Help! I am Locked in a Fortune Cookie Factory!

Criticism, I firmly believe, is most valuable when it’s sympathetic to the specific goals of a work. “This apple is no sort of orange” is about as helpful as complaining that you can’t talk to the monsters in Doom, or that there aren’t enough puzzles in a kinetic novel. Articulating what a game is trying to accomplish, then analyzing what pieces of the design and implementation either support or undermine those aims, is what I try to take as my guiding ethos for reviewing – if I allow myself some leeway to nerd out about themes or influences or personal resonance, I like to think that’s OK so long as that foundational work of criticism is there.

By those lights, I can only judge Help! I am Locked in a Fortune Cookie Factory a resounding success. The game’s itch page explains that the goal was to make the smallest piece of IF ever, with size measured not by word count or file size but the physical dimensions of the screen displaying the game. And by implementing a miniature text adventure in Thumby, a platform that emulates what’s basically an even smaller-than-real-life version of the Nintendo Gameboy with a screen about the size of a stamp, I think the author must have done it. Mission accomplished!

…and if I were consistent in my critical methods, that’s where the case would rest, I suspect, but I can’t help assessing the game’s quality qua text adventure, and also what kind of experience the unique interface provides. So let’s proceed with those inquiries, with the disclaimer that these are just bonus sections because the game clearly did what it set out to do.

On the former question, I’d say it’s completely fine. I’ll give it points for the overall structure, which is basically an extended shaggy-dog story: you’ve messed up your shift schedule and gotten stuck in the eponymous factory right when it’s scheduled for demolition, so you need to scramble around trying to get out. There are five different potential avenues of escape you need to attempt before the final course of action unlocks, which leads to a groan-worthy and entirely predictable punch-line (I mean this in the most complimentary way possible). None of the five are especially challenging to figure out – the parser is pretty stripped-down, so most of them involve just typing USE [OBVIOUS OBJECT] in the relevant room, with the few exceptions just requiring straightforward, logical item usage. The writing is serviceable, light-hearted without ever being funny as such, and the only real quibble I had with the scenario is that at one point you try to wriggle out a vent, and the game notes that your head and shoulders fit just fine, but your rib cage can’t make it through, and I can’t help pointing out that that’s not how bodies work.

As to the second question:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!! FHHFGGGGFHNNNNNGGGGGGGHHHH!!! YUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGGKLKLKLKLKLK!!!

[pant,pant]

I am having a hard time coming up with comparisons for what the experience of actually playing HILFCF is like that do not involve trivializing actual real-world atrocities. So I won’t make the attempt, and simply describe how the game works.

Let’s start with that tiny display. It fits about 12 characters at a time, so anything longer than that slowly scrolls across, with each sentence repeating until you push a button and it moves on to the next one. I guess that’s pretty much the only way to manage things, but when I tell you that the description of an object is often around 100 characters, and the results of one of the five futile escape attempts can be more like 250, you can start to see the problem. Imagine every complaint you’ve ever heard about timed text in IF, then raise it to the power of please god make it stop.

So much for output – there’s also the input side of things. Thumby takes inspiration from the Gameboy here too, so by default you have a directional pad and two buttons. The default, recommended interface option is to use the directions (mapped to the arrows) to scroll through the letters of the alphabet one by one, with the buttons allowing you to select a letter or delete one. This mode also boasts an autocomplete feature, but it still took me like fifteen seconds to enter TAKE BAR. That was the last command I attempted with the default control scheme; fortunately, there’s also a QWERTY option where you can just use your keyboard as normal, except, whimsically, the m key doesn’t work. Oh, and while the two-word parser is generally pretty straightforward, many map connections aren’t two-way, requiring you to type BACK rather than the relevant direction to retrace your steps, which makes the game’s geometry far more confusing than it needs to be.

Put all this together, and the fifteen minutes I spent playing the game are among the most physically unpleasant of my IF career, leaving me squirming, impatient, and frustrated. Admittedly some of these issues were unavoidable given the aim of cramming a full text game into such a small container, but more could have been done to match the content to the game’s affordances, like writing highly-condensed descriptions that wouldn’t require so much waiting (I’m reminded of After-Words in the 2021 Comp, which made every single bit of text in the game exactly two words). And the weird map connections, and the inability to type m, just feel like bizarrely gratuitous obstacles to engagement.

I don’t want to be too negative here – I do find the ridiculousness of the game’s goal delightful, and the actual words and design are more than good enough given the remit (I am very partial to a shaggy-dog story). It’s just that HILFCF is way, way easier to enjoy by someone telling you all about it than by girding your loins and playing it. And whatever a game’s stated objectives, that sure seems like a shame.