A Very Strong Gland

What a fun little game!

This is a single-stroke parser game, a genre which I've seen a few of in the last year or two and not many more before then. So a single keypress becomes an entire command. It was disconcerting at times (especially trying to repeat past commands by hitting the up arrow, which maps to NORTH) but I eventually got the hold of it.

The idea is that you're kidnapped by aliens who submit you to nonsensical tests, until disaster strikes. Now they rely on you for help!

Gameplay is limited to only two action: eXamine and Touch. A few other commands like LOOK and WAIT also work. This may not seem like a lot to work with, but it's like the Library of Babel. That library is a conceptual idea where every possible 410-page book is in a library, containing essentially any novel that is ever written. Someone once pointed out that it's not as weird as you might think, as you could make your own 'library of babel' with two books that only have one page each (one with a 0 in it and one with a 1 in it); by reading them in the right order, you could reproduce any possible text.

So it's the same idea here. The simple two commands are made more complex by having cycling environmental elements, like buttons that do different things every time you touch them, or timers you can set off, or additional attributes you can acquire and then remove (which behave like extra verbs). So the limited command set is just a blind.

This is really hard to come up with puzzles for; I wrote a giant game last year with different areas, and one I specifically wanted to mimic Arthur DiBianca's style. It was by far the hardest to code, the most buggy, and the hardest to figure out, trying to wrassle tons of moving scenes and machine parts.

The puzzles in this game are similar to math research, where you just try to find patterns or loopholes and bang your head against a wall until you solve it. I got stuck in the middle, and was typing up a question to ask for help, but as I typed I figured it out. The final puzzle stymied me too; I had the right idea, but my timing was off.

The story is sparse but has funny parts. Everything familiar has a goofy name and everything goofy has a familiar name. Objects are clearly chosen so that they start with distinct letters of the alphabet (like 'yo-yo'). Overall the aliens reminded me of those in the movie Home.

I had fun with this. Several of the puzzles were very frustrating before I solved them and fun after.

It’s no secret that I’m very interested by the ways limited parser games share design DNA with certain kinds of puzzley choice-based games as well as hearken back to the golden age of point-and-click graphic adventures – here’s the long version of the argument, if you’re interested – so it’s likewise unsurprising that I’m very interested in the games of Arthur DiBianca, who much be one of the acknowledged masters of the subgenre whether you’re judging on quality or quantity. While an analysis of his full oeuvre is well beyond the scope of a single review, I’d argue there’s a divide between his cornucopia games, which are overstuffed with unlockable gameplay options and often bring in ideas from other kinds of games – I’m thinking of Skies Above and its myriad clicker-inspired minigames, or Sage Sanctum Scramble and its potpourri of word puzzles, or the complex, roguelike systems of Black Knife Dungeon – and his cooler, minimalist games, which succeed by stripping the player’s tools way down and wringing every single puzzle idea out of this restricted palette – Inside the Facility’s mapquesting, or Temple of Shorgil’s statue-swapping.

A Very Strong Gland is of this latter school. You’re nobody special this time out – just a schlub abducted by a trio of aliens so they can run tests on you to assess your intelligence – and since their translation software only works one way, you can’t even talk back: all you’re able to do is walk around, look at stuff, and poke stuff (oh, and wait – there are lots of timing puzzles). Fortunately for the aliens, you’re a resourceful sort and that limited action set is more than enough to save the day once things go wrong with their little experiments. Their spaceship is small but dense, with a host of locked doors, helpful robots, capability-enhancing auras, and even more mysterious devices to master as you fix its broken systems. Even this description undersells how streamlined the game is, because its interface employs the single-keypress approach previously used in Vambrace of Destiny. There’s no need to press enter or type the full name of objects; the game automatically translates X T into EXAMINE TULIP or T O to TOUCH OUTLINE.

There’s nothing much in the way of incidental scenery here, and everything you find in the ship is mostly incomprehensible and abstract; most of the puzzles involve figuring out controls that are described as a thimble or a funnel or a scallop, but whose function is entirely divorced from those forms. And while the aliens can speak to you and occasionally give helpful hints about what to do next, their advice also requires quite a lot of interpretation. They’re charming little weirdos – I picture them talking like Andy Kaufman’s character in Taxi – but rather than provide much in the way of context or character engagement, they mostly just blurble on about their oblu or complaining that the shouter is broken.

I’ll confess that this combination of parsimonious mechanics and abstract theme made my playthrough of A Very Strong Gland an arid affair. The setting feels like an artificial test-bed for intellectual challenges, because diegetically that’s what it’s supposed to be, but this means I didn’t experience exploration as intrinsically rewarding separate from solving the puzzles. Those puzzles, meanwhile, often rely on trial-and-error experimentation with devices whose functions are intentionally obfuscated, which likewise felt less than engaging. This describes most puzzle-based games, I suppose, and I enjoy many of them, but I especially like it when solving a challenge gets me a new bit of story or character development, or when I’m able to quickly get through an obstacle because I’ve intuited a logical solution; here, both of those payoffs are mostly off the table.

I get that with such a restricted action set, you need to design puzzles not to be susceptible to trial-and-error, and I admit that the solutions on display here are clever ones – but I unfortunately found them dry and occasionally annoying, requiring great leaps in logic that often rely on paying attention to tiny, unexciting details, as well as being fiddly to implement (again, there a lot of timing puzzles, and the single-keystroke thing plus the lack of undo meant I made a bunch of mistakes shifting my aura and had to restart the relevant sequences). There are some puzzles here I did enjoy – helping one of the aliens conduct an EVA repair job built on stuff I’d previously learned in a reasonably intuitive way, for example – but I confess that I got through a bunch of them just looking at another player’s transcript for hints since the experimentation required to make progress sometimes felt exhausting.

This is a negative-sounding review of a game that’s solidly designed and implemented, and will I’m sure spark joy in a certain kind of player. But to me it’s primarily interesting as a case study in how far you can push the limited-parser approach before I lose interest: I’ve realized I much prefer those games of abundance, where simplifying the interface allows for new ideas and new kinds of gameplay to be put into effect, so that the restrictions feel additive rather than just jettisoning standard parser-game affordances without replacing them with something else.