Go to the game's main page
Review
A nice thing about having been around IF-world for some time now, and making an effort to work through all the games in a couple of the major events, is that there are games that wind up sticking in my head as a sort of alternate canon – games that pushed boundaries or nailed a theme or were just really good, but for whatever reason haven’t stuck in the popular consciousness the way other, equally-worthy ones have. I’m not saying this to be more-hipster-than-thou; usually there are understandable reasons for the lower profile, like Fairies of Haelstowne, which was entered into ParserComp, or Constraints, which had a good showing in a twenty-years-gone Comp, or Accelerate, which was overshadowed by its prequel, Spy Intrigue, which I happen not to have played. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, communities glom on to some things and not others, memories are sparked or fade, new games cycle in to replace old ones… But going back to Accelerate, one of its fellow entries in the 2020 Comp is also on my idiosyncratic forgotten-classic list: Electric word, “life”. It’s a Twine 1999-set period piece about Halloween, and life, and death, but not in the way you’d imagine from hearing those themes laid out like that, and I adored it; even though I don’t think I’ve heard it mentioned in the last half-decade, I still think about it sometimes.
So I was excited to see that game’s author had written something new! While they still haven’t figured out how to come up with an easy-to-say title, the games couldn’t be more different: this time out we’ve got a wordplay-based parser comedy, and it’s a bit smaller in scope (though that could largely just be down to the difference between how scale works in choice-based and parser game). But it’s once again got great writing and satisfying mechanics; I can’t guarantee the Semtanta… the Semantamagia… the Assistant will wind up grabbing me the same way its predecessor did in years to come, but it’s certainly got a fighting chance of doing so.
Anyone writing a parser game where you solve puzzles by using gadgets to transform words must surely be intimidated by the legacy of Counterfeit Monkey, and to the game’s immense credit, it’s got the chutzpah to pay homage in one early in-joke and get on with things. The premise also helps cut to the chase: you play an underemployed striver looking for a job that’ll let you escape the grind, which has led to you answering a bizarre help-wanted ad and getting sucked into an interactive interview process. To prove you’ve got what it takes to be the magician’s understudy, you’ve got to figure out how to escape the room he’s trapped you in (there are no bones of previous applicants lying around, which is somewhat reassuring, at least?)
Where the plot is admittedly a bit thinner than in other, similar games – as is the number of puzzles, as there are really only three major word transformations in the critical-path chain – the range of tools is broader. There are half a dozen magical tools at your disposal, each performing a different bit of linguistic legerdemain: diegetically they may look typical stage-magician tat like a table where you saw people in half or a wheel with animals drawn on it or whatever, the effects include breaking apart or joining words, duplicating or removing instances of a particular vowel, slapping on a prefix, and so on. The operation of some of them is immediately clear, while the purpose of others is obfuscated, leading to a series of great aha moments when I worked out what they did and why that was useful.
Figuring out the syntax required to employ them can be just as challenging as solving the puzzles themselves, though – there’s a USE [DEVICE] command that’s mentioned in the About text as a way of providing a hint, but for some of them I think it’s more of a required tutorial; regardless, the game does eventually give you a hand. While I’m picking nits, there are a few other places bespeaking a slight lack of polish, like unimplemented scenery items and a super long location description that reprints every time you look. And I had to consult the actual hints after finishing the first major puzzle, since solving it doesn’t give direct feedback that something I’d tried earlier, only to see it end in failure, would now suddenly work.
Beyond those niggles, though, the implementation and design are both very very solid. Puzzle-wise, since this isn’t nearly as big a game as something like Counterfeit Monkey, there’s not that same scope for experimentation and solving puzzles through different solutions – there’s usually only one way to make progress at any time, and that very lack of extraneous options can wind up functioning as a sort of hint system unto itself, as a couple of times I went through some word transformations because I saw that I could perform them, rather than because I saw why I should perform them. But usually the logic clicked before I’d gotten too far down that path, leading to some of those “aha” moments mentioned above (I really enjoyed figuring out what the wheel was for). The downside is that I didn’t engage with the diegetic hint mechanics, which involve chatting with an adorable bunny, as much as might have been fun.
I was sad to miss out on any jokes that might have been lurking there, because the ones in the rest of the game are fun. The game steers clear of the flop-sweat-y patter of comedy games desperate to show you how zany they are, just weaving its gags into the inherent absurdity of the situation, alongside a calculated few flashbacks that quickly characterize your prospective boss:
“Magicians manipulate objects. I manipulate the names of objects. I can turn a cub into a cube; I can turn a tub into a tube—”
This time desperation took a back seat. “Hold on,” you interrupted. “Doesn’t that make you, like, an Orthographician? Spellingagician? Spellspeller…”
It all adds up to a delightful package, and in five years’ time I’d very much look forward to seeing an expanded sequel – or something just as different from this game as it is from Electric word, “life”.
