them engaged, the work will simply be rejected.

I am afraid KoX wanders deliberately or errantly into this space. As the titular King, the player is a preening, egotistical, divine-right product of oblivious privilege. Early on, the story asks the player to select among comically bad choices. The humor in these early scenarios is helpful - no one wants to be awful on PURPOSE, but as a joke? Sure, I’ll play along! This does not sustain very long, before dire consequences start presenting themselves and the jokes leave the room. Then it becomes simply escalating insularity and incompetence required by the PLAYER, until the completely foreseeable and unsatisfying conclusion. So, a work asking a player to inhabit a repulsive character, make obviously awful choices, then blames the player for the story’s tragic conclusion. In a no-longer-humorous tone. This underestimates the power of player initiative, betrays it in a way, then delivers an unsurprising, unsatisfying conclusion, seemingly punishing the player for getting involved in the first place.

Maybe I’m too emotional over this, let’s back up. There is a reading that this work is a character study of insular, egotistical political leadership, dangerous in its disconnectedness and their outsized impact on humanity around them. Sure. Thing is, there are no shortage of those in the world. The REAL world. In the US, you can find them in TikTok, the daily news, and in the White House without even trying. More ink has been spilled on these folks than, I dunno, the ink spillage problem. We understand them pretty well everywhere they appear at this point. To engage this character in IF, in this way, the unique opportunity is to give us insights - maybe we are compelled to better understand a character, having been ‘in their shoes.’ Being the choice-maker in this archetype maybe gives us a greater understanding of… no. That’s not happening here. We are just compelled to make bad choices, and only bad choices, with no insights or commentary beyond ‘bad, right?’ I mean, yeah. Right. So why am I doing it? This work cannot answer that question.

I didn’t really find any deep insights here. I recognized the archetype at play, and resented being forced to play it. And was rewarded with unsurprising and predictable results. The work did not seem to figure out a way to leverage interactivity (and the inherent player engagement) to make an artistic statement that leveraged that engagement into something larger. Quite the opposite, it told me things I already knew and despised, then made me do them. This is a very functional definition of Bouncy.

It is almost of secondary notice that the language in the piece was reaching just beyond its grasp. Phrases like “throng with trading fleets and grow about them the holy lichen of your vast, marble cities.” don’t really land with me. “The finest legion of the capital garrison postulates itself before you” almost certainly means ‘prostrates’ there. And this just seems like a straight up typo: “ach one a great drumbeat; the drum is made from human skin, and the skin is cracked and chipped from years of impacts” Honestly though, the language is the least of the work’s issues for this reviewer.

Played: 9/11/24
Playtime: 20m, two playthroughs
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 25 Sep 2024.

That is a lot of capitalisation!

I run my Mac in dark mode. This is a very white screened game, with black text … more awake than I often like to be!

However that aside, this is an evocative short choice-based piece, where you are a ruler, looking after a fantasy kingdom, in the face of oncoming strife.

Initially it took me a while to adapt to the rather over-written text. So many “throng” references in the opening portions! But it does capture the feel of the piece, and helps you get into the mindset of the ruler you are playing.

Prompted by the idealistic impressions at the start I was already questioning the narrator, even before the first main choices, none of which were ones I wanted to make, or thought might have good outcomes! Not least for the workers.

More ornate words appear. Is “postulates” even the right word in the context used? You definitely get the feeling of a ruler with an inflated sense of importance.

Then things really kick off. I was especially struck by the series of quick fire reports that appear on screen at one point. It reminded me of timed text in interactive fiction, but in an opposite way. The effect here was immediate, impactful and built tension, not slowing it as timed text often does for me. I could still click through in my own time, but the impression was almost of a series of slaps to the face of the ruler, as more and more things went wrong, in quick succession.

And throughout this there are still bad choices on offer. There is very much a sense of helplessness. Sadly the later portion of the game has an increasing number of typos, which I did find distracting. I don’t know if these sections were written late on, and not checked so much. But proofreading - especially by others - can be such a help, even in a choice piece.

Then things come to a climax, in a satisfyingly helpless way.

I liked a lot about this. The writing is strong and emotionally effective. The world building is imaginative. And the story moves relentlessly on. Just a shame about the typos.

Totally trivial and shameless point: though I should probably be thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge more, or at least the real life Shangdu, the game’s title couldn’t help reminding me of Olivia Newton-John’s Xanadu film which I watched fairly recently.

(Another review with unmarked spoilers here, due to the brevity of the piece and the centrality of the way the plot develops to assessing the game).

Kubla Khan is a deceptive poem; for one thing, even though I should know better, I always need to catch myself to remember that the title isn’t Xanadu. But more importantly, the mythology Coleridge built up around it – that the idea came to him in a dream, and he had a flash all at once of hundreds of lines that he raced to scrawl down, until that famous person from Porlock knocked on his door, deranging his train of thought and dooming the poem to be a fragment forevermore – is self-evidently bollocks. I don’t have any special insight here, or done any deep examination of Coleridge scholarship, but come on, just read the poem: we get like a dozen lines on Xanadu and Kubla Khan, as advertised, then an overlong digression about a fountain, then a little more about Kubla, before a swerve to first-person section where suddenly we’re talking about an “Abyssinian maid” (Abyssinia being Ethiopia, quite far from China as a polymath like Coleridge would well know), and our narrator starts talking about how if he could conjure up the image of Xanadu in a song, everybody would think he was divinely inspired, if not mad. So yeah: there’s padding, a false swerve, and then a meta turn – this isn’t interrupted genius, it’s a guy desperately trying to spin out those first awesome ten or twelve lines and not quite succeeding.

So it’s appropriate that KING OF XANADU is likewise a deceptive little thing. The title is at least a bit more on point here: you do play the eponymous monarch of the eponymous utopia (though here an empire rather than a city-palace), making judicious choices of how to order your royal gardens, arrange the imperial armies, and perform your religious responsibilities so as to best please your refined sensibilities. The language too is worthy of its inspiration – it’s very easy for attempts at this poetic kind of prose to wind up as claggy high-fantasy treacle, but the writing remains fleet as it picks out one lovely detail after another to highlight:

"The people perform the usual celebrations. Red cloth is hung from balconies. Young children paint bouys the colours of daydreams and set them out to sea. Elders with lit candles parade through the capital, singing the old songs, winding through the streets like ancient snakes. And, lastly, arithmaticians take out tablets and chalk, ready to count and divy the grain of the harvest."

The author’s not afraid to take big swings for pretty much every at-bat – here’s another early bit:

"The fields surge with life. Rivers twirl through the tumbling hills like veins in a grand muscle, unwinding into your harbours, which throng with trading fleets and grow about them the holy lichen of your vast, marble cities."

“Holy lichen” is perhaps a bit too much of a reach for my taste, but the missteps are rare, and better by far to reach for something surprising than let caution keep things boring, in this kind of story.

But this is not a fantastic story about an enlightened, Orientalist despot. No, twist the first is that no matter how you try to play him, my man is an awful ruler, like “80% as bad as Donald Trump” awful. After being presented with a new elm grove for the palace grounds, I ventured the opinion that a water feature might improve things; His Eminence took this to mean the trees should be razed and replaced with an artificially-created salt-water (!) stream. Later on, when confronted with a famine, I attempted to heed the wise counsel of one of our scholars who suggested we “watch closely the simple animals of the world and preserve the ecological balance" before making any rash moves, and of course Kubla Mao issued edicts to kill all the wildlife that might be eating the crops.

Speaking of that famine, another feint is that the game takes as much inspiration from another poem in the Romantic canon, Shelley’s Ozymandias, as it does Kubla Khan. Despite how Xanadu is built up as a perfect, powerful state, it only takes a few years of failing crops – and the king’s increasingly unhinged ukases – to bring it to its knees. The exterior catastrophe mirrors the protagonist’s mental degradation; even as food riots are flaring up outside the palace, you wind up enacting purges, engaging in the kind of mad caprices that enliven the biographies of some of your more outré Roman emperors, and coming up with big ideas that would put the Simpsons’ Mr. Burns to shame (Spoiler - click to show)( “Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun” I scrawled down in my notes halfway through, and giggled) – look on my works ye mighty, indeed.

I don’t want to accuse the game of striking false notes, let me be clear – it’s very obvious that these subverted expectations are part of the design, and in fact each of these strands intersect cannily to deliver the desired effect. Having a protagonist who willfully misinterprets the player’s choices can be played for comedy once or twice, but quickly becomes frustrating, for example, but since the game telegraphs that doom is the only possible outcome, it’s possible to sit back and enjoy the ride. And if either the internal spiral of the king’s faculties or the external collapse of the state’s institutions were at all realistic, it’d risk the other half of the game feeling unrealistic; instead, they slide into extreme satire in tandem.

No, for all its deceptiveness, beyond the unfortunate accumulation of typos as the game wears on the only true bit of fakery I picked up on was the ending; after seeing everything come to ruin, you’re given a chance to tack a moral onto the proceedings, choosing to reflect either on the inevitability with which hubris is punished, or the fragility of social cohesion, or the importance of staying true to one’s dreams. But come on: there are no lessons to be learnt here (besides, maybe, “don’t put assholes in charge” – good advice to anyone who can vote in the US this November), and attempts to gesture at one feel unnecessary, like Coleridge grasping for his Abyssinian maid: just stick with Xanadu, no need to go any further.

Yes, the title of my review is a reference to the Dawn Machine from Sunless Sea, but to be fair, it was hard not to, with the references to clockwork and solar present in the game.

I quite enjoyed it overall. The writing was tight and tension immediate, even before the (Spoiler - click to show)famine began--- the need for control and perfection from an absolute monarch, one who already seemed high strung when all was well. Playing this was what I imagined Caligula was like, and my heart sympathized for the poor subjects of the king of Xanadu.

This Twine game depicts the fall of a great empire. We play as the emperor, a being with complete control over the the people. Excess and corruption are rife.

But then, a famine strikes the land, and the old way of life begins to disappear.

The writing is descriptive and evocative, and the story is good in itself and can be applied to almost anything in life where a group has grown powerful and complacent.

It reminded me of something I saw in China earlier this year. At the Summer Palace, there were some older buildings that had been destroyed, and I heard the story about how it had been burned down by Europeans. Our tour guide said that her mother used to bring her there in her youth, tell her the story of the burning, and say, 'That's why you have to study for school, that's why you have to work hard, because if China isn't strong it will be burned down again."

Obviously this game is different as there is no invading force, just nature itself, but the two tied together in my mind.

This is a short, surreal fantasy piece that I really enjoyed after playing through it twice. I won't go into too much detail on the actual content as it's much better to be surprised, but I was struck by the tense and haunting prose, which is crafted really well at the level of the sentence and contributes to an unforgettable atmosphere. Some of the imagery- the black stalks, the sunbeams, the clockwork- really stuck with me in a way that keeps me wondering about this story hours after I 'completed' the game. I would definitely play any other game by MACHINES UNDERNEATH (although I don't think they've published any others) and if I found out that they had written a novel, I would buy it on the spot!

I did notice a handful of spelling and capitalization errors, which was a shame because the rest of the game was so well polished. I always feel that in very short games where each individual word carries so much weight, it's important to craft each of those words carefully. Even so, I think MACHINES UNDERNEATH did a really great job on this game and I'm going to be thinking about it for a while!