Pirate Railroad

The only other review for this game (at least, at the time that this one is being written) frames this work as an experiment of dubious value and inconclusive results. Both Pirate Railroad and that rewiew were written in 2011, a year before Twine arrived on the scene. We'll skip over the immediate years following Twine's arrival and note that here and now, fifteen years later, the situation (as memorably phrased by Mike Russo) is that the Twine wars are over, and we can all benefit from the peace dividend. One of those dividends has been the large number of experiments with new models of interaction seeking better control of pacing of the play experience, and this short piece would seem very much to be a precursor to those.

Pirate Railroad is unapologetically a subversion of the dominant parser model of its era. The player is quite heavily railroaded through the accelerated, nonsensical vignette of a pirate attack on a train traveling through the desert of New Mexico in the late 1800s. The player character saves a damsel in distress, flees a horde of pirates, is saved from certain death by authorial convenience ex machina not once but twice, is ushered through a micromelodrama of tragedy and comedy with a dash of plot twist and a near-instantaneous mock romance -- all in the space of about 10 or 15 minutes of play time. As Kenneth Hutt notes, the player has no real control and the "correct" moves are telegraphed so strongly that playing along is as easy as turning a page.

But still, it's a bit different from static fiction, isn't it? The need to enter a short command is like a little lock on each page, one that asks the player to confirm with just a tiny bit of effort that there is a desire for the story to continue. It's a little more effort and a little more engagement than would be required by a press-any-key-/click-this-link-to-continue interface, and to me this is the right way to create a fast-paced sequence in parser IF. Though trying to step off the rails causes the game to exhort you (somewhat monotonously) to play along until you relent, the experience of cooperating with the plain-as-day prompts sure beats trying to mindread one's way through a gauntlet of false choices that result in a "death end" whenever a wrong one is picked.

The author deploys a limited conversation system that is used for clever comedic effect in at least a couple of instances, and this, in conjunction with the finely-balanced writing required to sell the absurd premises just enough so that the player can have some genuine snack-sized fun with the scenario, convinces me that Utkonos was an interactive fiction author of some nascent skill. The only other work by the same author, The Duel in the Snow, seems to have been released earlier and to be somewhat better known, but so far as IFDB is concerned, this game was the end of a brief yet promising career.

This one is well worth the investment of the small amount of time required to play, best experienced when in the mood for something pacy that is inherently silly but played straight, as seen in games like Moonbase Indigo, A Matter of Heist Urgency, Fine-Tuned, or the like. Would-be authors can dissect the writing for clues about how best to "herd cats" along a railroaded sequence in a relatively congenial way.

I'm not sure what to make of this.

Let's start with the basics. You are on a train when ... a certain event occurs. You take some actions, and a surreal little story slowly unfolds. But, as far as I can see, you have literally no choice -- not even really any real appearance of choice -- at any point. There is one thing you can do, and must do, at any point to advance the story. What it is is always clear. And nothing else will achieve anything at all. The game is in control.

Within those pretty severe limitations, it's done well enough. The writing is clear and reasonably lively. The implementation is more or less sound, though there are some points where the technical joins show (Spoiler - click to show)(for instance when you try to talk to a person who the parser tells you is inanimate).

But you have no control at all.

Which brings up the different possible ways of looking at this. It could be that this is a genuine attempt to produce a game which tells a fast-paced story and that its "rails" were seen as necessary by the author to get that story told. If so, in my view, it is fundamentally unsuccessful. The complete absence of any sort of choice means that your actions are, in substance, no more significant than deciding to turn the page. And the story, though it has spirit, was not sufficiently interesting to justify that, at least as I see it.

The second possibility is that this is a game that is making a point about IF -- that its whole purpose is to see what happens when you have the trappings of IF without any real interactivity. The name of the game tends to suggest as much, as does at least one feature of the story itself ((Spoiler - click to show)where the pirate's commands themselves prove futile). Perhaps, as a technical exercise, that might help us reflect on such matters as the significance of the parser ("What if the game understands me perfectly, but is totally recalcitrant?") and the relationship between parser-based IF and CYOA -- an elaborate demonstration that the superficial freedom of the prompt is not to be equated with the ability to make any real choices at all. If it is such an exercise it succeeds as a technical exercise ... but not in a way that makes it actually interesting to play. And the point is surely sufficiently obvious that it seems hardly worth making.

A third possibility, I suppose, is that there is in fact some way to break away from the rails, and that the game is an elaborate puzzle -- a sort of "escape the railroad" exercise; that there is some way of cracking the game so that one acquires the freedom that IF seems to promise but this game deliberately withholds. That would be, as the kids say, cool, and my rather-less-than-lukewarm reception would be unfair. But if it is so, I'm afraid, I missed it or any indication of it.