The Song of the Mockingbird

This game is a nice entry in a very under-represented niche of parser games: Westerns. While there have been some entries in this genre before (a Scott Adams Game, the puzzle game Hoosegow, etc.), it hasn't really attracted a lot of attention.

In this game, you play as a sort of singing cowboy, but your gun has been taken. You're on a quest to save a woman named Rosa from a band of bandits. All you have is your wits and your trusty guitar.

Along the way, you'll solve a lot of tricky puzzles. This game had some of the harder puzzles in the comp (from my point of view). There are complex mechanisms whose purpose you have to unravel as well as many physics-based puzzles involving (mild spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)heat, leverage, etc.

The story was pretty good. Like others have noted, it lacks the sense of urgency a drawn-out gun standoff tends to have in films once you start tooling around for the hundredth time. I'd prefer that over a turn limit, though! Second, there are some reasonable solutions that weren't implemented, particular when facing Whitey (I particularly would have appreciated responses saying I was on the right track for (Spoiler - click to show)putting hay in the barn and setting it on fire.).

The game has a lot of ties to real-life history with detailed notes at the end. The songs in-game include a lot of old classics that remind me of my grandfather who recently passed, and who loved singing cowboy songs. I think the game in general reminded me of him.

While the game did have minor flaws in the puzzles and story, I was overall impressed with it. Definitely would rank it at a higher difficulty rating than most games in the comp. I ended up using hints on only one of the puzzles, but the other two took me several days of on-and-off playing.

Well, then this game would not have a reason to exist, which would be a shame.

You've fallen head over heels in love with the sensuous dancer Rosa. A gang of hoodlums stole her away from your embrace.

They took your pistol for good measure. This leaves you no choice but to rescue your damsel in distress with nothing but your brain and whatever you find lying around.

This setup clears the way for a collection of great puzzles. All of them require a good deal of common sense, and when you notice that your sense might be too common, the ability to think around the corner. Many times the use of the objects is not straightforward, leading to some very nice "Aha!"-moments.

This uncommon-sense feeling is reinforced by the map. It's quite small and contained. There are a bunch of locations to explore and a few cleverly placed bottlenecks. At almost every point in the game, you can be sure that you have seen every accessible inch of your surroundings and found every object there is to find. The challenge then becomes straightforward and deceptively simple: "Here is your inventory. What to do with it?"

I liked the writing a lot. The style of puzzles requires a clear visualization of the locations, but the author manages to throw in enough small surprises and unexpected details to keep the descriptions from becoming a list of notable features.

The overall tone of the piece caught me off-guard. From the intro and the characterization of the protagonist as a singing cowboy, I expected a lighthearted parody of western-tropes. In many places, this is true. Until you get to the more serious and sometimes downright brutal bits. It's not easy to blend these together, but The Song of the Mockingbird doesn't feel disjointed because of it. It serves rather well to highlight different aspects of the protagonist's character.

The song-lyrics throughout the story and especially the historical notes at the end tied this game together and showed just how much this game was lovingly polished.

Very good game.

I've been on a Western streak for IF lately, and The Song of the Mockingbird is one of the more prominent entries in that genre. Arguably, it is responsible for kicking off the largest wave of Western works in the hobbyist era of IF -- fully a quarter of all titles listed under that genre in IFDB follow Mockingbird's publication in 2021, when it placed 3rd in IFComp and tied for second in that year's Miss Congeniality vote.

Consciously modeled after old-time serial adventures for the cinema, Mockingbird claims to be episode 12 in an ongoing series, and it makes significant reference to events from (non-existent) recent episodes that directly inform the plot arc embodied by this work. To summarize: the hero, "Boots" Taylor, has fallen in love with the beautiful performer Rosa, who has been abducted by the scurrilous Black Blade -- a local villain whose most recent dastardly plot the hero was not quite able to stop entirely -- and he means to free his love from the clutches of this evildoer.

The only complication is that Boots doesn't have his gun, which was stolen by members of Black Blade's gang the night before. Right off the bat this work eschews some of the most elemental tropes of the Western, in the process creating much potential for action in the medium dry goods puzzle-solving mode so familiar to parser IF. It's a clever setup, and it works really well when backed by author Mike Carletta's engaging prose.

After overcoming an initial ambush in an arroyo, the action moves to the abandoned ranch that the gang is using for its hideout. Carletta does an excellent job of conveying a fairly complex space here, one that features important three-dimensional elements. The hero (via the player) must use his wits to overcome the trio of remaining gunmen protecting Black Blade and the hostage Rosa, who is in the house at the center of the ranch, always tantalizingly near but out of reach across a no-man's land of open ground that offers no cover for the hero. This mid-game is on the whole extremely well done; my one quarrel with it is that a key item is "hidden in the scenery," i.e. only disclosed after the player chooses to >EXAMINE a particular item in the room description. (Spoiler - click to show)(It's the branding iron, found in the stables only after (Spoiler - click to show)>EXAMINE RAFTERS.)

A minor rant for the benefit of would-be authors: (Spoiler - click to show)Although this "search everything" style is a classic old school parser trope, it's really the weakest form of puzzle (if you care to dignify this type of obstacle with the name), since it forces the player to lawnmower everything in sight, usually with at least three verbs: >EXAMINE, >SEARCH and >LOOK UNDER. I don't generally have a problem with this type of activity when there is a payoff in cases where nothing is found, i.e. when the author uses the descriptions yielded by the activity to further exposition, mood, etc., or when it's an integral part of the scenario (e.g. a forensic investigation). (In such cases, the activity becomes interactive storytelling instead of just drudgery.) Otherwise, it's still mostly OK so long as the author has taken pains to cover every mentioned noun with corresponding objects. (I don't exactly like it, but I accept it as fair.) Far worse than either of those approaches is a spotty object implementation that doesn't cover all mentioned nouns but still expects you to be investigating them routinely. Parser errors (e.g. "You can't see any such thing."), even inventive replacement versions, are never entertainment when repeated with frequency. The point of a parser error is to train the player to not do that in this game, and an author penalizes the cooperative player when making the applicability of parser errors inconsistent. If you want to hide items, better to hide them "in plain sight," i.e. as part of some tableau of objects about which the PC reasonably might not perceive every detail at once. (Key word: "reasonably." Having to >EXAMINE a table or the like to see what's on it is ridiculous and thankfully does not occur in this game.) Failing that, some gentle prompting to direct player attention (e.g. in this case perhaps the rafters occasionally creaking in the wind) or eventual automatic disclosure (e.g. the PC "happening" to spot something after so many turns) is called for. An author never ruins any genuine puzzle by directing players' attention to the components they need to solve it.

Once entering the endgame, the plot is resolved in short order -- regrettably, too short of an order. The game hints so strongly about what the player should be doing that it might as well be pure cutscene. The larger problem with the climax is that it hinges on a twist revelation that the player can't meaningfully absorb, resulting in a wedge being driven between the player/PC identity so carefully nurtured to that point. It turns out that (Spoiler - click to show)Black Blade and Rosa are one and the same, and though this doesn't seem to matter to the protagonist (whose undying love for her is proclaimed but not explained) Rosa, apparently unable to live with her recent past, is about to (Spoiler - click to show)commit suicide by dynamite.

This climax could certainly work as drama, but as presented here it's just too rushed to appreciate; the result is a bad stumble at the end of what is otherwise a high quality production. Better preparation of the player's mindset would be the key here: As always, the measure of quality for a twist is how much it makes sense in retrospect given what the audience has been shown, i.e. how well it reorganizes prior perceptions, especially how it grants new significance to details that didn't quite fit the audience's operating assumptions before the reveal. Perhaps the device of (Spoiler - click to show)using each bad guy's dying words as a clue (as seems to be started with the death of Ace at the end of the opening scene) could be leveraged to better set up the intended unveiling. (Even better would be to have released some prior episodes, so that the player would be able to genuinely sympathize with the PC's viewpoint, but let's not get too ambitious with our idle wishes here.)

Ending aside, this was a very enjoyable game to play -- it took me two or three hours to complete since I was unwilling to use hints or a walkthrough (though I did end up needing one clue). That's a testament to the author's skill in crafting a fun and engaging puzzle-solving experience, and I can see why Mockingbird placed so highly in 2021's IFComp. It's certainly among the top few of IF Westerns and Western-adjacent games I've seen (alongside The Legend of Horse Girl, Like a Sky Full of Locusts, and Hoosegow), though I've tried only a small portion of Westerns listed on IFDB. I'd recommend The Song of the Mockingbird for the puzzles, if not the story, and I'd certainly tune in for another episode of the adventures of Boots Taylor.