Miss Duckworthy's School for Magic-Infested Young People

It’s a commonplace, I think, for those of us in the mainline IF tradition to look over at the (far bigger and far more successful by any metric you care to name) Choice of Games community and goggle comically at the Brobdingnagian word counts. 110,000 words! 470,000 words! 1,140,000 words! What on earth could they possibly need all that space for, we muse – well, I muse, let’s drop this not-fooling-anybody first-person-plural conceit – and possibly crack a joke about that game a year or two back where character creation involved deciding on the color of your favorite mug. Well, comes a time when I’ve got to eat some crow, because while I’m not sure Miss Duckworthy’s School for Magic-Infested Young People needs to be twice as long as War and Peace, it sure would work better at three or four times its current length.

There is a lot going on here, but I’ll do my best to hit the high points. So this is a ChoiceScript magic-school game except in place of Hogwarts you’ve got a flying castle hovering far above the Indian Ocean, and there are additional dystopic-YA-novel tropes layered in because magical beings in this world are hated and feared by the general population and the world’s governments fund jack-booted thugs to drag magical teenagers off to the grimly authoritarian Miss Duckworthy’s once their powers begin to pop off. The game includes all the stuff you’d expect to play out given this premise – you wind up part of a plucky group of friends trying to get to the bottom of the school’s mysteries and fight the man, with optional romances on the side and a time-management minigame where you can balance building your various magical skills against exploration, investigation, and relationship-building – and a bunch of extras besides, most notably the four bespoke “origins” for the main character, which involve substantial vignettes that allow you to meet some characters early or otherwise have a reasonably significant impact on the main storyline.

I opted for playing a respectable Dutchman, admittedly as much through a process of elimination as anything else – “artsy Canadian car thief” is not an archetype I feel at all confident at being able to embody, and the Australian and Indonesian origins require you to be athletic and industrious, respectably, so no thanks to those too – but I wound up fairly excited the more I thought about it, since typically I struggle with how to approach ChoiceScript games as anything other than a self-insert of my boring, middle-aged self, and this prompt gave me the idea that this time I could play as @VictorGijsbers instead!

Alas, it was not to be, because Miss Duckworthy’s doesn’t provide much scope for roleplaying, largely due to the rocket-boosted pacing. The opening vignette feels like it lasts an appropriate amount of time, long enough to establish your mundane life and bring a bit of oddness and dread into things as your magical nature manifests and the baddies show up. But after that, all the stuff I mentioned above – meeting your three or four new besties, learning to control your abilities, engaging with student politics, learning secrets about the school, the tentative stirrings of teenaged romance – plays out over maybe half an hour in real time, and seventy-two hours or so in the fiction.

To say that this is break-neck speed is overestimating the resilience of the spine; indeed, the game feels like it’s in so much hurry that it routinely gets way way ahead of itself. My first hint of this was when, on the plane to the school, a troll named Jack introduced himself – he came on a bit strong, maybe, but he seemed like an interesting character, whose backstory had him helping run a magical Underground Railroad for a year before being caught. Seems like a potentially interesting character, I thought to myself, only for my cat familiar to immediately tell me “this guy is consumed with rage and is going to try to dominate everybody,” which in addition to playing out what feel like not-great stereotypes (trolls are people too!) also flattened out any sense of ambiguity about him, bottom-lining what could have been an extended subplot of learning about the ways Jack uses idealistic rhetoric to cloak naked ambition into literally one line of dialogue.

Similarly, the game just sort of assumes that you’ll be down with the fascists. The main plot of the game turns on the fact that Jack decides within two hours of the school to mount a coup and knock off the student who’s sort of the queen trusty of the place (and takes two and a half more days to actually attempt it), and rather than deciding to join him because this whole system sucks and said student appears to have one of the newcomers killed because he sassed her your only options are to ignore the plot, tattle on it, or try to get close to Jack to learn enough to betray him to the authorities.

Now, there’s a reason for this – in my playthrough, I learned that the student capo wasn’t actually that bad, and just pretended to kill that dude so that she’d seem hardcore and no one would mess with her (this is pretty stupid IMO, but we are dealing with teenagers…) But I think that’s missable, and pretty much all the plot-lines are like this, overly-accelerated and assuming you’ll have certain knowledge you might not actually get. There’s also some sloppiness to the game knowledge that means continuity errors were rampant. Within one second of meeting one of the other students, Hannah, she told me that she was a reporter just pretending to be a troll, which seemed like a ridiculously risky thing to disclose to someone you don’t know – and I guess the game agreed because a day and a half later, after gaining her trust, there’s an emotional scene where she told me the exact same information again, with no indication that she was repeating herself. Meanwhile one member of the friend group just sort of showed up in our shared bedroom with no indication of how he’d gotten there; there’s a fun subplot where we successfully conspired to help him escape back to his home in Indonesia, but this didn’t prevent him from still being around during the climax. The game never directly told me that I’d turned into an elf in the opening, either, which seems like a heck of a thing to have to intuit from context.

I have many, many more examples of this stuff, I think a combination of trying to cram too many characters and plot twists into too small a word-count, and a lack of adequate testing for all the many possible permutations (I got rescued by a troll named Rock and had a bunch of banter with him afterwards, the game not seeming to acknowledge that I had never even heard of this guy before in my life). It’s pervasive, and it winds up having a substantial impact on the gameplay mechanics, because I never felt like my choices really mattered; the game is on the clock to get through the story that it’s telling, and I was just along for the ride (as is typical for ChoiceScript, there are like a billion stats, but I feel like maybe only one of them ever made a difference). And the impact on tone and theme is even worse: seriously, are the fascists fascist or are they cool? That’s kind of a big deal!

This is a real shame because I think there’d be a lot to enjoy in a less-hyper version of Miss Duckworthy’s. The characters and situations are broad, sure, but they’re fun, engaging archetypes, and the writing’s quite good at moving quickly while providing enough detail to anchor you and fire the imagination. I really love the disparate-origins approach to the game, which is a lovely mechanic that can make the player’s decisions feel really meaningful. With the action spread out over maybe a month or two rather than just three days, more granular choices allowing the player to actually make decisions, and better testing to make sure all the pieces fit, this game could be really very good – unfortunately that’s not the version of it that’s currently available to play.