Frankenfingers

The fact that you play a severed hand scuttling about scenes that would be right at home in a Hammer horror movie is only the second weirdest thing about Frankenfingers – and let’s be real, it’s a distant second, especially after the two Rosalinda games proved jockeying around dismembered limbs could even be cozy. And you’re the special kind of hand with all five senses, so basically you’re just a standard IF protagonist minus some height, the ability to hold more than one object at a time, and the gift of gab, which are no big deal in the grand scheme of things. No, the weirdest thing is that it’s almost entirely in verse.

There are of course many pieces of IF that are written as poetry, but the list is mostly choice-based games – and while there are other examples in the parser space, like Portrait With Wolf and Nelson’s Shakespeare’s Tempest, they’re generally not structured along conventional medium-dry-goods lines, for the understandable reason that this sort of thing is beyond silly:

You feel a vibration beneath you, a rumble transmits through the floor,
The wall to the north slowly rotates, and now serves as a passable door.

Let me be clear: I enjoy things that are beyond silly. I think the idea here is to lean hard into the cheesy-horror vibe and make it seem like Vincent Price is narrating proceedings, and if that’s the case, the occasional misstep into doggerel just adds to the mood; as long as innocent villagers are being chopped up, I guess the meter can be too:

The damage the innocent suffer, is needed but quite unintentional.
But digging up graves and killing the locals for parts seems a bit unconventional.

There are times when it feels a bit intimidating to have to page through five stanzas of description plus some dialogue to figure out what’s going on in a location, and there are places where the game does resort to unadorned prose (those most of these, like listing moveable objects that have been dropped, are entirely forgivable given the number of variations that would be required). But overall the verse thing works surprisingly well, communicating a sense of place as well as all the quotidian bits of parser functionality like where the exits are, shifting location descriptions when you change state (like noting that a hatch is either opened or closed), and even making some fun shifts into alternate genres of poetry on occasion.

While the verse is the standout feature, Frankenfingers’ design is no slouch either. This is a reasonably big game with a bunch of puzzles, but the clueing is elegantly done; even if I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to accomplish beyond escaping the castle (since that Dr. Frankenstein definitely doesn’t seem nice), there are usually clear sub-objectives to work towards, with new chunks of the map opening up at dramatically appropriate times. The puzzles are very well integrated, with many hinging on your unique abilities and limitations as a hand, and hitting just the right level of complexity and difficulty to feel satisfying to solve without throwing up too high of a hurdle to progress. Getting detected by the good doctor or his servants can lead to a game over, but it’s easy to UNDO, and figuring out how to elude them made me feel very clever. And the horse-riding set-piece makes for a funny enough mental image that it’s easy to overlook that it’s got the one maybe slightly-underclued puzzle of the game (Spoiler - click to show)(in retrospect, feeding her the apple makes sense, but the messages about why she was refusing to move could have been a little clearer about what the issue was, since at first I thought she wanted a blanket to keep the rain off). There’s an effortlessness here that’s very, very hard to achieve in a parser puzzler, again leaving aside the additional difficulty imposed by the use of poetry – it’s impressive stuff.

As for the plot, it’s a silly horror pastiche, but one that doesn’t tip too far into zaniness. Once you accept that you’re a dismembered hand trying to escape Frankenstein’s castle, everything you encounter is entirely logical, and the protagonist has clear, if not poignant, motivations – while it’s hard for a hand to have too much personality, he does have an appealing impulse to help those in need. Actually, one of my few small kicks against the game was that it felt slightly mean to have to keep typing HIT HORSE WITH CROP, except when I slightly mistyped it once the parser error revealed that actually I should have just been TAPping instead, meaning that actually I was the asshole on that score.

When it comes to classic formats like the comedy parser puzzler, often success is more down to execution than novel ideas. Frankenfingers is the rare example of succeeding on both fronts – the alternately super clever/deeply awful verse provides the razzle-dazzle on top of rock-solid implementation and design.