The Bat

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 15 Sep 2024.

This is a richly implemented parser game, full of NPCs and an incredible number of things to do. You play a valet, dealing with an eccentric employer, and have to contend with the drama that occurs during a fundraising party at his manor.

I just loved this, and laughed so much. It is extremely PG Wodehouse esque. As the valet so much was going on that I needed to deal with, and I was constantly struggling to keep up with everything and what to do next. But I was enchanted.

The game has a very limited parser. THINK to see what tasks you need to do (and yes, this list just grows so long), ATTEND TO X (or just ATTEND X) to attend to things, including picking them up and putting them down, and also helping people (including your employer) with problems and talking to them. And you can additionally use EXAMINE, as well as compass directions to move around.

It was chaos, and so much fun. I’m a very lax parser player in that I very rarely ever consciously map. But in this game that wasn’t a problem for me. I quickly learned where enough of the locations were, and could run around manically otherwise.

The need to run around was compounded by an incredibly tight inventory limit. Which initially I was exasperated by, as I’d constantly need to drop something I desperately needed to get something else I needed both hands for. But then I relaxed, dropped essential things in fairly repeatable places, and enjoyed the sheer bonkersness of it.

I think this game is tight for managing in a two hour play through. There are a phenomenal number of puzzles to solve, including ones that can only be solved after others. Apparently you can’t get into an unwinnable state. But there are an awful lot of things to do. Fortunately the THINK command helps keep you on track. And the author has kindly provided a walkthrough, which is helpful if you get stuck.

The NPCs are numerous, almost too numerous initially. But they settle into their roles, and are well differentiated character wise. They also take on different elements of the barmy plot. Having a large cast helps a lot with that.

The game also introduces a particular game mechanic which is just sheer genius. And I was pleased to see it gets heavily used in later portions of the game.

As for the ending, well I wasn’t surprised by one thing ((Spoiler - click to show)who the thief was). But I adored the absolute ending.

Thoroughly recommended, but expect to have some exasperation at least for a while as you grapple with the inventory limit. And ideally budget for more than two hours to play right through.

There are, of course, two iconic master/valet pairs in fiction (well, three I suppose if you the Remains of the Day guy and his Nazi boss), and the Bat’s name, cover art, and listed genre will likely prompt you to think of the more famous one. But the “superhero” in this limited-parser game isn’t Master Bryce of stately Wyatt Manor – instead it’s you, his valet, tasked with preparing the mansion for a charity concert, seeing to the needs of the demanding guests who each have their own agenda, and steering your master through it all while minimizing harm to reputation, limb, and life, in that order, inasmuch as he’s come down with some kind of disorder that’s left him thinking he’s a bat (fortunately, he’s rich enough that everyone else pretends he’s just slightly eccentric).

Yes, what we have here is a farce, in the grand Jeeves and Wooster tradition, with you playing the Jeeves role. This is a tricky genre to realize in IF form, since it turns almost entirely on pacing, which is a fickle thing for an author to stage-manage when players get involved. To smooth the process, the limited-parser approach is pared to the bone, as besides movement verbs, looking, and examining, the only action-verb available is ATTEND TO, which will serve equally well for mixing drinks, opening doors, manipulating machinery, and putting out fires both metaphorical and literal. It also serves to pick up and drop the myriad inventory items, which you’ll be spending a lot of time doing – besides a few small objects like a matchbox and keys, you can only hold as many things as you have hands (sometimes fewer if something’s especially big). This juggling isn’t too annoying, thankfully, both because the map is relatively compact so you won’t have to go far to track down what you need, and because it’s a reasonable compromise to make the puzzles work – most hinge on the fact that the result of ATTENDing depends on what you’re carrying, with a mess of broken glass for example giving a “better not touch that” response unless you’re holding the broom, in which case you can sweep it discreetly away. A bottomless inventory would trivialize things, so the limit is a small price to pay.

If the mechanics are well set up to support the comedy, the prose plays a starring role. The protagonist’s voice is hilariously understated, even as he weathers indignities Wodehouse could never have dreamed of. The use of dry asides left me giggling:

"All the fortunes amassed by the Wyatt Dynasty can be traced to a single magneto-polonium mine, which the late Tomas Wyatt acquired (along with radiation poisoning) in the last century."

And while a gentleman’s gentleman would never directly criticize their said gentleman, there’s still plenty of room to read between certain lines:

>X MASTER

You are careful not to see what might be indiscreet, especially when you can see it very clearly. Master Bryce has such a difficulty keeping himself dressed when he is in these moods.

Just about every description and event has something that’s chuckle-worthy at a minimum, with a few of the edgier developments eliciting a delighted shudder (Spoiler - click to show)(the prongs, oh god, the prongs). The other fertile source of comedy is the donations meter – as the guests’ moods fluctuate according to whether they’re pleased that you’ve recently refreshed their drink, say, or miffed that Master Bryce is trying to eat the dragonfly-clips that are keeping up their hairdo, you’ll get a notification that their expected gifts to the widows-and-orphans fund you’re stumping for have shifted accordingly. It’s a simple gag, I suppose, and not one that appears to vary based on your performance – I think all players wind up with the same final result – but it still helps establish the magnitude of certain beats, like exactly how grateful a noblewoman is for your help arranging a surreptitious tryst, or precisely how far you’ve sunk when another dignitary notices that her jewelry has gone missing in the chaos (it also allows for a great running bit about how the Bishop – a prince of the church! – is a gigantic cheapskate, kicking at most $40 or $50 into the kitty).

So yes, every element has been polished to a sheen to provide a lovely time, and a lovely time I had. Oh, there were a few small elements that provided tiny hiccups, but really, we’re talking tiny – there’s a flashback at the midpoint of proceedings that’s fine on its own merits but I though disrupted the energetic buildup into the second half, and I had a hard time visualizing the geography of the climactic sequence, though I was able to bungle through just fine following the game’s copious prompts about what I might want to do next.

But that right there is my one substantive, and admittedly supremely churlish, critique of The Bat: it’s so smooth, so finely-tooled, that I found myself craving a bit of friction. Just about every time you run across an obstacle or crisis, just examining or attempting to attend to it will provide a substantial hint about what you should be doing, and if you don’t get it at first, repeated attempts will likely provoke an onlooker to prod you further in the right direction. And more broadly, I rarely felt like I was coming up with exciting plans to try to manage the party’s multiple escalating catastrophes as I was following someone else’s script.

Again, this is jolly good fun, but for me at their best parser games feel like a pas des deux between player and author, while in the Bat I just didn’t always feel like my creativity was required. Part of this is the nature of the valet’s job, I suppose – you’re always at someone else’s beck and call, fetching whatever they require or dropping everything to be dragooned into their schemes. But what makes Jeeves an incomparable servant is his skill of anticipation, of seeing how his master’s failings will get him in trouble and allowing things to proceed just up to the edge of disaster before revealing how his foresight has actually saved the day; by comparison the Bat’s man comes off a rather more ordinary servant.

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.

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.)

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!