Uninteractive Fiction 3

In our irony-soaked age, there’s nothing as shameful as admitting you don’t get the joke. But as I get older I am intentionally trying to more and more embrace being cringe, so here goes: I’ve never really thought the Uninteractive Fiction games were that funny. The whole point is that they’re low-effort, so that’s not really a critique, but the core gag, of a game that just consists of a single button you push and either congratulates you or berates you based on authorial whim, just doesn’t land. On a conceptual level, yes, the “I” in IF is often only smoke and mirrors, but I’ve been playing games messing around with that fact since the y2k bug was a going concern. Even an old joke can be funny if it’s told well, of course, but here too the very brevity of the UF games works against them; the sound-effects were well chosen but that can only take you so far.

Points for defying expectations, at least: you certainly can’t say that brevity is one of UF3’s flaws. The troll-move here is to take the all-you-do-is-push-a-button gimmick and decompress the heck out of it: each passage is a sentence or two of text, with a 60 second timer that allows you to bang a drum when it reaches zero, at which point the next passage loads. And there are a lot of them – I kept the game running in a side-window while I was approving some expense reports and working on some emails (the timer pauses if you leave the game’s screen entirely) and it took me about two days to reach the ending, which understates the amount of content: per the blurb on the ballot page (Latin for “misery loves company”) it appears that any players’ clicking advances the story for everyone who’s playing, so my game picked up in medias res about a quarter of the way into the narrative.

Said narrative is a shaggy dog story that meanders without ever landing – or at least, if it did, I missed it or it didn’t tickle my funny bone (and let me state for the record I love shaggy dog stories). There’s some business with a dragon, a Dr. Who cameo, a Cookie Clicker parody (seriously, a Cookie Clicker parody in 2026)… Occasionally a graphic of an ape sweeps across the screen, because we all remember that video where you’re supposed to count how many times a basketball gets passed and you get so focused you miss the guy in a gorilla costume walking by the camera, right? It’s all fine, but there’s no plot drawing you through this illogical accumulation of incident, and the progression of action just alternates various forms of stasis (a loooot of the passages are repeats, so you’ll probably see each individual blurb at least three or four times before the narrative ticks over into the next phase) with arbitrary movement, usually violence. And “fine” stretched out over 6 or 8 hours no longer seems quite so fine, if you ask me. The game was also slowed down by its habit of interrupting the story, every six or seven minutes, to berate me for using Chrome instead of Firefox (I was actually using Firefox).

I know, I know – this is a troll game, I’m not supposed to enjoy it, just the delightful way it’s messing with me. Unfortunately, maybe it’s because of the depressing state of the world, or that wasting your time doesn’t seem so funny when there are dozens of other games to play, or that last year’s Violent Delight did a similar time-delay gag with far greater verve and wit, but regardless I just wasn’t any more delighted by UF 3 than either of its predecessors.