CODENAME OBSCURA

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

There’s a longstanding tradition in parser IF that authors should eschew the generic USE verb. The conventional wisdom, which I ascribe to, is that there are two major reasons for this: on the player’s side, it removes much of the fun of playing a parser game if you can just mindlessly spam USE X or USE X ON Y without actually thinking through a potential solution, and on the author’s side, you wind up with one mega-verb that can function radically differently in different contexts, which can make debugging really tricky, and can paradoxically make implementation even more work, as the player might expect USE to work as well as whatever more bespoke actions might be needed to resolve a challenge. After playing CODENAME OBSCURA, a spy-themed Adventuron game that’s an intentional 80s throwback, I can adduce a third rationale for avoiding USE: I, specifically, am very bad at figuring out when to try it, such that I had to go to the walkthrough three separate times to figure out what I was missing, and each time it was because I’d attempted everything but USE.

Admittedly, I expect the Adventuron parser to be a bit picky in the best of circumstances, and in each case, it was immediately obvious what to do once I got unstuck, so I shouldn’t pretend my repeated oversights about USE were that much of a barrier to enjoying the game. It makes a winning first impression, efficiently setting up a silly James Bond plot (you’re a secret agent working for an organization called TURTLE, visiting a town in Northern Italy to foil the plans of a German Count who’s stolen a diamond from England and is in league with the Sicilian mafia) and charming with lovely, colorful pixel art. The picturesque opening quickly segues into an action set-piece and then a simple escape puzzle, before setting the player loose to tackle the meat of the game.

There’s a lot to do, from visiting a witch to infiltrating a costume party to breaking into the compound where the Count is building a doomsday weapon. The map is reasonably open, but there’s typically only one or two puzzles where you can make progress at any point in time, which could be frustrating if the game world was much bigger, but CODENAME OBSCURA just about gets away with it. Speaking of the puzzles, they’re typical medium-dry-goods affairs; there’s perhaps a bit too much repetition, with three different blocked-off areas requiring you to WEAR something and/or SHOW something to gain entry, and one sequence where you solve a puzzle to find a password which allows you to find a combination which allows you to find a code, but they’re generally straightforward enough – save for a computer puzzle that combines unclear instructions with a bit of timed text to make for a fairly irritating barrier.

Speaking of annoyance, that USE issue is a real one, however, and bespeaks a game that has a very particular idea of how it wants you to interact with it. There are relatively few actions implemented – despite sound being important at several points, the player can’t ever LISTEN – American spellings for common commands aren’t accepted (PET vs. PAT, PUSH vs. PRESS), there are lots of items that you can’t examine until you pick them up, and it wasn’t just the USE case where I had to play guess-the-verb (the worst offender was a bit where you have to manipulate a part of a statue, and only one very precise syntax will work). CODENAME OBSCURA also does the default-Adventuron thing of bluffing when you try to interact with or examine an object that’s not actually implemented – it just says “you notice nothing special” rather than admit it doesn’t know what you’re talking about – and then makes the problem worse by retaining that same “you notice nothing special” default description for several game-critical items. I suppose that thinness of implementation is part of the game’s intentionally retro vibe, but a bit more testing could have helped the author strike a better balance between that lo-fi feel and player convenience. Likewise, I twice ran into a bug that led to the game hanging and not accepting input; fortunately, I was able to simply reload the webpage and seamlessly pick up from where things went off-track, but it was nevertheless kind of a pain (that’s why I’m attaching three transcripts).

For all these complaints, I did enjoy my time with CODENAME OBSCURA; it’s a far friendlier old-school puzzler than The Witch, and it’s got more meat on its bones than Magor Investigates…, so it did scratch an itch – and I say that as someone who doesn’t have any nostalgic attachment to the old two-word parser games that it mimics. I’d say it needed a bit more time in the oven, but from the blurb it sounds like the author’s been working on the game off and on since 1987, which is quite the gestation period; still, a little more testing and refinement to sand off some of the unintentionally rough edges – and provide alternatives for the USE-allergic among us – would be quite worthwhile.

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Adventuron, that’s a thing! An authoring tool that explicitly enables and embraces 8/32/64 bit adventure games. I love that it exists. It’s like a web-enabled portal to the past. If I read the background right, this particular game was originally developed 35ish years ago and reimplemented today? As a guy who reengaged the hobby after a similar gap, what a powerful way to make cross-time connections in your life - reconnecting with ancient passions and enhancing and expanding with the life lived between. I whole-heartedly endorse. Even if it were fake meta-text, I endorse that spirit.

Adventuron presentation is evocative, well-serving its core mission, not the least of which with its comfort-food font options. The, lemme say 32-bit? graphics are terrifically reminiscent too, presenting a variety of Italian scenery with rakish aplomb. All of it transports the play experience to the dawn of computer imagery, just past mainframe text only, and just before home PCs were powerful enough to do more.

The gameplay here mimics that also, and I am taking the authorship claims at face value here. The game has tight descriptions, bounded interactivity, and many unimplemented nouns. All of which precisely reinforce gameplay of the purported era. There is instant death which can only be avoided through un-deducible and unrelated coincidence. There are puzzles that don’t make immediate sense, but are still the right vibe ((Spoiler - click to show)cf the hacksaw in a bottle). The plot is a PG Golden Age Bond Movie type riff (and a breezy, fun one!), but you are nevertheless talking to Witches and repairing statues. Mapping is not strictly essential, but probably time saving. There is a late losing state very easy to blunder into. I HIGHLY recommend SAVING as you go, certainly once you get to the (Spoiler - click to show)Control Room. It is an interesting alchemy: gameplay is not Mostly Seamless by modern standards, but IS a Mostly Seamless pastiche! It seems very much of its 80’s pedigree and effectively weaves a ‘game out of time’ spell.

So the question I found myself asking as I played it was… what is the value of nostalgia, and how far does it go before it runs out of juice? Offering nostalgia without commentary, without sly subversion, without subtle updates or contrasts with the intervening years’ culture, norms and gameplay conventions… what is the value of a fake time capsule when REAL ones are still available? To be clear, it is not valueLESS, but how satisfying is it, ultimately?

Mental exercise: what if Adventuron somehow became the dominant or even just a prominent authoring tool for IF, does that ultimately help the hobby? Does it hurt? Does it make for soft historical shackles and somehow back pressure innovation and modernization? (A charge that has been leveled at Parser IF for a while now). I mean, it is a fake mental exercise. Adventuron’s presence is really just MORE flavors available, not LESS of other things. But playing modern Adventuron games today, I kind of feel should trade in just a little more. Doesn’t have to be alot!, but just a little. There was a Spring Thing 23 Adventuron game I thought managed this well - while gameplay and presentation were bound to the 80’s there were more sophisticated narrative elements that tweaked the formula just barely enough to make an interesting frisson. Codename Obscura is not about that and doesn’t care to be.

Look, there’s a reason nostalgia exists. It works. It Sparks. This is nostalgia-bait for ME specifically, and I am powerless before its siren call. But at this point, I don’t think nostalgia without a twist gets beyond Sparks.

Played: 10/14/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished, Schwarzberg escaped which I think can’t be avoided?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete


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

CODENAME OBSCURA is a relatively simple parser with a retro-vibe, reminiscing of 90s spy movies (à-la James Bond), where you must rescue your partner in a small village in Italy, finish his mission... and save the world! The game includes in-game hints and an external walkthrough. I used the walkthrough a handful of times to solve some puzzles.

From the premise, the game screams trope spy movie, almost to a silly degree*. You must catch the big baddy that took down your partner, or at least foil his plan to maybe save the world(?). Getting to him is not an easy feat! You must clear(-ish) your name of a murder you didn't commit, run around town buying/trading/gamble things for something else, pick up anything you can on your way, not get scared of the crows**, maybe pet a cat (or not), spy-ily find a way into the baddy's villa to find some secrets, and "break" some things to stop him. Oh, and there's the fighting sequence!
(Spoiler - click to show)*a boomerang?!?!?
**are they following you???

The visuals of the game feel very retro, with 8-bit pixelated illustrations* and little colour**. The illustrations have different sizes or placement, adding a bit of depth into the mapping of the game. It was pretty neat and added to the funky vibe.
*there was the hangar one that didn't change even after the plane was gone :/
**a bit of contrast with the different text elements would have been neat.

Most of the game is relatively smooth, though I did find some friction with certain commands: insert instead of use, or having to use adjectives instead of the noun*, or not having synonyms for certain verbs (pet/pat/stroke or climb/climb over...). There were moments where the game reloaded the page, removing important information a bit too quickly (for passwords), while it wouldn't automatically for actions like opening/unlocking a door or digging. It would also have been nice to have the translation of Italian phrases in-game/passage (please keep them, they added a lot of charm), to avoid missing information (Adventuron doesn't allow copy-paste...).
This is not the game's fault but just me being an idiot, but I keep examining items before picking it up... and there were a lot in this game xD

The puzzles were a-plenty and quite diverse, but I still struggled a tiny bit with some, especially the box in the bedroom, the safe password, and the computer one. The rest involved quite a bit of running around*... I think I liked best the changing your costume ones the most (reminded me a bit of Agent 47).
*this was a bit annoying, but by the time you enter the villa, no more frustration