Turn Right

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

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 16 Sep 2024.

This is a short but exasperating (in a good way!) Adventuron parser game. Where you’re driving in a British car, trying to exit right from a car park into busy traffic. As a fellow Brit who passed my driving test too many years ago, this is a scenario I can relate to oh too well. Even if I haven’t driven for many years for medical reasons (my license was eventually revoked on medical grounds). I can still remember the anguish of trying to drive right out of a car park into never-ending traffic. And still experience it today as a front seat passenger.

As you try over and over to get out of the car park into traffic the game repeatedly confounds you, racking up the tension and frustration. And the sense of constant near accidents. This writing is strong.

I especially liked the visual display at the top showing the road. Very Frogger like! But, like another reviewer, I wish this had updated to show the other traffic as you play the game. That would have been awesome, and enrich things so much.

The downside with the game for me is that I’m the type of player who can repeatedly type a single command over and over and over and over and … I have no quick limit on that one. And what was most rewarding about this game, as I found on replay, was trying other options. If you’re willing to blindly type the same command over and over, you don’t necessarily get the full sense of immersion that you might otherwise.

One option I really wanted to try was to hoot my car horn. And the game wouldn’t let me. This was the one case where I battled with the parser: HOOT HORN and SOUND HORN didn’t work, but HONK HORN did. Well it recognised it, but wouldn’t actually let me sound the horn. Which I really, really wanted to do. I was also a bit disappointed that when other drivers hooted their horn in game I didn’t hear them. I would have loved to have jumped out of my seat on hearing that!

So a good and atmospheric game, but I wish it had been a bit more fully developed. And suspect that my own way of playing was not the best for experiencing it to its full potential.

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.)

The one-way street I live on dead-ends at a busy four-lane road onto which I frequently have to turn left (the US equivalent of the game’s UK right turn). Often, as I’m sitting there waiting for this to be possible, some jerk in an unnecessarily large vehicle will get impatient and try to go around me, although the street is not really designed for that. Of course, the reason I’m just sitting there is because there are no openings, so the overly large vehicle will just sit there for a while blocking my view of traffic, and then take the first opening that comes along before I can get to it, even though I was there first!!!

When a similar incident happened in Turn Right, I may have started yelling out loud. Just a little.

This short parser game simulates the experience of attempting to turn right onto a busy road. I’ve been vocal over the years about my dislike of games that simulate boring and/or frustrating experiences, but Turn Right’s spot-on observational humor makes it work. At first, out of some sort of contrarian instinct, I tried everything I could think of besides what the game wanted me to do, but while it was all implemented, the responses were terse enough that I gave in and committed to my fate of repeatedly trying TURN RIGHT. I was then rewarded with a surprisingly varied set of exasperating events, related in wry tones. (Although I am glad I tried (Spoiler - click to show)examining the car park and saw that the van responsible for the aforementioned incident was taking up two parking spaces, foreshadowing that the driver was an asshole.)

I did experience a touch of cultural dissonance; you see, I’m from Boston, and to get anywhere in this godforsaken city, you have to drive aggressively. So on one of the several occasions when someone in the near lane stopped to try to let the PC through, I would have just barged on out there on the assumption that someone on the far lane would let me through sooner rather than later once I was conspicuously blocking traffic. But I understand that in most of the US, to say nothing of the rest of the world, people are too polite for that sort of thing.

Turn Right is probably not nearly as funny to people who don’t drive, but I would recommend it to anyone who does.

I think this is the only Adventuron game in the competition. I always like Dee Cooke's games, but seeing how short it was made me wonder if it would be able to tell a complete or engaging story.

It ended up being funny, relatable, exasperating, and had quite a good chunk of writing in it.

It's pretty simple. You are trying to pull out of a supermarket by turning right (which for me in the US would be the equivalent of turning left). I saw a complicated map and thought I'd have to navigate complex commands, but it didn't turn out that way...

I won't say how the game ends but I was amused and honestly impressed by how many different scenarios the author could think of to cause problems with turning right. It reminds me of living in Philadelphia, where I felt like I had this kind of experience a lot. I'm glad I'm in Dallas now, where things are thankfully a lot better.

Very amusing, and I found no errors.