Logic Land

Two Rybread Celsius games? In this economy?

You can refer back to my previous review for the backstory, but after finding Verb Noun Adjective surprisingly welcoming to at least dabble around in, I was amused by the randomizer deciding to cram Rybread’s other Comp entry right next to it. I also experienced some dread, since “text adventure you need an Atari 2600 emulator to play” sure sounds like a troll calling his shot. After spending ten minutes wrestling with the emulator – at least the blurb recommended one and gives a few tips, but for some reason it refused to recognize any keyboard inputs until it suddenly did – I was definitely frustrated. But after mostly-finishing the game, once again I found some things to enjoy, even if I’m a little more skeptical about authorial intent this time out.

My grandparents had a 2600 when I was a kid, and from wresting with it to force my sister to play Combat with me whenever we visited, I’m familiar with the two main forms of input used by the system: either a one-button joystick, or a one-button paddle for Breakout. Given those affordances a text parser is of course right out, so Logic Land adopts a choice-based interface where pressing the button toggles you between movement mode, where the joystick allows you to select a direction, and action mode, where it lets you select one of half a dozen standard text-adventure verbs (USE opens up an additional submenu where you can indicate which item from the inventory you want to try). This allows for a reasonably robust design, albeit it adds quite a lot of friction to each interaction, especially when you add in an input delay that, again per my memories of Combat, is at least authentic to the original hardware. The other constraint of the platform is that there’s not a lot of screen real-estate – some quick googling indicates a resolution of 160 x 192 – and the game makes sure no bit of text takes up more than one screen, which was certainly the correct decision.

If you were to outline the above affordances to me and ask me to come up with a piece of IF that would be a reasonable fit, I have to say that I’d probably come up with something like Logic Land: simple mechanics, medium size, highly abstract. You explore a sort of philosophical Wonderland, with different rooms standing in for various tropes, arguments, and thought experiments across a wide range of subjects – Zeno’s paradox, the theory of relativity, Schrodinger’s Cat, stuff like that. Entering each gives you a short blurb establishing what it is, with LOOK sometimes giving you a further clue about what’s going on and what you might need to do. Sometimes there’s just an object to take, sometimes there’s someone to talk to, sometimes you need to use one of your collection of inventory objects, and – well, that’s pretty much it, aside for the fact that there are some non-obvious dependencies requiring you to solve room A before room B.

The required actions are sometimes intuitive, and map to a certain degree to their philosophical inspirations – you use the plank of wood to repair a part of the Ship of Theseus, for example – but they also sometimes require you to squint to suss out the logic – I guess the idea is that in the room that says there may or may not be an exit, Descarte’s Cogito is a bold statement of existence that resolves the question, but the exit isn’t actually supposed to be sentient, I don’t think, and why is the Cogito implemented as ERGO? Anyway I solved about half the puzzles by having an idea of what to try, and the other half via trial and error. And I didn’t actually finish the game, because I think I used an item prematurely to unlock one of the endgame puzzles, rather than first deploy it so I could carry the box with Schrodinger’s Cat around, and I didn’t feel up to doing everything again.

It’s not a bad little game, in other words, with a design that minimizes the pain of its archaic platform, and if the philosophy is mostly there for flavor rather than to say something, eh, at least it passes the time. So for what it is, it’s reasonably well done – the question is just why you would enter an Atari 2600 game in the first place. And here’s where Occam’s Razor can be deployed to intuitive effect: if the simplest explanation is that it’s an attempt to épater la bourgeoisie, well, it probably is.