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Review
When I say that Ryan Veeder’s Agatha Christie’s etc. etc. etc. really reminded me of a game from a previous IF Comp, the obvious one that springs to mind is last year’s The Little Four, a loving piece of fan-fiction that imagined the retirement life of Orient Express sleuth Hercule Poirot, depicting him amid a found-family that loved him, vain foibles and all. But actually, despite their shared central character that game has little in common with this one, which is decidedly larger, decidedly less respectful towards Christie’s creation and canon, and decidedly less of a detective game, too. No, the game I wound up thinking about was Swigian, a decade-old experiment by @mathbrush to see how a large-ish cleanly-coded and designed game with simple puzzles and the sparsest prose imaginable would be received.
As the title perhaps indicates, the prose is not sparse in Ryan Veeder’s Agatha Christie’s etc. etc., so it’s more precise to say that it reminded me of an inverse take on Swigian’s goals: this is a large-ish, cleanly-coded and designed game with simple puzzles and the most florid parody of Christie’s style imaginable. And, actually, it’s a pretty good approach! The jokes at Poirot’s expense are good for more than a few chuckles:
Without relish I consume the final morsel of croquette mignon de boeuf; with the white serviette I dab at my lips and my moustache. I rise from the table with great dignity. Nothing in my manner betrays the immense weariness of a man who has been witness to so, so, so many murders.
There’s also a truly groan-worthy pun on “little gray cells” that I loved to death (and won’t wholly spoil here). Admittedly, some are hit and miss – I felt like the game belabored its shifting of Poirot’s nationality from Belgian to French, where a quick blink-and-you-missed-it reference would have been funnier – but the batting average is certainly quite high.
I did find myself laughing a bit less as the game went on, though, since the humor is generally pretty one-note: Poirot explores a new area, happens to meet an old acquaintance, engages in a short exchange of banter that mocks his vanity, and repeat. The structure also gets repetitious. See, this isn’t at all a close adaptation of the novel (that extraneous “the” in the title might be a clue) – the initial set up of a murder on the train is preserved, but you spend as much time off the train as on, since in addition to exploring each car in turn, you also visit stations from France to Constantinople. You’re always on the hunt for clues, since they act as gates unlocking new parts of the train, and new corresponding station stops, but these are a wholly abstracted affair: a “clue” is simply a token with no description or other characteristics, each new one adding to your accumulating pile and eventually allowing you to access the doors that require 10, or 15, or 30 amassed clues to open.
The clues are almost always hidden in plain sight – you just need to examine all the scenery in all the locations and open any likely containers and you’ll find most of them. There are a few exceptions that require some puzzle-solving, but these are likewise almost all straightforward: in a few places examining the scenery will get you an item or a combination you can use in an entirely straightforward way to unlock another location or clue, or obtain another item or combination you can use to work further down a chain. When explained at that level of generality, that’s how just about all puzzle-based IF works, of course, but the contrivances felt rather more direct than usual to me here: there’s a place where you find a series of directions and then a trackless desert you need to navigate, a safe combination and a series of numbers, and so on – you’re almost never in a position of figuring out how to solve a puzzle, rather the typical experience is to stumble on the solution and then retrace your steps until you get back to the place where you can implement it.
Again, that’s not necessarily bad, but it does lend the game’s systems a mechanical vibe, and turns the exploration of the large map into a species of lawnmowering: go everywhere, examine everything, then go back to places you’ve been before to see if the clues unlocked someplace new, examine everything… and if you pick up something that’s not a clue along the way, check to see if it cleanly lines up with an obstacles you’ve previously encountered (and if not, just keep playing, since you’ll surely stumble on it soon). Admittedly there are some later items and puzzles that mix this formula up a bit, but some of them just mean you need to re-mow grass you’ve already visited, like the guidebook that has critical information if consulted in many locations, but which requires wandering back over the full map to exhaust its hints. And this means there’s no real mystery to solve: you need to reach a certain clue threshold to unlock the ability to accuse someone and end the game, but the clues provide no indication of who is really at fault, so you’re just left to pick someone you prefer (or someones, if your appetite for lawnmowering is starting to run dry – I confess I only tried a few, as I couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm to work through the couple dozen possibilities).
I am somewhat giving Orient Express short shrift here – there are a few more secrets and layers that I haven’t fully divulged, and I was having a good enough time to persevere through them to reach an amusing secret ending (as well as consult the helpfully-included source code to track down one last easter egg I couldn’t quite crack). It’s an amusing game, I’ll repeat, and I’ll also repeat that it’s solidly designed and coded. But for my taste it’s a bit too samey for its longish running time, and the challenges and systems are kept at arm’s length from the fiction. It makes for an archly entertaining and smooth game, but I confess I wished it had done more to remind me of the tight, sentimental Little Four.
