The Garbage of the Future

This game uses a choice-based format I haven't seen before, where clicking on highlighted words opens a pop-up window with both more text (which can have its own highlighted words that open more pop-up windows) as well as action options at the bottom.

This system is genius, and could become a very popular choice if it were easy to write in and implement.

Unfortunately, I think this game was not a good choice to showcase the engine.

The game is about trying to dispose of toxic waste near a creepy forest.

You aren't really told what to do, except to find a manual. But you can't read it since it's dark; there's a flashlight, but it dies after a few turns. So I ended up with no light source before finding the manual.

I got out and explored, and couldn't find anything but an empty forest and a truck, as well as some background things that run away if you look at them. I found a hose, but nothing to attach it to. After a while, I restarted the game and used the flashlight right away on the manual, discovering that there was a valve somewhere.

That's when I found out, by looking around, that the truck is in multiple locations, and which location you're in changes what you see on it. There was no hint of that given in the game, and that behavior is different than the vast majority of parser games I've played. Innovating isn't bad, but I'm not sure how I was supposed to guess that examining the truck in multiple locales gives different responses.

So I eventually figured things out, and was close to doing my job, and then I died. But that's okay, because that's one ending and an achievement.

A lot of the game involves waiting for a long time, but there's no way to just 'wait'. I found out you can just talk to Bill dozens of times.

Overall, I think this system is fantastic, and the author's writing has a lot of highlights, and there aren't any bugs. I just got frustrated with the gameplay style. I would absolutely love to try a wider variety of games using this system and/or written by this author though.

There are certain kinds of criticism that, while well-intentioned, nevertheless always bug me, and high on that list is I-wish-this-parser-game-had-been-a-choice-based-one. It can certainly be a legitimate reaction to a game that doesn’t leverage the unique affordances of the text parser, or has a clumsy interface that would be much smoother if the player could just click their way through it, but it sometimes can also just reflect essentialized views of what the two houses of contemporary IF, both alike in dignity, are all about: if a game is about feelings and relationships and people other than straight white men, well, wouldn’t it be more comfortable with the choice-based crowd, not stuck over here with all the medium-dry-goods puzzles? Well, perhaps, but perhaps shifting our expectations of what goes where is worth a bit of discomfort.

With all that as context, it hopefully conveys the power of my reaction to The Garbage of the Future to say that I really wished this choice game had been a parser one.

The minimalist, creepy premise isn’t the issue: the protagonist is a working stiff who’s driven a tanker trunk jammed full of supernaturally potent waste out to the woods to empty the tank where nobody else is around. This is a simple task that’s obviously replete with danger and vague, ominous implications, and the game’s prose does a good job playing up the nerve-wracking details of your errand, from the flickering of your temperamental flashlight to the sound of a threatening figure skittering through the mist. The exact nature of the toxin you’re dumping is never explained, nor are the motivations of whoever’s paying you, but my brain had no trouble filling in the blanks with horrifying possibilities.

No, the trouble is in the implementation. Performing the job requires reading a manual in the darkened truck-cab, picking up and repairing the hose from one compartment and tools from another compartment, as well as exploring your environs for useful equipment and a place to put the waste. The choice-based interface for doing all this is straightforward enough: objects you can interact with are highlighted, and clicking on one of them will usually pop up a sub-menu allowing you to use some standard commands (take, drop, open) or use an inventory item on them or navigate to an exit or some other, bespoke option. But in practice this can be rather overwhelming, like in this early location description (many later ones are even more complex):

Jake opens the glove box. Inside, a faint glow illuminates a flashlight and a manual.

The truck is unnervingly dark.

Bill says, “If you forget what to do, it’s explained in the manual.”

A distant groaning fills the air.

(Exits: Field, Path)

Jake, glove box, flashlight, manual, truck, Bill, field, and path are all highlighted, and in practice I found I was having a hard time keeping up with all my options. Navigation was similarly tricky; not all locations are reachable from all others, and figuring out which areas were connected to which other ones took a long time.

The core puzzle at the center of the game also feels like it leans into the system’s weaknesses. Futzing with the hose feels like it does in a parser game, for example – I definitely got confused trying to remember which end was which – except with more interface friction from all the clicking required, and a half-second screen-refresh delay that began feeling interminable. There’s also a ton of waiting – after I got the tanker draining, I had nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs while the gauge slowly ticked down, and reaching 0% required five solid minutes of clicking wait, with nothing much of interest happening in the meantime.

As a parser game, I think Garbage of the Future could work quite well – default actions and affordances would suffice for most of the machinery-manipulation portions of the puzzle, and moving round the small map would be much easier (it’s also quicker to repeat-slam the Z key and enter than keep clicking in different places on the screen). The fractal nature of attention in the prototypical parser system, where looking at one object may reveal several more to consider, would also help tier out the level of detail provided. As it is, I found my engagement in this creepy vignette was often undercut by interface woes, which is an awful shame given the creativity on offer; exploring the generous spread of achievements tracked by the game, and checking off the variety of different approaches and endings, would have made for a pleasant second hour with the game, but the thought of once again having to juggle a turn timer and click dozens of times to get through sequences I’d already explored was too daunting to surmount.

This game has a unique UI that has a sleekness to it, but is also rather disorienting. Other reviewers (at intfiction.org) have covered this aspect well already, but I'll echo that because of the way the UI and navigation is set up, it took me a bit to realize that you have to look at the truck from three different locations to get all the items you need to proceed with your mission.

While I spent a fair amount of time with the game, replaying more times than I can count, I never managed to get the “good” ending. Even once I (eventually) realized how to do it, I got too impatient (Spoiler - click to show)just sitting in the truck waiting and went to flip the pump switch to make the disposal go faster… and got eaten. I restarted, determined to try again… and that time (Spoiler - click to show)I got eaten just when I’d finished setting everything up. I didn’t have the motivation to do it all over again, so I gave up, only discovering far too late that you can save the game—all those times I replayed from the beginning when I could have been reloading a save!

I enjoyed the spooky vibe and all the different possibilities for what you can do/what can happen. Those aspects reminded me of last year’s A Thing of Wretchedness, although here you have a concrete goal and more of a sense of stakes, which was nice. The glimpses of the world that we get are intriguing, and I enjoyed seeing the descriptions of the environment change (Spoiler - click to show)once you become a mutant—honestly, I think the Mutant Jake endings were my favorites. I also like that (Spoiler - click to show)the duct tape can be used in (at least) two different, mutually exclusive ways (tape the hose to have no leaks, tape the pump switch for speed); I’m so used to items in adventure game puzzles being single-use, so having two different options here and having to choose your trade-off was a nice design feature.