All Hands

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

There’ve been a goodly number of short Texture games this Comp and last, and call me jaded but by now I’ve got a pretty solid sense of what to expect when I see one coming up next: a personal narrative with a reasonable albeit clunky metaphor, confusing use of the drag-and-drop interface, interestingly flawed writing, and minimal branching. Leave it for the last such game in my queue to leave me spluttering and unsure of what I’ve just seen: All Hands is, I swear to y’all, a limited-parser game in Texture form. I didn’t know you could do such a thing, but now that I have, I think the system might be almost perfect for it?

In retrospect, this maybe should have been obvious to me. The drag-verbs-onto-nouns interface is quite similar to how classic graphic adventures were set up, but since most games tend to change the verbs on offer with each passage, the resemblance is typically obscured. Here, the player gets a consistent trio that map cleanly to traditional IF actions – reflect/examine, take, and approach/go – and the author’s also set things up so that after an introductory section, you’re able to wander around different areas of a ship and even revisit places you’ve been before. And while I wasn’t even aware Texture could do much in the way of state-tracking, there are obstacles that are clearly puzzles, and which respond in different ways if you’ve acquired the right tool or piece of information. I wouldn’t say any of them are challenging – this is very much an exploration-focused game – but this is a sturdy formula to drive player engagement, and it’s well-realized here.

Uncharacteristically, I’m three paragraphs in and I haven’t said anything about the game’s plot or themes; it’s time to remedy that, but take the omission as an indication of just how much the structure bowled me over. So you’re a young person living in a fantasy version of the real world who’s always been fascinated by the sea, and as part of your backstory, your sister killed by sea monsters, so this fascination has a dark, obsessive element to it too. One night while wandering the coast, you come across an unearthly vessel that plays host to a strange, ocean-going carnival. The ringmistress invites you aboard and gives you a chance to explore before the show begins, and as you poke around belowdecks, you can uncover the ship’s secrets, some of which are uncannily personal…

The premise is over the top, in other words, and the writing sometimes doesn’t sell it as effectively as it could – as you climb the ladder onto the ship, for example, you’re told that there’s a bunch of dust on each rung, indicating that it’s been a long time since there’ve been any visitors coming aboard. It’s presumably meant to be a spooky touch, but it’s rendered ridiculous by the fact that you’re scaling the ladder in the middle of a storm, a detail that this very passage takes pains to remind you of. But there are some authentically eerie notes too, like the observation that the ship’s larder seems to stock only root vegetables, which is bizarre and oddly specific. Overall, despite its moments of weakness, I liked the prose; unfortunately, you’ll need to trust me on that because I played the game on mobile which meant that whenever I tried to copy and paste any excerpts into my notes, it crashed (Texture gonna Texture).

The game’s climax is a nice capstone too, snapping into focus some thematic elements whose presence earlier in the narrative seemed slightly off. It seems like there were several different endings the player can choose between, based on how deeply they plumbed the ship’s mysteries, which was a pleasant way to make the parserlike gameplay relevant to the story, though once again one of Texture’s foibles reduced my enjoyment; I wanted to go back and try out some of the other options, but without an undo or save/load option, that would have meant replaying the whole game from the beginning.

I guess I can’t help banging on about Texture even when reviewing a game I enjoyed; it’s a frustrating piece of technology. But for a change, I can actually see how it supports what a game is trying to accomplish, and the tweaks I’d want to see to make the system work better are just tweaks, not fundamental reimaginings. That’s an exciting place to leave my journey with Texture for the year, so nice work, All Hands; your weirdo creepy circus and this weirdo creepy engine are a surprisingly good fit.

I'm still not sold on Texture. There's the weird bug with the extremely small button text, but let's ignore that. Then there's still the problem that the affordances of the text are hidden; that is, you cannot see at a glance how you can interact with the screen; you have to grab each button in turn just to find out what your choices are, then go back to grab the button you want and go to the place where you can drop it. It's so much more laborious than link clicking, that there should be a large upside to make it worth it. But I'm not yet seeing it. All Hands, for instance, could just as well have been done in Twine.

Now we'll talk about the game itself. No, I'm lying! I first want to make a completely random comment about the blurb. This is the entire blurb: "The sea is calling you. Its voice is getting louder." And that is such pitch perfect Fallen London / Sunless Sea prose that I was surprised to find out that the game is not Failbetter Games fan fiction! But it's really not.

So let's finally talk about All Hands. It's a short story about someone who enters what it for all intents and purposes a ghost ship. They've always been drawn to the sea, but their farmer father forbade them to so much as think about anything nautical. And perhaps with good reason, because their sister drowned in the sea; more than that, was pulled under by waves that seemed hungry for her. Now the mysterious ship that has been sailing in this neighbourhood has come to shore, and of course you enter it, drawn in by the fascinating woman who owns it. Once you're on board, there's a geographically organised exploration section in which you can find several songs. When you are finished, you return to the woman in charge, dance with her, choose a song to sing... and depending on that song, you get one of several endings.

All Hands is nicely atmospheric. (Spoiler - click to show)I think it might not have been a great design decision to hide the room which explains the backstory most behind a lock that can only be opened if one has picked up the compass in the beginning; especially because it is extremely easy to miss this compass. After my first playthrough, I thought the story made no sense. Only on my second playthrough, when I got the compass, did things click. (I especially enjoyed the fact that you get a puzzle and then the protagonist just solves it without your input.) The 'good' ending, where the magic is dispelled and the characters embrace each other, was a fairly nice surprise.

I enjoyed this snack sized game, and would gladly play something more substantial by the author.

All Hands is a short horror-y interactive piece set on a ship, one you can explore, and maybe find its secrets. Its prose is atmospheric horror, with a hint of lovecraftian. In each screen, the game offers up to three actions (Regard/Approach/Take) to interact with the text or the environment. There are multiple endings, but found just one.

Due to the vagueness of the prose on what is truly happening or even your own backstory, the entry leaves quite a bit to the player's interpretation. Called to the sea, but always forbidden to sail, you find your way to the Devil's Delight, a singular type of ship. Aboard, almost pulled in by a strange tune (music? voice?), you can explore the different rooms of the ship, or interact with the Captain's. At the end, I found myself back on the shore, believing Albertina was some sort of a mermaid, and I was her prey; and the ship itself felt a bit ghost-like.

I quite enjoyed the interactivity of this texture game, with the different actions (almost parser-like kind), how you could explore the ship and interact with different element (the books made me giggle). The few available actions give the illusion of restricted agency for the character, as if the PC was restricted in their movement or abilities on this strange ship. That and the imageries from the text really gives a creepy and almost suffocating vibe to the game.
But I wonder if Texture was the best engine to use for that, due to the lengthy hidden content shifting the text formatting (I liked the content a lot! Texture formatting it less so).