Trenchline

I promised we’d be circling back around to this series, and so the time has come for another thrilling installment of:

Wait, Did I Beta Test This?

This time I’m pretty sure the answer is yes! My son was one and a bit during the 2022 holiday season, which was about when he started sleeping most of the way through the night, so while I don’t have perfect recall of those almost-four-years-ago days by any means, I went into this one pretty sure I remembered some of the high points from putting it through its paces – artillery fire, a satisfyingly complex implementation of a radio, a bunch of rigmarole with some wire. But sadly it turns out I’m 0 for 2 in this series, as per the in-game CREDITS it was actually some guy named Mark Russo who tested it.

Well, whoever that Mark dude is, he must have given some solid feedback because I had a lot of fun with whatever number run through the game this was! In my Edge Valley Bigfoot Society review I mused on the well-intentioned advice to newbie authors to focus on finishing a small game before getting too ambitious, and how despite agreeing with that advice I admire the hubris of those who choose to disregard it. Trenchline does a really good job of walking the balance-beam, because on the one hand it’s got a very manageable scope – the map has half a dozen or so locations, most with only one or two interactive objects, and there’s only one real puzzle. On the other hand, that puzzle has a lot of different steps, all logical and satisfying to solve without requiring excessive hand-holding (though the hints are a lot of fun, if you do have recourse to them). Meanwhile, the radio is a very ambitious bit of design – there are a bunch of different parts, all of which behave the way you’d think, and once you get it working there are multiple NPCs you can interact with. The implementation is tight, with lots of scenery implemented and logical courses of action anticipated, and good use is made of some of TADS’ bells and whistles, like hyperlinks for navigation and topic-suggestion in the ASK/TELL conversation system. About the only hiccup I noticed was that there’s a bit of disambiguation required when you’re juggling multiple parts of a long wire, but it only held me up for a few seconds.

Beyond the design, the writing is also nice and tight. The setup here is that you’re a mercenary (don’t worry, you were hired to fight fascists) whose company has been slaughtered, left to take shelter in the eponymous underground bunker to avoid a withering artillery barrage and hopefully find some way of escaping. I’m not aware of too many pieces of IF that center on modern-ish infantry warfare, and still fewer that present military matters with any sort of verisimilitude, so I was impressed by the game’s ability to present what felt like a well-observed, grounded setting without forcing the player to wade through boring gun porn. There’s even a bit of environmental storytelling in the laconic descriptions, like this bit that provides some hints about how and why the bunker became abandoned:

"A clearly professional job of smashing these crates was recently conducted. Few splinters are larger than a forearm and all of the ammunition the crates previously contained, now gone. Whether issued to PWM forces or expended in anger there is no way of knowing. The wooden debris is loosely scattered about."

Similarly, conversations with the soldiers on the other end of the radio are appropriately bureaucratic, but I always felt like I had enough context to understand what they were saying and how to respond.

It all adds up to a satisfying package – confidently written, cleanly implemented, with a single puzzle that’s satisfying to solve and doesn’t wear out its welcome. It’s about as assured a debut as you could hope for, so plaudits are definitely due to the author and the mysterious tester who backed him up.