Archive 13

There is, I would posit, no better setting for a piece of IF than a library. In IF everything is text, and the interactive element means that the player is necessarily manipulating text, moving from one passage to the next, trying them on for size, imagining how they could be different. That’s why there’s always been something post-modern about IF even from the very beginning, and why there’s nothing more perfectly apt than placing the protagonist within an enclosed environment bounded by words, and letting them free.

Of course, take this logic too far and we wind up arguing that Naughty in the Library is a better piece of IF than Zork, and while there may be certain incredibly narrow circumstances where that’s true, that’s probably an indication we should step back from the sweeping declaratory statements and motte-and-bailey our argument into just being that libraries in IF are cool.

Archive 13 is a short Twine game entirely set within such a place, though with a pair of meta twists, one authored, one circumstantial. The former is that the eponymous archive is no public institution – it’s an idiosyncratic congeries of newspapers, yearbooks, diaries, and official documents, arranged not by publication type or subject area or even author, but purely by date. It seems to serve as a machine not for general reference, but for remembering the traumatic disappearances of several children, a decade apart. And you, a night watchman new to the task, turn out to have a key role to play in that mechanism of remembering.

The second meta twist is that the game is written entirely in Russian. Through the magic of Google Translate, I was able to play it despite my one semester of college Russian being way in the rearview mirror at this point, but as with so many tech company offerings, this is something of a poisoned chalice: relying on a machine to render the game’s prose makes me unsure which of my impressions are based on a close-enough encounter with what the author wrote, and which are biased by the idiosyncratic or over-literal workings of a stack of silicon. Don’t get me wrong, there are some howlers here that I’m sure are machine errors – the choice, upon noticing a file, to “honor the article”, is almost certainly mangling an idiom for pulling it out and paying special attention to it – but there are only so many such outliers. So while I can make a tentative critical approach to the premise – I’m in favor, see above – everything about my judgment of the implementation is subject to the world’s biggest asterisks.

As such, examination of (what I think of as) the game’s prose is rather besides the point. Overall though my subjective experience was fine; the writing seems effective at its aims, conveying clarity when it wants too, becoming appropriately muddled when the story in the papers starts to get tangled up with the story of the watchman, and boasting some engagingly clunky images and locutions that might be translation bugs, or might be stylistic tics authentically in the Russian original, but which I kinda liked all the same even as I acknowledge that yeah, it does feel pretty awkward at times.

I’m hopefully on firmer ground with the pacing. Again, there’s nothing especially novel here but I think it works well enough. The game is structured around multiple shifts, as you perform more of your work and learn more about the disappearances in each of your visits. There are only a few layers to this onion, but they’re peeled back engagingly, from the early intimations about a chapel that no one remembers, to more directly spooky revelations from the documents and the fellow who has the shift right before yours. The choice structure also helps keep things moving along briskly, as there are usually a couple of dialogue options with the other watchman, or decisions about what order to tackle your research, to liven up even the more linear sections.

The blurb does promise three endings, so at least some of those choices do branch the story, but the exact mechanics for that weren’t ever clear to me – and again, that could be intentional on the part of the author, or it could be that the algorithm stripped out carefully-placed signposting. Regardless of the cause, the unfortunate result is that when I hit a game-ending bug – there’s a non-climactic passage with a single link, and when you click it there’s nothing on the other side – I wasn’t sure what I should have done differently to get to a better result. The game does have a default-Twine undo arrow that in retrospect I could have used to backpack and find a path forward through trial and error, I suppose, but at the time, the fractured, premature ending seemed curiously of a piece with the disjointed way I’d experienced the rest of the game – and besides, it’s not like you get finished with a library by reading everything in it, just by deciding that you’re done.