The Bat

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.