The Samurai and the Kappa

I’ve never dug that deeply into Text Adventure Literacy Project games, mostly just because I’m already fairly overcommitted when it comes to IF, so it’s interesting to see a game initially intended for that event crop up in ParserComp instead, if only to provide a look at how one veteran author might introduce IF to new players. Beyond its well-implemented tutorial, The Samurai and the Kappa provides a few simple but mostly appealing characters, manageable medium-dry-goods challenges, a world that’s enjoyable to explore, some slightly ill-fitting logic puzzles, an old-school maze that’s not too hard to flail through with trial and error, and a happy ending – seems like a pretty good way of getting your feet wet to me.

You play a Tokugawa-era samurai era who’s fed up with life as a courtier and has take to wandering the countryside looking for work. After spending the night in a small village inn – the business of paying for a room, taking a bath, having dinner, and retiring for the night constitutes the tutorial section – the plot kicks in when you’re approached by a peasant who asks for your help rescuing a kidnapped child from an evil turtle-spirit. There’s a nice mix of historicity and fantasy to this premise; the Kappa’s folklore feels authentic, and SAK does do a good job of weaving in period-appropriate detail so that the world never feels generic and rewards poking at the scenery. Admittedly, it wears its research a bit heavily – implementing three separate pieces of your clothing feels a bit much, and while I enjoyed the density of scenery, some of the descriptions feel like they could have come from a textbook:

The shimenawa is a special rope that’s woven from hemp and tapers towards each end. It’s suspended below the rafters of the haiden to denote its sanctity or purity.

Still, I enjoyed the care taken with the game’s setting and atmosphere, so this is a mild complaint.

The process of rescuing the child is enjoyable too. You need to learn the kappa’s weaknesses from several characters across the game’s small map, and while dialogue is mostly kept short and to the point, they respond to a wide variety of potential topics. For the most part progress depends on solving two puzzles – there’s a Nurikabe, which is a sort of Slitherlink or Picross-style exercise in coloring a grid, and one traditional logic grid. The game’s itch.io page provides feelies to make solving them more convenient. I found them satisfying to work through, though writing down all the different clues and then alt-tabbing into a logic grid tool to laboriously work through them did take me out of the story. The final set of challenges are resolutely in-game, though, and focus on taking advantage of what you’ve learned about the kappa’s likes and dislikes, and even when these are a bit esoteric, I never had any trouble getting the parser to understand what I was saying.

…and I really wish that I could end this review here, saying that SAK is a fleet, puzzle-focused adventure with nice period details and a pleasant story. Alas, I can’t end the review without addressing the inclusion of one disastrously ill-advised bit of content. The game earns its “adult content” content warning by virtue of your interactions with Mokuko, the maid who works at the inn in the tutorial section. When you first enter, the innkeeper suggestively indicates that you can avail yourself of some extra “service” for one additional silver coin. The implication is made clear when, after your meal, Mokuko asks “if you require any extra ‘service’.” As far as I can see there’s no option to simply decline the invitation – the tutorial text butts in here to say “when someone mentions something interesting, you should ask them about it. In this case, ASK MOKUKO ABOUT SERVICE.” And when you do, well:

Mokuko parts the folds in her kimono in a suggestive manner to reveal the cleavage of her petite breasts. The poor girl looks like she’s barely out of puberty.

You see, this is Mokuko’s description:

Mokuko is very pretty, but she looks too young to be a maid. You wonder how old she is.

And when you ask her about her age:

“I’m 16 sir, but I’m very experienced.”

It’s a small mercy that you don’t have the option of going to bed with her, as you automatically decline politely and go to bed. Any relief I felt at that point was undone by the fact that the game then told me that I had a hard time getting to sleep because of the noise from the guest next door having sex with his maid (per the author this is meant to be a brand-new character, but as this other maid is never seen or mentioned in the game I had no idea she existed and assumed Makuko was serving the other guest as well).

So this is a game that forces you to think about the sexual exploitation of a 16 year old girl. And it gets even worse – I think there’s a reasonable implication from the excerpts mentioned above that Mokuko is lying about her age, and she tells you this if you ask her about herself:

"I’ve been working here for two years. I’ll make sure you have a pleasant experience in our humble little inn.”

So actually this is a game that forces you to think, at minimum, about the sexual exploitation of a 14 year old girl.

I am really at a loss to understand why this is here. Is it the case that maids at roadside inns like this engaged in sex work, that they were pimped out by their innkeepers, and that they were sometimes teenagers? I’m no expert on the period here, but I’m certainly willing to believe it. Authenticity is certainly no reason on its own to have included something like this, though – the setting here departs from reality in innumerable ways, and reflects the author’s editorial judgment about what to include and what to elide. And it’s not as though this is a plot element that has any narrative significance or connection to the rest of the story in any way; it’s just a throwaway incident that’s the definition of gratuitous.

I’m no prude and I’m not opposed to “adult” or sexual content in IF by any means. But there are certain topics that, if you include them in your game, now your game is about them whether you want them to be or not. I can certainly imagine playing a game that engages with this topic in a nuanced way and creates space for Makuko’s subjectivity, but this is the Samurai and the Kappa – no room for her here. At best, the child sexual abuse is meant to be an interesting historical detail and a way of underlining the manly self-restraint of the protagonist, while at worst it’s meant to function as an enjoyable moment of titillation. Either way, it was a profound mistake to include it, and it comprehensively soured me on the rest of the game.

This game has an interesting relationship to mimesis. It’s very much a game of two halves. The first part is a puzzleless tutorial about following cultural rules; the second part is a series of puzzles with little cultural rule following (other than observing the priest’s ritual).

In the initial tutorial section at the inn, the player’s action is entirely dictated by what is culturally expected of the samurai character. For example, the player must take off their shoes before entering the inn. The game throughout is richly researched, though written very much in an edutainment register.

In the second half, the player does three of what Roger S. G. Soralla, in his seminal essay “Crimes Against Mimesis”, called “Puzzles Out of Context”. The player has to solve a logic grid puzzle, a Nurikabe puzzle, and a maze with room names all alike (this isn’t a spoiler, the game’s main page explicitly warns you that these are coming). To Garry Francis’s credit, all three puzzles are somewhat embedded in their setting, though their presentation in each case quite literally takes you out of the game. In the two logic puzzles, you go away from the game and fuss about in an abstract grid and then go back to the game and enact the solution; in the maze, you’re encouraged to make a map. Map making is a time-honoured adventure game tradition, and one of the game’s goals is to teach players somewhat to play adventure games, so I can’t really begrudge this one. However, the overall effect is to repeatedly step out of the story and think as-a-player, rather than as-the-character. And this is in sharp contrast to the initial, more setting-grounded, section.

In the second half, the social rules have mostly been forgotten about, the player needn’t remove their shoes before entering any of the huts (though perhaps those rules don’t apply to commoners).

There are a lot of period-appropriate details in The Samurai and the Kappa, and the game invests the most detail on three of them: the specificities of the strange myth of the Kappa, Kami temple rituals, and inn-based child prostitution. The first two are intertwined with the game’s puzzles and plot and make the game a distinct experience. The third is a period detail that the author was especially interested in exploring but has no impact on the plot or puzzles, though maybe we can say that it is used as a way to teach new players how to use the parser.

Both halves have their merit, but tonally they make for an unbalanced experience.