Nonverbal Communication

My wife recently decided she wanted to get into gardening, and as a result we’ve started to slowly make some improvements to our back yard, which heretofore was evenly divided between tufts of fake grass (don’t judge, we live in Southern California where we’re just getting out of a yearslong drought with more to come) and a dirt patch overgrown by snarls of weeds and a tree that keeps sending off a fusillade of saplings as though it’s overheard us speculating about chopping it down (again, don’t judge, it’s really tall and close to the house so we’re paranoid it could fall down in a wind storm). We’ve now mostly pruned that whole mess back, and gotten a couple pots of flowers and vegetables to prop up by the fence, and while it’s not much to look out we’re proud of the progress. It’s a bit sobering when we consult the source of her horticultural impulse, though, which was born of watching a British reality show: in that, people are always acting all ashamed about the state of their rear allotments, which boast lush flowers, well-tended herb beds, and a well-judged mix of different plants; it’s on a whole different level from our meager efforts.

All of which is to say that opinions differ about what standard “Back Garden” implies, and I’ll confess to being a bit mystified about why Nonverbal Communication isn’t in the main festival; it’s a bit short, sure, but it’s got a neat premise that combines real-world resonance with a clever riff on standard fantasy tropes, some clever puzzles with multiple solutions, and in my view the best joke of Spring Thing to date (I won’t spoil it, but it’s the death banner when you try something obviously and spectacularly stupid – nothing quick UNDO doesn’t fix).

The setup here is that you’re a wizard whose power comes from their mastery of words, but in your haste to prepare for an attack from a dragon, a mishap occurs that throws your magics all out of whack. I’ll quote the game’s description of the result, since it’s emblematic of the elegant yet approachable prose:

But verbs are independent, fickle things, and although you feel the presence of some of your most beloved verbs within the tower, you doubt you’ll be able to compel them directly.

What this means is that you don’t have access to verbs: a set of the most common Inform actions, from the humble EXAMINE to the workhorse OPEN to the disfavored ATTACK to the how-am-I-supposed-to-live-without-this GO have flown out of your head and become incarnated in various automatons scattered throughout your tower (WAIT, THINK – a hint command – and various out-of-world activities like SAVE and TRANSCRIPT are still available). Interaction therefore hinges on your nouns – by typing in the name of a thing, you can focus the automatons’ attention on it and prompt them to target each of their actions at that one object.

That’s simple enough in theory, but in practice this makes for some tricky puzzle-solving, as well as some slapstick comedy. There’s always at least two or three automatons firing off at one time, and with no ability to tell the automatons that OPEN is needed here, so having CLOSE execute immediately thereafter is counterproductive, you need to get creative – while none of the puzzles are too too hard, I definitely did some floundering, and picturing all the different gizmos faffing about and working at cross-purposes definitely elicited a giggle. The flip side is that cracking each conundrum left me with a strong sense of satisfaction.

The narrative was also satisfying; there are multiple endings, tied to which of several significantly-different tacks you take to solving the game’s puzzles, and the one I found tied a neat bow on the themes implicit in centering a protagonist who struggles with the sometimes-destructive results of their careless words. This turn towards the serious isn’t enough to bring down Nonverbal Communication’s lighthearted vibe, but it definitely lends the game more heft than the average hey-look-I-came-up-with-a-cool-mechanic-for-my-half-hour-puzzle-game puzzle game.

All told this is a polished game that checks all the boxes it should – my only points of critique are that the convenience of bolding significant nouns when they show up in room descriptions meant it took longer than it should to realize that other nouns might also be available, and in common with other limited-parser games that get rid of access to the EXAMINE command, room descriptions could sometimes get a little long. It occurs to me that one reason the author could have nonetheless picked the Back Garden is that they’re considering this a proof-of-concept for a longer game, because yeah, it is a little on the short side – if that’s the case, I’d definitely be interested in seeing more of both this world and this approach to puzzles, since I think there’s plenty more room to explore here!