The War of the Willows

(This is an edited version of a review I originally wrote for my 2015 IFComp blog.)

War of the Willows is a combat game, requiring a Python interpreter to run, in which you must put down a giant, killer willow tree that's menacing your kingdom. Put it down mano a mano.

I doubt that anyone would have guessed this about the game based on its IFComp blurb –

"Did you see the clean air of the hilltops? Wind waves tumbled down through the trees, tore the drift of lavender smoke... Did you see then, in the cinder that glowed in the pewter cup, did you see how Death would wrap its roots around our throats?"

– except perhaps for the presence of that subtle pun about the roots wrapping around our throats. It's like that moment in the original Resident Evil when Chris Redfield, having polished off a building-sized carnivorous plant, says, "I think we got to the ROOT of the problem." (His emphasis, not mine.)

War of the Willows wraps a randomised combat game of obscure mechanics – one that at heart is not entirely unlike the kind of thing that appeared in David Ahl's 1978 book BASIC Computer Games – with a poetic and sometimes heavy-leaning text delivery. When a game starts by quoting a chunk of Edicts from the Bible, that's heavy. The original prose that follows flows in a similar, stansa'd vein. Poetry + combat = a novel entity, and once you get stuck in, you'll probably be hooked on trying to win at least once. But the game throws up tons of very obvious design issues. Primary amongst them: requiring the player to deal with way too much repetition of prose and key-mashing.

I believe that I am a poor reader of poetry-poetry, but I enjoyed picking my way through the figurative language of War of the Willows to learn about the woes of my kingdom and its apparent comeuppance at the hands of nature and such. At least I enjoyed doing it the first time. After I had tried to kill the tree about ten times, died as many times and mashed RETURN to make it through all of the same prose ten times, as well as answering the questions I had to answer on each playthrough to get to the battle, my right hand was ready to fall off and I was displeased at this design weakness.

Also – when you type in a god's name, you have to capitalise the first letter or it's not understood! And double also – I often experienced buggy code dumps in the middle of the prose. Maybe they're related to my version of Python. They didn't wreck anything, but seeing blocks of code from the game appear during the game was not an endearing quality.

The upshot is that when you get to the combat, you'll become interested in the combat, and all the unvarying material preceding it then just becomes a delay at getting back into the combat on replays. This applies to player death, too, which also requires a fair bit of RETURN-whacking to end proceedings.

The combat itself is significantly frustrating, but still compelling. The mechanics are hidden, but the prose does give feedback on your actions. Seeing new phrases appear suggests that your last action might have brought them about. There are logical ideas about useful ways to string together the available actions like strike / evade / advance, etc. that are likely to occur to any player, but as I say, it took me about ten plays to score a victory over the willow. It's hard to know what effect your pre-battle choices of god and desire have on the proceedings; I was having so much trouble killing the tree once, I never swerved from the walkthrough's advice (the walkthrough is purely advice) that one always choose certain combinations. I went with Vordak and Power.

I think the author has hit on a strangely original idea with this game, but it's a pretty user-unfriendly incarnation of that idea.

This is an odd little game, and the lowest-ranking game of IFComp 2015. In its own sphere, it's great and wonderful, but it's just not what most people are looking for.

What it is is epic, obscure and symbolic poetry about trees planted over ancestor's graves coming to life to take revenge on their descendants for blasphemy. There is an intentional emotional distance between the listener and the author.

The battle system is similarly opaque. You can attack. You can pray. What do these do? Is not knowing an essential part of the experience?

It starts with Choice of Games-style choices establishing stats before diving in.

Interesting game. To get it to run in modern python 3, open all the python files and change raw_input to input.

The War of the Willows is a fantasy horror game about fighting a tree threatening to destroy the protagonist and their village. It has mythical and horror overtones, and is extremely lethal.

The first impression is that The War of the Willows is not a user-friendly game, which is likely why it placed so low in IF Comp 2015. Having to download and install Python on top of downloading the game files is a high barrier to judges, especially when such a prolific year means 53 games to blitz through.

For me, playing in a console window isn't good for my eyes and makes it harder to read. It doesn't help that the game launches straight in with a long epigraph that, while atmospheric enough, is pretty esoteric to open with and is tempting to skim or skip altogether.

Player input comes from a list of case-sensitive keywords to type into the console. You choose your motivation (I chose "love"), an item to help you along (I chose a locket), and your patron deity (I chose Athena). The descriptions and responses to these choices are lovely and help build up a sense of the protagonist and their background, though it seems that most of the decisions don't have much mechanical effect. In a game that's all about the battle, it would be helpful to have more feedback about the effect the choices have.

The battle itself is a back-and-forth between the protagonist and the tree, with feedback about how the protagonist is feeling and how many limbs or branches have been hacked off. The feedback sometimes felt incongruous: one moment the protagonist was feeling hale and hearty, and then they were stumbling around, and then buoyed up again. At various points I wasn't quite sure how much health my character had, and death came as a surprise. In this case the flowery language (pun not intended) got in the way of providing information to the player.

The choice to write the game in verse is a Marmite kind of decision. I liked it: it creates an unreal atmosphere, and while over-the-top, it works to build the sense of a legendary battle. The main language issue I had was the use of "Fuck." when hitting the tree: I don't mind swearing by any means but it feels out of place amongst the game's mythical register, and I wasn't sure what exactly it was responding to.

It's an extremely difficult game to complete without dying; I died several times before stopping playing. I don't mind that, really - a challenge can be fun - but the game ends abruptly upon death, kicking you out of the console window without so much as a "play again?", which doesn't lend itself to feeling inclined to continue. It also requires reading through the introductory text again, which while intriguing the first time round, grows tiresome when you're reading through it again and again.

Having said all this, I'm not sure The War of the Willows deserves its 53rd placing in the Comp: it definitely suffered from being written with an unusual system. A parser with limited verbs, or a hypertext system, would have almost definitely gone down better. Regardless, the language and concept are intriguing and interesting, and I'd be interested to see more work from this author.

Further reading: Mathbrush's review which discusses modding the game (as encouraged by the documentation), to make changes to language and combat.