Improv: Origins

A prequel arriving more than two decades after the original series wrapped up, Improv: Origins is a funny, deep one-room puzzler that makes me interested to check out the sequels it sets up. There’s some old-school difficulty, plus a nasty bug or two that made things even harder than intended on my playthrough, so I can’t help bemoaning the lack of modern conveniences like a hint menu, so the game’s definitely not for everyone, but the entertaining cast of characters and intricate puzzle design made me glad I powered through (and, er, begged for help on the forum when I got stuck).

What we’ve got here is comedy superheroes. I see you shuffling for the door, and I know, I know, that sounds pretty dire. But the game makes a great first impression, with sophisticated jokes that go way beyond the typical played out super-parody. Like, your hero is a temp – so far so standard, but the reason the bottom’s dropped out of the heroism game is that a superhero bubble has just burst. The game’s set in a bank – your job is to open up a locked safe after the bank fired the inventor who created it, and they huffed off without sharing the trick of accessing the thing – and as a result there’s a set of economics jokes that kept me laughing, like the painting of two financial-themed heroes, PIN and Teller. Sure, much like with the game as a whole the author must have been sitting on that one for several decades, but it still got me.

It quickly becomes clear that the challenge on offer is no laughing matter, however. As befits a good one-room game, you’re presented with a clear goal and a dense space to explore in hopes of finding an answer. Atypically for this sub-genre, though, soon enough you’re not alone – your MacGuyver-themed superhero is eventually joined by others whose powers include object-finding echolocation, Google News searches avant la letter, and deep familiarity with the dictionary. This is the crew, presumably, that star in the 90s-era Frenetic Five games, and their powers – and personalities – strike a good balance between being comically useless and surprisingly helpful. The group is implemented well, too, with the team serving as a Greek chorus to some of your more hapless flailing, and interjecting into each other’s conversations with the occasional bit of kibitzing.

For all the fun banter and clever writing, though, the game is very much structured around that puzzle, and as mentioned up top, I found it to be a doozy. After finding that the obvious ways to try to open the vault end in failure, I wound up doing a lot of further poking and prodding in the environment not because I had a clear sense of how it would be helpful, but just because it was something to do. And this single big puzzle has a lot of sub-steps, some of which can feel more frustrating than they need to (the mini-puzzle of accumulating rubber bands especially seemed like it ended in anticlimax, though the bug I mention below might have contributed to that). There are definitely high points – I felt super clever when I sussed out how Lex’s word powers could be leveraged – but also moments where it seemed like reading the author’s mind, or using out-of-game thinking, was necessary to progress, and overall I spent a lot of time banging my head against the wall.

What’s worse, some of that banging was occasioned by what seemed to be bugs. The blurb indicates that it’s meant to be impossible to render the game unwinnable, but I think I managed to bork it up by (Spoiler - click to show) taping the rubber-band ball to the book, which rendered the former object unusable and didn’t seem to be possible to reverse. I also was sent on a wild goose chase when looking for a password for the vault, after consulting with the finding-specialist Clapper to locate it: (Spoiler - click to show)typing ASK CLAPPER FOR PASSWORD results in the heroines herself starting to beep, which by the rules as they’ve been spelled out indicates that she should know, or somehow be, the password. But that appears to be completely incorrect, unless I missed an alternate solution.

These are significant downsides to the game, and again, there’s no integrated hints or even separate walkthrough file to hold the player’s hand, which makes me think some might not make it to the end. Still, I think there’s more than enough creativity and humor here to make Improv: Origins worth trying. What’s even better news, the ABOUT text indicates the author’s return to the IF scene looks to be no one-time thing, so I’m looking forward to seeing more of their work – and as mentioned, I’ll likely check out their older stuff too, though I hope someone’s hacked together some walkthroughs in the intervening decades…