Deadline Enchanter

The first thing everyone should know is that this isn't a simple game. It's not even a difficult or strange game. It's probably one of the most perplexing game I've played.

The prose is rich, the puzzles are simple (harder puzzles simply wouldn't work). It's fantasy-like setting, but on the point of view of something clearly alien.

Suggested to anyone who likes strange, surreal IFs. Even if you don't understand everything, there is surely something fascinating under there.

Seriously, I've made it to the end of the game, and didn't understand a blessed thing other than the parser is supposed to be someone writing a letter to you. I think. The title leads me to believe that the game is in-jokey, that you have to be familiar with particular other works of interactive fiction to even approach this one.

At least the walkthrough is in-game, so you needn't feel guilty about using it. A lot.

It's a testament to the quality of the writing (and that walkthrough) I made it to the end. The game has a definite voice, almost conversational in its informality, which is refreshing. And it doesn't expect you to inspect the setting a great deal.

I just wish I got an ending that made sense.

Deadline Enchanter is one of a relatively small set of games that turns the player-parser relationship on its head a bit. Typically, the PC is unaware of your (the player’s) existence, and the parser invisibly takes your commands and transforms them into thoughts that appear to originate from the player character’s mind.

A few games, however, like Deadline Enchanter and, a particularly memorable example from the 2008 IFComp, Violet, change the relationship between the player and the player character by giving the parser a personality. In Violet, the PC is the significant other of the titular Violet, and Violet herself is the parser, replying the way the PC’s girlfriend would, adding tidbits of information and occasional commentary on the player’s attempts to solve the puzzles.

In Deadline Enchanter, it’s even more complicated. The PC in the game is another player of a piece of IF within the game world. The parser in this game is the voice of the person within the game world that wrote the IF game.

Still with me?

It’s terribly surreal at first, playing DE, but as you move through the game it starts to make more sense and you start to understand the rhythm of the game. Through the course of the game, you learn that what has occurred is that the parser, a princess trapped in a tower, has created an IF game as a means of training someone to go through the motions of freeing her. You, the player, is in essence playing someone who has found the game and is playing to figure out how to free the princess.

It’s a pretty ingenious setup in my opinion, but hard to classify and even harder to explain. The game ends up using a few narrative tricks that offer variety to the game play experience, and the ending... well, it gives the player just the slightest hesitation, in a manner designed to create player agency.

In the end, I liked it, and would encourage others to give it a try. It’s actually rather easy, and probably not terribly bad for beginners to IF. I wouldn’t go into it expecting this is how most IF goes, though.

One reviewer said you don't play this game, but rather let it play you - and that's exactly what it does. It takes you on a breathtaking ride through a world - what world, exactly? At some point you're no longer sure whether it's really an alien world, or whether perhaps your world is the one that's faux. And when the ride is over, you can't help but look at what's around you a bit differently, if only for a passing moment. That's quite a feat.

Reminded me of Snerg's "Robot" for some reason. Perhaps the feeling of helplessness, both because of being taken on a ride with destination obviously well-defined but just as obviously not known, never fully, to you, and because of being trapped, stuck in substance, unmoving, slowed down, held down, observing but disabled. All in all - a very emotional piece, even if in a totally different sense than you usually mean when you say 'emotional'.