Breakfast in the Dolomites

This is a parser game set entirely in real life. You are an Italian man on a weekend vacation with a beautiful young woman. Your goal is to check into a hotel and eat breakfast. And that's the game!

The game is both polished and unpolished. On one hand, many things are implemented smoothly, and there is quite a large number of background objects in different containers and so on that work right. The screen has some color to it, and special characters are used to show good and bad reactions to things.

On the other hand, I had a runtime error (moving 'nothing' into a bin). Several important objects were not in the descriptions and had to be guessed that they are present. So it's a mixed bag.

The girlfriend is highly interactive. She will constantly comment on what you do, and will suggest what you should do next. If you are not fast enough to please her or do behavior that she dislikes, she will chastise you and you will receive a negative symbol (represented by a spade). If you do what she wishes she will praise you and give you a heart symbol.

Just as in real life relationships, I find myself constantly on the hook for many faults, such as leaving a bathroom door open or not sitting while eating. My day was a series of never-ending criticisms, which only multiplied as I fumbled around trying to satisfy her unending list of demands. Perhaps the genre of the game should be 'social horror'!

In any case, the game is good at several things that many other games are not good at, like providing a realistic and detailed hotel setting. On the other hand, I found myself at odds with both the parser and my girlfriend. So some good, some bad. Overall it wasn't long and not too difficult; I used the walkthrough once in order to find the newsletter.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

A pleasant, slice-of-life work about two young people vacationing in the mountains, poised to enjoy beautiful views, hikes, and each other. What monster is going to be negatively disposed to that? I know it feels like me asking that question is setting up a ‘ooh, look at me, I’m a monster’ turn, but no. I’m on board.

Well, for all of five minutes. There is a class of parser puzzle that has always rubbed me the wrong way - the PLAYER needing tiresome trial and error to ‘solve’ a mundane interaction that the CHARACTER has full knowledge and competence in. These fall into three broad categories:

1. Endlessly searching for objects the protagonist has full knowledge of
2. Determining magic verbs to accomplish obvious tasks
3. Difficult world interactions that working sight would render trivial

Actually, there is a fourth - cluelessly exploring environs the protagonist is well familiar with. That is the one category we are NOT treated to here. Yes, this is ‘Stumble Through the Obvious: the Game.’

When I encounter these puzzles in the wild, my only real defense is to think, ‘ok, this is a gameplay compromise. I need to discover X on my own, to catch up to character knowledge.’ If the game quietly creates an atmospheric bubble around this information gathering, I can pause my engagement to get spun up on background, then reengage the main puzzles, pretending that dissonance never happened. Not great, but a compromise I have agreed to over time.

But when the game proceeds to punish or CHIDE me for this lack of knowledge? “S’matter player? Just show your passport!” >look for passport in drawer “Nope. You’re a moron player, just give me the passport.” >look for passport in jacket “Nope. I swear you are just awful at this.” Then it was (Spoiler - click to show)IN YOUR POCKET THE WHOLE TIME??? Screw you game, you’re just having a go at me. It feels like the game is being deliberately provocative here, by refusing to (Spoiler - click to show)list inventory in your pockets then MAKING YOU (Spoiler - click to show)SEARCH THEM ONE BY ONE. This is clearly a deliberate choice, as once you discover items (Spoiler - click to show)in your pockets, they are dutifully listed going forward.

Another mechanism that compounds this is stingy inventory management. You spend so much time juggling things in things in things, just to get them to your hand and use. This is not fun when it injects friction into unrelated puzzles. Here, it seems to be conceived of AS the puzzle itself! I don’t struggle this hard in real life, why should I here? More importantly, why is this fun?

With a work a this committed to blocking progress at the most trivial interactions, incomplete implementation effects are magnified. Being told repeatedly that you cannot (Spoiler - click to show)take a knife, but the only way to progress is to (Spoiler - click to show)>cut X with knife is next level progress-trolling. This moment actually brought unintended laughter as I pictured an observer’s view of the PC fumbling his hands all over a juice bar, ineptly unable to work objects in plain sight. Another laughable moment was being trapped in a bathroom because environmental descriptions omitted details that were necessary to progress. I imagined my game-partner outside, hearing me bang about for a half hour before escaping… a closed door.

If you think the game could not be MORE confrontive about its labored choice architecture, hoo boy it’s got a card left to play. This game really ups the ante by pairing you with an impatient romantic partner that will chide you repeatedly for NOT doing the simple things the game makes difficult. Then up it further by ominously noting ‘Your partner has asked you this X times.’ Is there anything more portentous than “I’ve asked you this three times, young man!” She was unsympathetic to my cries of “I’m trying, it’s not me, it’s the game!” At one point, the narrator describes the partner as ‘shrewish.’ In the moment I rebelled at that - that is a LOADED word narrator, surely that’s not what you meant?! By endgame I was forced to conclude, no, that was a pretty deliberate application. When you are fumbling to do the simplest thing, having someone repeatedly OBSERVE that to you is just the worst.

The crowning indignity of the game is that after subjecting me to a series of unforgiving, inadequately clued and implemented puzzles of mundane activity… after all that, the game ended BEFORE OUR FIRST NATURE HIKE. It was the triple crown of low stakes, high difficulty and no payoff.

Part of me actually admires this. The idea of gamifying an unspoken clumsy trope of parsers, of leaning it into it so hard it is the WHOLE GAME, there is a subversive charge to that. Marrying it to prose that is light, warm, and perfectly conveys the pleasant anticipation of holiday with great company makes its chutzpah GREATER. I can see the same wry playfulness of its prose in the game’s central conception. There is a difference though between ‘playing along’ and ‘being played’ and for me, this experience was so much the latter not the former. So yes, I can admire the conceit, but that admiration doesn’t make the playing of it less Mechanical.

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 1hr, got out of bathroom
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Intrusive fussiness
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

I’ve vacationed in Italy a few times, and when people ask me my favorite part of those trips, it’s usually something about some ancient site or other that comes to mind – often I’ll name my visit to the Castel Sant’Angelo, a set of Renaissance-era papal apartments built atop a medieval fortification built atop the Emperor Hadrian’s tomb, or the time I had a beer on a patio overlooking the Mausoleum of Augustus, or winding my way down St. Patrick’s Well in Orvieto, a shaft dug two hundred feet into a hill-town’s rock to reach the water that would allow the town to outlast a siege. My wife, though, will usually talk about the hotel breakfast buffets: pillowy bread, unlimited Nutella, fresh-squeezed juices, eggs that had been inside a chicken just a day or two previous, and (I am told) high-quality coffee and cured meats worth risking heart disease for.

EDIT: my wife, having read the above paragraph, wishes it to be known that 1) she liked many things about Italy much more than the breakfasts; 2) most days she just had half a croissant since breakfast isn’t her favorite meal anyway; and 3) I am exaggerating for the bit, which, guilty as charged.

The author of Breakfast in the Dolomites thinks my wife has the better of this difference in priorities. While the blurb promises a fizzy romantic comedy on a romantic hiking trip to the mountains (and the AI-created cover art suggests slightly-melted plastic versions of Emma Stone and David Duchovny will be playing the leading roles), the title is actually a more accurate guide: while there’s a bit of prefatory matter and a brief lavatory-based denouement, obtaining and eating breakfast is the main course.

There can be a meditative kind of charm to playing a game whose subject matter is so relentlessly quotidian, but rather than the parser equivalent of those European art films that just follow someone doing their everyday chores in real time, Breakfast in the Dolomites has more in common with slapstick games like Octodad or QWOP where the joke is that a weird bendy alien is trying to act like a regular human and flailing badly. While the game uses your girlfriend, Monica, to prompt you as to the next required course of action, and I didn’t run into any significant bugs despite an impressively deep implementation, my transcript still reads like a comedy of errors. When the desk clerk at the hotel asked for my ID card, for example, I checked my inventory to confirm that I didn’t have my wallet; after Monica prodded me again I thought it might be in my pocket. I was on the right track, but typing X POCKET spat out the kind of response that gives parser-phobes nightmares:

"Which do you mean, the left back pocket, the right back pocket, the left front pocket, the right front pocket, the left leg pocket or the right leg pocket?"

Fortunately I found the wallet on the third try, and thought I had things sorted, except then I ran afoul of the inventory limits that objected to me trying to carry my wallet, ID card, and two keys all at once. This minor inconvenience was as nothing to the hijinks that ensued when I reached the buffet the next morning, though: look, in my IF career I’ve stared down mad scientists thousands of meters deep beneath alien seas, used the last of my strength to perform rituals of banishment abjuring abhorrent gods, and endured painfully-immersive narratives of abuse, but rarely have I felt as stressed as I did juggling a bread plate and a scrambled egg while trying to work a juicer.

> put carrot in container

The juicer bowl is closed.

> open juicer

You open the juicer bowl.

> put carrot in container

“You cannot put a whole carrot in the machine, you have to chop it first.” — Emma suggests you.

> chop carrot

You should specify what you cut it with.

> chop carrot with knife

It is better to lean on a chopping board.

The level of granularity here is frankly incredible; there are easily a dozen different kinds of food, many with different options like choosing lemon for your tea or different kinds of jam for your toast; meanwhile the waiter, waitress, and cook are flitting about, and your girlfriend is making up her own plate. It’s impressive stuff, but I’m at a loss to explain why the author went to this much effort for such a mundane series of set pieces. It’d be one thing if deep conversation or sparkling banter were playing out alongside the banal action, but the hotel staff are blandly efficient, and Monica is too focused on giving you instructions with the patience and level of detail you’d typically associate with a preschool teacher catechizing a bunch of distractible toddlers to have much of a personality. Meanwhile, the charm of what seems like it must be a beautiful setting is smothered under goopy prose that reads like ChatGPT ate a real estate agent:

"This charming little hotel welcomes guests with its cosy reception area: the inviting atmosphere is immediately apparent, with a blend of rustic elegance and modern comfort. The reception of this little hotel in the Dolomites serves as the perfect introduction to the unique blend of comfort and authenticity that awaits guests throughout their stay, promising a memorable and rejuvenating experience in this picturesque mountain retreat."

For all that, I was disappointed when the game ended so prematurely – the technical chops and attention to detail on display made me feel like the author could have implemented a very special nature hike, or a nicely open-ended conversation with Monica that would get me invested in their relationship. I’m not sure if this small slice of narrative was always the plan, or if the effort of coding up these early sequences with such fidelity wound up eating all the development time allotted for what would have been a larger story. Either way Breakfast in the Dolomites doesn’t quite live up to its billing, whether you’re in the mood for seeing the sights or just a rich meal – but here’s hoping the author takes that impressive ambition and level of effort and turns them to different ends next time.