Sidekick

Now, this is another game I tested, but, sad to say, I didn’t finish testing it at the time, because it’s actually pretty hard! I have finished it now, though.

This is a long, difficult Dialog parser game that uses Dialog’s hyperlink system to turn itself into a parser-choice hybrid.

In it, you play as a sidekick to a cowboy hero who is famous for saving people from villains. The secret is, though, that you are the one who is actually saving everyone!

The game is expansive, and largely revolves around getting Buck out of trouble, defeating henchmen, and investigating the outskirts of town.

Gameplay is very hard. You can lock yourself out of victory; to avoid that, you can set ‘winnable on’. If it’s in ‘easy’ mode, you’ll know right away that you messed up. If it’s in ‘hard’ mode, you’ll only find out a few turns later.

The solutions to all puzzles revolve around objects that are far away and that usually aren’t labelled or associated in any way with the area you need them in. Given that this is a big game, that means that the best way to progress is likely carefully mapping out the world and taking every object you can find, looking at what verbs it’s capable of, then trying out obstacles one at a time.

Alas, there is an inventory limit that comes into play fairly often. I think you might be able to carry some things in the knapsack, but I forgot to try that this playthrough.

As a side note, multiple puzzles require you to throw an object into an adjoining room, which isn’t standard in most Inform/Dialog games, so keep an eye out for that!

Overall, I think this game deserves a long, careful playtime that will likely exceed the two hour IFComp limit. So I recommend trying it out, and coming back to it after the comp if you like it!

(Get it? Cause Shane is a famous Western...? How did I get this far up my own butt?)

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I have taken to calling this “link-select UI on otherwise parser-based gameplay” stripe of game “Twinesformer.” I am resigned to not being able to make ‘fetch’ happen, but am too enamored of it to drop it. This may be the most intricate version of this paradigm I have yet encountered. Deep parser constructs like “attach to…” “put in…” “pour on…” are provisioned here. A vast array of nouns are available in most locations and conversation trees. This is a two edged sword. On the one hand, it successfully mitigates one criticism of this style: ‘lawn mowering’ all possible command combinations to get a result. The command space is so large, and includes enough clearly incorrect combinations to cast doubt that it is worthwhile to try.

On the other hand, in order to provision all those combinations it takes, 3,4,5 clicks to build the commands you would type into a command prompt in a fraction of the time. Maybe a tablet/phone player would find some economy here, but anyone with a keyboard will chafe at these decisions. The UI is implemented as a semi-standard NAV block, inventory block, command expansion line, and system command block. Unlike other implementations of this, it is printed inline to the transcript and is just dynamic enough to require a full read every time. Often requiring searching lists of text for the noun you want. Meaning its layout regularity does not turn into command efficiency. If I could make one recommendation, it would be to put this ‘control’ section in a static pane away from the transcript. That would go a long way to reducing the clumsiness of it.

The story is a comedically engaging one - you are an Old West gunslinger’s sidekick, whose task is keep your charge alive and on task ridding a town of baddies, fighting his unearned confidence every step of the way. It is a tried and true formula, and the setup here is capably rendered. The local color NPCs are amusingly portrayed, for all their terseness. The environment and scenarios are pleasantly silly and occasionally laugh out loud funny. It is a great playground, economically established.

It does feel though, that the vibe it is striving for is at war with its gameplay. The ‘help’ command generated real dread when it revealed the presence of two benighted old-school tropes: unwinnable states and inventory management. Are these ever fun? Ok, unwinnable states has its defenders, but I am DECIDEDLY not one of them. There was at least a mode option to inform you the moment the game became unwinnable, which I appreciated. I instead played ‘standard’ mode, a deliberate choice to give the game opportunity to try and convince me of unwinnability’s merits. It did not, but to be fair, the scenarios themselves telegraphed their unwinnable decisions well enough that ‘UNDO’ was usually pretty obvious. There were also some insta-deaths that were funny enough to mitigate any frustration. Even so, I can’t escape just how often I was clicking ‘UNDO.’ Yes, much less onerous than a restart. Still well short of fun.

Let me scratch a bit at these unwinnable states. One inescapable feature of this gameplay choice is that the player will revisit, sometimes often, flavor and setting text. When that text is cold and concise, it kind of disappears into the problem solving focus. When it has personality and humor, for me anyway, it devolves into a grim reminder of the fun I COULD be having, instead of retracing old ground, over and over.

There is another way the game commits to its old school vibe - hiding things around town expecting the player to find and pick them up, with their use only becoming clear waay down the road. This is a perfectly legit and time-tested approach. However, it ALSO becomes baffling when confronted with the puzzle that needs them, but no text hinting what might be needed. Ie, if you didn’t already FIND the magic thing, you won’t have any idea it’s even available, let alone necessary to solve the puzzle. The text did no work to point you to missing possibilities. So you try so so many ill-fated and unsupported things. And then UNDO repeatedly. Add some timers to those puzzles and it can be many iterations before you realize you don’t have what you need. It is no exaggeration to say UNDO was, by FAR, my most utilized command. In retrospect, perhaps I should have consulted the walkthrough sooner, but it does speak to the piece’s strengths that I chose not to for so long.

So what we have is a delightfully engaging setting, chock-a-block with wry humor (and surprisingly cold, and funny for it, deaths), married to a PUNISHING gameplay paradigm and clunky UI. There are infrequent but notable bugs: “since the itself fills most of the space”; “There’s currently You are here.”; a donkey that follows you even if its enticement is not present. These are notable, but not overly intrusive in and of themselves, though the latter definitely falls into an ‘absent magic item’ puzzle category.

In the end, for me, the amusing prose and setting could not escape those contrary gameplay choices. And I didn’t even talk about the deeply unrewarding inventory management click-drudge. Lots of bouying Sparks, but too many notably intrusive counterweights dragging it down. And so, so, …so…so

…SO much UNDO.

Played: 9/1/24
Playtime: 2hr, score 3/17
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable UI and gameplay fighting
Would Play Again?: No, saturated on UNDO

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

So, remember two reviews ago, when I was playing The Bat? Remember how I said that it was so smoothly-put together, “I found myself craving a bit of friction”? Well, guess who else remembered: the gods, who decided to punish me for my hubris. Sidekick is our second Old West game of the Comp, taking a more overtly comedic approach to the theme by having you be the unheralded number-two to a swaggering, useless “hero” who relies on you to get the actual work of villain-foiling done. But while that premise offers some thematic resonance with The Bat, the implementation is exactly the opposite: not only is this game Cruel in the Zarfian sense (it ostensibly offers an optional warning system that renders it Polite, except the feature is buggy so if anything it’s Extra-Cruel), it’s also a Dialog game that relies exclusively on clickable links for its interface while still relying on parser-standard conventions for interactivity. The result is a game with some cleverly designed puzzles and engagingly witty writing, in a package that nonetheless did a real number of my rapidly-thinning, rapidly-graying hair.

I am going to reverse my usual order and start with the critiques this time, since I do think there are positives here worth celebrating but they’ll risk getting buried under the cavalcade of annoyances if I start with them. So let’s start with the gripefest, beginning with that major red flag I adverted to in the parenthetical above: authors, I am begging you, if you make a game that can be made unwinnable, and flag that to the player, that’s good; if you then program in an easy mode that informs the player when they’ve messed up, either immediately or after a short delay, that’s even better (coward that I am, I opted for the “tell me right away” option); but if you then don’t have sufficient testing to ensure the feature actually works as advertised, that is worse than if you’d done nothing at all. Three separate times I had to replay significant portions of the game because I hadn’t realized I’d borked things up: I think the issue is that the testing algorithm doesn’t realize that much of the map can be made inaccessible, either temporarily (the first part of the game is built around a series of set-piece encounters with the Black Hat’s henchmen, some of whom block you from exiting the room where you encounter them) or permanently (let’s just say some stuff goes down in the mine), and as I found out, this can make the game unwinnable if you can’t reach items you still need, with no warning given.

Now, I kept multiple saves in different filenames, and replaying in a parser game is usually a pretty quick process, so this shouldn’t be that big a deal, right? Oh my sweet summer child. Sidekick uses one of the cool features of Dialog to increase accessibility by offering a web-friendly, clickable interface: after the description of each location, a compass rose gets printed out, as well as a listing of your inventory and a small set of standard verbs; if you click on an object, you’ll get a further set of options about how to interact with it (if it’s a person, for example, you’ll get examine, and greet, and ask about…), which may then involve an additional click to set an indirect object – so for example, you could click on a burning match in your inventory which will pull up a context-sensitive list of options that includes LIGHT, so you click that which then pops up a further list of everything else in the room so you can choose what to try to set on fire.

It’s a respectable enough interface and I’d been playing on a phone I could see it being a godsend, but the trouble is, it’s not optional, and the sad fact is that it’s much clunkier than just being able to type in commands. Limited parser games or puzzle-light ones would probably not be slowed down too much by this interface awkwardness, but Sidekick is decidedly old-school in the degree of medium-dry-good manipulation it requires, and doesn’t make any allowances for the fact that players are not using an old-school parser. For one thing, there’s a sprawling map that’s a pain to navigate, because you can’t simply type E half a dozen times to go from one end to the other – because each location’s description is a different length, you need to wait for each one to print out, look for where the spacing has pushed the compass, and then click to get to the next one and then repeat the process again. Time also progresses when you’re in the middle of multi-step actions, meaning I got frustrated when trying to tie a rope to a randomly-wandering mule, only to find that she’d left in the time it took me to click ROPE → TIE TO…

That’s not the only fiddly part of Sidekick, either. There’s of course an inventory limit, and one that appears to be based on volume or weight, rather than a simple count of items. Helpfully, you can click the CAPACITY button to be told how many available “units” remain in your hands and your knapsack; less helpfully, there’s no way of telling how many “units” a given item takes up without trial-and-error experimentation, which I generally didn’t attempt given the aforementioned interface clunkiness (…you maybe now are seeing why I wound up leaving so many items lying around in places I couldn’t later find my way back to). And there were a few times where I was stymied because an object offered necessary actions only when I clicked on it when I was standing right next to it, even though it was visible and I could do other things one room away, or when I had to close and re-open a matchbook because I was only allowed to click on the match it contained immediately upon flipping it open.

…I am finally coming to the end of my complaints, but there are a couple of puzzles I can’t let go by unmentioned. Most of them involve getting your hapless boss out of trouble, but he has an annoying habit of wandering off without any indication of where he’s got to and which bad guy he’s run into, meaning that your reward for solving a puzzle is often to comb through the large map to look for any changes. There are also a few that felt completely unmotivated to me – I’d thought I’d made friends with a visiting scientist, and in return he’d lend me his geyser-detecting helmet (…don’t ask), but instead I was apparently supposed to lure him to the saloon and start a punch-up with some random cowboys, which would lead the good doctor to flee the scene but forget to bring his room-key along. The fight against the first henchman is even worse, relying on slapstick cartoon logic that’s at odds with the rest of the game.

But – and here we can finally transition to the praise – there are a lot of really good puzzles here too. There are a series of reasonably challenging ones in the middle part of the game that I nonetheless was able to solve without clues, while being original to boot. Busting your “hero” out of jail and getting rid of the thug who stuffed him in a railroad-side water tower was immensely satisfying, albeit those are both examples of the game’s occasionally-disquieting bloodthirstiness.

The writing as well is often a lot of fun. While the sidekick conceit recedes somewhat in the back half of the game, as your boss gets well and truly kidnapped and you’re left doing standard IF-protagonist stuff on your lonesome, the game wrings some solid comedy out of him while he’s around:

“Well, Mr. Mayor, I eat danger for breakfast and evil for brunch. And that’s a kind of breakfast.”

Pausing awkwardly, the Mayor recovers and again takes Buck’s hand and shakes vigorously.

So this is a game I wanted to enjoy, and often did enjoy, which just made all the time it spent dragging me across a bed of nails hurt all the worse. I know there are a lot of ideas bandied around about how to make parser games more accessible, which is an important conversation to be had, but unfortunately Sidekick stands for the proposition that if you take a clever if old-school game and remove all the typing, you’ll wind up with something worse than what you started with.