Campus Invaders

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).

Everyone who writes parser IF must, if I have my causaility right, have had a first game where they taught themselves to write parser IF. Traditionally, these games fall into two categories: my-dumb-apartment games that turn some familiar location in the author’s life into the backdrop for a series of puzzles that gradually run through the key features of the language, or games that superficially adapt some currently-popular bit of media and use it as the backdrop for a series of puzzles etc. (personally, I went for option B, working on a House of Leaves pastiche that thankfully never got nearly close enough to completion to tempt me into trying to release it). These games aren’t necessarily always bad, but they are almost always inessential, important only insofar as they hopefully will lead to other, more interesting games later on in the author’s IF career.

The signs that Campus Invaders is a teach-myself-IF game are pretty clear if you know what to look for. It’s set in a school, which I’m guessing is the author’s school, where aliens have attacked the protagonist’s game design class – there are twists here, but we’re recognizably in the my-dumb-apartment subgenre. There’s a small map, relying on cardinal directions. There’s a put-X-in-Y puzzle, a lighting puzzle, and unlock-door-with-key puzzle, a give-item-to-NPC puzzle… and all the puzzles fit together into a linear chain, with NPCs or the narrator spelling out exactly what you need to do at each stage.

With that said, Campus Invaders is a pretty solid example of the form. Another frequent hallmark of such games is that they’re buggy as all get-out, but here the worst thing I ran into was a line saying that “in the Doctor Eve Sturgeon’s car is a solar battery” – not bad. The prose also has a zippy, goofy charm that doesn’t take itself too seriously but doesn’t go too over-the-top zany (it appears to be translated from an Italian original, and while there are occasions where the syntax or word choice are a little wobby, that mostly just adds to its easygoing charm). Importantly, the author also knows not to wear out the game’s welcome – there’s little unneeded scenery, the simple plot is easy to follow, and it ends before the player has a chance to get bored.

Do games like this really need to be published and entered into IF Comp? Well, probably no, though see the spoiler text below for a potential caveat to that. But so long as they are, it’d be no bad thing if they were all as well put-together as Campus Invaders.

There is one aspect of the game that’s potentially interesting, but it spoils the one surprise in the game, so I’m spoiler-blocking it – if you’re planning on playing it, I’d wait to read this until you’ve reached the ending:

(Spoiler - click to show)In the ending text, the game gives you a password – deuterium – that allows you to “access the secret section of the game.” This is somewhat of an overblown label, since typing that just gets you an author’s note, which confirms that the game was written as part of a university event. But the author also suggests that they now view this game as a platform for crowdsourced expansion – winning players are invited to write in with ideas for new plot elements and puzzles, which will then be incorporated into a Campus Invaders 2.0 release next year. This is an interesting idea – not far off from Cragne Manor, from a certain point of view. And I can see how if you’re proposing the IF equivalent of stone soup, it makes sense to start out without anything too fancy or idiosyncratic, the better to allow the additions to shine. On the other hand – if you have to start out by trying the soup when there’s just the stone in there, it’s not going to be very tasty yet.