Sequitur

Sequitur is a CSI tech game with a unique feel. You play as Detective Stephen Cochone, investigating several mysterious deaths that occurred at a supposedly abandoned house. He’s being taught how to use sequitur, a program created by quirky tech girl Jenny, as part of the investigation. The main use of the in-game program is to review written descriptions of found footage and sound recordings taken from the crime scene, and arrange them in chronological order.

Having this separate ‘program’ as the main interface is itself pretty interesting. I did find it confusing at first because you’re hit with a lot of special commands and phrases upfront, which can be overwhelming. The game does provide you with in-game help, though, including the option to ask Jenny to order the sequences for you. While this may be too easy of a bypass, the player still has to view all the videos and come to their own conclusions.

What I enjoyed most, though, were the characters. We quickly get an idea of who they are, and I enjoyed the dialogue between Stephen and Jenny. I was pretty invested in them by the end and (Spoiler - click to show)really bummed that the endings don’t give us any concrete details about what happens afterwards. I first played Sequitur a few years ago, and I’m still disappointed we don’t find out what happens to Cochone! Even the best ending doesn’t tell us.

The game also has custom responses to out-of-game commands, giving functions like save or restart in-game explanations, which I thought was a nice touch.

Overall, it’s very well written and one of my favorite IF games.

Sequitur, the first release by author Nigel Jayne, is an unusual work perhaps best described as a one-room police procedural.

The player inhabits the persona of Detective Cochone, stereotypical grizzled veteran of the homicide police. His hard life has not been improved by the multiple murder case that's his current assignment: several people found dead in an abandoned mansion, with the one survivor who might have information currently in a coma. The only clues are various bits of video footage and other information recovered from devices found on the scene, including a video camera and phones. Due to damage to the devices (or some other plot contrivance), the recovered footage consists of only fragments for which the order is not known. Cochone's (and the player's) job is to review the footage and attempt to reconstruct the sequence of events. A tech expert, Jenny, stands ready to assist as needed.

After a brief introduction to the scene, made somewhat chaotic by the attempt to conduct both character introductions and player instructions ASAP, the game proper begins. Individual clips (of which there are only 15) must be reviewed, sorted and rearranged. As this is being conducted, the PC sometimes chooses to interact with Jenny, and various bits of background business unwind automatically to give some life to the framing story. I have to say: Upon initial orientation, I wasn't very hooked by this game, but that changed pretty quickly once I got going with the main task.

The initial review yields a jumble of confusing impressions, many seeming entirely disconnected. (I didn't find out until after the fact that this game was made for ShuffleComp, and it's clear that the rather tenuous framework for the mystery is disjointed at least in part due to the need to try to reconcile the disparate elements of a random playlist serving as the seed.) The victims are clearly trespassers, and they were clearly murdered, but it's not immediately obvious by whom and why.

The game soon communicates that there are two sequences to be assembled, one consisting of ten segments and another of five, but there is a huge number of theoretically possible orderings for the two. Jayne put substantial work into creating quality-of-life features to assist the player in this task, including allowing the player to rename segments, create summary notes for them, and rearrange them in a number of intuitive ways. When the player gets portions of the sequence right, the PC will note this and explain the reasoning, and subsequently the related segments can be treated as a unit group. As a result, much like with a jigsaw puzzle, connected groups of segments can be added to and rearranged as blocks, so each connection significantly reduces the search space and speeds the process of finding more.

This is a very clever mechanic in that it automatically handles pacing in a manner that is self-adjusting to individual players. Making progress through sheer luck isn't very likely in the early stages, when juxtaposing any two in correct order is a low probability. No matter which thread of imagery or action intrigues the player, it narrows the search to a subset of other pieces -- again similar to a jigsaw puzzle, in which the same applies to details of coloration or shape. With each "click," progress is made.

Two things stand out about this to me: First, when I took a moment to think about what the match confirmation mechanism involves, I was wowed by the number of cases that have to be handled. Responses are not always phrased as matches between a pair of individual segments; the PC might notice a run of three or more that fit together enough to be a coherent block. I doubt that this was handled in an entirely brute-force manner simply because the number of cases to cover would be so high, so there must be some way of aggregating links into larger descriptions. Regardless of how it was achieved, it is very well-done -- the description of Cochone's insights does not come across as any kind of mechanically-generated text.

Second, there are apparently different ways to put the sequences together. However difficult it was to pull off the central mechanic, the complexity jumps substantially when that possibility is taken into account. My hat is off to Jayne for this accomplishment, and he's earned my gratitude for the willingness to share the game's source code. (Very fortunately, though the author's personal website is defunct, the complete source appears to have been captured by the Wayback Machine, at least in unformatted text format. An HTML format version is at least partially lost.) I haven't studied it yet, but I am looking forward to it.

The implementation of the central mechanic is not perfect; I encountered a few run-time errors while playing. However, the game is resilient and makes it easy enough to recover from these hiccups, so they do not significantly impede completion. The author has explicitly licensed the mechanical aspects (but not the story text) under the Creative Commons license, so would-be authors are invited to dissect it and adopt any useful elements. (From what I've seen so far, the code is well-documented. Note, however, that it was written for Inform 7 6L38, so some minor rewriting might be needed in places.)

Once the footage sequences have been finalized, the endgame begins, and this is kept interesting through the device of asking the player to demonstrate some understanding of the total scenario revealed by the assembled footage. Cochone, who is (Spoiler - click to show)suffering medically and about to lose consciousness has only a few turns to try to communicate vital information to his superior officer. (This is done with a command prompt to eliminate the possibility of a lucky guess from a menu.) The ending that follows is improved by providing the correct information, but the story resolves satisfactorily even without this cherry on top, so only those interested in solving the mystery need go back if they haven't figured it out already.

My initial inclination was to rate this a solid three stars, but the central mechanic is unique in my experience and urges a rating of four stars on the basis of notability. It would be much more solidly in four-star territory if it were bug-free, the pacing of the introduction were a bit less hectic, the tone (Spoiler - click to show)(which wavers between gritty police mystery and horror) were more focused, and the individual stories created better synergy in their combination. (Although it's not bad given the central challenge of Shufflecomp, the game itself would have benefited from trimming the (Spoiler - click to show)apparent child prostitution subplot, which feels artificially grafted onto the main scenario. Also, the bad guys, presented as (Spoiler - click to show)generic "terrorist" bogeymen, are not very interesting.) This collection of demerits is enough that in the end I'm going with my gut instinct of three stars, which I remind the reader counts as "good, not great" in my book, and means that I'd recommend it as a play experience.