A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Four panel cartoons are in the twilight of their cultural ubiquity for sure. There have been a few spikes in relevance over the century-and-a-half or so of their existence - the formative years of convention establishment in Crazy Cat, Nemo and Li’l Abner, their 50’s bittersweet sophistication with Peanuts and Pogo, the heyday of revelance in the 80’s and 90’s where Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbs and (ehh) Garfield were full on pop culture phenomena. This cultural potency didn’t survive the marginalizaion of newpapers, at least not in their classic form.

But what a great setup for IF! Clicking through four separate panels to decode and assmeble a full story. Between the implied motion of the four panel setup, making for intuitive navigation, to the uniqueness of each panel facilitating multi-layered puzzle play, it was equal parts sparky and natural. Is this the first time this has been done? First time I’ve seen it, and what a great insight. This conceit alone earns it good will points it can spend with impunity. I hope more authors would take this idea up, there seems to be a LOT of ground to explore here!

I kind of wish the story had been as engaging. It is a more straight-forward police tale of cornering an offscreen suspect via an intermediary. Seemingly a middle portion of a larger story. As a story element, it didn’t really stand on its own, nor might it feel necessary to do so. As a standalone work, this does keep the piece from becoming truly engaging I think. Also, it requires multiple restarts to win, where the player must carry knowledge and sequencing from previous iterations to succeed. Lacking a central ‘time loop’ mechanism (which would be a tough fit here), a ‘successful’ story run actually doesn’t make a lot of sense. Looking in isolation at the final run, the detective would need to know things he had no way of knowing. It was only through prior failures the knowledge was gained. Ehh, its fine, it is a game after all. Certainly the loops are tight enough, and subject to enough variety that it never gets tiresome. I think the four-panel format helps here, it constrains things to not need TOO much repeated depth. But it would be nicer if the story held together a bit better.

This leaves me with a truly unique IF entry that leverages its strengths quite well, whose story is just shy of engaging to me. I think maybe it will really shine in a collected volume of the whole story some day. Y’know. Like Bloom County, or Mark Trail. Actually, just imagining a full page of independent four-panel adventures I could execute one after another is giving me late nite Doonesbury Onmibus vibes. In the immortal words of Bill the Cat: “Ack!”

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 15m, ~12 loops
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless, bonus for clever ui
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

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

I confess that I don’t really have a clear idea about what’s going on in this cops-and-robbers comic-strip game. Here’s what I now: the central agonist is a truck driver who’s conducting a delivery mission for his uncle, who appears to be some kind of crime boss (so far so good, but things are about to get much worse). The driver’s not just a but the Egocentric, which in this case doesn’t mean that he’s a superhero with solipsism powers (Marvel, call me), I guess explaining why he’s got compulsive urges including rewriting stray graffiti so that it’s about him, but I’m not sure how the player character, an aging policeman, knows that about the driver so that he’s able to use this tic against him, just how I’m not sure whether there’s meant to be an explanation for why the only way to win the game is to learn the driver’s phone number while locking yourself out of victory, then restart and use your out-of-world knowledge from the get-go. Much less do I understand why the blurb and genre tag say this is a satire. Are we making fun of self-centered truck drivers? Are they a thing? Or is it just a linear concept of time that’s in for a kicking?

Fortunately, while the substance of the game left me cold, I found the form sublime. I mentioned that it’s presented as a comic strip, but rather than having the player click through each panel in turn as they take actions, instead you always have a view of the four panels that make up the full row. Your options are listed under the panel where the protagonist is currently located, while the driver makes his way from left to right, taking actions as you do. This does a good job of keeping the suite of possibilities manageable, while ensuring that you don’t miss the driver’s activities – which is important since the game’s single puzzle hinges on manipulating his behavior. It’s also a really clever conceit for visualizing a series of complex spatiotemporal relationships: your moves left and right simply shift your location, whereas the driver is always moving forward in time.

I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of IF by any means, so possibly someone somewhere has previously attempted an interface like this, but even if it’s not wholly unique it’s still well out of the ordinary and makes for a compelling interplay between words and pictures – and I say that as someone who’s generally profoundly unsold on the importance of graphics in IF. The juxtaposition of this richly-interactive presentation with a flashback, which shows up as a traditional click-to-advance-to-the-next-panel sequence, just underlines how much more freedom this almost parserlike (or, dare I say, point-and-click like) approach affords. So yeah, the puzzle breaks some of the rules of good puzzle design, and the plot and characters are a bit inscrutable – admittedly, there’s apparently a prequel game or games that might provide needed context, but real talk, there’s a week left in the Comp and between this event, the Review-a-Thon, and ParserComp, I’ve been on the review train pretty much without stop since the beginning of July so this is not really a moment where I’m doing the extra credit – but A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric is very much worth the couple minutes it takes to play just to experience the possibilities of its interface.

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 26 Sep 2024.

This is a graphical form of interactive fiction, where you have a series of comic strip panels, and below them text links that you can click to move the story on. You are a cop, trying to catch some criminals. And end up in a tight scene at a gym. As you work through the story the graphics in the panels update to show what happens. Which is really neat.

However I had trouble with the user interface on my Mac. I run it at a very large low resolution. I couldn’t see all of the panels or text initially. Changing the screen resolution helped. As did zooming out from the browser. More seriously I struggled to even see the clickable ? link to the walkthrough. Which I really needed by this point. I recommend that the author provides a linked version of the walkthrough on the competition game listing. Because I had got very stuck, and was going to give up the game, unscored, until I found there was a walkthrough after all.

The story itself is a tight one, where you have to slot in with the right actions at the right time. You will need to replay. In particular you need information you only get later, but then have to use earlier in a subsequent replay. To be fair, I rationalised this with myself that (Spoiler - click to show)if the cop had been watching these criminals, and had intel, then they probably already knew this info. But as a player it was surprising to have to replay with info my character hadn’t then seen in game.

My other interface hitch was that at one key moment you need to not use text choices to move the plot on, but must click on part of an image to see vital info. That caught me out, and I found it really unintuitive. I was cursing repeatedly that the option needed wasn’t a text option. It never occurred to me that I had to click on an image. Until I read the walkthrough.

So I think those two core puzzles are a bit unfair, especially the latter. However I liked the tight plotting, and I was happy eventually playing right through, with the walkthrough’s help.

The art is great. I particulary liked how earlier panels also changed as you did things, e.g. at one point - before you have to replay - something major happens in the first panel. Where your player character isn’t currently located. To be fair that could be easy to miss. But unlike the “click on the image” thing that I did miss I thought this visual narrative trick was good.

So stuff to like, and very creative, but I think at least one unfair puzzle (the image click one), and another that breaks normal game play rules, but that I could just about justify for in game reasons.

However I’d be a lot happier if the game worked on lower resolution screens too. And make sure folks who need it know there is a walkthrough and how to find it. Even once I knew it was there, the ? link was often hiding and hard to click on.

Even though The Copyright of Silence was punishingly difficult and I never actually completed it successfully, I have a lot of fondness for it, so I was happy to see that the author was back with another (much smaller) optimization/replay-based Twine game with an unusual visual design.

In this one, you play as a detective trying to intercept a black-market weapons shipment being transported by a young man who thinks the world revolves around him. Progressing in the game largely entails figuring out how to exploit your quarry’s idiosyncratic reactions to his environment.

I enjoyed the process of replaying and making incremental progress, and was able to finish the game in this case. Getting the timing right was fiddly but didn’t seem too unfair. However, this is a small slice of a larger story and I haven’t played the other installments in this series, and I was kind of fuzzy on what the larger situation was and how the PC was involved in it (as he appears to be acting in a less-than-official capacity here). For a game that’s not really going for emotional punch or complex characterization, that’s less of an issue than it could be as long as it doesn’t impinge on the player’s ability to figure out the puzzles, which I didn’t think it did in this case, but it was a little bit distracting.

This is a neat idea I hadn't seen before this competition: an interactive comic strip.

It's four panels, each of which remains fixed with the same general background while a character moves between them.

The story itself is that you're an off-duty or retired cop who's trying to uncover a gun shipment. You need to find a way to break into a truck and uncover the truth.

The concept is pretty neat. The game is pretty hard! To fully get it right, you need to replay the same short sequence over and over, getting a little better at it each time. It's hard to guess what effects actions will be ahead of time, so experimentation is a must.

I tried some of the other linked comics, and the idea definitely seems fun. I'd play more games like this in the future (hopefully a bit easier for my own sake!)