Turn Right

It’s been well said that America and the U.K. are two countries separated by the Atlantic Ocean, but interestingly, you could make the same observation about our supposedly-common language. Take, for example, “left turn”, a simple phrase we Yanks commonly use to indicate a sudden, veering shift in the way things are going. It’s one I deploy without thinking, but now I’ve realized that it must make no sense at all to our fancier-accented cousins, for whom the left turn is a trivially-executed move while it’s the right turn that’s the stuff of nightmares.

This revelation comes courtesy, of course, of Turn Right, an Adventuron game that is to vehicular paralysis as Dubliners is to the emotional and existential varieties. After a long day, you’ve stopped off to pick up some groceries, and just need to pull out of the parking lot for the short drive home. But as the attractively-illustrated overhead map reveals, that means crossing like four different lanes of traffic (there’s something confusing happening with an off-screen roundabout that means you need to get to the farthest lane), and getting a hole in the rush-hour traffic that wide is akin to winning the jackpot on a slot machine.

The gameplay of course isn’t what carries a piece like this – typing TURN RIGHT over and over isn’t intrinsically engaging – but fortunately the author’s got comedy chops to spare. The jokes come in two distinct registers: there’s dry understatement, like the opening screen’s declaration that “this game is about a driving manoeuvre made in the UK,” which left me howling, or the surely-intentional way that the helpful here’s-everything-you-Americans-need-to-know-about-driving-in-Britain glossary casually drops the phrase “multi-carriageway” into the one of the definition as though that’s a meaningful sequence of words. Or, perhaps best of all, take this description of one of the traffic lanes:

The far lane on the opposite side of the road is the one you take if you want to take either the first or second exit from the first roundabout, or the third exit from the first roundabout onto the second roundabout and then the first exit from the second roundabout. The last of these options is your route home, and so you want to turn into that lane.

If your brains aren’t melting out your ears at the end of that, you’re made of sterner stuff than me.

Then there’s the more slapstick flavor of humor, as exasperating event after exasperating event prevent you from getting into gear, achieving “Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake fifteen times” levels of sublimity. I won’t spoil the best gags here, since there are some great ones (Spoiler - click to show)(I particularly liked the sequence with the grocery store manager), but suffice to say they substantially enliven what could have been a dully repetitive scenario.

Also helping relieve potential tedium is the game’s deep implementation; I thought of a bunch of logical and not-so-logical commands, from turning on the radio to waving at oncoming cars, and the game handled everything I threw at it with aplomb. The author even anticipated my attempts to nope right out of Turn Right’s Kobayashi Maru scenario by abandoning my car and walking home, or just stopping off at the neighboring pub for a couple of hours until traffic lightened up. Sure, this isn’t a game that will change your life or make you see things differently than before you played it – unless for some reason you’re unaware that driving is awful – and there are one or two small dud notes (the disappearing clown was a bit too silly for me, especially the second time he showed up) but I am always happy to see a solid gag executed at such an impressive level.

(Speaking of, the joke with which I opened this review was lifted wholesale from Eddie Izzard.)

This game was pretty good but didn’t really make a good first impression. Despite being advertised as fifteen minutes long, it immediately hit me with two arguably short pages of instructions and a complicated-at-first-glance diagram.

DemonApologist mentioned they liked the diagram as a bit of dry humor. I’m not sure whether the author intended it that way or not, despite the game’s wry tone.

Anyway, I kept at it — I remember liking one of Dee Cooke’s “Barry Basic” games — and found out that “Turn Right” is simple as it advertises.

As far as I can tell, you really can only try to TURN RIGHT to advance the plot. Any other actions are there so the parser can reject you. It’s a waiting game. I think you need to try to turn right around 30 times to finish. I also tried to TURN LEFT, GET OUT, and WAIT several times, so it took a bit longer.

I wasn’t sure if the game would actually end, so I was relieved when it did, which I guess was the author’s intention.

There are a few things that happen that imply progress –(Spoiler - click to show) like when you’re noticed by the supermarket manager for waiting too long— that gave me confidence the game would end.

Ultimately, I would have liked more ways to break the system. Very few games try to be “waiting games” like this, so it’s largely uncharted territory.

I mentioned in my review of “Lime Ergot,” which is also deliberately repetitious, that you can lose the game in a few satisfying ways.

Then again, allowing for subversive ways to reach an ending might have undermined the intentional frustration of “Turn Right,” no matter how much I wanted to get out of the car and go to the bus stop. So maybe alternate endings are not appropriate here. I don’t know. This game is what it is.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

On behalf of IF players on this side of the Atlantic, let me thank this work for contextualizing ‘Right Turn’ to its native traffic laws. This would have been a much shorter, or more baffling work in America.

While (Spoiler - click to show)no choice IF is a subgenre I am not particularly attracted to, I have seen a lot of iterations over the years that make real strength out of its constraints. As confining as this subgenre is, I am continually delighted at the disparate themes authors find to express this way. This is yet another completely unique yet thoroughly resonant application of its conceit. It is also playful both in its thoroughly trivial central problem, and the comically endless complications it throws in the player’s path.

I can appreciate all these things at a meta level. The work does, though, labor under a central tension kind of intrinsic to its construction. The longer things go on, the funnier the overall joke is but the more tedious the actual gameplay becomes. The low stakes of this setup humorously underscore the mismatched labored difficulties, while also denying the player any strong investment in the proceedings.

These contradictory forces ultimately left me with two competing impressions - appreciation for the FACT of it, but total lack of engagement with it as an interactive endeavor. For me, the humor rested in its completely reasonable setbacks, expressed mildly and matter-of-factly, that just never ended. This was a mild humor, a bit too mild to sustain itself even over its short span. I can envision a version of this work where the setbacks escalate hilariously, with decreasing realism and increasing left field slapstick. In my head, real belly laughs could be had, keeping things bubbling along and engagement high. It would ALSO lose its core wry turn: that this is NOT outlandish, just endlessly, needlessly defeating. That’s also kind of funny as an observation.

For me, conceptual strength did not overcome its necessary gameplay restrictions. It was ultimately a Mechanical exercise I appreciated for its novel application of a confrontive game style. Shout out to its graphical design too - its functional map cleanly depicted the core challenge in a way words would struggle to concisely define. It is also the first time I’ve encountered Adventuron WITHOUT its trademark pixellated font, so, novelty on novelty!

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 15m, made turn
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless, bonus point for commitment to its wry concept
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless