Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe

This was a hefty TADS game that I took several hours to play. It employs a variety of perspectives and player characters, and uses literary quotes, mostly from Poe.

The game primarily takes place in two time periods. One is set in the present (or around the present), in which an author has been discharged from the hospital after a explosion in a skyscraper leaves him wounded. The other is set in 1800s Baltimore where Edgar Allen Poe lies raving in a hospital sickbed.

The modern parts, while they include puzzles, are more story oriented, light on puzzles, and philosophical, while the older parts are an atmosphere-heavy mystery with puzzles and codes.

The city of Baltimore is fairly large, although the author has kept the total number of rooms to a small amount and gatekeeps them a few at a time to keep from getting overwhelmed.

The story that plays out is one that many can relate to, commenting on writing and authorship itself in a way that I found delightful. The exact specifics of who is who and what we were meant to believe and what is true can be difficult to suss out at times, but I'm thinking about replaying in the future to nail down those parts.

I became very stuck at one point due to the nature of some of the puzzles in Baltimore that are based on elapsed time. Something had changed without my being aware of it, and I went through every hint in the help section and couldn't figure it out, and even dumped the strings in the game and that didn't help, until I wandered around a bit more. So I'd say that frequent exploration, careful examination, and gathering everything not nailed down (and maybe some that is) are definitely helpful here.

Overall, the game has a literary or cinematic feel, much like Photopia. The game itself focuses on two ideals for writers: (Spoiler - click to show)popularity with the masses vs critical acclaim. I wonder which of the two ideals the author believes this game to be aiming towards, and which the audience response will be closest to (of course neither or both are a possibility). I love the idea, the writing rolled easily over my mind. I did have to take frequent breaks as there is quite a bit of information and it could be a lot to digest at times, what with both in-game puzzles, the big area, the multiple narrative layers and the mysteries left to the reader to puzzle out even after the game is over.

The author's most recent game before this, According to Cain, won the XYZZY Award and placed highly in IFComp. I found this game fairly similar in length, quality and difficulty to that one, but with more of an emphasis on the passage of time and interactive NPCs and with more unity in the story while According to Cain had more unity in the puzzles.

Another comp game that I'm a bit torn about, although the parts I liked made it one of my favorites this year. As a sucker for historical settings, I loved exploring the lighthouses and pubs of mid-nineteenth-century Baltimore and meeting people dressed in gibuses and gabardine (well, I actually encountered both of those items while they were not being worn, but you get the point). I loved the way the plot unfolded as I collected clues and pieced together what had happened to Poe and what was going on with the mysterious characters around him. When I did some Wikipedia-ing after finishing, I was impressed by how well the game was written around the actual circumstances of Poe’s death!

On the other hand, the present-day sections were significantly less engaging to me. That layer’s PC was so minimally fleshed out that I wasn’t really invested in him as a character (I don’t think gender is ever specified, actually, but I definitely imagined this PC as a man); we don’t get any backstory to reveal why he was willing to go to such lengths to achieve his goal of being known for writing without having actually written anything. And as a writer myself, that goal was impossible for me to relate to!

So as you know Edgar Allen Poe suddenly surfaced in Baltimore raving unto death, a mystery forever inexplicable, and this has thrilled generations of readers as apropos; we do so love a death apropos, it wreathes life with the faintest sense of poetry. Which proves enormously appealing to our everyman narrator slogging toward middleage to be born, so “tired of the day-in, day-out… of being overlooked and underappreciated. You deserve more.” A lot more more, it seems, wishing to swing the pendulum across the pit: “All you wanted was to publish a novel. Take it on tour. See your name on the bestseller lists. Was that so much to ask?” Cue Mephistopheles with bargain in tow, offering you either literary reverence or its opposite, monetizable fame. One does not write hundreds of thousands of words without the narcissistic insistence that the void should not be more eloquent, so I perused the literary option: “From a scan through the lengthy synopsis, you see it’s a multigenerational family saga of an American farming family that produces three children. The two sons become doctors and move to the city, while the daughter establishes a veterinary practice near the farm.” Needless to say I chose the famous option. This decision point layers in the game’s innovation on the tale, doubling the doublebind by binding you to whichever authorial attunement imbues your name with its resonances: “In the glass, your reflection stares back at you … you come to realize the glass wall permits you to see into another passageway… the path you did not take. It’s your split double, the one who chose to be literary.”

With the stage set for the artist’s struggle between their daily bread and their Last Supper, we promptly throw it out the window for a dizzying time travel caper involving three whole sets of Faustian twins sprawled across half a millennium, multiple explosions with a quantum of mechanics, and two separate attempts to come loose in time through legalese. If that all sounds complicated, then the thematic heft of these hijinks is more concise: the reward of success is the fulfillment of the attempt, otherwise you may as well drive a marathon, gets you to the same place. “The curse of mediocrity has returned. It’s like it was before that fateful day in Belyle’s office, when you desperately craved to write a novel. / No, you desperately craved publication - to be lauded and praised. The writing was always a means to an end. / Pen in hand, you stop waiting and start thinking. An idea peeks its nose up. One by one, you wrestle out the opening words of what might become a novel…” There is of course no point in having written a book if you haven’t written a book, so moral in hand we’re right back to where we started…

Where did we start again? Oh yes, Edgar Allen Poe. In celebration of his role in developing the detective genre, we’re donning a fedora as our “lips fidget with the toothpick”, ready to gumshoe nineteenth century Baltimore, gathering clues to uncover the circumstances of Poe’s death, which has gotten gnarled up with all the above. A few homages to Poe help settle the setdressing, with a lighthouse in line with his unfinished final story, a climactic confrontation with rival Rufus Griswold, a few lines of Annabel Lee lying around, and assuredly a raven, box ticked. What the story seems to miss most is the quality for which Poe was most famous, an overbearing pervasion of mood. The prose is frequently workman, even rather curt, only occasionally crafting up the effort expected of a work ardently enjoining us to our writerly duty of “Nurturing your dream with sweat and passion.” A shocking revelation withers on the line: “Belyle’s involvement is now confirmed. My suspicions about Poe’s ordeal have been justified. It sickens me to think Belyle may have played some part in Poe’s now-fragile condition." Ah yes, I see, it’s the demons; make a note of that, will you, Watson? When the writing does go grand, it can trip over itself by simply restating the previous sentence with gusto: “To your horror, the fountain pen’s ink is blood. The oily vermilion liquid congeals to a black crust across the dotted line.” This is a shame, because the author is quite clearly capable of arresting visuals like “knife-edged sleet” and “his now-crystallized froth made his mouth hairy with ice”, and maybe it’s a little silly but the sheer inventiveness makes it my favorite: “Blackened metal scraps lie about it like curled patisserie chocolate.” Honestly, I think the glue that keeps this juryrigged Poe/Faust/Jekyll/airport thriller hybrid humming along are these moments of gothic effusion, so I kept craving menace. With what we have, at least some humor makes a virtue of the dryness, with jokes ranging from the very broad ““And here’s your free whiskey,” the one nearest me says. She presses a voucher into my hands. / And so concludes my introduction to American Democracy.” to the little less broad “From the blast marks about the room, my powers of perception tell me this is the locus of the fire - it originated here.” I also laughed when, having read the literary precis, I thought gosh who other than Franzen is desperate to be Franzen, only for the game to namecheck him later as its caricature source.

Rather than mood, the game seems inspired instead by Poe’s most famous quality, high concept succinctness. It’s an enormous credit to the pace and focus of the work that the somewhat awkward mashup of ideas streamlines thrillerishly propulsive. While I would have liked more emphasis on the duality of lives debating the roads traveled, there is a satisfying dialogue between the doubles at the end which sculpts to a delightfully morose capstone: “You feel vaguely dirty signing your other’s book, cowardly claiming someone else’s compromises as your own.” Artworks are vitalities of another’s compromises comprising a destiny, so though this work’s are not the ones I might’ve made, I’ll still celebrate the ease in which it couches its furtive intensity, a stainless steel requiem for the individuality that dies with a writer, what strikes us in “the nurse frantically trying to explain something about a bombing victim’s last words.”

Last night my wife and I had one of our all-too-infrequent dates (we’re parents of a toddler, the struggle is real), and I made the questionable decision to use some of that precious time telling her about the drama surrounding NaNoWriMo endorsing LLM tools. She was gobsmacked: the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel, so what possible point could there be to having an “AI” write part of it for you? I didn’t have any great answers; the best I could come up with is that there are people who really want to have written a book, but either can’t or don’t want to do the work to actually write it.

Comes now Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe to assert that yes, there definitely are people like that, and to imagine what they might do if they had to make a deal with an entity darker still than ChatGPT to get their way. Oh, there’s plenty going on in this impressively-put-together TADS game – beyond the main thread involving investigations in an evocatively-presented 19th-Century Baltimore, there’s also a terrorist thriller, and even a brief Renaissance interlude – but the heart of it is a meditation on artistic ambition; trying to uncover exactly what caused Poe’s death provides impetus to the plot, and he enigmatically haunts proceedings as inspiration, cautionary tale, or victim, but the story is ultimately concerned with others who lack his talent and perseverance while feeling no less entitled to success.

Speaking of ambitions, this is a lot for a parser game to bite off, but UCEAP manages it all with aplomb. There’s a modern-day framing story for the main action in Poe’s Baltimore, as well as one or two other nested flashbacks, but everything except the 19th Century stuff is presented in a compact, guided fashion that ensures the player doesn’t flounder even as they’re put in situations without enough context to understand them, or asked to make thematically-charged decisions via a parser interface that doesn’t allow for much nuance. The tools used here include a fair amount of prompting, via a (optional, but enabled by default) system that provides hints about possible conversational topics, or the reduction of complex dilemmas to binary choices represented by physical actions easily fitting the medium-dry-goods paradigm. It’d be churlish to complain about this kind of thing, though, since these sequences are clearly ancillary to the main event, where the player is afforded far more freedom; keeping the necessarily-less-engaging side-stories moving is the right decision.

And oh, what fun there is to be had in Charm City! As an admirer of Poe’s who has heard news of his troubles, you rush to his hospital bed and vow to discover who or what brought him to such dire straits. The whole sequence is rendered in enjoyably melodramatic prose that brings the milieu to life, like this description of the harbor:

"Eagerly I pass through the doors of the ferry building, columned on both sides by the sails and smoke rising from the ferries gliding over the glassy Patapsco River."

Or this later one of a damaged mechanism:

"A great iron pot-bellied engine sits mounted into one wall, with a webwork of contraption and gears sprouting from its head. Blackened metal scraps lie about it like curled patisserie chocolate."

It’s impressively-wrought apery, conjuring ambiance while avoiding mentioning too many nouns that would need to be implemented, and if there are anachronisms or infelicities, I didn’t notice them. A lot of research has clearly gone into this, but the game avoids the pitfall of ploddingly reciting Wikipedia summaries; historical tidbits like how voting frauds were perpetrated or what medical care looked like at the time are given life and made plot-relevant instead.

The puzzles are also woven into the narrative with care and skill. There are barriers to your investigations – you’ll need to retrace his steps before the attack that felled him, wheedle key information out of a wino, er, toper, and even decode some cryptograms that could have come straight out of a Poe story. But they all arise, and are surmounted, in organic fashion; there’s nothing that comes off as a gamey contrivance to pad out the running time, and the puzzles all reward logical thinking and period knowledge (in fact I managed to sequence-break by guessing a cipher keyword well before I was supposed to based on knowing some things about 19th-Century medicine). And even for folks less well-positioned to grapple with its challenges, the game offers hints and a walkthrough.

For all that they’re well done, though, the puzzles aren’t what UCEAP is most interested in. Nor, in the end, is Poe – the game does engage with the historical circumstances of his death with impressive depth and fidelity, and it’s generously larded both with specific references to his work, as well as with tropes that invoke the mysterious, haunted atmosphere of his writings, from uncanny doubles to ominous codes to insoluble murders. But we don’t get much of a sense of his subjectivity: the active characters are people who look up to him, or are jealous of him, or find themselves enmeshed in situations that wouldn’t be out of place in one of his tales. Indeed, there’s even a clever feint that led me to expect that Poe would be revealed as his own worst enemy, only to find that something else entirely was going on.

No, it’s the protagonist and villain, and their echoes in the modern-day story, who are most thematically central to the game. It posits a series of dualities within literary identity: the desire for broad success as well as critical acclaim, for bourgeois respectability as well as demimondaine extravagance, and above all for the trappings of fame without the effort required to master a craft. Much like the puzzles, this theme is well-put together and cleverly integrated into the game as a whole, but here’s my major complaint about UCEAP: I’m not convinced it winds up with as much to say about literary production in general, or Poe in specific, as I’d have hoped.

Most authors, I think, really are trying as hard as they can to produce good work; if they’re taking shortcuts, they’re shortcuts imposed by the exigencies of artistic production under late capitalism rather than moral failings. ChatGPT and its ilk pretend they offer the equivalent of a deal with the devil – have your masterworks handed to you on a platter rather than forging them with the sweat of your brow – but it’s nonetheless clear that this Mephistopheles has not a golden fiddle but an out-of-tune ukulele. And as for Poe, UCEAP convincingly demolishes the character-assassination portrait of him as a depraved alcoholic brought low by his inability to control his vices, but it doesn’t dwell much on the positive vision we should have of him instead. I don’t disagree with anything the game is saying, by any means, but I do wish it had found a way to penetrate a little more deeply, engage more directly with the questions it raises about how we sinful mortals can create undying art.

Let me be clear that I’m just talking about the difference between a great game and an incredible one, though – I found UCEAP a joy to play, with best-of-class prose, design, worldbuilding, and narrative structure (I haven’t gotten a chance to mention how scene transitions are often accomplished via seamless match-cuts, like jumping from a 2024 hospital to an 1849 one). It also boasts the most hilarious way to get out of a bad contract I’ve read in quite some time. And if it doesn’t completely transcend its origins as a sensational tale of depraved and desperate ambition, well, Poe wrote a bunch like that himself and many of them have survived the test of time nonetheless.