Traffic

Fittingly for a game that’s structured as a series of repeating time loops, I am getting déjà vu writing this review, because I’m sadly going to have to start and end with a point I’ve made many many times before: if you are planning on putting a game in the Comp, especially if it’s a parser game, especially especially if it’s a puzzley parser game, and especially especially especially if it’s a puzzley parser game relying on a bunch of nonstandard commands and mechanics, you need beta testers to put the thing through its paces. Traffic has some clever ideas and an engaging premise, but as it currently exists I think the only options for experiencing it are “type in the walkthrough” and “tear out a tuft of your own hair every five minutes for two hours, at which point you’ll probably be irrevocably stuck maybe halfway through.” I’d definitely recommend the first experience over the latter – even for those of my readers who are fortunate enough not to be dealing with the incipience of male-pattern baldness – but even better would be playing a hoped-for post-Comp release that improves the clueing and implementation so that its clear potential can be realized.

Part of that potential is the comedy of the setup. Much like Turn Right, this is a game about getting across an intersection; unlike Turn Right, this time you’re a pedestrian (yay), and the risk of being run over is very high (eek – the blurb should probably have a content warning for this), but you’re carrying a weird science gizmo that allows you to rewind the clock and hop into other people’s bodies (er?). With a little experimentation, you learn that by looking at particular people in the short time available to you before you get pasted, you can queue up targets for your Quantum-Leap-y ability, at which point you’ve got a short window to try to change things so as to avoid the accident – prevent the phone-addicted parent from pushing her baby stroller into the road, reset the wonky traffic-light controller system, deescalate a passenger’s mental health crisis that will lead to the bus getting stranded in the middle of the intersection. If you fail, no big deal, you can always try again, albeit at the cost of another bone-crunching death to reset the timeline.

I love this premise; it’s a clever way of making a puzzle of, and lightly skewering, the absurdities of everyday life, while getting around the artificiality of letting the player have infinite time to prevent a traffic accident that clearly has to happen within a few seconds. And making the protagonist be a sad-sack postdoc just adds to the comedy, while the drily understated prose gives the slapstick room to breathe. Unfortunately, to switch transportation metaphors, things quickly go off the rails.

There are two main issues I experienced that undermined the puzzles – and this is an entirely puzzle-focused work. First, you’ve got your implementation challenges. There were many times when I knew what I had to do, but struggled to communicate this knowledge to the parser. Take the bus scenario: to prevent the old lady from melting down, obviously you’d want to let her take your seat rather than being forced to stand. But STAND doesn’t work (someone else takes the seat out from under you), and ASK/TELL WOMAN ABOUT SEAT just gets a generic response indicating the conversational topic isn’t recognized. I had to go to the walkthrough to learn that I had to GIVE SEAT TO WOMAN, which I suppose is idiomatically reasonable but wouldn’t be intuitive to anyone familiar with parser IF conventions; really, if the player types any of these things it’s clear they’ve solved the puzzle and they should be accepted.

Then there are the puzzles that aren’t sufficiently clued. Some of these might just be places where I was being thick: there’s a math puzzle that I feel like might be underdetermined, such that answers other than the one the game is looking for should also be valid, but I admit I could be wrong about that since it’s a long time since I’ve solved this kind of problem. But in the late game, there’s a puzzle that can only be solved by intuiting the presence of an undescribed item (Spoiler - click to show)(the bed, in the sequence with Sarah – adding insult to injury, the stuffed animals, which are mentioned, aren’t implemented), and after you resolve the initial trio of challenges you’re thrown into a second that requires you to maneuver two different cars to block the progress of a police cruiser, which is described so confusingly that even the walkthrough couldn’t get me unstuck, requiring a restart.

And finally there’s the puzzle that gates off the real ending from the premature one, which requires both reading the author’s mind AND wrestling with atypical syntax (Spoiler - click to show)(the game very clearly indicates that looking at people is what triggers the body-hopping, so THINK ABOUT SARAH is completely unmotivated and not a command most parser-players would think to try; and after that we’ve got BREAK PACKAGE rather than OPENing it, which gives a discouraging result, and BARK TWICE being mandatory when BARKing on subsequent turns would be more natural). Admittedly, said “real ending” is still a shaggy dog story, but the game is much more satisfying with it than without it so gating it with the aggressiveness with which you’d conceal an Easter Egg is a bad design choice, to my mind.

But again, I don’t think this was a design choice: like everything else I’ve complained about, I think it’s just a lack of testing – there aren’t any credited that I could see, at least, while the blurb describes these extra-spicy puzzles as “mild”, and many of these issues are ones that I think would be easily corrected if the author had the advantage of seeing how people try to grapple with the game. Again, this is an awful shame because Traffic deserves to be its best self; with its many rough edges thoroughly sanded down, I could easily see myself recommending this game to folks in the mood for a clever yet grounded comedy game, so I very much hope to see a post-Comp release.