A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric

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.