Temptation in the Village

(This is an edited version of a review originally published in my blog during IFComp 2025.)

Temptation in the Village is Anssi Räisänen's parser game adaptation of the eponymous unfinished short story by Franz Kafka. That story is dated 1914. Räisänen explains in the game's ABOUT that Temptation begins as a faithful adaptation of the story, then develops via his own expansions on it in the style and spirit of Kafka. The result is the experience of a Kafka tale manoeuvred to suit the parser format. Psychologically focused within the PC, it is atmospheric and works very well. The methods for the adaptation are interesting but uncomplicated, and they drew my attention back to some fundamental qualities of the parser format and their effects. The story is certainly as existential as one expects from Kafka, but it doesn't have the unrelenting heaviness of something like The Trial. Its feet are in naturalism and it's set on a village farm.

The opening paragraph of the game acts as a kind of benchmark. It depicts the PC experiencing what psychologist Abraham Maslow termed "the peak experience", the feeling that life is infinitely interesting and exciting, and potential-filled:

"One summer, as evening falls, you arrive in a village you’ve never been to before. You’re struck by how broad and open the roads are. Tall, old trees stand in front of the farmhouses. It has been raining recently, the air is fresh, everything delights you."

This experience will soon be defused by the PC's dealings with a roster of unhelpful and sometimes unintentionally sinister village characters. In my reading of the game, the elaboration of the move to or away from this psychological high point is the frame for what happens in the story.

I need to preface the rest of this review by saying that at the time I wrote it, I hadn't read any Kafka in full. Being a literary type, I know a lot about Kafka from secondhand reading, the zeitgeist, and the overused adjective "Kafka-esque". My experience of Temptation meshed with specific qualities I expect from Kafka. The game features absurdity and an uncertain prosecutorial atmosphere, and though there are no real bureaucracies in it to confound the PC, the minor hierarchy of the farm's running amounts to a version of one.

The story begins with the PC wandering in the countryside when they come across a farm. Looking for shelter and work, they start to enquire about both, and are soon running afoul of ambiguously helpful/unhelpful locals. A village man suggests the inn might suit, but also points out it's been turned over to a cripple the local community was obliged to provide for. The cripple and his wife can hardly manage the inn, so the inn stinks and ends up providing for nobody. The villager and his wife hang about the dithering PC, following at a distance for no good reason and seeming both menacing and foolish in doing so.

The main way such events are managed in the game is just by allowing or blocking directional movements at different times. The player is forced to twitch and dawdle about the first location, being invited in one direction, finding that way blocked by NPCs or their ideas, invited in another, finding it now blocked too for new narrative reasons. For the most part, these methods get around the need for any conversation mechanic, though there is some ASK SUCH-AND-SUCH ABOUTing required.

The divisions created by parser game turns and locations suit Kafka's and Räisänen's unhelpful NPCs. The prose of Temptation conveys an inner psychological process, not just a series of standalone vignettes about place. The PC enters a room, is often prohibited from performing actions by implied social customs or just the silence of others (how strange it would be to ask an old couple for a room for the night, and find they're prepared to sit at their porridge dinner in the half-dark just ignoring you) and must work out what to do to unstick the situation. The prose indicates a normalcy, or at least non-rudeness, in the PC, which is tested by others who seem to be unthinkingly rude or just not thinking.

Even children have an air of menace in this story. They awaken and encircle the PC in unison when they hear the sound of a dog barking at night:

"It is too late; suddenly, all around you, you see the children rising up in their white nightshirts as though by agreement, as though on command, and eye you closely."

There is a sense of conspiracy amongst others, never verified or verifiable. It just emphasises that the PC is the PC and cannot know others' thoughts, yet he keeps trying to balance what he guesses those thoughts might be against his own standards.

Where Kafka's story ended in the night, Räisänen continues to the morning with the PC's enquiries regarding work. A young man seen earlier on a wall, where he was inviting the PC onto the farm in what modern folk would describe as a passive-aggressive manner, now submits the PC to a pre-work test:

"It would make a great impression on the master if you mowed the tall grass south of the house. There is a scythe in the old barn... Another thing you could do is move the big trunk from the old barn to the new barn."

The PC thinks this man seems like a foreman, and speculates he might even be the son of the old farmer, but chooses not to ask about either of these things. The player's more traditional adventuring skills are now drawn on to bring the farming tasks to a close, at which point the man asks one more thing:

"... remember seeing those fallen cherry blossoms in the garden? You could go and glue them back onto the tree branches. I am sure the master would appreciate that very much."

The PC's realisation that the man has been pranking him and wasting his time is accompanied by another; that the PC himself has been behaving in a blindly obedient manner while on this farm.

Similar incidents sprinkled throughout the game have led to this point. As a player, I recalled my own following of all the suggestions made by those initial villagers outside the farm, in spite of them not actually being helpful. I still didn't realise that the old couple I'd found eating porridge on the first evening had never actually offered me a room until I reviewed my transcript of play. I'd just felt that they had, then gone off and lain down on a pile of straw to sleep. The so-called foreman never indicated who he was, or why he might have had any real authority over me, yet the PC had behaved in a manner as if he had.

Given that this is the conclusion to the fully original portion of the game, and that it weaves together the prior contents of Kafka's short story so well, I think the integration is excellent, and the story has a thematically and psychologically powerful conclusion.

The man's prank isn't the final word, though. Recalling the peak experience of the protagonist in the first scene, that hard-to-share delight he experienced at everything, I'm aware of the distance travelled from that moment to his humiliation at the hands of the foreman. The game has shown that the PC got here by careless small steps in the face of uncertainties, and certainly lost his way after that first moment. Peak experiences can feel like accidents. Abraham Maslow ended up assuming they were. Writer-philosopher Colin Wilson later explored the phenomenon in literature and in reality as something one could try to bring about. Temptation ends with a turn back towards the potential of the opening high point:

"But even in this desolate moment, you know that one day you will find a place that truly belongs to you, no matter what it takes - and it will be somewhere entirely different from here."

For the evolution of the PC, this is obviously the right move. The game casts most of its situations in Kafka's socially adversarial light, so there are practical implications we can take from the story, or be reminded of, about how more assertiveness may be needed in dealing with such situations, and with self-proclaimed authorities, if we aren't to be given the runaround like the PC is in Temptation.

Given my lack of Kafka-reading, I don't know if Kafka ever ended stories with what you might call a positive vector. By his reputation, I doubt it. On the other hand, if he'd trafficked down in Samuel-Beckett-like levels of wilfully stupid pessimism, I'm sure I'd have heard about that.

Temptation in the Village is interactive, but not in the sense that the player could have warded off all those unhelpful people. There's a journey to go on here and the interactions highlight opportunities to think about it. The player is subjected to the old "You can't go that way" message a lot – in situation-specific prose, of course – but that message is existential, not just physical. The PC chooses not to go that way, now. Why? Probably because they're being too careful to try not to offend any of the uncaring NPCs.

What is the Temptation of the title? I have no idea. Some googling suggests there aren't solid ideas out there regarding Kafka's original piece. It was an unfinished fragment, after all. I think some mystery is always a good thing.

I admit I cringe at hearing a work is (yet another) retelling of a beloved or important classic in Twine or Inform. There've been a few adaptations of poems into hypertextual form, and some work quite well, my favorite being one written in Squiffy that the author had taken down. They do feel workmanlike or more like "hey, I like this too." Which is hardly a crime, but, well, I found myself saying, what about an author's other works that might fit the medium better? Here I like that the author has taken a Kafka story other than the Metamorphosis and made it fit well.

Text adventures aren't the only medium where this can be done--on Twitter (I'll always call it that) there's an account called SportsButMakeItArt, which features art we may not know and compares it to a screenshot from a sporting event. It's wonderful and cool and I learn a lot from it. They avoid popular works. It teaches us without any "OK, time to learn, kids." It's one of the few reasons I go back to Twitter. (Another big one is Rep. Jack Kimble. IYKYK.) So I like that TitV shows us something new beyond just a new form of presentation.

And Kafka seems like a good author to write a text adventure about, or at least a simple one, and the story is chosen well. The main characters wind up feeling like that had no agency in the end. They're pushed along by people smarter or at least more cunning than them. And they're rejected without satisfactory explanation. There seems to be so much possibility in the parser, but often there isn't really.

This is the case here, too, and I missed the foreshadowing in "just get things done" mode. TiTV is a relatively sparse twelve rooms with the promise of more, but you're rejected from certain passages. That's too private right now, etc. At the start, you are walking east, to a town, but you're a bit tired and there's that village to the north you've never seen before. You stay for the night. It's free, a village resident says. You return a dog to a woman, feeling as though it's your fault it got lost, or at the very least that you made so much noise returning it. In the process you find a guest room you weren't offered. You wonder why, and the man you met explains: the innkeeper must trust you to give you that room. You want that room. You just need to do a few simple chores. People seemed friendly. It reminded me of a picture at the end of Amerika, where Karl Rossman meets up with the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, all smiling line-drawn people that would be out of place in pretty much any other Kafka story. I was optimistic!

The first chore is straightforward, but the second is a bit odd. This is where we get into spoiler territory: you have a realization. The realization reminded me of times people had left me fit in if I did something for them. I'd fit in just fine, sure. But maybe I never got a call back. Or maybe they had private conversations among themselves where I wasn't allowed. We all have had those episodes. But this is something more: something with a little arm-twist, where if you don't know how to push back and call things out for what they are, you'll get stuck. Throughout the game there's a sense you feel you're imposing. The innkeepers say you talk too much. The kids you sleep with in the attic are upset you woke them. And so on. You get things for free, well, monetarily.

And yet, it's nice how one task helps you with another, right? There's also a suspicion that the foreman made it so you had to do the tasks in an awkward order, and this wasn't adventure game logic. Then the reveal at the end. I felt it was unfair at first, well, to the reader. But I had another look. The next time, things clicked more, that it was fair, and it reminded me of stupid hazing rituals or people who just want to keep you busy on something other than your own thoughts. I was reminded of the Saved by the Bell episode where Zack was still in junior high, and he went through an initiation, only to find the real initiation was getting kids to pretend to an eighth-grader that he'd be accepted. This isn't quite so personal, and it has no crowd going "aww" in the background. But it reminded me of people who acted like they had more authority than they did, and how I believed them, because surely someone else wold've set them straight? (In some cases, these people were new and I was not.)

On replaying, I wrote down memories of some people who felt that way, who made me jump through hoops. Not any farmwork or anything. But I remember people telling me a lie and saying I had to believe it, and I felt uneasy, and maybe sometimes I saw most of the proof they were lying but I couldn't go along with it. And I went along with it here, a few times, but with a different purpose each time, feeling wiser each time through.

The ending is less fatalistic than The Metamorphosis or The Trial, so there's that. I found it easy enough to work through. I do remember people in high school saying The Metamorphosis was some fearsome thing (they were in Advanced Placement English, I was not,) then being shocked at how short it was, on reading it in an introductory college writing course. I remember hearing people use and over-use "Kafkaesque." And the huge section of literary criticism of Kafka in the library. Kafka was a Big Name. Then I buckled down and read him and felt I still missed the point. Perhaps I still do, and this is a minor work of his for a very good reason. But it made me feel like I could pull my bootstraps up, and I'll remember it, after playing Let Me Play! earlier today. It was a different look at free will and what the player could do. The characters sort of float about as you try to find your way. I guess I fell prey to the blind obedience the main character had, just wanting to get through things and not paying attention. Sometimes we have to be that way. And it's better to be caught like this in a text adventure than real life.

I don’t mean to be controversial here, but I’m going to go ahead and say it: Kafka was a great author. Oh, I know some might disagree – including the man himself, who famously wanted all his writing to be burned after his death – but for all that he’s not great at interiority and he’s better at situations than plot, he sure nailed the 20th century. But beyond his ideas (bureaucracy, alienation, the absurd), he sure could sling a sentence even when working in a more mundane register. Temptation in the Village is an interactive rendering of one of his fragments, and where the game sticks close to his prose, there’s something about it that makes me squirm in my seat with glee:

"One summer, as evening falls, you arrive in a village you’ve never been to before. You’re struck by how broad and open the roads are. Tall, old trees stand in front of the farmhouses. It has been raining recently, the air is fresh, everything delights you. You try to convey this in the way you greet the people standing at the gates; their replies are friendly, though a little reserved."

I can’t easily articulate why this delights me, but it does: the simple words, the emotional immediacy, the accumulation of simple clauses creating a momentum belied by the fact that nothing in particular is happening, the small note of unease at the end… Sure, this borders on the pastoral, but when we get down to the grubby business of human interaction, the distinctively Kafkaesque note begins to emerge. For example, after you decide to take lodgings in the village and bandy some words with a curiously-hostile passerby, a supercilious young man pops atop a wall to tell you you can stay at a farmhouse:

“That’s right,” he replies, with the same arrogance in his reply that there is in all his behavior. He sits above like a master, you stand down below like a petty servant; you have a great desire to stir him up a little by whirling a stone at him.

“Beds for the night are furnished here, not to everyone, but only to those to whom they are offered,” the young man continues.

The near-tautology at the end: lovely.

The gameplay here is pretty minimal – just moving about the map and taking simple actions (talking, sleeping) according to the game’s prompts, which lend a minimal interactivity to the fragment. Sometimes the suggestions can get pretty bald, telling you exactly what the protagonist is feeling and what you should do next, and while these can feel intrusive, I think that’s forgivable due the exigencies of adaptation, especially of a piece so light on plot as this: without clear narrative stakes or character goals to structure things, a heavier authorial hand helps the player avoid flailing.

The trouble is that this is just a fragment, and the author’s given in to the temptation to finish it. It’s hopefully no major critique to note that the writing in this section isn’t as good as Kafka’s, and both the plot and the structure open up a bit: the bit Kafka wrote breaks off after the protagonist experiences an odd incident upon awakening in the farmhouse in the middle of the night, but from there the game’s narrative has you deciding to work as a farmhand for a while, which requires you to perform some chores to prove that you’re up to the task. This involves some satisfying but very typical parser-puzzle business – you need to oil a rusty wheel, things of that nature – and while there’s a consistent undercurrent suggesting that things aren’t right, this comes across more as the locals playing a practical joke on an outsider, which doesn’t contrast well with the more uncanny, slightly-off vibe of the first half. And then the ending strikes the least Kafkaesque note I can imagine:

"But even in this desolate moment, you know that one day you will find a place that truly belongs to you, no matter what it takes - and it will be somewhere entirely different from here."

Still, a too-pat finale can’t negate how engaging I found the first part of the piece; I do wish the author had been more willing to let narrative uncertainty lie and end the game the same place Kafka did, but that’s not because the second half is bad, just comparatively banal. And heck, compared to the various forgettable-at-best attempts at adding closure to incomplete narratives – stabs at solving the Mystery of Edwin Drood or bringing Sanditon in for a landing or the last seasons of Game of Thrones – it could have been a lot worse.