Hinterlands: Delivered!

I’ve tried to write this metaphor three times now, but it keeps getting away from me. Part of me would love to keep tuning it until I get it right, but another, larger part of me would love to clear my review backlog before the Comp kicks off. So we’re going to go with draft number four, no matter how it turns out.

Imagine you’re looking at a cake. And not just any cake – this one’s colored mauve, let’s say, and has little pitchforks of spun sugar crammed into it at odd angles. Now that you look at it more closely, in fact, the whole thing is asymmetric, the various tiers all stacked off-center in a compellingly lurching way, though the structure is impressively solid. You cut a piece, and the cake itself is a marbled red and black with an anarchy sign somehow baked in, the verdigris frosting veining it almost seeming to pulse. Filled with excitement (and maybe a little trepidation) you fork a piece into your mouth – it’s … well, it’s good, and there’s a hint or two of some nonstandard flavoring in there, but actually, it mostly tastes like vanilla cake? Not that you dislike vanilla cake or anything, and again, this is a pretty good example of the form. But wow you were expecting something else.

Okay, I’m not too unhappy with that. I’m going to dive into a more direct discussion of Hinterlands colon Delivered exclamation point now, but keep that cake in mind.

Delivered! is the second in a series of Hinterlands games (the first, Marooned!, was a one-move game with a lot of jokes and even more gore), and its setup promises a slice of blue-collar sci-fi – a driver for the interstellar Parcel Express service, the protagonist gets caught up short on fuel and has to stop off at a godforsaken rock to gas up. Unsurprisingly, what starts out as a straightforward errand quickly winds up going off-track, but the twists and turns are anything but predictable, involving stealing a golden bucket from a sacred well, befriending then betraying some space moonshiners, drug abuse (like, using it for something other than its intended purpose, though yeah, people also use it to get high), mail fraud, freelance espionage, cross-dressing, blasphemous pyromania… oh, and here’s what X ME gets you:

"You are a more or less average specimen of Outer Lumpan heritage. Your leathery skin is pale blue and completely hairless. Your large spherical eyes are solid black. Your mouth is a lipless slit below an eggplant-shaped nose. Your small rounded ears protrude from the sides of your head in a way that is (apparently) comical to anyone who isn’t from Outer Lumpus. On top of your bald head are several dark blue nodules, which your dermatologist assures you are perfectly normal. Your build is tall and lanky, but you slouch (as your mother is always so keen to mention)."

In other words, this isn’t just blue-collar sci-fi, it’s Heavy Metal sci-fi, full of louche characters, oddball aesthetics, and shaggy-dog plots. This subgenre is pretty thin on the ground these days, so it makes for a refreshing change of pace, and Delivered! is a well-implemented take on the theme – the protagonist even after his triumphs remains firmly a loser, it feels like every single character you meet is running a scheme or scam (or is a gigantic dupe), and the setting boasts a scuzzy detail to go alongside every exotic one. And crucially, there’s some actual worldbuilding on display – unlike some games that are wacky for the sake of being wacky, here the setting is there to play host to jokes, rather than just being a joke. Speaking of implementation, things are solid on that front too. There’s a lot of depth in Delivered!’s medium-sized map, with tons of scenery, some complex set-pieces, characters with a ton of non-obvious conversation responses, and prose that communicates the weirdness of the world without getting overly prolix. There is an occasionally bit of guess-the-verb annoyance – I quickly figured out how to (Spoiler - click to show)drill holes in the wall to spy on the neighboring hotel room, but getting the syntax right took some trial and error – but nothing too bad.

So this is overall a fun, unique game that I really enjoyed. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t add a few critiques, though. First is that the puzzles, while generally reasonable in terms of their difficulty, are occasionally unmotivated. For example, after suffering a certain reverse that meant that the most logical source for more fuel wasn’t going to pan out, I was stymied for what to do next – turns out the solution was to open a certain package, with no indication so far as I could tell that it would have anything to do with resolving my dilemma. And I had a similar experience two or three more times, when I took an action because it was the only thing available to do, rather than because it seemed likely to advance the protagonist’s goals.

As for the other point: remember that cake? Delivered! has a lot of off-kilter aspects, but both the overall structure of the plot (look for MacGuffin, suffer reversals until finally obtaining MacGuffin) and the details of the puzzles (there’s a disguise one, and a couple swap-stuff ones, and some keys to find) actually wind up being pretty normcore. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – heck, I’m wearing khakis right now! But given the lurid, gutterpunk vibe Delivered! so capably projects, I think I wound up feeling a little disappointed there wasn’t more gonzo on offer. In fact, for the author’s first full-bore piece of IF, the game is admirably controlled. From a design perspective, that was probably the right call, but I can’t help but hope that a notional third Hinterlands game will really cut loose.