Between the Lines of Fire

The RNG has been getting its laughs in – after putting the two games starting with X together, it also gave me the duo of Adventuron games back to back. There the commonalities end, though; for one thing, the protagonist is a Russian soldier fighting “the 19th century Eastern war” (is this Crimea?), but more importantly, while we imagine the protagonist of The Last Mountain as an intensely moral figure, here we’re playing someone with distinctly darker ethics. The opening crawl tells us that after volunteering to fight, Sidorf’s “ideals were quickly replaced by a survival instinct… he wants to do one last thing perfectly. Whatever the cost.”

Going into the game, I had several ideas for what that one last thing might be, and what cost might have to be paid. Points to the author: all of those ideas were completely wrong. This is a story I haven’t seen before, at least in exactly these contours. But partially I think that’s because while Sidorf’s motivations present a compelling enigma, once they begin to resolve things slightly fall apart. To dig into why, I’m going to need to spoil the plot, so fair warning that you might want to finish the game before reading the rest of this review (it’s short and worth playing, in my view).

To provide some padding before getting to the spoilery bits, let’s talk briefly about the mechanics and the prose. We’ve got here a linear series of set pieces, which makes sense because Sidorf is a grunt following orders – he shouldn’t have free rein to wander. The game uses a relatively stripped-down command set, and runs into some of the syntax foibles out-of-the-box Adventuron is prey to, but because it’s quite direct about prompting you about what action you’re supposed to take next, I generally didn’t have too much trouble, with just a few notable exceptions (Spoiler - click to show)(I knew exactly what I wanted to do in the late-game sequence where you need to sneak around the back of a tent and blow up some explosives, but it definitely took some wrestling with the parser to get that across).

The prose takes a similarly blunt approach. BLF boasts a translation credit, so it was clearly written in another language first, but the English is solid enough; the game’s prone to simple, declarative sentences that are closely grounded I the first-person narration, which is an effective way of communicating Sidorf’s voice. There’s the occasional off note – him calling his fellow Russian soldiers “comrades” feels like an anachronistic Soviet-era touch – but overall it fits the game quite well, with the relatively straightforward language not getting in the way of establishing the ambiguities of the protagonist’s desires and goals.

In fact, this combination of straightforward prose and aggressive prompting of the player is doubly important because Sidorf’s motivations turn out to be quite idiosyncratic – if the player were given more freedom or a muddier picture of the situation, the game could easily have turned into a frustrating experience, since they’d almost certainly wind up chasing the wrong goals. Sidorf doesn’t dream of performing an act of heroics, or of surviving to go back home no matter what: no, he’s resigned himself to death in battle, but wants to make sure the last letter home that’s found on his body is the best-written, most compelling letter anyone has ever seen. He’s also fixated on a very specific way of accomplishing that goal: purloining bits and pieces of the letters his fellow soldiers write. Understandably, none of them are especially likely to share their missives back to their sweethearts or tearful farewells to their children with someone who, as it turns out, is quite the socially-awkward weirdo; fortunately for Sidorf if not for the others, he’s willing to go to any extreme to get them to cough up the goods.

The game thus has a regular rhythm to its half-hour runtime: meet a new soldier or soldiers, then follow order for a while until you have a chance to kill them and take their stuff, until you have all the raw material you need to write your masterpiece, bringing the game to a close with a brief narration of Sidorf’s inevitable death. In its favor, this resolution is compellingly demented; against this, though, I simultaneously found it both annoyingly obscure and a little too pat.

On the obscure side of things, besides that one sentence in the intro talking about the death of Sidorf’s ideals and the triumph of the survival instinct, we don’t get any sense of how Sidorf hit on his ideas – they’re just taken as givens (and, one feels obliged to point out, they don’t seem to have anything much to do with survival). Beyond his monomaniacal acquisitive zeal, Sidorf doesn’t have much characterization, and indeed, the climax feels frustratingly anticlimactic. The contents of the final letter are never so much as hinted at, nor do we get any clue about who Sidorf’s family are, what they might think of what he’s going to tell them, or why he’s so concerned with making such an impression on them (and again, we don’t even know what war this is!).

Sure, to a certain extent this is beside the point; psychologizing a character who’s clearly meant to be an allegorical figure risks crushing an intellectual argument with banality (the game would hardly be more compelling if we found out, say, that Sidorf is desperate to impress a father who used to beat him). And there’s no indication that there’s something about the contingent facts around this particular historical conflict that brought on his mania. But to my mind fiction works best when it manages to ground its ideas in personality; to stick with the game’s milieu, Tolstory is surely working with abstractions in War and Peace, but the novel has survived because Pierre, Natasha, and the others feel like specific, idiosyncratic characters with depths that go beyond their mere function as elements in an argument about history. We don’t get anything like that here, and so Sidorf dies as he lives: a cipher.

As for the other way of looking at the game’s themes: I mean, writers are vampires, film at 11. To its credit, BLF stages this idea in a novel way, but as far as I was able to engage with the game, the novelty felt only skin-deep, and actually winds up undercutting the effectiveness of the argument. Like, even if we consider the intensely negative case of an amoral author who takes the stories or emotional trauma of their loved ones and turns them into a crass commercial product, we’d still say “compared to Sidorf, this isn’t so bad!” The things authors do to get ideas or inspiration from others don’t look very much like the stuff Sidorf does so he can steal letters from the corpses of his friends, so while the parallels may work intellectually, they feel schematic rather than visceral.

I always like to see parser games that are going for a literary effect, and BLF certainly looks good on that score; the plot, characters, writing, puzzles, and gameplay are very clearly arranged to advance a very specific set of themes. But for all the grubbiness of Sidorf’s experience, I found the perspective offered wound up being too high-level; there’s not enough blood in the veins to make the various dilemmas and atrocities here truly sing.