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Searching for More, August 8, 2022Although you’re only told it in the blurb, rather than in the game proper, Kondiac has a neat premise: there’s been some untoward events in a small town in Alaska, and it’s up to you to troll through the archives of the local newspaper to get to the bottom of things. As someone who maxes out their Library Use skill whenever they play Call of Cthulhu, I’m a sucker for this kind of diegetically-presented approach to research, and the specific keyword-search system used here reminded me of Her Story, which I quite enjoyed (some might raise the question: even though this kind of game involves typing, there’s not really a world model, so is this truly parser IF? To that I reply, eh, doesn’t bother me one way or the other, in ParserComp it is so into the ParserComp review queue it goes).
Sadly, these initially-high hopes were quickly dashed. The game doesn’t take the “newspaper archives” premise at all seriously – while several pieces of evidence are found by using specific proper nouns, as you’d imagine (looking into a business by checking out its name, for example), many of them require the use of incredibly common words as search terms, which somehow turn up only a single hit. This small-town newspaper has also amassed quite the trove of evidence already, including photos that unambiguously depict crimes being committed and bank records of private parties, so one feels less like an intrepid investigator connecting the dots and more like a harried IT staffer under the gun to wrestle a cockamamie file storage system into shape ahead of the already-written big scoop.
It doesn’t help that the mystery being investigated isn’t especially twisty or fleshed-out. There appear to be less than a dozen different pieces of evidence to find, which stymied me for quite a while – I followed the initial thread of obvious things to search, like the name of the town and the proper-noun that greets you when you start up the game, and got to a page indicating that rather than the single missing person I’d turned up, there were actually a total of half a dozen people who disappeared in this town all at the same time. But searching for any of the other victims was a dead end; only the first person had anything written up for him, and lots of other search terms that really seem like they should give some result (like the police department, or even the newspaper itself) come up empty instead.
Further deflating matters, the punchline to the investigation is both one you’ve probably seen before and doesn’t make much sense on its own terms: the plot centers on an inpatient substance abuse treatment facility, which is being paid $12k a pop to perform various evil deeds, but having done health policy work and being familiar with the reimbursement rates you can pull down for this sort of thing, garden-variety Medicaid fraud would be far more lucrative. And I ran into some technical wonkiness with the implementation: notably, errant white space seems to confuse the search bar, so “kondiac” gets a hit but “kondiac “ doesn’t, and while a first name or a last name might get you to the same hit, a full name won’t.
All told, Kondiac seems like a proof of concept that needs substantial expansion and editing to hit its potential. The basic premise, again, is good, and I liked the visual presentation – there’s some creepy CGI art, and it’s fun to look at the mocked-up bank statements, newspaper articles, and missing posters on display to extract the relevant information. The technical niggles would also probably be easy to sort out. But as is, there’s not enough here to justify the trip.