Tangled Tales

There’s a cold shiver of fear that runs down my spine whenever I see the words “parser-based” and “Windows executable” in a Comp blurb – the tell-tale sign of the custom parser. I think I formed this prejudice – and prejudice it is – fifteen or so years ago, and it’s even more unfair now, since I think many custom-parser games show up quite solidly these days (I helped beta test Happyland, for example, and it’s got quite the robust parser). Tangled Tales, sadly, undoes some of the progress I’ve been making on getting over my hang-ups, turning what should be an easy-going fairytale romp into a grim twilight struggle against an obtuse parser and a too-large map.

The first impression TT makes is a pretty good one. The engine allows for art, and the opening scene features a pleasant, pastoral view of a green woodland. There are menu-option shortcuts to out-of-world actions, and you get a choice of genders for your protagonist (either Cinderella or Prince Charming, from the blurb, though this wasn’t clear to me from the game itself – at first I wondered whether I was someone from the real world who’d been sucked into the realm of fairy tales). Common abbreviations mostly work, and there are some conveniences like EXITS to show exits, and WHAT IS HERE to show what objects can be interacted with (this is all spelled out in the included manual, which confusingly is tucked in a walkthrough folder in the download). And the setup is effective enough – your head hurts and you’re lost in the forest after overdoing it at a pre-wedding party, and now you and your best buddy Rumpelstiltskin (blessedly, he also answers to “Rumpy”) need to make your way back to the castle in time for the ceremony.

Sadly, the wheels start to come off pretty quickly. Some of this is just the lack of a last editing pass: despite choosing to play as the female main character, people kept calling me “Henri”, and there are a lot of typos and grammar errors. Then there are design issues, like guess-the-verb puzzles that make it hard to make porridge when you’ve got all the needed items and the steps are obvious, or that told me when I tried to dig a hole to plant some beans that “a spade isn’t suitable for digging,” or that completely prevented me from reading a signpost despite this not seeming like it was meant to be a challenge.

But some of the problems appear to be embedded in the parser and engine. I had a perennial issue where some commands simply wouldn’t work the first time I tried them, but would be accepted the second time. For example, the opening screen has a glass container (I guess a bottle) lying in a wheelbarrow. Typing TAKE CONTAINER got me this error: “An empty glass container isn’t here. if[sic] the object is in, under or behind another, you’ll need to be more specific.” After unsuccessfully trying a number of other options, I tried TAKE CONTAINER again and it worked. Ditto for DRINK WATER, and several other attempts to get items out of containers. And many puzzles involve interacting with other characters and getting them to do things, and the syntax here is really painful. Neither TALK TO nor ASK X ABOUT Y nor CHARACTER, ACTION are supported as far as I could tell; instead you need to type variants of SAY TO RUMPY, “UNLOCK CHEST WITH KEY”, which are quite a mouthful. And the game is inconsistent – to get into her tower, you need to type RAPUNZEL “LET DOWN YOUR HAIR”.

The engine also works in pseudo real-time, forcing you to pass a turn if you wait too long to type anything and occasionally having other characters wander in and out in between your actions. There are no timing puzzles so this doesn’t have much impact, but it did add an additional layer of intimidation since I was constantly worrying I was letting the clock run down, or that the movements of the bee and unicorn were important (Spoiler - click to show)(they’re not). Oh, and of course there’s an inventory limit.

Aside from these engine and parser issues, the design isn’t bad, with puzzles that fit the fairytale theme and generally make sense, at least once you internalize that Rumpy is there to help and is much stronger than you are. The fly in the ointment here is that the map is enormous, with four or five completely empty and pointless locations for every one that’s got something interesting to do. This culminates in an old-school maze that doesn’t appear to have an associated puzzle or shortcut, though I have to confess that by this point I was having quick recourse to the walkthrough.

While I can’t personally relate, I know for many folks part of pleasure of creating IF is making a new engine and parser, as much or more so than making the game. So it’s not really helpful as a critic to say “maybe you should have just made this in Inform or TADS?” – but nonetheless that’s what I kept thinking. The features of the engine that makes this one distinct don’t really play much role in the game (outside of the first couple screens and the last few, there’s really not much art), and with a tighter parser and a much-smaller game world, TT could have been a lot of fun, but as it stands I worry it’s too hard a nut to crack to get at the good stuff inside.

Everything about Tangled Tales screams 1980's text adventure, including the manual which feels like it came directly from Infocom. While on the positive side this brought out a lot of nostalgia, it also came with all the drawbacks of the time. Tangled Tales uses its own parser and is reminiscent of Scott Adams' games, with brief and awkward descriptions. To wit:

"You examine a rusty old wheelbarrow. This is the kind often used to remove garden waste, or drunk [sic] from parties. A rusty old wheelbarrow is open and in a rusty old wheelbarrow is an empty glass container."

Also:

"A bottle of water is open and in a bottle of water is nothing." This despite the fact that the bottle is full of water and you can drink from it!

The game itself is rather easy, as it's mostly a series of fetching quests for fairy tale characters, reminiscent of King's Quest only some of the stories have changed slightly, being more crass. I did smirk a few times, my favorite twist being the reimagining of the Three Billy Goats Gruff tale. However, because the parser was quite limited with its syntax I got frustrated early and went to the walkthrough. To my dismay, the walkthrough also had its issues, as abbreviations used there were not always accepted by the parser, and a couple of times the compass directions were wrong. Also, my fairytale kingdom for an undo verb!

The low-res graphics were the highlight.

The first thing I noticed about Tangled Tales is the ambition of its presentation: it’s a multimedia experience with a parser, graphics, and sound all bundled into a .exe.

I have to respect the amount of work that went into the design of this interface. This could have been breezed through in good old Inform 7, but no, Tangled Tales insists on going the extra mile. Was it worth it? For me as a player, the answer is probably not. I didn’t feel that the graphics or sound added much to the experience. The window is set up so that you can only display either the text or a location graphic at a given time. Consequently, I spent almost no time appreciating the graphics.

Everything about this game seems to be painstakingly built to induce a very particular kind of nostalgia trip for a very particular kind of player. That’s true of the interface, which bravely bucks the familiar and minimalistic presentation of a typical modern parser game. It’s also true of the writing, the world design, and the parser itself, which I swear came straight out of an era from before I was born. The world is more-or-less a maze, full of indistinct locations connected in a large, convoluted network, and you may indeed be driven to draw yourself a map in order to try navigating this game. The story and the characters are amusing, but they aren’t developed in any great detail - they’re not the focus here.

The focus is a series of puzzles which would look extremely easy in theory, but which are viciously difficult in practice due to Tangled Tales’ cheerful indifference to the kinds of quality-of-life details that modern IF players are accustomed to. This is a game in which the parser is so finicky that I didn’t even know when I was playing guess-the-verb or not. Looking at a table might yield a brief description, but there’s no indication that what you really need to do is to look on the table. Sometimes you have to give an NPC a command in one syntax, sometimes you have to use a totally different syntax for no apparent reason. If it were not for the walkthrough, I never, never in a million years would have finished this game, because I wouldn’t even have understood that the things I tried were usually correct, just not phrased properly… with the proper phrasing often being some idiosyncratic command that I’ve never seen before and never would have thought to try.

To top it all off, we’re given a fifteen-page walkthrough file. The actual walkthrough is a chunk of run-on text encompassing about half a page. Then there’s an image that takes up one page. One page is dedicated to explaining what interactive fiction is, and briefly introducing this game in particular. The other twelve pages? Instructions. This astounding document is what cements my belief that Tangled Tales is designed to provide, as faithfully as possible, the authentic oldschool experience, deliberately complete with all the shortcomings and frustrations that may entail. It’s a metaphorical middle finger to every new idea or convention that has been developed in the realm of IF-design theory over at least the past 30 or so years.

There’s definitely a certain audience who will get a kick out of this.

Custom parser games only available as windows executables are always a mixed bag, but this is one is better than most.

You play as Prince Charming (or Cinderella) and you have to get yourself and Rumpelstiltskin back to a wedding. Along the way, you have to complete several fairy tales such as Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Jack and the Beanstalk.

The map is expansive, with a lot of diagonal directions and several little colleges.

The parser is definitely better than most custom-made parsers but has a lot of work it still needs. Conversation especially is very picky; I had to use the walkthrough a lot. I don’t think TALK TO or SAY _________ TO ________ or similar constructions work, and you have to use quotations in a way I’m not used to. There is a provided manual, though it is very long.

The puzzles are logical, and the included art looks nice, although it started bouncing up as soon as it came down later.

Rumpelstilstkin got a little annoying as he says ‘Let’s hurry’ pretty much every 3-5 lines.

Creating a parser from scratch is very difficult, so this game is a technical feat. But unless the author is planning on making several games with this engine and refining it over and over (like Linus Åkesson with his game engine Dialog), it might be worth using previously-refined engines instead.

+Polish: Despite the problems with the parser, the setup here is clean and looks great for a Windows executable.
+Descriptiveness: The characters and locales are described in detail.
-Interactivity: I was frustrated by the specificity of required commands.
+Emotional impact: I was fairly amused by a few parts.
-Would I play again? I think I've found everything I wanted to.