Wild West

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forums during this year's ParserComp; due to the similarities between the trilogy of short games that includes this one, I reviewed them together)

The phrase “old-school adventure” conjures up, at this late date, a few modest charms – perhaps an ingenuous treasure hunt, an exuberant narrative voice pleased as punch at the simplest things – and a parade of horrors: awkward parsers, dead-man-walking scenarios, no UNDO, guess-the-verb puzzles, endless empty maps… We look back and where we imagine we came from and we shudder, grateful to have been delivered from such tribulations and newly content to graze the fruit of recent years’ labors.

How accurate this picture is, I’ll leave to others more familiar with the 80s scene; I’ve played a few Infocom titles and a few random entries here and there, but know it much more by reputation and its influence than by direct experience. But I’ll admit that it’s a set of stereotypes that informs my thinking, which has left me in a bit of a hall of mirrors when evaluating this trio of games. They’re loosely-linked series of Italian diskmag games from the 80s, sharing a totally blank protagonist and a vague Western setting, translated and updated into (Puny)Inform. In some ways they’re exactly what I’d have expected based on that description, in other ways they’re not, and while I’ve got some guesses as to what the adaptation changed and what it left lie, they feel like stabs in the dark – because of course the past was more idiosyncratic than the flattened version that’s come down to us.

Let’s start with the difficulty, since that’s probably the place where the mind contemplating a throwback adventure goes first. While there are a few tricky puzzles here and there, mostly they’re – easy? Outside of a maze with a thirst timer, I don’t think it’s possible to die or render the games unwinnable, first of all, and the smallish maps and limited number of red herrings mean I was rarely at a loss for how to progress. Indeed, where the games err, it’s most frequently in overdoing the hand-holding. Here’s the description of some seats in a stage-coach in the first game:

"They are fine-crafted and look very comfy, if you overlook the holes and the stains. It may be worth searching them."

You will be shocked to learn it is! Perhaps this is a modern effort to make the puzzles friendlier, or perhaps it’s a relic of a time when finicky parsers required more direct prompting of the player (the implementation of all three games is smooth throughout, unsurprisingly, with plenty of synonyms available and no disambiguation issues or other hiccups). Either way, it can sometimes be a bit too much, as with this sequence in the third game:

"> x dead

"It’s the corpse of the outlaw you shot from the bell tower. He’s now paid for his sins. You should search him to see if he has anything important on him.

"> search him

"You search the body, but don’t find anything noteworthy. You should now hide him in case the other desperados return. Perhaps you could drag him into one of the villas.

"> x sombrero

"It’s the sombrero the outlaw was wearing. You should put it on as a disguise, in case the others come back."

In other sequences the player does have something to do, though. That aforementioned maze, which comes in Tin Star, actually isn’t bad – it’s not too big, the map connections aren’t too byzantine (there are no diagonal directions), and there’s a fun sense of progression as well as relief once you finally escape. There is a critical item located in there that’s off the beaten path, but the need for something like it is clear once you get to the appropriate point in the game, and once you’ve secured water and your horse it’s much less of a pain to re-scour. And I enjoyed the counterintuitive way to navigate the mines in the same game ((Spoiler - click to show)you can only find the way out once you lose your light source). It’s medium-dry-goods all the way down, and most puzzles are simple lock-and-key or swap-this-for-that affairs, but each of the games has one or two that are at least a little novel and reasonably satisfying to solve, so it all goes down easy enough though there’s little here that will stick to the ribs.

As for the narrative components of the games – well, remember what I said back in paragraph two about how we retrospectively view the past as more monolithic than it actually was? I wasn’t just talking about 1980s video games. Unsurprisingly given the trilogy’s provenance, the setting owes more to spaghetti Westerns than nuanced scholarship. There are bandits, mines, rattlesnakes, noble Indians, and victimized women. It’s a relief that the natives are generally portrayed sympathetically at least, and get a little bit of specificity in their material culture is described – though my eyebrow did rise upon finding some pemmican in the second game, as the game’s set in Arizona, amid the Hopi and Apache, while pemmican is a plains-Indian food.

More eye-rolling is the games’ take on vigilante justice. In Wild West, you’re a rancher whose family has been abducted by bandits; in the second, you’ve decided to take on a career as sheriff, while in the third you give up your badge in order to avoid creating an international incident when you pursue raiders across the Mexican border. Your goal is always to find a group of criminals and gun them down, and there’s not a Miranda warning in sight. Winning the first game requires poisoning a bandit gang’s water; the others climax with gunning down the Black Hats without a word of warning. Maybe I’m too much of a civil libertarian, but the victory message in Tin Star seemed to illustrate how hollow so-called law and order rhetoric can be:

"Hiding behind the broken window, you fire on the bandits and pick them off one by one. The bandits look around in confusion to see where the gunfire is coming from. By the time they realise the source of the ambush, they’re all dead. Justice has been served. No one will mourn for those animals.

"Congratulations, sheriff! Once again, the law triumphs."

Am I reading too much into these simple time-wasters? Almost assuredly so, but that’s the modern condition: these games were originally launched into a world where thematic analysis was not a go-to tool for reviewers, I don’t think, but today the question of what a game *means* often feels more important than what it *does*. For all that the updates make the games eminently playable in modern interpreters and with modern gameplay assumptions, they can’t, nor I suppose should they, allow them to fully meet this modern cultural context: these games weren’t originally meant to do that and it’d be wrong to pretend otherwise. So they stand as an incomplete time capsule, made more pleasant to contemporary eyes and capable of whiling away an idle half hour, but most interesting, perhaps, for what they say about a time we can no longer fully recover.