The Count and the Communist

It’s hard to talk about the Count and the Communist without focusing on how unique it is, and especially on its visual presentation. Taking Inform 7 as its foundation, the game reimagines basically every traditional element of input and output to create a lavishly-illustrated point-and-click adventure, with lovingly-crafted ASCII graphics providing the visuals and limited-parser menu-based interaction standing in for the mouse. Beyond that, per the title you’re playing a committed follower of Marx bent on defending the nascent Soviet state from a White Russian conspiracy by going undercover as a laundress at the estate of an émigré aristocrat; this means there are rather more lectures on dialectical materialism than in most Comp entries, but also that object-manipulation puzzles, while present, are de-emphasized in favor of stealth-based gameplay, as you snoop around the manor while trying to avoid arousing the suspicions of your employer or your fellow servants. I’m going to talk about all this novel stuff – as soon as the following paragraph, in fact! – but let me just note before we do that I don’t think it makes sense to stop there.

So, let’s lead off with the presentation. It’s great! The graphics are really well done, conveying a real sense of character and responding to state changes (there are slight variations to what you look like when you are and are not wearing an apron or carrying a laundry basket), while providing an impressive level of detail when you’re getting a close-up of items that are important to some of the set-piece puzzles. There’s a well-done map that conveys a reasonably complex, 3D space with aplomb, and the overall interface cleanly indicates what you can do at any given point in time. There are times when the graphics perhaps tempted the author to fly too close to the sun – I’m thinking here of a specific code-breaking puzzle that I found tricky because it was hard for me to keep my place in the message – but while I’m not an especially visually-oriented player, what’s on offer here still managed to impress me, while largely supporting some of the trickier elements of gameplay.

As for the interface, it’s similarly impressive but my verdict here is a bit more mixed. You have around a dozen verbs available to you at any given time, each abbreviated with a single letter, as well as a separate inventory screen where you can examine what you’re carrying or take action with those items as well. Once you decide on what to do, you’re often prompted to indicate the direct object of the verb via a numbered list (stuff in the location first, stuff you’re carrying listed after that), and then potentially an indirect object as well, with each step requiring you to input a number or letter, then press enter. This succeeds in retaining a lot of the complexity of a typical parser game – just check the post-game AMUSING option to see exactly how many interactions are accounted for – while avoiding guess-the-verb problems, and providing enough friction to prevent the player from simply lawnmowering through all the options they’re presented with.

There are places where it can feel awkward, though, since you can’t know what number corresponds to what object before you start taking an action, and how numbers are assigned to objects can shift as you uncover new stuff or interact with different items in your inventory; where in a typical parser game, you’d think to try UNLOCK X WITH Y and then just type it, here you need to select the verb, hit enter, look on the list to see what number corresponds to X, hit enter again, look at a potentially-slightly-different list to see what number corresponds to Y, and hit enter one last time. The mapping of verbs to letters also took a while for me to get used to, since the use of cardinal directions means USE is F rather than U, and CLOSE takes precedence over COMBINE, which maps to B (also, while usually you need to use COMBINE to have one item interact with another, there are a few exceptions where you just USE the first item and then pick the object). And scenes that play out over multiple screens can’t be advanced just by hitting enter – usually you need to type a period, then enter, except sometimes that switches to the number one instead. Overall it’s a solid system, but sometimes it does feel like it’s missing that all-important last 10% of polish.

Story-wise, I’m always a fan of a grounded, historical setting, and research has clearly gone into every aspect of the game, from the protagonist’s choice of reading material to the technology underpinning the set-piece puzzles. The protagonist is an appealing character, sincere and plucky, and the Sapphic overtones to her relationship with her handler were tropey but fun. There’s also a nice sense of escalation to the three main sections of the game – admittedly, I think the pacing of the last act is slightly off because the puzzles that come after your final confrontation with the Count are anticlimactic, but until then there’s a great ramp up as your mission shifts, and the stakes rise. The supporting cast are also appealing, from the aforementioned handler to your fellow servants, who are often preventing you from accomplishing your key tasks but nonetheless wind up being sympathetic. I do think the game’s politics are a bit wobbly at a few points – in particular, I’ve got no problem sympathizing with idealistic characters fired up about what Red October might mean for the plight of the working class, but having another character explicitly call attention to the future course of events in the Soviet Union by warning of the potential for horrors to come, only for the protagonist to argue them into thinking it will be fine, is a bit much, as is the bit where you get a pacifistic character to be more open to political violence. The fact that the specific historical backdrop for this is a proposed invasion of Ukraine also brought in some unpleasant real-world associations. Still, at a time when jingoism is de rigueur in blockbuster AAA shooters, a single Panglossian game about heroic Communists is hard to get too worked up about.

This all finally brings us around to the gameplay, and here is where it’s possible to judge The Count and the Communist according to the same standards one uses for most other pieces of IF. The puzzles are well-clued without being overly obvious, for example, with many of them hinging on interacting with seemingly-complex mechanisms that get much more intuitive after you’ve checked them out piece by piece. Similarly, sneaking around is always a concern – at least until the cathartic finale, which is a canny way of shifting the gameplay to match the narrative climax – but the game is actually quite forgiving; you’re typically given three turns of warning before an NPC actually moves, which is usually plenty of time to leave or hide, while still making you feel the pressure. There’s a nice variety of tasks to perform, and a pleasant day-by-day rhythm to the gameplay loop as you do your chores, do some spying, get to know the other servants better, and check in with your handler. Put baldly, even if you got rid of all the graphical bells and whistles and implemented this design as a regular-degular parser game, it would still be lots of fun, which is why I think the game is ultimately such a success: it’s unique, sure, and perhaps even innovative, but that’s no guarantee of a good time. We players are very lucky that Count and the Communist offers the whole package.