valley of glass

This is a small Inform game that seems unfinished in some sense. It has a small map with one central area and four spokes. Travelling in each of the spoke directions tells you of a memory, except for one which seems to be your current life.

It seems like it might be setting up something interesting (polishing the fruit was fun, as was wondering why we're wearing a night gown, and decompiling led me to try to BREAK OPEN the fruit), but it doesn't pay off, instead ending abruptly. If it's meant to be short and poetic, it might benefit from more careful attention to detail; if it's meant to be part of something longer, I'd love to see it finished.

...early spring in the valley of glass, the first of the seven years you promised to the village blacksmith. Your breath clouds in the crisp morning air as you walk the North Road, your borrowed coat wrapped tight against the chill...

Gameplay in valley of glass is brief. You start on a road.

One thing is clear: you have journeyed a long way to where you are now. Traveling in different compass directions from this starting point allows you to sample some of the protagonist’s memories of their journey- but only briefly. Ultimately, the only place for us is south: to a village where we begin the seven years of working for the blacksmith.

It’s easy to overlook this fact, but the game is a snippet borrowed from the “Black Bull of Norroway,” a folk tale from Scotland. Feel free to look it up if you want the full story. (Yes, I crawled to Wikipedia). Here is what I gleaned about the backstory:

The protagonist is female. She is the youngest of three sisters (hinted by the boots’ description), all of which were sent out on a quest to learn about their futures. The fruits we have in our inventory were gifts from a friendly bull.

In the folk tale, she and the bull travel until they reach a place called the “valley of glass.” At one point the bull has business to attend to and gives the girl some instructions. While he was gone, she was not to move. At all. They would continue traveling upon his return. Unfortunately, she flubs these instructions (although it's hard to blame her).

And so, she finds herself stuck in the valley. She cannot escape- it's made of glass. Too slippery, apparently. All she can do is commit to serving a blacksmith in a nearby village for seven years. After seven years, the blacksmith gives her a pair of iron shoes that allow her to climb out of the valley. There’s more to the story, but I’ll stop there.

Having read all this, I found it easier to appreciate the game. It was kind of fun seeing what details in the game are taken from the folk tale. The protagonist’s reason for carrying non-edible fruit now makes sense.

If you’ve not read the folk tale, the game feels disjointed and directionless. It essentially boils down to (Spoiler - click to show)going south and going in (to a house). The end. No character interactions or explanation. You think that’s it? Reading the folk tale in advance provides needed clarity.

I understand that with this game, less is more. I like that it does not try to fit the entire folk tale into the game. But rather than providing a succinct, minimalist experience, it feels under implemented. The default parser response ("as good-looking as ever") for examining oneself also contributes to its sparseness. Guess-the-verb is also an issue when trying to (Spoiler - click to show)enter the blacksmith’s house.

The game needs further development before I can give it a higher rating, but it’s almost there. I encourage the author to deepen the interactivity available to the player and provide a bit more exposition on the protagonist. A post-comp release, maybe?

Ultimately, I like its atmosphere and concept.

You turn your back on the ridgeline, and return to the work ahead.

On thing that I never fully appreciated until I started writing some of my own fiction is just how full of holes most narratives are. I don’t mean inconsistencies in the plot or anything like that – just gaps, elisions, places where the story skips through some dull bits. They seem simple enough when you’re reading, but when you’re in the author’s seat, I found it was very easy to get sucked into the momentum of narrating everything that happened to my characters: if I said they went out their front door, well it just stood to reason I’d need to relate what they saw on the other side, then which direction they turned when they finished walking down the driveway, and then whether they had to wait for the stop-light to cross the street… internalizing that you can (and should!) segue into the next place where something interesting happens, trusting that the reader will follow, can be deceptively hard, especially when the next sentence isn’t “when X arrived at school…” but “the next day…” or “by the time Summer Break was over”, much less, as in the case of the fairy tale on which valley of glass riffs, “seven years later…”

The game doesn’t attempt to tell the full story of that fairy tale, or even an incomplete slice of it – instead, it lives entirely in the gap. I had vague memories of the Black Bull of Norroway, which is name-checked in the blurb, but had recourse to Wikipedia to fill in the details, and it sure is a fairy tale: there are three daughters who go off on three separate journeys, a youngest daughter who travels alongside a black bull and is gifted three miraculous fruits, a seemingly-simple instruction that’s accidentally violated to supernaturally-catastrophic effect, and then transformations, setbacks, a trilogy of bribes, and true love winning out in the end. There’s a bit too much business, a bit too little thematic resonance, for Disney to be adapting this anytime soon, but it’s an enjoyable example of the form, and valley of glass zeroes in on one particular lacuna in the narrative: after the youngest daughter inadvertently disobeys the bull which is her polymorphed love, she’s abandoned in the eponymous dale and forced to work for a blacksmith for seven years, at which point he promises to make her iron shoes that will allow her to climb the slippery slopes and make her rendezvous with destiny.

The game doesn’t give you the full context for why you’re here, or where you’re headed after your labors have finished – I’m not sure because the author assumed the audience would know the story (debatable, I think, at least in the US) or if being enigmatic was an intended part of the vibe. I will say I’m glad I looked up the story, since it enabled me to appreciate some details that initially left me nonplussed, like the fact that the aforementioned fruits start out in your inventory. Honestly, even with that background, the game is pretty slight: it just depicts you remembering how you came to the valley and then turning back to the forge to keep up your labors, hoping one day to escape. The writing is evocative, but there isn’t much in the way of interactivity:

"It is early spring in the valley of glass, the first of the seven years you promised to the village blacksmith. Your breath clouds in the crisp morning air as you walk the North Road, your borrowed coat wrapped tight against the chill."

(That last line is unchanged even if you remove the coat).

Pretty much all the player can do is explore off the road, which triggers the aforementioned non-interactive memories. The fantastical nature of the landscape isn’t especially harped on in these sequences, and while I typically like understatement, in a piece this short (it took me less than ten minutes to play through) I think going bigger would have helped it make more of an impression. Similarly, if you’ve read the story, there are some things you can do that would eventually change the outcome (Spoiler - click to show)(breaking open the fruits so the daughter can’t use the gems within as a bribe) but the game can’t really acknowledge that, since its horizon closes well before the next bit of the fair tale’s plot picks up. This makes for a game that’s pleasant enough while it lasts, but almost militantly low-key in its refusal to offer challenges, choices, or consequences, and even the mood it evokes is rather restrained. It’d be churlish to suggest that the fairy tale skips over this bit for a reason, but I did find myself wishing the author had communicated a clearer rationale for why this particular bit of the story was worth spending time on, besides the aforementioned narrative-autopilot I had running as a novice author.