You Are Standing

It's been a while since I last wrote a review on ifdb. Like Bruce Lee in the movie in Rome, I swore I would never do it again. For many reasons, but above all because reviews are hateful things, especially if they are negative. We all wait for them with open arms, until we read something that doesn't suit us...

I promised myself, however, to use this means "sometimes", when I felt it necessary, and only for good purposes. That is, to showcase those stories that had, so to speak, cut me in half. Not for the five stars ones, what would be the point? There are dozens of better reviewers than me, maybe hundreds. And never for anything less than five stars.

So, I do it for something more.

There are pieces of IF that are simply atomic explosions. If I think that this was made as a "bonus game" for the backers of the 50 Years project it makes me cry. Like that, with the left foot, just for fun...

...But no. You Are Standing is obviously a VERY THOUGHT OUT game.

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Let's make it short: these are six games in one, played by a PC that finds themselves in their hands with an old disk of their companion (lover? friend? it doesn't matter), left on the desk and ready to be examined (in the best tradition of text adventures). Each game is in the peculiar style of a gaming era (the one that you can go and reread in the wonderful compendium of which this game would be a compendium: 50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron Reed --> If you don't have it, go get it!): we start from a game book, in which you have to turn the pages to pace forward, and then move from the old YOU ARE STANDING, YOU CAN SEE, up to the "modern" semi-Twine-like one. And then one last, which doesn't work because the diskette is corrupt and needs to be fixed (no spoilers here, I guess). None of the games on the disk work, however, to completion. And I won't add anything else because, yes, that would be a spoiler.

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Well, I almost cried over it. And it's not, as I wrote on intfiction, because this "game" made me relive my entire gaming life. But because it is a moving game and the very MAKING of it turned me romantic.

There's a story inside, which is made up -- guys, I'm not kidding -- of SINGLE PHRASES of EVERY SINGLE INTERNAL GAME. The story is what we expect, the medium in which it is told... well, yet another answer to those looking for something that can only be done with IF.

In short, I can't say more. Technically You Are Standing is a gem: programmed in PunyInform, the Inform6 library that allows games to run on 8-bit machines, the result is already exciting in itself (I don't even want to start thinking about how to do them, all those things there, in I6--but Aaron is certainly more competent on the subject than I am by several lengths). But this is not the point. The point is that for a couple of hours (it's not even short, this "bonus game") you will be immersed in keys, mirrors, singers and castles from which, if you have an empathy similar to mine, you will never escape.

There are two things I want (sorry for the imperative), and it would be nice if you could help me:

One, the reason behind this review: I want you to play this game. That you leave for a moment the castles and hermits and singers who are just castles and hermits and singers and throw yourself like a fish into a universe of metaphors. Let everyone know that IF is serious stuff and not an endless fetch the key.

Two: I want to know how the hell you write a game like this. I mean, not just thinking about it, but then putting down every single brushstroke so that it looked like any other brushstroke and, in the end, instead they were all gems, to be dug in the desert (yeah) and to be brought to the ruler at the end of the path.

Six stars. Cursed are you who always raise the bar...

PS: (Spoiler - click to show)The game is also a gift. This must be told. A poem, at the end, which you, the player, help create. It is Shakespeare. I'm not exaggerating it a bit. You can even save your copy. I sure as hell saved mine.

Thank you, Aaron. You are standing.

This game would probably be great as a freestanding artifact, but it is especially poignant when you consider the context in which it was created: as a bonus for people who bought a deluxe copy of 50 Years of Text Games.

The game has 5 parts, each a reflection of interactive fiction technology at a certain point. The whole game has been compressed to fit into a very small amount of memory, both so that it could be distributed on a floppy disk but also because it was part of the author's love letter to IF technology. As many authors before, this author struggled against the constraints of the medium but found a new beauty that could only be expressed under those constraints. The use (and reuse) of technology and text, delivered by a skilled writer, is truly moving.

The story is a short one of joy, building, destruction, and loss. The medium and the text some together in a way that no other form of media would allow. Exploring the story is also an exploration of what interactive fiction has meant to others, the promise of building a world all your own, the sadness of a world decaying, and finally what interactive fiction means to you, the player.

After playing this game I was thinking to myself what I would have done if I had decided to constrain myself to use six different game styles and still tell a very coherent and touching story.

I think I would pick one or two topics that many people can relate to (to avoid having to explain too much in-game) and then iterate on those same subjects throughout the different game styles. For example, one such topic could be trains (well-known and easy to model in game systems) while another, less mechanical topic could be how the characters use train travel to fulfill goals (the human aspect). Then each sub-game would both iterate on how these two topics are treated in the given era's engine of choice, as well as how they might reflect the fictional time of creation (the meta-story).

This example is just to show that I think it would be doable to string together a workable story similar in style to You Are Standing. However, I also feel like it's a pretty daunting task to try. It seems very easy to get stuck wanting to present a beat of the story at a certain point but being limited by the game style/meta-era/fictional engine limitation blocking that beat from really fitting in, and then you'll have to move things around. At least I think I would end up in conundrums like that.

I think You Are Standing really succeeds at using all of these really very different game styles to present a cohesive story specifically because of the changes in style, which I think is very impressive.

The game is also a nice illustration of how text games have changed over the years. I have read the author's book about text games and kind of knew what I should be expecting for the different eras, and wasn't disappointed. I especially liked (Spoiler - click to show)the switch from the late 90's very simulationist "hardcore" game style to suddenly playing what was essentially a Twine game. Really fun!