The Bat

Playing this game was a whirlwind of associations, expectations, references, and laughs.

You play as the valet to Bruce Wyatt, billionaire playboy, who is undergoing a crisis of sorts at the worst possible time. He's acting, well, like a bat, fleeing bright light sources, screeching, and crawling around. All this is happening right when a fudnraiser party/gala is about to start!

The story is divided into an act/scene structure. And my expectations swirled around. Spoiler-heavy discussion:


(Spoiler - click to show)
At first, I thought the game would be a Verdeterre-style optimization game as we struggle to make enough money, a game that would be heavily replayable but relatively brief. I thought the story was a reference to Der Fledermaus, a comic opera I've seen a few times but have mixed up with Der Rosenkavalier at times.

Then I started thinking that the money changes weren't related to optimization, but rather a way to inject additional humor into a scenario. Having someone get injured or annoyed or amused can be mildly funny in and of itself but attaching a specific dollar amount to it is especially amusing.

Similarly, I realized that this was a Batman parody when I saw the names of Bryce Wyatt's parents, Thomas and Martha (or something similar). Soon guests arrived, and I saw versions of Two-face, Poison Ivy, and Catwoman.

But others eluded me. Then the game itself mentioned Der Fledermaus, and I looked up the wiki description to refresh my mind, and saw that it included other characters that were in this game! So it was referencing two bat stories at once (and I saw later, in the credits, another one referenced).


Pacing was shockingly smooth. On several occasions I began thinking that I would run out of things to do, when subtle nudges pushed me in the right direction or major events (like the doorbell ringing) took place. Conversely, at times I'd have so many tasks piling up I thought I'd have to miss some and replay the game to see them. I kept thinking, "Surely this can't hold up, the pacing's going to go all wrong at some point and I'll be stuck twiddling my thumbs or getting too frustrated," but it never happens.

Compass directions have an in-game explanation, which I found fun given that Chandler Groover has expressed his own struggles with the compass in other parser games and his decision to keep it out of most of his own games; so having its presence so carefully justified here makes sense both outside of the game as well as in the game as a kind of tutorial for new players. Perhaps the later parts of the game where (Spoiler - click to show)the compass serves as a tool for control and destruction serves as an unconscious metaphor for the community's over-emphasis and use of the compass and the pressure it puts on authors to do the same.

Overall, this game was well-made and enjoyable. It includes some sensual material and some puerile material with bodily fluids, but both are framed in such a way that they are not really objectionable and leave more to the imagination.

Given that a few characters resemble people from different sources, I wonder about those I couldn't place, like (Spoiler - click to show)the twins. Are they from another source, or new creations?

I think this game will join Eat Me and Toby's Nose among Chandler Groover's best-regarded games, and serve as both a good introduction to new players and a fun treat for the experienced. Great work!

In this substantially sized parser game, the player takes the role of the valet of billionaire Bryce Wyatt. Master Bryce is holding a soiree for charity, and of course it would be your job regardless to make sure that everything went smoothly, but now there’s an added wrinkle: your employer was recently bitten by a radioactive bat and now he’s acting… strangely.

The charming (if sometimes hapless) rich man and his devoted, efficient valet are well-established figures in pop culture, and the dynamic between them is generally supposed to be endearing. The Bat methodically dismantles the familiar archetypes, emphasizing the dehumanization of the servant (while the master is treated like a person even when acting like an animal, the PC may as well be furniture as far as the wealthy guests are concerned) as well as how fundamentally childish it is for a healthy adult to insist on having someone else attend to their needs in this way. (Dealing with Bryce often strongly resembles dealing with a toddler.)

“Attend to” (helpfully possible to abbreviate as “A”) is in fact the main verb you will need to use in this game as you try to take care of an ever-growing list of tasks. Your inventory is also limited to what you can carry in your two hands and your pockets. The item-juggling that this type of limitation requires can, in many games, end up feeling like busywork, but in this case it plays nicely into the farcical tone of the proceedings, and I was ultimately entertained by it even as I was asking myself where I’d left the goddamn drinks tray this time.

On the other hand, while limited verbs usually don’t bother me, I struggled somewhat with this one. If your one verb is, say, EAT, you can apply a certain amount of in-universe logic to what would be useful to eat in this scenario, but since ATTEND TO is vague and there’s an intentional lack of consistency around what ATTENDING TO something actually entails, it tends instead to turn guess-the-verb into guess-the-noun. (There is a reliable out-of-universe logic, which is that if something can be picked up or dropped, ATTEND TO has to do that duty, so if you’re trying to use something portable, there’s probably something else around you need to ATTEND TO in order to make that happen. But I had trouble keeping that in mind.) If I squint I can also see the PC repeatedly picking up and dropping the dustpan as he tries to figure out how to empty it as part of the farce, but for me it mostly created frustration in a way that didn’t feel entertaining or sufficiently diegetic.

I also found the puzzles in Act II harder to figure out, but I can’t tell if that’s because they’re actually less well clued or just because at that point my brain had burnt out on keeping track of everything (which is possibly fitting as well; I can imagine the PC also becoming increasingly frazzled as the evening wears on).

But all in all, it’s a polished, funny, and inventive game that blends farce, parody, and satire, filtered through the PC’s dry, circumspect commentary. It also draws on bat behavior in surprising detail; while the low-hanging fruit (screeching, hanging upside down, producing guano) is certainly present, I was tickled to see allogrooming as one of Bryce’s bat-related compulsions. And while I sometimes struggled with the parser, I thought the final command was just perfect. So I’m content to assume that my problems with it were mostly, well, my problems, and regardless of those, I do feel it’s one of the strongest games of the year.

(Litcrit BS side note: While I understand the role of the compass in this game to be a dig at the hold that convention has over parser IF, I couldn’t help noticing that it also serves as a locus of subversion of the typical power dynamic between master and servant, so if you felt like being a bit cheeky, I think the text would support an argument for The Bat as a pro-compass game. But I don’t feel like engaging in high-effort trolling at the moment, so I won’t take this any further.)

I played Chandler Groover’s “The Bat.” I really enjoyed it. Its frustratingly relaxing, kind of like Sim City and Roller Coaster Tycoon.

The game keeps piling things onto you and there’s an ominous money score in the corner. I don’t know exactly how this works. I think the game could have deducted money more aggressively, but I’m happy with it regardless.

The situation is this: you’re a valet for a Bryce Wyatt, who is (not much of a spoiler) a (Spoiler - click to show)Batman/Bruce Wayne analogue. He seems to be a sort of were-bat.

The game doesn’t use the term were-bat, but I wanted a word that distinguished his situation from vampirism. Unlike vampires, which are famous for flying, sucking blood, and their brooding elegance, Master Wyatt appears to have adopted the more mundane aspects of bats, such as screeching, climbing, preening, hitting walls, and, most importantly, dropping guano on people.

The plot develops as (major spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)a Selina Kyle/Catwoman analogue starts stealing things from the other guests. You, as Master Wyatt's valet, have to deal with this and everything else that goes wrong.

The writing is very funny, and it’s one of the funniest IF games I’ve played in recent memory. The situations are absurd, the wealthy patrons’ ignorance of the situation is hilarious, and there are some great one-liners. For example:

There’s no good reason to remove this magneto-polonium from the vault right now, but there are many bad reasons.

The baron, of course, is both an oil baron and a real baron.

You wring the soggy newspaper into the pond. Now it’s as good as new (which speaks volumes about its original state).

There is some mild implied adult content. It’s not explicit and doesn’t really merit a content warning (which I don’t think the game has). And, on principle, I wouldn’t request a content warning on any work. But, as a matter of reviewing the game, The Bat requires you to make some inferences that might be uncomfortable if you’re playing this with friends, family, or other company.

The Gameplay

In The Bat, gameplay is simplified so that you only need to “attend to” certain items in the presence of someone or something.

This means that the complexity of the game generally comes from the fact that you can only hold one or two objects at a time. In other words, you need to keep track of where you leave everything across the game’s roughly 13-room map.

On top of that, there are a lot of things to do in “The Bat” at any given time. Many of these tasks are repetitive (especially serving drinks), but since you don’t have to do them in any specific order, it doesn’t actually feel repetitive, and it encourages you to keep moving.

Technically, this does pad the game out more than necessary, but I don’t really have any complaints. The only thing seemed excessive was the need to close certain things, like the icebox or vault, before leaving a room. This is pretty rare, but it could have broken the flow if there were a larger number of containers throughout the game.

The bottom line is that the tasks are simple. There are a few times where you do need to solve light puzzles, but these are straightforward, well-clued, and mostly limited to Act II. I only checked the walkthrough — which is styled in an interesting way — once and I would have solved the problem if I was more patient.

The Characters

There’s a large cast of characters. The valet and player character, aka Albert, is characterized as dryly satisfied with and accustomed to the idiosyncracies of his job.

Since the characters are analogues, Albert is presumably meant to be (Spoiler - click to show)Alfred Pennyworth. However, that character isn’t really iconic on their own; rather, I imagine this is what P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves is supposed to be like.

The titular Bat, aka Master Wyatt, doesn’t really have much characterization. Throughout most of the game, he can’t speak and only causes chaos. There’s a bit of a development when you start putting his disruptive talents to use (particularly when you have him (Spoiler - click to show)deal with the Baron’s moustache), which seems to give Master Wyatt a bit of agency. But at the end of the game, he’s just a normal billionaire playboy with no recollection of events.

I think one thing that makes Master Wyatt in bat form likeable is that the rich patrons’ superficially gentle and civil demands are far more irritating than the trouble caused by Master Wyatt himself.

And despite being oblivious to the Master Wyatt’s general condition, the rich patrons have a bit of savviness among themselves. (One remarks that there’s nothing interesting up there as Master Wyatt stares at the ceiling; another quips: “You’ve always had trouble appreciating things from another person’s perspective”.)

Otherwise, I kind of lost track of the guests’ unique identities, apart from (Spoiler - click to show)Célina, who gradually emerges as a key character.

Finally: this is a really approachable game. I finished this game almost entirely without using a walkthrough. I played it in two sittings across three days — the middle day involved dealing with a surprise tax notice in real life, which seems appropriate — and I managed to pick up the game again easily and complete it. A really good game overall.