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Hey, That Is a Thing I Recognise, November 23, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
You’re all familiar with Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, yes? Twenty+ years old now, the first comics mini-series assembled a collection of Victorian adventure literature characters into a super-team of sorts, fighting Victorian villains. They were all public domain characters like Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Dr Jeckyll, etc. Mssrs Moore and O’Neill then proceeded to jam the limited series with a confounding amount of well-known and obscure story references, directly, indirectly, and in the background of the main plot. I mean JAMMED the frickin thing. There are page by page annotations (Extraordinary Gentlemen+ Annotations). It was considered a critical and sales success (spawned a less-said-the-better movie), and 3 years later we got Volume II. The two were qualitatively completely different works.
Vol I was first and foremost a ripping pulp yarn, as I believe it was called back then. It pitted a team of mismatched anti-heroes against Fu Manchu and Professor Moriarty, with a plot that used these pre-existing texts for settings, MacGuffins and motivations. It had surprisingly dark edges but fundamentally was a love letter to adventure tales, taken from mismatched parts of other stories and somehow put into a shining clockwork of its own.
Vol 2 was a slog. It was like the takeaway was “People really love these references! Maybe if we phone in the plot and characters we have room to jam in EVEN MORE!” (It was also a good deal meaner, but I think consensus is this had more to do with Mssr Moore’s contemporary professional dissatisfactions.) It was not a clockwork, it was a jumble and characters and plotlines that contorted more and more wildly to accommodate just one more reference. The linking story was unpleasant and unsatisfying to read, so at its best it was an illustrated trivia contest.
The message here is references in narrative are a dangerous will-o-the-wisp. You can totally lose your way pursuing them and whatever promise you think is in those dancing lightballs is insubstantial. You will need to provide the substance yourself, in the form of how you use those references. LoEGv1 did exactly this. YFLYRTiaB showed us what that could look like too. In the single best moment of the game, the amnesiac protagonist figures out his identity and they’re… warning, this is the biggest spoiler in this game do yourself a favor and assume my point is valid, don’t look until you’ve played it (Spoiler - click to show)The amnesiac protagonist is the Man in the Yellow Hat! Yah, the one with the busy-body monkey!! I laughed out loud at the audacity of that, it was a terrific recontextualization of that particular reference in a surprising and creative way. As far as I can tell, that was the ONLY reference that was recontextualized.
As far as gameplay goes, it is really limited exploration from one referential map location to the next, shuttling minimal objects to unlock other locations then finish. Call it what it was, it was an excuse to usher you across the chain of references. I’d say I picked out maybe half of them? Above I sneeringly called LoEGv2 a ‘trivia contest.’ I’ll take the sneer off that. Trivia contests are fun! If I think of this as an IF implementation of a trivia contest, that’s probably how it best succeeds (complete with ‘answer key’ if you want to grade yourself!). No one says puzzles have to be complicated logic or wordplay. Trivial Pursuit is an all-time best seller boardgame for a reason. Certainly IFLYRTiaB drew from an admirable breadth of high and low literature. But for me? I’m not much of a trivia guy. That one twist was the only time it felt alive to me. It was predominantly Mechanical.
Played: 11/7/22
Playtime: 10min, survived
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless