Number of Reviews: 7
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Stirred, not Shaken, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/15/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, die twice, then win
At this point, I think we sometimes agree to pretend that parser IF will be enjoyed equally by novices and old hands alike. That as a form its evolved norms have made parser IF more friendly and less obtuse. There is some truth to this, of course. Certainly modern games are less cruel than their ancestors. Everyone who has a second is going to have a first IF experience and it COULD be any modern game in the archive. Even so, there are many informal norms that are deduced over time, like:
* If it’s listed, it will likely be important sooner or later.
* Walls and ground are rarely, but sometimes, interesting.
* Any location not connecting other locations has a purpose as a source of clues, objects or puzzles.
Despite having recently returned to the hobby (and enjoyed discovering the intervening years’ progress), my game play can never not be informed by the informal norms of the form. (“…informed by the informal norms of the form.” I wasn’t even trying and look what my brain came up with!)
It doesn’t feel calculated, so I’m going to say Marie Waits effortlessly leverages these informal norms to make a rarefied parser experience. The game opens with you, a plucky English detective, captured by villains and needing to escape before time runs out and their plan comes to fruition. There are objects to find, locked places to escape, and backstory and clues to discover. The text is constrained, with terse descriptions of environs and objects. The places are tight - each location with just a few things to interact with, maybe lugging around to be used later, maybe needed now. This has the nice side effect of constraining the noun/verb space within the bounds of normy actions. The ‘can’t do that’ messages seem fair and few. The spark of this game is the time limit. You are given three hours to secure your escape, and minutes tick by maddeningly fast.
Between the text, the location design, tight vocabulary space and the time limit, after two missteps I felt like this game put me in some Platonic Ideal IF Player zone. Leisurely trying random things to see how deep the implementation was was not going to be rewarded. There was a premium on leveraging meta norms to search, poke, prod at high payoff areas and shed distractions. And they were almost always rewarded! (Spoiler - click to show)There’s a bush here. Imma needa dig that soon as I can." “Can’t find exit, check the walls.” “Got a match, gonna need to light it when it gets dark.” It sounds like I’m running this game down, but I don’t mean it that way at all. It really felt like I was in the IF Zone, clicking along with the puzzles because of the tight adherence to metagame in a way that felt harder for newbies than me, but made me feel like a king.
Everyone who has a second whiskey has had a first. And it suuuuucks. The mouth experience runs contrary to millennia of species-preserving evolution. It’s kind of a miracle anyone ever has a second. But maybe you take it with coke for a few years in college, then someone introduces you to a perfect Old Fashioned, and before you know it, you’re having two fingers at night just to stay sane. I mean, you have grown to appreciate the nuances of the flavors. You even start differentiating whiskeys from each other as better or worse, but really as what is the best whiskeyness for your palate.
That’s what this felt like to me. Not a super sweet combination of spirits drowning in fruit juice. An unadorned experience that showcases the learned pleasures of a very specific flavor for someone who has trained themself to appreciate it. A perfect two fingers of cask strength IF to be savored and enjoyed, but quickly before those thugs come back.
A quick note on the narrative. The game makes an interesting choice to foreground the ‘escape from bad guys’ stakes (that is where the urgency lies after all), but background the underlying mystery that got you caught in the first place. As you navigate the spaces, bolting for freedom, you periodically find clues that trigger flashbacks. These flashbacks provide discrete snapshots of mystery pieces, puzzle pieces if you will. Some that snap into others to expand your knowledge, others that are in empty spaces of the puzzle tantalizingly hinting at a larger picture. The incompleteness of the mystery both underlines how inessential it is to the urgency of the escape, yet implies a compelling larger struggle outside the bounds of this 3 hours (game time. less than half that clock time.) It is just the right spice, the bitters to the cocktail if you will, that make this a crisp, satisfying experience.
So, I’ve spent a lot of time comparing this game to a perfect cocktail for the spirits enthusiast. The dirty secret is, when I really enjoy a perfect cocktail, I usually want another one behind it! Marie? You gonna keep me waiting?
Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: In Media Mystery
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I see that this is an entry in a series of games, which is absolutely what I was about to recommend. If it were mine, I might entertain a deconstructed mystery approach: a series of short IF showcasing discrete sequences of an overarching mystery. Perhaps out of order. Standalone IF type puzzle games, (or even disparate IF forms: a Twine detective relationship game! A Texture code breaking excercise! An I dunno Ren’Py point and click!) whose full mystery only makes sense when fully assembled. If this was already the path… points for guessing it?
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.