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.