A Rope of Chalk

Ryan Veeder has been one of my biggest influences in game design. His games are generally the model I use for quality and ease of play.

One thing I’ve always admired about his work is how he makes the most trivial parts of his games as elaborate as possible and simplifies the important parts. In the first review I ever wrote of one of his games, I said:

"The game gives you explicit directions on what to do at first. I love ignoring directions in parser games; in some games, like Bronze, the game just doesn’t move forward at all if you ignore the directions. In this game, ignoring the directions gives you a lot of different, fun results.
[…]
The conversation system seemed at first incredible, and then very annoying, especially with the main favorable NPC. You have a lot to say, but 95% of it is completely irrelevant."

I no longer really see that as annoying, because now it’s something I look forward to. And those two quotes above could easily describe this game as well.

This game is a multi-perspective look at a sidewalk chalk contest in 2011. Given Ryan’s predilection for going whole-hog into fictional backstories for his game, I think it’s likely this is entirely fictional, but there is a great deal of worldbuilding behind the scenes included in an epilogue. It’s especially interesting that the intent of the epilogue is to construct in the player an image of Ryan and his personal life, giving the game a pseudo-autobiographical nature.

The actual gameplay is walking through a sidewalk chalk contest multiple times as different people, together with some flashbacks and some flashweirds where things go bizarre. The game is abstract enough at times that you could put any personal interpretation on it, and I enjoy the interpretation where the sidewalk chalk contest represents IFComp. Funnily enough, it represents this comp very well, with games with heavy worldbuilding, a game that is entirely a political statement/slogan, games that are mostly decorative, games based almost entirely on other media by other creators, and sexy games that some judges feel are too sexy (guess that judge is me!).

So I enjoyed the game, it had exactly the kind of things I look for in a Ryan Veeder game. It’s always a pleasure to see the directions his mind takes him. If you liked this game, I could recommend Winter Storm Draco for a generally similar style. If you want more puzzles, I’d recommend Taco Fiction, The Lurking Horror II: The Lurkening, the Crocodracula games or Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder.

+++++Polish, Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional Impact, Would I play again?: All 5 categories are satisfied here.