Monkeys and Car Keys

One of the trickiest bits of designing a parser puzzle game is fitting the crossword into the narrative. Sometimes everything hums along in perfect harmony, and challenges naturally thrown up by the story have obvious mechanical implementations that are well-suited to the medium-dry-goods model – or, conversely, a great idea for a puzzle turns out to be easy to slot into the plot with minimal complications. But often, the gears grind rather than turn smoothly; you can wind up with long stretches of narrative with no ideas for how to break them up (maybe throw in the Towers of Hanoi?), or more often, a fiendishly clever puzzle idea that one despairs of justifying diegetically. On the horns of this dilemma, many an author has bent over backwards to try to come up with some minimally-plausible justification (if I had a nickel for every time aliens or a wizard ran a test to find out if I was worthy…) Monkeys and Car Keys, though, opts for the bolder path: since trying to reverse-engineer an explanation for these puzzles would itself be disruptive to any sense of narrative coherence, why not steer into the skid and just go with it?

Which is to say, when I pictured the kinds of stuff I’d need to do to retrieve my eponymous car keys when the eponymous monkeys snatched them mid-jungle-safari, I was on target with exactly one of them (though really, I get no points for guessing that at some point I’d need to bribe a monkey with a banana, and now that I think of it even that isn’t played entirely straight).

The range of challenges put before you include a translation puzzle, an action-mirroring one, and a fair bit of hidden-object spotting – none of it exactly explodes the conventional paradigm, but they’re all clever and provide a spark of novelty. And none of them make a lick of sense in any universe resembling our own. I won’t spoil the later places it goes, but the first set of puzzles revolve around figuring out how a trio of magic statues work. It’s satisfying when the pieces click into place, and I found there were just enough clues to move me along to the next step (albeit sometimes these were of the “you’ve been flailing around for an extended number of turns, so here are some increasingly-direct prompts to get you back on track” variety). But logical deduction isn’t enough to solve these puzzles: instead, you need to check your assumptions and the door and experiment.

For all that this represents a total capitulation of narrative in the face of the crossword, this is something parser games are quite good at – and let’s be honest, letting the puzzles dominate a “some monkeys stole my keys, those silly-billies” premise probably doesn’t mean we missed out on War and Peace. There are some places where I found my tired brain wasn’t up to the task – the second major set-piece involves a bunch of different bits of scenery and characters, and I found my mental picture wasn’t quite accurate enough for me to have a handle on what was going on – but Monkeys and Car Keys largely plays fair. It’s also smoothly implemented, with only one or two small exceptions (I had to consult the hints at one point since I’d forgotten that MONKEY wasn’t an acceptable synonym for the STATUE of a monkey). And honestly, given that the last story beat made me kind of feel like a bad person (Spoiler - click to show) (OK that one monkey was being a jerk, but did he really deserve to get beat down with a tire iron?) there’s something to be said for refusing to allow the player to take matters seriously – and while the game knows its puzzles are the main draw, there are some engaging bits of simian mischief, and a cute sidekick, to lighten proceedings. There’s also an incredibly long setup for a bit of physical comedy illustrating that nothing’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Tricky puzzles and silly jokes is an enduring recipe for success in parser IF; if it lacks a certain balance of form and checks its literary pretensions at the door, well, what else would you expect of monkey business?