Aisle

Aisle is one that I finally broke down and played a few years ago. It did not impress me, and I didn't find the central innovation (i.e. one-move game) to be very interesting as a mechanic. A recent re-examination of the work and its reviews in greater detail changed my opinion of it -- for the worse.

The game's tagline calls itself: "an instant in the life of a man" [emphasis mine]. Likewise, many reviews mention "the story" [again, emphasis mine]. But there is no single story. This is made clear by the "frontispiece" displayed upon opening Aisle, which at its end states: "Be warned; there are many stories and not all of the stories are about the same man."

As many reviewers note, extended interaction bears this out. It's not possible for the PC to be just one man due to conflicting information presented in various "endings." (I put scare quotes around the term because it seems clear that no one outcome is intended to represent a complete experience, thus the interactor is almost certain to "replay" many times before deciding to stop.)

Obviously, on a purely structural basis, the interactor of this work is expected to try at least dozens of different moves in order to observe the various bits of past and/or future that each new "ending" produces. Theoretically, that structure does offer an interesting possibility, in that the motivated interactor can try to suss out particular details and build up a picture of the whole possibility space of the protagonist's future as well as the complex of factors in his past that shape his present. To my mind, the kind of meaningful question asked and answered by a work of this structure should be: How can one action now change the future of this person, and what are the limits of that change? (As Duncan Stevens puts it, the point would be "to explore the central character and take a look at the various possibilities available to him from one point in time.")

Unfortunately, since this work is not consistent in the details that a diligent player uncovers, any meaningful exploration of those questions is abandoned, and the whole concept reduces to an exercise in style. Sean Barrett's I'll does a good job of making the point in an exaggerated manner via rhetoric-in-action.

The central premise of the scenario is weak and seems particularly ill-suited to a weighty treatment of the possibilities opened up by the novel mechanic. (As the review by Ben at Trotting Krips notes: "It is difficult to turn your life around in the middle of a Winn-Dixie.") The inciting incident is that the protagonist has a moment over the fresh gnocchi at the end of an unpleasant day. Prior to this, he seems to be just have been going aisle by aisle through this, his regular grocery store, in a run-of-the-mill bit of shopping. Is this the first time the store has stocked fresh gnocchi? Has he never noticed this item before? Has he forgotten that it was there? Why does *this* time seem so significant? The work offers no answers -- does not seem to have anticipated the question.

... Or maybe it has. Perhaps the added significant context is the proximity of the brunette, whose appearance reminds the PC of a woman, Clare, who features so prominently in many responses.

The work is noted for its 100+ unique "endings," but the range of supported actions is not well-correlated to the situation, making it hard to predict the effect of many commands. For example, if >SLEEP is tried by the player, it is because he or she is in "lawnmowering" mode and that is a default verb, not because it makes any sense for the PC to actually go to sleep. At least some responses use unique verbs that are unlikely to be discovered without a walkthrough or decompilation. It's hard to know what to make of responses to commands such as >GIBBER or >DROOL, which are highly unlikely to be tried without external prompting.

Interactions with the woman tend to send the "story" on an unexpectedly dark trajectory. Stevens notes that the PC "often treats apparently normal conversational gambits as an excuse to act psychotic." While I immediately agreed with this sentiment, that description is, on balance, overstated. The author usually chooses an unpleasantly surprising spin on the interactor's choice of actions involving her, even those that seem innocuous, in a manner that strikes me as a deliberate exploitation of the coarse-grained interaction afforded by the ASK/TELL model, which collapses many potential variations of topics into one keyword or keyphrase response. Since the woman is by far the most interesting part of the environment the player is certain to stumble over one of these warning signs soon enough, perhaps in response to >ASK WOMAN ABOUT PASTA or >ASK HER ABOUT HER CART. Sure, asking someone about the contents of their cart at the grocery store is an unconventional conversation starter, but does Barlow think that the PC's subsequent actions truly represent the player's intent? Compare those two responses to >ASK HER ABOUT HERSELF or >ASK HER ABOUT GNOCCHI for similarly unpredictable results in what is presumably intended to be a positive direction.

Inevitably, the interactor reaches a point in exploration where, to quote Stevens again, "options for civilized behavior run out." If one stops before that point (and has by happenstance missed the yellow flags presented when interacting with the woman), then it is indeed possible to come away with a sense that this is a single story dominated by themes of "romantic isolation" and "melancholic longing" as labeled by Jimmy Maher's review, or even one that is "beautiful and tragic" as described by manonamora's. However, the work itself does not stop there, and a completionist will soon discover huge swathes of additional "story" that are very dark indeed, with possibilities ranging as far as assaulting the woman in the store or the revelation that the PC is a murderer. When one bears these darker outcomes in mind, it becomes more difficult to interpret the "positive" outcomes as good things, after all. (In fact, on closer inspection, even some of the presumably-positive outcomes involving the woman seem tinged with a sense of predatory manipulation.) As one progresses through less and less likely significant responses, the PC becomes steadily more repugnant.

Between the single-response constraint and the author's capricious imputation of the intent behind any given command, I'm hard pressed to say what it is the player is supposed to be actually doing after loading up Aisle. When interacting with this work the interactor is not actually exploring a character or a story -- between the limited and/or contradictory information about the context of the single choice point for the protagonist and the extremely low ability to predict the impact of that choice on the situation, this work is missing the heart of what I consider interactive fiction to be. There is nothing solid to discover through persistence, and although any one response often resonates to a greater or lesser degree with others, it is difficult for the player to even draw firm boundaries between the various major permutations of the "true" situation, as these seem to bleed into each other in places. In the end, we are only exploring the author's momentary whimsies until patience and/or interest runs out.

As noted in the review of Mike Root, there is an alternative lens for evaluation of Aisle, which is that the work's purpose is to "play the player." The best evidence for this interpretation is the way that certain clusters of responses do paint a semi-consistent portrait of a certain type of person with a certain type of past. However, these responses do not seem consistent enough to look like deliberate planning on the author's part. For example, if the player focuses on mundane goals, the commands >EXAMINE GNOCCHI, >EXAMINE PASTA, >TAKE PASTA, >TAKE GNOCCHI, >TAKE SAUCE, >ASK WOMAN FOR SAUCE, and >PUSH CART are all straightforward options, but they each define significant aspects of the PC and/or his backstory in a manner that the player can't possibly predict. For example, >PUSH CART imputes an active anger to the PC over being confronted with the suppressed memory of Rome and edges slightly malevolent toward the brunette, while >TAKE GNOCCHI suggests long-settled resignation about the outcome of the events of Rome and ignores the fellow shopper. >TAKE SAUCE yields a Clare-less response implying that Rome wasn't that significant, after all, and >ASK WOMAN FOR SAUCE indirectly suggests a painful episode from which the protagonist might be starting to recover (or perhaps, taking some responses into account, something less pleasant). Although the outcomes differ significantly, I don't see any consistent logic mapping those significant differences in outcome to significant differences in the player's choice.

In summary I would say that Aisle does best when engaged with on a very shallow basis -- one can argue whether or not that necessarily means that the work itself is shallow. I think I would have liked it better with fewer implemented responses, and especially if Barlow had chosen to trim out or simply not respond to various default verbs related to violence, as it does for some of the stock actions in Inform 6's Standard Library. In that form it might live up to the praise in Jimmy Maher's review, even as it was reduced in scale to a bite-sized 15-minute novelty. I would definitely have liked it better if all endings were consistent with one another such that discerning the protagonist's total past becomes a genuine exercise in discovery, which would let the diligent player reach the point of making an informed and more importantly intentionally significant choice of the single allowed action.

I like the idea of telling a story in disjoint pieces -- it can be done really well. But it is harder than telling it straight (because there are fewer conventions to lean on).

In this case, the story parts seem somewhat disconnected from the actual choices made, and in combination with trying to guess what commands are accepted, I get a little tossed out of the story each turn. The narrative is intriguing, but not intriguing enough to keep me in it. Maybe I'm just incompatible with one-turn games.

Either way, you should give it a try! Clearly some people like it a lot and the investment is small.

You play an (older?) gentleman doing some late night groceries after a long day. Most of it is pretty mundane and uninteresting, until you see some fresh gnocchi in the pasta aisle. Your mind can only think of the last time you had those, in Rome. Around you, the shelves block your view to the other aisles, and a brunette woman stands a few meters away, filling her trolley with pots of sauce.

And in this aisle you stop your trolley, waiting on what to do next.

Though I never found more than a few dozens by myself/with the French IF peeps, there are over 136 actions producing an ending in this game. 136! Whether you interact with yourself or your environment, there are a lot more you can explore with this very restrained environment.

Even if the experiment of one-action-the-end is truly amusing and insanely entertaining (who doesn't like a treasure hunt for all 136 endings), it is the writing that shines the most in this piece. The game is humourous, and dark, has bits of lightness, and becomes incredibly sordid, it is sad and genuinely touching... It can say so much with so very little. Truly incredible.

Through the endings, a backstory forms around the PC. Or maybe two or three. He had a wife, went to Rome with her, but something happened (death/illness/something else?), and he was left alone. It is not truly clear what happened to his wife, or the PC's involvement in said disappearance/death, but what is certain is the pain and the guilt the PC still feels after all this time (has it be years, by now?), making him unable to form new connections with people, leaving him truly and completely alone. What stays is his fond memory of that trip to Rome and those gnocchi he ate there...

An interesting idea and some great endings. Some more disturbing than others, but maybe more disturbing that I tried then it was implemented.

After a few plays, you start really thinking of edge cases and find out the author thought of some interesting responses. It gave me the feeling of playing the older games when the parser wasn't rich and you could get stuck in a game and start trying some "off the wall" responses and getting surprised it was implemented.

I have a few more plays in me before I explore the internals to see all the endings.

The premise of Aisle is simple:

You're standing in the pasta aisle of a grocery store. You've got one turn. What will you do with your one chance, and what will it reveal about you?

The parser understands numerous commands, and recognizes each with a distinct ending. Some endings are happy, some are sad, some are funny, some are disturbing.

Aisle is a very short story that can be played through repeatedly in rapid succession, with all sorts of contradictory conclusions reached. It's very well done, amusing, and probably worth the small time investment if this sort of game seems interesting to you.

As someone who *doesn't* play interactive fiction games, I enjoy this as a way to test out commands. It can be frustrating after a few minutes, but it is pleasant to just see how many endings you can get out of it.

New as I am to interactive fiction, I had not heard of this game until recently, nor had I heard of the concept of its genre - you have only one turn in which to input a command, after which the story resets and you can start over, ad infinitum.

Aisle, which is as of this review a 20 year-old game, is an extraordinary piece of writing, and I can see why it has a special place in the hearts of so many. Although the concept is simple, it is executed so brilliantly and with such depth that each repeated turn reveals another layer, and another, until you have not just one story but many in parallel.

There are breadcrumbs placed throughout leading you to more ideas of what to do next, so it's not really a case of just throwing in random verbs to see what sticks - though you can do that if you want, and I think it'd be just as rewarding. There's also a list of commands available out there for the completionists who want all 183 possible outcomes. The true genius, however, lies in how all of those outcomes are woven together - or not together, as the case may be - and the depth of feeling created from every piece as well as the whole.

After playing this game I am curious to try others like it, but I think I will always remember Aisle, decades late to the party as I was. Five packets of Gnocchi.

Perhaps the first serious game that would automatically end after one move. The premise is quite simple as you play an ordinary man in an ordinary supermarket who has stopped in the pasta aisle next to a woman who is also shopping. There are exactly 136 possible moves you can make that produce 136 separate endings. There is neither a puzzle nor a plot, and one would be hard pressed to say this is even a character study, as some of the endings’ portrayal of your character’s history contradict each other.

I do wish there was something more here to unravel, but as it stands this is quite a pleasant diversion thanks to the imagination and quality writing of Sam Barlow. More importantly, Aisle inspired many future authors in experimenting with the genre, including a few entertaining games that mimic this one.

I still come back and play Aisle about every five years. There's just something about the protagonist's world view that makes me smile.

This is another game that is made to be replayed. And the player can choose how many times they want to replay, or how much of the story they want to uncover. I tagged it "mystery-ish" because, while it's not a puzzle game with a mystery and clues in the traditional sense, the player uses the previous play-throughs to know how else they can interact with the setting and, therefore, uncover more back-story and characterization. You put a small amount of effort into the game, and receive an increasingly rich back-story and characterization.

It's a game that can function as an accessible introduction to IF but the beauty of the narrative is for anyone. I consider that I've "played" the game but I haven't yet reached a point where I feel I've "finished" the game. I'd consider it a short game though I haven't yet reached an "end" and I don't know if there is one.

I didn't feel very invested in the characters. The behavior and insanity of the protagonist doesn't help with this. I don't feel like I can really figure anything out because the narrator is unreliable, and I don't really feel like the personal experience of the narrator has any relevance to me because I'm not insane. But, most of all, I found the absence of challenges to be the biggest reason for not enjoying this very much.

I play games to have fun, and one of the biggest sources of fun for me is being engaged in solving problems and overcoming challenges. When you take that away from a game, you'd better have a really darn good case for me to want to play this game as opposed to the many, many other games out there that DO have that engagement. This game doesn't provide a good enough alternative to that.

After playing without a guide and figuring out enough of the story, I went through and tried all the commands in the walkthrough. There's certainly some fun in that, with how many different commands are implemented, but it's just not structured in a way that makes it interesting. The lack of a goal makes it particularly problematic.

This game reminds of Her Story. You have to piece together what is going on by watching short video clips. I think Her Story is basically a better version of this game because it actually has a goal and actually has a flow and pace to it. Stuff changes in the "meta" game as you discover important bits of information. Having, at the very least, a meta layer might've made Aisle more interesting for me.

All of that aside, it's quite short and you can play it in the space of an hour. This, alone, is it's most redeeming quality (and I don't mean that in the sense of "it's great it's short because it SUCKS"). It gives you a complete, fully-realized, unique experience all in the course of an hour.

I give this three stars because, despite my lack of engagement with it, it was short and unique. I would recommend this, because what do you really have to lose with a game this short?