The Edifice

Edifice is a short game that takes the player through the various stages of development of human civilization. The game stands out because it has the best puzzle I've seen in any game so far. The writing is solid but unremarkable, and the other puzzles are good, but the language puzzle is by far the reason to play the game.

In Edifice, the player begins as a caveman, and is faced with a puzzling edifice. The player must teach the caveman to use basic tools, to open a door in the edifice. Inside, there are stairways taking the player up to different levels, each one of which takes him to a new stage of the development of civilization. In each stage, he must advance the state of civilization by solving a certain puzzle that teaches his character how to do something.

The puzzle that makes the game is the language puzzle, in which the player must learn to communicate in the foreign language of an NPC. It is hard to describe, without giving spoilers, why this puzzle is so much fun, but I've found that it's simply the most satisfying puzzle of any game I've played.

Play it if: you'd like a collection of realistic puzzles presented in an engaging and quite atmospheric way, because as far as the central premise of the puzzles goes it's a good one.

Don't play it if: you want an overarching story, because this game never really amounts to what you think it will.

Not long ago, I gave five stars to a game which was in most respects average because the outstanding elements more than made up for them. Now I'm giving The Edifice three stars, because while it's in many respects a very well-designed and well-conceived game, it has a rather large deficiency that left me a little disappointed with it.

I like prehistory. I don't think there's enough of it in our storytelling. The last "serious" film to take place before the dawn of writing was 10,000 B.C., for God's sake. But there's a sense of mystery to that era. In many ways, it is a time we will never understand fully, because it is so alien to us: we are left to decipher figurative artifacts like cave paintings and tombs rather than dead languages. And yet it carries objects of profound curiosity - our first experiments with the technologies that made us great...tools, fire, language, husbandry. Who developed these things? What inspired them? I always wished the Civilization games would start a little earlier in time, before these concepts entered the psyche of our species - and now we have a game which takes place almost entirely in that black box of history.

The game's most prominent artistic influence should be obvious. The titular Edifice, an enigmatic construct which steers the protagonist's "evolution", draws from the Monolith of Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (and of course the first chapter involves tool development under...somewhat similar circumstances to that film's famous opening scene). There's even an underplayed "reincarnation" aspect to the plot which is metaphorically reminiscent of the Star Child.

A more distant possible influence, and one I freely admit is probably just my own imagination, is EVO: The Search for Eden, a Super NES game released for American audiences in 1993. It features a protagonist (initially a fish) who "evolves" through various stages of complexity in a process not unlike reincarnation, passing through eras of geological history and approaching a sort of evolutionary singularity. It also has a driving plot device which remains mysterious in many respects. Players of the game will immediately understand the comparison, though I don't know whether the author has any experience with it. I recommend it, though.

The point is, this game hits a lot of my buttons in terms of genre interest. Smith wisely keeps the "sci-fi" elements of the story low-key; the Edifice is basically a plot device that allows him to string his puzzles together, and unlike the situation with certain games, in this case the puzzles justify it. They've got variety, verisimilitude and a good level of complexity. Individually they've probably been done before (level two comes to mind, obviously(Spoiler - click to show), with The Gostak employing it in a more complete sense a few years later), but they're done well. The worst thing to be said about them is that they're very unlike one another - yes, the game's basic thematic premise is helpful in understanding what it is you're supposed to try and achieve, but in any other sense solving one puzzle won't help you solve another. This is understandable when the puzzles require you to sort of reinvent the wheel (almost literally), but it can be a source of frustration at times.

That's not what I'm talking about with the whole "three stars" thing, though.

I hesitate to criticize a story for feeling like it hasn't sufficiently explored...well, itself - that is, its setting or its main theme - because the scope of a game is the author's business. Asimov's "Reason" might have been worthy of a novel, but it's hardly his fault he decided to publish it as a short story. Nevertheless, The Edifice doesn't feel like it ends; it feels like it stops. This was the same problem I had with Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, which shared the themes of reincarnation and humanity's evolution but failed (in my opinion) to do much of interest with them.

Three levels feels insufficient for a game with this much promise, but it's more than that. It's that the protagonist unthinkingly accepts the circumstances of his or her situation regardless of its surreal nature, which in some cases is an acceptable artistic touch but here feels incomplete - a dangling thread in what could have been a tapestry. Hemingway once said that omission was acceptable as long as you knew what it was you were omitting. The Edifice feels less like a case of deliberate omission and more like a case of Smith simply not knowing how to continue the idea much further. Which is understandable, and I'm not going to criticize the guy for laziness or anything, but it did mean I left The Edifice feeling disappointed.

How would I have addressed this gap? It's admittedly a tough question. If I were to plot out a "full" game, it would involve the protagonist understanding something more of the Edifice itself. (Spoiler - click to show)I'd have probably had him end up building it, I'm a sucker for those sorts of circular narratives. But even giving the protagonist the option to work against the Edifice, or act upon his knowledge of its existence and function in the "real" world, would have been interesting.

But even if I hadn't expanded or added to the settings, I'd have done what 2001: A Space Odyssey did: close the game with a vision of what was to come from our perspective. Not necessarily transforming the protagonist into a space fetus, but something awe-inspiring and transcendental - after all, isn't the Edifice godlike in its powers and implicit motives?

Perhaps 2001 is the key comparison here. As a work of art, 2001 is about the promise of transcendence - in a spiritual as well as technological sense. The Edifice has the technological development down pat, but it can only feebly suggest the spiritual, and so to me it will always feel like it could have amounted to something much greater.

The Edifice is a puzzly, rather sparsely implemented parser game in the tradition of Zork. It's very well-regarded, winning a XYZZY award and appearing on several "best of" lists, but I think it's aged very poorly and it doesn't meet my standards for interactive fiction in 2021.

Let's begin with The Edifice's narrative. Although this game is mainly puzzle-focused, it makes a stab at an ambitious high-concept theme -- a sweeping retelling of the dawn of humanity, the discovery of fire, and so on. Unfortunately, this is handled very superficially and comes off more as set dressing than a real story. There is no overarching conflict, no rising tension, and no resolution. The central plot device of the Edifice hardly even plays a role in the different stages of human evolution; rather, it escorts the player from half-baked vignette to half-baked vignette. And that's a shame, because in creating these grand narrative expectations, The Edifice sets itself up to disappoint when it doesn't follow through.

What about the puzzles, then? The Edifice is centered around three major self-contained puzzles, each one representing a particular period of human history. There are also minor puzzles peppered at the beginning and within individual time periods. I thought that all the puzzles were competently implemented and their solutions made in-world sense, but I found them unfair, unfun, and kind of painful to play through. (I used the walkthrough to complete the game.)

What is a fair puzzle? In my opinion, every puzzle is a sort of contract between the puzzle designer and the puzzle solver. The puzzle solver promises that she will make a good-faith attempt at solving the puzzle, using all means available to her. Meanwhile, the puzzle designer promises that if such a good-faith attempt is made, the puzzle is solvable and the solution is obvious in hindsight. If you can't figure out a puzzle, look at the walkthrough, and think "Oh, of course, I'm an idiot" -- that's a fair puzzle. On the other hand, if the puzzle forces you to guess verbs, or make use of information you couldn't possibly have known, the puzzle is unfair and poorly designed.

The Edifice's puzzles suffer from that boogeyman of 90s parser games: guess-the-verb. All of the puzzles require verbs that are rarely used in parser games, have never previously been hinted at in the text, are only used for a specific puzzle, and never appear again. For example, the very first puzzle requires you to (Spoiler - click to show)HIDE from the Enemies. Other examples of puzzle solutions that require flash-in-the-pan inspiration to solve are (Spoiler - click to show)STRIP to turn branches into kindling, SHARPEN to create the spear, and POINT and DRAW for the language puzzle everyone seems to love so much. The game includes a list of commands, but it's condescending, hidden behind a dismissively written fake help page, and doesn't include any of the verbs I listed above (and also omits some others that are required to complete the game, like DROP and ENTER). So much for "info."

Even when the puzzle solutions don't require guessing verbs, they include leaps of logic that don't follow from any in-game clues. They make sense according to real-world logic, but no one expects a game to perfectly model everything that a person could try in real life; for the player to try an action, some kind of hint has to be placed that the action is actually possible in the game world. To solve the language puzzle, (Spoiler - click to show)we not only have to come up with the idea of DRAWing an image, but the idea that the crushed berries will make suitable ink, the bone will make a suitable writing implement, the bark is suitable for writing on, and the author has taken the time to implement all these things. This insistence on off-the-wall puzzle solutions is exacerbated by confusing room descriptions that don't always make clear the positions of things. (Spoiler - click to show)I didn't realize the protagonist's Hut could be entered, because it didn't appear in the list of exits. I thought the bark was across the river and spent many turns skipping rocks across the water, only to find that the river was an unimportant diversion and I could just have typed TAKE BARK.

Over and over, my playthrough of The Edifice ran into pain points that made me feel as though the author was more interested in creating theoretically elegant puzzles than making sure the game was a positive experience for players. One puzzle is possible to make unwinnable, and the solution is so convoluted that it's likely you'll do this multiple times before reaching the solution; the game does reset the puzzle after a while, but this requires waiting so many turns that you might as well restore a saved game instead. When you do happen on a useful action that can solve a puzzle, it's blocked with an unhelpful message that comes across as a "you can't do this at all" message -- unless you do it at precisely the right time and place that the author wants you to. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)if you aren't holding the Useful Rock, SHARPEN STICK returns "The Stick will not readily hold an edge." An even more egregious example is (Spoiler - click to show)TAKE OFF HEADDRESS, which returns "Headdress represents your authority in the Village. If you took it off, you would be abdicating your position, and the People would elect a new leader. If you want to accomplish anything here, you had best leave it on." This reads as the clearest "You can't do that" message I've ever seen -- and yet it's a required move to solve the horse puzzle. Insane.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh on this game: after all, this is a Z-code offering from 1997, when Short and Veeder and Reed and all the other vanguards of the "new school" of IF hadn't yet entered the scene. Perhaps some allowances should be made for the game as a historical artifact of the Before Time. But then again, Graham Nelson wrote The Craft of the Adventure in 1995, with a Bill of Player's Rights that reads much the same as the criticism I'm offering now. And discussions of accessibility, of affordances, of the user experience, have been around as long as the field of design has existed.

In closing: The Edifice is an ambitious but fatally flawed classic parser game. It attempts and soundly fails to convey a high-concept narrative. Its prose is mechanical and derivative without a memorable voice of its own. Its puzzles are so unfair as to be impossible to solve without a guide. Overall I wouldn't recommend this to anyone, except as an example of why so many modern game-players think of "text adventures" as a dead genre.