Shadow and Ink

There’s nothing more annoying than someone who’s constantly citing themselves (well, OK, I guess it’s worse if they’re a professor, and as part of this bad habit they’re also making you buy the textbook they wrote). But as I played Shadow and Ink, an enjoyably bibliophilic romp through a fantastical version of early 20th-Century Japan, I couldn’t help thinking of M. Russo’s seminal 2023 Rosebush essay Guybrush’s Heirs.

See, in that piece I worked through some of the the ways limited parser games and “parserlike” choice-based games resembled each other, and identified a couple of the design considerations most implicated by those choices of interface. And one of the, if not in fact just the, central dangers I talked about was lawnmowering: the player realizing they don’t actually need to think about things, they can just spam the one or two verbs the parser accepts or click on every link they see, and get to the end. Ironically, this can lead to a more mechanical experience than a puzzleless story that just lets you get on with it, because the player knows they’re interacting with a system, they’re just not engaging with it the way the author wanted, and they risk being taken out of the experience altogether.

Nothing quite as bad as all that happened to me in Shadow and Ink, thankfully. There’s plenty to enjoy here, from the setting-appropriate visuals to the gently bucolic vibes of the cursed village you explore to – especially – the insistence that everyone’s problems would be solved if they just read the right book. The story is mostly just an excuse to wander around, meeting a bunch of people suffering from more or less dramatically unfortunate magical transformations, but some of the vignettes are quite well done, like using your shadow to feed shadow-rice to a shadow-fish in a shadow-pond, or, on the more prosaic side, the traveling salesman who’s missed the birth of a child. Sure, there are some corny jokes (“Shogun and Sensibility” is trying way too hard to make a Jane Austen pun when Lady Susanoo was right there (yes I know he’s a male deity, if you have a better joke please share it!)) and the occasional odd image – what’s a “disheveled mansion”? – but this is a nice place to spend time with a breezy prose style making exploration rewarding.

For all that, though, there is an evil enchantment, and to put things right, you have a store of magical book-making materials that you can use to turn specific objects into books; then offering the right book to the right person will break their curse, usually allowing you to collect more materials and/or another object. Some of this prompting can be rather direct, like this guard dropping a not-so-subtle hint about what could persuade her to let you past her post:

She nudges the drawstring bag Old Willow gave you with the butt of her spear. “Course, it’s been a while since I had something new to read. And anyone who offered me a book—say, one about long-ago battles—would never break the peace. Why, they’d no longer be a stranger, for that matter.

“You get what I’m saying?”

Gee, let me think! But for younger readers or those new to IF, this kind of direction isn’t necessarily a bad idea (and admittedly, this is one of the very first characters you meet). What is a questionable design decision is that even without the prompting, these puzzles would largely solve themselves. You only generally have access to a few book-making objects at any time, and after you’ve made one, the choice to offer it to the correct person pops up right on the main exploration screen, with no incorrect choices even listed as options. As a result, the gameplay just involves running around the map, hoovering up everything you see, periodically turning it all into as many books as you can, then looping around again to see if there’s a new option that’s popped up. Notionally, there’s a resource-management aspect to the system, because you only have so many sheets of paper and bottles of ink, but in my game this limit was bugged – I could keep making books even though I was out of paper – but even if it was working, it wouldn’t have done much to address the lawnmowering issue since extra materials typically aren’t gated around puzzles, so without the bug I would have just had to make one additional tour through the map before I had everything I needed to make all the books.

Thinking critically about the lawnmower problem might have also suggested that the game’s endearing “bonus challenge” – finding an octet of hidden ninjas to unlock a bonus ending – actually makes this issue worse. The way you find them is clicking on all the scenery links you can find, as some of them have a chance to reveal a hidden ninja. From what I could tell, this sometimes requires revisiting previously-explored areas, and as a result, just pushes you even further towards a playstyle of automatically running laps around the village and clicking everything without thinking about it.

I suppose this is the point where I should admit that in my article, I didn’t solve the lawnmower problem or anything, it’s actually quite a tricky one to grapple with. But there are some tools in the toolbelt, and I very much do think a bit of friction could have really enhanced the puzzles. Requiring the player to go into the inventory tab and think about which object could be turned into a book responsive to a character’s dilemma would have helped bring the mechanics and the narrative together more closely, and create a stronger sense of satisfaction at having solved a puzzle. Or getting the resource-constraint working properly, and using it to drive decision-making, could have been a viable option as well. Or, heck, just not having puzzles – there could be a version of the game where you can always make a book for a character as soon as you meet them, but you have to weigh the choice of handing them a Dostoevsky or a Marx. Like I said, I by no means have this all figured out. But I think Shadow and Ink would have been stronger if it did more to grapple with the problem.