A Train to Piccadilly

I would like to say that it is my decades of IF experience that allowed me to suss out the subtle gradations of influence that gave rise to A Train to Piccadilly. But after you get through the linear prologue, you’re given a choice of three objects that will whisk you to different times and places, one of which plays host to a conspicuously-placed jigsaw puzzle. And if that’s somehow too recondite a reference, the third of those objects is straight-up just a copy of Trinity.

So what we’ve got here is an entry in the canonical-but-rarely-attempted genre of romp-through-puzzle-filled-historical-and-allegorical-vignettes. Despite the idyllic title, the story starts in a post-apocalyptic past, with the triumph first of Hitler and then of Stalin has cast all of Europe under a totalitarian pall far worse than the historical Iron Curtain (…don’t even ask about the U.S.). You play a member of a resistance movement, whose mission is to collect far-flung artifacts in hopes of somehow correcting the moment when the timeline got out of joint.

This isn’t laid out in po-faced infodumps, thankfully – the game throws you into a deadly situation from the get-go (there are a lot of action sequences, many of them quite tricky, but UNDO will get you through them), and then dispenses worldbuilding sparingly, relying on the player to put the pieces together from isolated documents, strange encounters with people who know more than they’re saying, and the odd cutscene. Sure, there is one bit where a superior provides something resembling a briefing, but it’s got more in common with a Dostoevsky novel than a traditional pre-mission psych-up:

"Confused, I ask: '…and where are we?' In the Berlin underground doesn’t seem to be the right answer.

"'Nowhere, and at no time. Or, perhaps, in all places and at all times. A question of splitting hairs.'"

The writing is really good throughout, actually, not encumbering the puzzles with excessive ornamentation but providing plenty of evocative details. Here’s a bit of scenery for the opening scene, which underlined the physical misery of living in this world:

"Tents and curtains stretched between buildings, forming a series of overlapping levels—I imagine they were once used to dampen the rain. Unfortunately, now, while good for hiding, they are useless for the purpose for which they were erected. Water cascades in torrents from one tent to the next, amplifying the downpours on the ground."

It quickly becomes clear that this is a puzzle-forward game, however. Each of the three main branches has a distinctly different area of focus: one is a single multi-step puzzle-hunt style conundrum involving exotic methods of decoding and recoding information, one is a set of musical variations on a theme, and the last requires traversing a series of environmental puzzles to make progress through a hostile area. I don’t want to go into too many details because they’re almost all very good, with the puzzle-hunt one especially impressing me with its elegance. I did find it the toughest, however, and was glad for the existence of invisiclues linked off the game’s IFDB page.

While they’re uniformly well-designed, though, they’re not always integrated into the story. The hostile-environment branch I think does the best job of grounding its challenges in diegetic reality (and perhaps as a result, I managed to get through it without any hints, even a tricky-in-retrospect password-guessing bit). The music one is more equivocal, with some implausible elements like a song-generating staircase running through a castle being used as a torture prison, though this branch does have some neat thematic elements, like the way your reuse of apples in multiple solutions echoes the theme-and-variation mode of musical composition. And for all that I admire the elegant way the strands of the puzzle hunt come together, I have not the foggiest idea how any of it can be justified in narrative terms – it feels like a really well-done crossword crashing into the narrative and daring the player to say boo.

As for that narrative, while I found it ran decidedly second-place to the puzzles, it’s pretty fun in its own right. The nonlinear, mystery-box storytelling and effectively dystopian picture of a triumphant Soviet empire make each plot point feel urgent and compelling when it comes. I confess that I didn’t find the last revelation especially plausible – (Spoiler - click to show)come on, Churchill is cool and all but there’s no way assassinating him before he became PM would let Hitler win – but I suppose it’s the nature of the genre to focus on key, personalized turning points in history. Even if it’s a more correct take, “Allied victory in WWII was guaranteed given the inability of the Axis to target the U.S.’s overwhelmingly large industrial base” doesn’t really lend itself to dramatic scenarios where one person can suddenly shunt the future into an entirely different track. That’s only one of the many reasons why this subgenre is so tricky to get right, and, I suspect, why we’ve seen so few authors make a run at it in recent decades. Kudos, then, to Train to Piccadilly for calling its shot, and for nailing so much of the follow-through.