SCAVS

There aren’t a lot of One Simple Tricks in IF. There are so many different kinds of experiences text games can provide, so many differences in goals and design and interface, and so many different audiences, too, who all like different things – it all means that a gameplay element that earns near-universal approbation in one context could be a real drag if moved into a different kind of game or just if different kinds of players encounter. But with that said, I sometimes wonder whether there is a universal make-IF-game-better button, and if there is, it’s certainly playing around with the triangle of identities.

This is a fancy (well, where “fancy” equals “hearkening back to cutting-edge game-design discussion of the late 90s”) way of saying that in most pieces of IF, there’s a narrator that’s the source of the words, a protagonist who’s doing the things, and a player who’s reading the words and telling the protagonist to do the things. The basic Zork-y approach where the protagonist is more or less an avatar for the player, and the narrator is a disembodied voice wryly relating proceedings, certainly works well enough, but trying to introduce some tension in the legs of the triangle to squeeze a little bit of extra narrative or thematic or gameplay juice is almost always a winning bet. SCAVS is a case in point: its dystopic sci-fi tale of interplanetary scavengers stripping an abandoned mining facility of its resources won’t win many points for originality, while its puzzles and prose are solid but unspectacular. Beyond some high-production value sound and graphics, though, what helps it stand out is a simple tweak that separates the player from the protagonist (who’s also the narrator), which helps enliven a standard planetary-excavation scenario and open up space for some second-half narrative twists that make it one of the most purely enjoyable games I’ve played in the Comp so far.

See, the first big thing you do in the game is go through a character-selection process, picking between a grizzled vet and a young engineer (you know which one of these is a man and which a woman – SCAVS doesn’t try to subvert the classic tropes). But this isn’t who you play as: it’s who you’re sending down to the surface to try to complete the mission. You’re actually playing an Operator, in the employ of the surely-benign System, issuing orders to the scavenger who’s taking all the risks. There are some cool interface gubbins, like an upgradeable sector map and a data-file log collecting the inevitable audio logs, but otherwise just about all the text in the game comes to you via the scavenger’s narration of their surroundings. Meanwhile you direct their explorations via dialogue, telling them which way to go or whether to mess around with any of the various ruins or other points of interest on the surface, and can make choices in longer conversation sequences that are usually triggered when your scavenger is forced to hunker down for a while to wait out one of the periodic dust storms (mostly these choices reveal more backstory and strengthen or weaken your rapport with your scavenger – while the human instinct is to make conversation, System warns you that they’re doing this job for a reason, usually because they did something messy in their past, and given the risks it’s best not to get attached).

The prose gets across the disparate voices of the two characters – there are a few areas only accessible to one or the other, but even though they’re mostly describing the same map, there’s very little repeated language that I could pick up on. It’s not especially literary, though. Their respective personalities are established in very broad strokes, and the engineer in particular is prone to stepping on any moment of potential poignancy to spell out the metaphors:

The ground here… it’s crunchy. Every step I make cracks through a hard, compacted layer and releases the fine sand beneath to join the dust surrounding me. When I look back, there’s no trace of my footsteps; they’ve already blown away. My history, so recent, already erased.

(The jarhead, by way of contrast, is prone to screaming stuff like “THE WIND… IT’S LIKE A THOUSAND FISTS. FULL OF FURY AND RAGE!”)

Still, both are appealing characters in their own way, if a bit jejune, and they’re good company as you jump through hoops you’ve probably jumped through dozens of times before. There are hidden caches of Helium-3 to track down, broken mining equipment to get back in working order, and hostile wildlife to avoid or fend off. The map is a good size, not too gigantic but with a bunch of interconnectivity and several identifiable regions with different stuff going on; it’s satisfying to work your way through it, figuring out which puzzles can be solved with which resources, sussing out shortcuts, and seeing your Helium-3 reserves tick up. The occasional puzzles are very straightforward, but the game’s understandably focused on traversal and resource management rather than brainteasers, and they do serve to break up the pacing.

And speaking of pacing, inevitably there’s a twist mid-way through. I won’t spoil the details, but I found it well handled, giving the player an easy off-ramp if they were satisfied with the experience so far while also offering inducements to dig deeper. This post-twist chapter also sees some of the game’s less-utilized elements come into their own, most notably that rapport system, which initially seems underdeveloped. It all leads up to a climax that’s legitimately exciting, culminating in a big action set piece that perhaps strains credulity but nonetheless brought a grin to my face and ensured SCAVS went out on a very high note.

Now, those of y’all who know me might have pricked up your ears when you saw me say SCAVS is “purely enjoyable” back in the intro, because yes, that was something of a back-handed compliment. The game’s main flaw is that it goes down far too easily, as though it were afraid of imposing any friction on the player. Despite the setup and systems priming me for a survival experience, the gameplay is tuned to be very forgiving: except for a few times when I intentionally took a course of action the game was clearly warning me away from just to see what happened, I only took negligible damage from any of the ambient hazards. Meanwhile, the challenge of navigating based only on a topographical map is quickly negated by alternate map modes that highlight the connections between different areas, place circles on the shelter areas where you can hide from storms, and even list off the places you should investigate. This plays out on the narrative side, too. While the whole final sequence is an enjoyable rush, it’s kicked off by an unbelievably melodramatic coincidence, and while the game talks a big game about the incredible dangers of the planet, and the all-seeing eye of System, in the event all those obstacles crumple like a wet paper bag, leading up to an ending whose overwhelming positivity felt unearned.

This is a fine line to walk, of course – it’s very easy for an author to respond to every bit of negative feedback from testers to add more clues and more streamlining, and usually that’s good! There are way more pieces of IF that are too rough than ones that are too smooth. But remember what I said up top about there being few universal constants in IF? SCAVS is the rare case where a bit less polish, a bit more unfairness, and a bit muddier of a narrative arc would have made for a more rewarding, memorable experience. It’s still a very fine game that’s easy to recommend, but less perfection could have made it great.