Breakfast in the Dolomites

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.