The Missing City Council

The author's comment from the STF website: “My first piece of interactive fiction. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?”

Yes! And this is an amazing place to start.

While I didn't get practically anything, I did learn that saunas are (supposedly) a common sight in Finnish buildings.

To win, and I'm basing this off of the walkthrough since I couldn't finish it myself: you have to (Spoiler - click to show)infuse a cup with the putrid stench of (?) oil, make the two guards of a prison cell holding some political leaders/councillors/long-dead heads of state inside sniff it, making them sick, while you free the guys inside.

10/10 idea, (but) flawful execution.

Before that though, you have to perform a strangely specific set of seemingly random actions that the average player would obviously never arrive to without being high on LSD. Just look at the walkthrough to see what I mean.

And speaking of the walkthrough. The game seems to have been updated since then, so the walkthrough's outdated, atleast in my experience, cause when I tried (Spoiler - click to show)giving the left guard and the right guard (I love it) my bewitched cup, they sniffed it and promptly returned it to me... I feel inadequate...

This transcends from one-star to two-star territory purely because of the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)the lift "makes some regular lift noises" while lifting you through all the lifting places. I LIFT IT.

And the politicians... say some confusing stuff right after (Spoiler - click to show)being released... before George V runs off to a (World War 1 Era — I looked it up — bi-) plane conveniently parked in the basement, and flies off... "Crisis averted", though I have no clue what. (Spoiler - click to show)(an invasion on Finland? Rereading it right now, I feel like I get it a bit more...)

Yeah, title of the review.

EDIT: I completely forgot to mention (Spoiler - click to show)Untitled. Untitled is an enigma. Behold the in-game description: "175 lbs of hard-boiled sweets, of many flavours. They seem to have mostly melted together because of the heat."

Weird, right? But this hits the perfect itch for me, one that I didn't even realise was there. Gives (the utmost vague) vibes of stuff like (Spoiler - click to show)MissingNo. from Pokémon or the Far Lands from Minecraft; it's like the start of a creepypasta or an ARG.

What you gotta do is (Spoiler - click to show)"hit" Untitled, whereupon you receive a drop of (randomly flavoured, I tested this unwittingly) "boiled sweet".

Yeah, it was probably never intended as any of those things, and I'm stretching it a bit, but it makes you wonder... An IF where you solve an ARG as the player would be epic. Even better if the IF itself is just one piece of the puzzle, and you gotta play a bunch of them to figure it all out.

I'd settle for either, honestly (seeing other people solve ARGs is entertainment enough for me), though the former would be more accessible for more people.

3 stars for inspiring me.

This game feels more like an unfinished prototype than a fully-intentioned game. I have no doubt it could be completed into an enjoyable game, but it has yet to be so completed.

You start with no explanation in a room in a building that has 4 floors and a basement. Items are listed in each room in the default 'you can see' listing, and most have no description. Some items are not implemented at all (like the desk in the office whose description is 'This is an office with a desk').

I am so grateful for David Welbourn's walkthrough. Most of his work is with more polished games but there is real value in a polished and complete walkthrough for an incomplete/rough game like this.

If this is ever updated I'll update the score for sure.

Local government is weird. In my career I’ve done advocacy at the federal level as well as the state level in California, working on bills that would raise and spend billions of dollars or make substantial changes to major sectors of the economy. But I’ve also done work in cities, counties, and other local governments, and while a lot of the dynamics are exactly the same, just with smaller numbers, I’ve also come across irruptions of pure chaos that are impossible to explain without just saying “man, this is weird.”

Like, one time I was supporting a community group that was pushing for expanded weekend burial hours in a rural public cemetery district – they were Hmong, and had a tradition of doing Sunday funerals – which seemed pretty straightforward. They’d gone to the district superintendent, who was an old guy who didn’t much like changing the way things were done, and he’d said he wouldn’t do it, so they went to a sympathetic board member who said he’d be willing to push for it if he could get a sense of what it would cost. The superintendent wasn’t going to be helpful, so I worked with a colleague to analyze the district’s budget, made some estimates, and concluded it would cost maybe a couple thousand bucks wouldn’t really impact the bottom line. We were feeling good about things when my colleague went out to one of the district’s board meetings to share the analysis – except instead of greeting her presentation with a “huh, cool, glad this won’t be a big deal after all,” the superintendent freaked out at the idea that someone else was looking at the (publicly available) books. Even more unlikely, it turned out that one of the attendees at the meeting was a woman who’d decided to spend her retirement going to every single cemetery district meeting, and she tracked down my colleague’s phone number so she could leave a rambling three-minute voicemail in which she expressed how upset she was about… something, it was very hard to tell. Everyone got angry at everyone else, the county supervisor had to pull some strings to get people removed from the board, and the superintendent eventually decided this was all too stressful for him and retired. It was an enormous mess that took hours and hours to deal with, a gigantic fight over the smallest imaginable iota of policy. Like I said: weird!

But not as weird as what’s going on in the Missing City Council (ha, managed to get around to it before we hit the 500 word mark!) The premise of this debut parser game is that you’re a Finn at City Hall for a hearing about a zoning dispute, but when you arrive, the building is almost deserted: nobody’s in any of the offices or meeting rooms, except for a pair of British guards inexplicably hanging out in the basement. So your task is to explore the building, get through some locked doors, and solve a multi-step puzzle to find out what’s happened to the misplaced aldermen so they can rule in your favor.

At least, that’s what I think is going on, based on the title and blurb; the game itself doesn’t provide any direct context or motivation, so this is really one of those fumble-around-with-everything-that-looks-like-a-puzzle-until-you-win affairs. And fumble I did, because Missing City Council makes a bunch of idiosyncratic interface decisions, like eschewing compass directions in favor of having you ENTER or go IN various doors and passages. The contents of rooms are also often listed in a jumble at the end of the sparse location descriptions, which lends a bizarre air to proceedings:

"You can see a staircase up, a door to the lift, a left guard, a right guard, a door to the toilet, a door to the shelter and a door to the garage here."

There are also a lot of the usual infelicities of a minimally-implemented game that didn’t receive any outside testing – many objects (including the player) have default descriptions, there are locked doors that open only by PUSHING and items mentioned in descriptions that aren’t implemented, and so on. The puzzles also seem like they must only make sense to the author – while I dimly intuited that I needed to make some tea to distract the British guards (points for knowing national stereotypes), the steps required are so Byzantine that I can’t see how a player would make progress without going to the walkthrough. Like, the first step major step is to intuit that an avant-guard art piece described as being made of boiled sweets would dislodge some of its hard candies if you hit it, then hitting it enough times to get a lemon drop to pop off so that you can put it in the tea to make lemon Earl Grey.

Usually try to say at least something nice about authors’ first games, no matter how much I’ve complained about their rookie mistakes, and that’s actually easy to do here: this is a charmingly zany premise, some of the scene-setting, like the art collection crammed into the upstairs sauna, is memorably silly, and the ultimate explanation as to what’s going on made me laugh. So this is an author with a unique comedic angle, and we could always use more farce in parser IF – hopefully their next game will get some more testing, and sand down the weirdness so that it’s quirky rather than completely impenetrable.

(Oh, and there’s a happy ending to the cemetery district story: a new superintendent took over, and confirmed that yeah, they could extend the hours for just a couple thousand bucks, no big deal. I’m not sure whether that lady kept going to the board meetings, but I like to think she does, and finds something new to get incredibly upset about every month).