Hand Me Down

Ruby’s riding the bus, on her way to the hospital. Her father’s not well at all, and Ruby’s struggling, wanting to see and hug him as fast as possible but at the same time reluctant to see him sick, postponing the confrontation with her dad in a bed in a too-white room.

There’s been a rise lately of a new genre or side-branch within IF: Works where the main game is embedded within a frame-story which opens a perspective on the protagonist and the (fictional) writer, which colours the player’s interpretation of the events. In Repeat the Ending and LAKE Adventure, what would have been a rather standard text-adventure on its own gains a more complex meaning and narrative depth by the player’s experience being informed by the frame-story.

Hand Me Down's prologue introduces Ruby and her father, Miles Walker, in a slice-of-life choice-based manner. The choices have no immediate consequences for the rest of the game, the player can choose to rush to the hospital room, or go with Ruby’s reluctance and opt for a number of delaying activities without special punishment or reward. The simple presence of the choices as a depiction of Ruby’s worries is enough to put the player in the right mindset for what follows.
Once Ruby is with her father, he is quickly wheeled off for medical tests. Before that, however, he offers her a much-belated present: a game he has written in TADS3 for her sixteenth birthday.

-A Very Important Date-
The main game, considered outside of the frame-story, is a straightforward treasure hunt. There’s a party going on in the back garden of the manor, but no one, not even you, the birthday girl, is allowed without an invitation, a costume, and something to share with the other guests.

The manor has an expansive map which is almost completely open for exploration from the start. There are outdoor and indoor regions, some rooms with unexpected functions, and loads of stuff to examine and investigate.
Simple (but thorough) exploration will yield a great harvest of objects, some necessary to gain entrance to the party, some apparently just stuff lying around, either on its own or as left-overs from finding another object in or under them. The inventory can become quite unwieldy if you should choose to hang on to everything. Leaving items behind might mean that you lack a crucial object for a puzzle you have yet to encounter… I picked a convenient central stash-spot to dump everything I didn’t regard as useful at the time.

Puzzles range from simple lock-and-key to clever physics to fiendishly difficult multi-step decoding, and even dating. (In the historical sense, that is.) This latter variety absolutely requires the use of outside sources to solve, something generally frowned upon in IF. In A Very Important Date however, with its game-within-game setup, it’s not only justified but could even be leveraged to deepen the player’s engagement. (More on that below.)
The “fiendishly difficult” puzzles could be brought down to simply “perplexing at first” by a scrupulous pruning and streamlining of the gameplay relating to those puzzles. More gentle nudges toward a solution when the player is flailing around aimlessly, cleaning up some of the clutter in rooms with such a puzzle so the pertinent parts are more readily visible.

In fact, the implementation as a whole is rather uneven. For most of the game, it’s more than adequate, splendidly surprising even in some instances where examining bits of scenery returns a beautiful reverie about the sun’s rays, or in one memorable instance, a not entirely shabby freestyle rap. In other parts though it seems the author fell victim to a heavy bout of implementation fatigue, leaving all but the most immediate objects undescribed and thus dropping much of the moodsetting scenery descriptions aside. At one point I joked with the author in a PM that I could read his state of mind through the depth of implementation, whether he was in the creative flow or stressing against time, playful and free or distracted and worried.

The same criticism holds for the writing. Here and there the descriptions feel cluttered, grating sentences and elegance lost. This actively works against clear visualisation of the surroundings by the player. It makes me suspect that the author too did not have as coherent an image of the room as he wished, or that more time was needed to sort the important and unimportant bits.
This said, there are true flashes of brilliance too. The Vegetable Garden with its compost heap, or (my personal favourite) the Statue Garden with its intricately carved figures are a beauty to imagine, and made a lasting visual impression on me.

For any other game, I could close the review here, concluding that I had fun with this challenging and satisfying treasure-hunt puzzler, and that it might benefit from another run through the testing mill. With Hand Me Down however, I have only laid bare the superficially obvious. The game-within-game approach deepens the emotional response I had, widens the range of interpretation considerably.

Synthesis

Throughout A Very Important Date, there are reminders of the “real world” of the prologue. The author, Miles Walker, Ruby’s father (!), has left pictures, notes, letters, all kinds of information about his own life and that of his father, Ruby’s grandfather, around the manor. Perhaps these started as little Easter eggs for his daughter to find, little tidbits about her family’s history to discover in her birthday present. Along the way, however, Miles has begun using his writing of A Very Important Date as a way to capture intimate lost moments, ventilate anger and grief, remember or break down turning points in his own life.

The PC-Ruby in A Very Important Date remains a typical underdescribed player character in an old school adventure game, frozen in excited exploration and casually conversing with funny animals. Miles Walker understandably wrote her like this, expecting his real-life daughter to project her personal feelings of joy and discovery onto this digital placeholder. This PC-Ruby shows no emotional response to her father’s sadness and frustration evident in the notes he hid in the game. But, with the Ruby from the prologue still echoing in our minds, we can only imagine the effect this all has on that girl sitting in the too-white hospital room with the laptop on her lap…

This is where the intense emotional impact of Hand Me Down lies for me: In keeping in mind that I am not playing A Very Important Date, I am playing Ruby who is playing as herself in this text adventure her father made for her as a deeply personal gift. I’m channeling this girl in the too-white hospital room, shaken by worry about her sick father, learning intimate details of her father’s life she didn’t know or realise. My mind’s eye kept flashing back and forth between the manor, where my PC was doing all this fun and frustrating stuff, jumping through the hoops as we make our adventure PCs do, and the too-white hospital room where Ruby is typing commands onto the keyboard, worried about her father, maybe crying…

This invites further speculation about this tangled web of of relations. If the player is channeling Ruby playing PC-Ruby, then what of the fictional author? Miles Walker, Ruby’s father, is a character in Hand Me Down. He’s the in-game writer of A Very Important Date. While he was struggling with TADS3’s containers, was Brett Witty channeling Miles Walker as he is seen by the player?

The continued tension between levels of reality, the juxtaposition of the girl exploring the manor and the girl crying in the too-white hospital room, lift Hand Me Down to a degree of sophistication, a height of complexity above and beyond the qualities of the surface adventure. The characterisation and emotional weight set by the prologue reverberate throughout the game-within-game, the father’s intimate intrusions serve as a bridge, feeding “real-world” feelings into the imaginary adventure, regularly jolting the player’s realisation of the wider story in which she is taking part.

It is here that I think there is a great opportunity for the puzzles requiring out-of-game resources to play a significant role in leveraging the identification of the player with Ruby, and in more closely entangling the text-adventure with the frame-story. The father, aware of the fact that his daughter is an adventure-novice, could break the in-game fourth wall to leave little encouraging remarks, explaining to her that she might need to look up some information in an encyclopaedia. (“Hey Ruby-doo! I’m glad you’ve already made this much progress. If you found this note in the skull, you might want to open up Wikipedia.”) This would strengthen the in-game father-daughter bond, and it would also alert the player to do what Ruby’s father says: prepare to do some out-of-game research.

Bugs and momentary lapses in implementation aside, Hand Me Down had me deeply engaged for more than five hours (fortunately I remembered to enter my rating at the 2h-mark).

Remember: The player is not you. The player is Ruby, the girl in the too-white hospital room, worried sick about her dad, crying over the “treasures” of her father’s intimate revelations her adventure-counterpart discovers in the family manor.

Very moving.
----wipes dust speck from left eye----