Quotient, The Game

When learning something new, the most important factor – I’d argue bigger than native ability or quality of instruction or anything else – is often enthusiasm. No matter how quickly things click, you’ll invariably run into road-blocks, and no matter how fun developing one aspect of a skill might be, there’s always going to be something else that’s a slog. Sure, all those other things, skill and good teachers and so on, can reduce the friction so it’s easier to power through, but you still need that motive force to keep you moving even as things get tough. And beyond overcoming obstacles, enthusiasm can have active virtues too: even the most jaded critic can be charmed by a roughly-hewn work if the palpable excitement of creation comes through.

The thing is, though, enthusiasm can only take you so far. A short game with all the flaws of inexperience can still leave a positive impression if it’s fleet enough to end before those flaws weigh down its exuberance. But if things drag on too long, the nitpicks start to pile up, the bubbly energy starts to feel exhausting, and the jaded critic (hi, it’s me!) loses track of what perked them up about this thing in the first place.

Quotient: the Game could have been engineered in a lab to illustrate the principle. The ingenuousness of its spy-thriller-meets Zork premise wins it a smile, which is only deepened by the cornball appeal of its love of junk food and Ohio pride (seriously, your jet-setting spy can go to Oxford, DC, “Africa”, outer space – or Cleveland and Cincinnati). And there are some solid puzzles that help keep the momentum going. But over the course of this two to three hour game, the constant in-jokey references to Dr. Who and Star Wars start to grate, the lack of adequate player direction or clueing lead to floundering, and the weight of minor bugs and small implementation threatens to overwhelm the fun stuff. Most of Quotient’s issues are ones first-time authors have to deal with (especially those who don’t benefit from a lot of pre-release testing); it’s just a shame that so much time and energy appears to have gone into this debut when it’s likely that the lessons learned from completing a game would help the author write something a lot tighter the second time out.

On to specifics: Quotient self-consciously invokes Zork with its setup: you’re outside a house, with a leaflet promising adventure to come, and a scoring system that rewards the accumulation of treasure as much as progression of plot. But this is no fantasy pastiche: instead we’re in the realm of a technothriller, as you play a new recruit to the eponymous spy agency, tasked with … well, it’s not really clear from the outset. One of the first challenges I faced with Quotient is that the game seems to assume you already know about the important characters, the world, and the basic outline of the plot – there’s some exposition, but almost always it left me with more questions than answers. Not getting bogged down in details until the player’s invested in the game can be a powerful technique, but here the other shoe doesn’t really drop. Like, once I solved enough puzzles to be admitted to the spy agency as a probationary agent, I finally got a mission briefing, which read as follows:

"Welcome to the team. Your mission involves two things. One is simply treasure hunting. This will earn points toward your rank. While we were setting up this training mission, a real mission came in. This is the second and most important part of your mission. The Lion has escaped and interfered with Cassie’s time experiment. We need your help on this mission. It’s critical we help Cassie complete her experiment. All of our agents are already working it. There is no time to explain more, you’ll have to figure out the rest as you go."

I eventually groped my way towards a fuller understanding of the premise: the aforementioned Cassie is a scientist working on a future-prediction machine that uses quantum computing, but a villain stole the magic crystal that powers the device, so you have to track him down and take it back. The game doesn’t end at that point, though – to my surprise – as you then need to help Cassie complete her experiment. Each of these steps is either underexplained (exactly what the experiment is, or what it requires, isn’t really spelled out) or overexplained (I got a few updates from Florian about how to find Robert well before I had the slightest idea of who either of those people were).

As a result, it’s most natural to treat Quotient as a treasure hunt – just wander around, solve puzzles because they’re there, grab whatever’s nailed down. And on that score it works OK! Here’s where the enthusiasm really tells; the game is palpably excited to show you around such tourist attractions as the National Mall, Oxford University, and downtown Cincinnati. In the farther-flung locations, the narration is very much lifting up the Wikipedia highlights and flubs a few minor details (I’ve lived in DC, and the geography there is slightly off in a way that kept wrong-footing me). But the local Ohio stuff elevates what sure seems like it must be the author’s favorite diner, and the allegedly-famous Cleveland sign. The gonzo would-a-teenager-thing-this-is-cool sensibility is also in best display in this section, like when you get this readout on the current British PM:

"Prime Minister Jason Stevenson is an experienced leader with a deep understanding of European state affairs as well as genetics. He is a skilled martial artist and has been known to relax in front of a videogame at times."

The puzzles are also pleasantly moreish, for the most part. There are two mazes and some unmarked exits, and some of them rely on completely arbitrary clues, like a deck of cards that for some reason spells out the steps required to complete a high-tech feat of engineering, but on their own terms, that’s fine. There are some password challenges, a couple straightforward inventory puzzles, dark areas that require a flashlight – it’s all basic but goes down easy.

Well, it goes down easy until it doesn’t. At what I think is about the 2/3 mark of the game, my progress slowed substantially – I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to be doing, and I’d run out of puzzles that I could easily figure out how to solve. There are some in-game hints, but they tend towards the cryptic, and don’t account for stuff you’ve already done, but I was able to use them to grind through a few more puzzles, albeit these ones felt more arbitrary than the earlier ones (Spoiler - click to show) (I’m pretty sure praying in the National Cathedral made a laser pop out of the floor; if that’s explained anywhere, I missed it), and threw the unhelpful nature of the thinly-implemented NPCs into sharp relief (after I’d recovered the crystal she was looking for, why didn’t Cassie unlock the door to her lab instead of making me fly halfway across the world to try to dig up a keycard?). And then I hit a wall when I realized I’d soft-locked myself by fiddling with a much-earlier puzzle (protip: don’t put anything into the lighting tube you want to get back).

So yeah. At the one hour mark, I’d have said that I was enjoying the silly, giddy ride that Quotient has to offer, but at the three hour mark, I was mostly just frustrated. None of my complaints are mortal ones, I don’t think, and again, they’re incredibly common among first-time authors – assuming the player will know what they’re doing because it’s obvious to the author, missing that some puzzles don’t have nearly enough clueing or motivation to allow the player to solve them, going for a larger cast of shallow characters rather than just a few more deeply-implemented ones, and not quite enough time polishing and fixing bugs that arise when the player doesn’t do quite what’s expected. Unfortunately Quotient goes on long enough that its early promise does have time to curdle into annoyance. The good news is that usually second-time authors quickly learn how to avoid these mistakes – it’s just that for both author and player, there can be an advantage to getting to that second game sooner rather than later.