Quotient, The Game

Quotient is a game in which you are a new recruit to a secret superspy organization and have to fulfill various missions to increase your agent ranking and maybe incidentally save the world. It starts with a gratuitous homage to Zork that concludes by earnestly explaining to you that it is an homage to Zork, which is a signal of what you’re in for on various levels: first, that this is an old-school throwback game with treasures to collect, mazes, sometimes wonky puzzle logic, and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink wacky worldbuilding; second, that it is packed with references to all the media the author enjoys; and third, that it is not in any way subtle.

It’s also got all the polish issues common to first parser games—underimplementation, lack of synonyms, minimally responsive NPCs, and so on—and puzzles tend to be underclued. It has a tendency to intercept you doing X to tell you you need to do Y first instead of just making Y an implicit action, which was often frustrating. It’s also very wide-open after the first big puzzle, with little direction as far as where you should be going and what you should be doing in what order. I relied a lot on the helpful puzzle dependency chart that the author has supplied, but I frequently yearned for a proper walkthrough (or better yet, a little more signposting within the game). I didn't have a strong sense of my overall goals and spent a lot of time just wandering around looking for puzzles that I was currently able to complete.

Part of the problem is that it uses a slightly unorthodox approach to NPC conversation, in which ask/tell is implemented, but so is just plain TALK TO [NPC]; not only that, but sometimes TALK TO [NPC] will get you different information if you enter it multiple times, something I didn't really try because I did not expect it to be useful. There is a certain amount of redundancy between what different NPCs will tell you, however, which is ultimately what allowed me to get through the game despite never figuring out that sometimes the intended solution is for the player to just TALK TO [NPC] three times in a row.

I did appreciate that interactable objects are usually in boldface, while examinable scenery is usually italicized. (Though there are a few exceptions, which may or may not have been intended.) An “exits” command also makes up for the occasional unlisted exit and makes the mazes much more tolerable. Having an old-school feel doesn’t have to mean eschewing any quality-of-life features that the original Zork didn’t have, and I appreciate that Quotient understands this.

And in general, for all that Quotient is unpolished and the play experience can be chaotic, a massive enthusiasm consistently shines through—enthusiasm for Ohio chili restaurants and tourist spots around the world, for classic text adventures, for most of the major sci-fi and fantasy properties of the 20th and 21st centuries, and for the author’s own creations. While playing the game, I kept thinking of a bit from Susan Sontag’s journals (is this a hideously pretentious reference to make in a review of a game that says things like “It’s a maize maze… get it”? Probably). Sontag wrote that a writer, ideally, should be four people: “the nut” whose obsessions provide the material for the work, “the moron” who lets those obsessions flow onto the page (or screen), “the stylist” who makes the material artful, and “the critic” who supplies intelligence. But, she argued, you only really need the first two. Polish and style are nice, but that enthusiasm is irreplaceable; without it, a work feels soulless. And when it’s there, it’s hard to keep from getting swept up in it, at least a little.