Backpackward

Backpackward is about a put-upon wage slave who finds that when he wears his trusty backpack, the cellar at his neighbor Jan’s house turns into a portal to a medieval fantasy world. The main mechanic is inventory management, with the unusual-for-IF twist that this is basically a spatial reasoning puzzle; there are pixel graphics for the backpack and all the things you can put in it and you can rotate the items around to try to pack them in as efficiently as possible. It’s distinctive and smoothly implemented and the graphics look nice.

The writing, though, I have mixed feelings about. The game’s blurb promises a PC with “anger management issues” who experiences “no emotional growth”, so it feels a little gauche to then complain about him. I have looked into the bag labeled “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat”, and guess what, there was a dead dove in there. But look, it’s not that I’m against comedies where the point is to watch terrible people suffer the consequences of their own actions, it’s just, did it have to be a stereotypical nerd who’s weird about women and a little bit casually homophobic? I’m kind of tired of that guy as a protagonist, even when he’s mostly the butt of the joke. Maybe I would feel differently if the main fantasy-world female character didn’t fawn over him. (Of course, she has ulterior motives… which have to do with feeling insecure because her sister was forced into marriage by the evil ruler and not her. I’m not sure that’s better?)

That said, the writing is often legitimately funny, if often also mean-spirited with it. I enjoyed the description of the PC’s manager as a girl who “consists mostly of goth eyeliner”, for example, and the Jansport/Jan’s portal pun is groanworthy in the way one wants puns to be (if you like puns at all, of course). Also, the game did seem enjoyably responsive to having different combinations of items in your backpack—the differences are pure flavor most of the time, but I’m of the opinion that that’s a perfectly fine way to do IF.

So I do think there’s a lot to like about Backpackward, but the choice to have a funny-misogynist protagonist is not my favorite to start with, and when you put him in a narrative whose broader choices are just sexist in an unexamined kind of way, it becomes hard to tell what’s supposed to just be his opinion. Which is unfortunate.