Mr. Beaver

The comedy parser puzzler is a nigh-infinitely-extensible format, capable of incorporating the wildest of premises and set-pieces with nary a crack in the suspension of disbelief: we’ve been conditioned over the decades to accept puzzles based on logical absurdities and high-concept setups that wouldn’t pass muster as two-minute improv sketches, and in return, players are promised gags with a reasonable hit-to-miss ratio and the opportunity to participate in a farce. Polymorphed pigs, idiot knights, gentleman thieves, harried chefs – any protagonist you can think of can confront any mad-libs combination of wacky aliens, bumbling cultists, blithering aristocrats, or misunderstood monsters imaginable, and the critical inventory item could equally well be a piece of chewing gum, a leaky jar of battery acid, a toy sheriff’s badge, or an authentic death ray. For the most part Mr. Beaver fits seamlessly into this tradition – here, it’s a diligent mailman rescuing a shrunken shopkeeper using a patched-together diving suit – but by making the protagonist’s degree of desperation a critical game mechanic, it also tries something I don’t recall seeing before. In some ways it’s a not a perfect fit for this extremely-plastic genre, but it does add a critical touch of novelty.

Without that element, the game would still work perfectly well, I think. We’re recognizably in the rescue-the-zany-uncle-from-his-kooky-mansion subgenre, which is a classic for a reason, and Mr. Beaver is a well-realized example of the form; the geography isn’t too expansive, and the locations are fairly dense, making the overstuffed antique shop something more than a bare setting for puzzles, with plenty of opportunity for character-ful details and tiny jokes. The inevitable sci-fi touches are also kept focused and while there are some out-of-left-field elements, like an incongruous coffin, they’re explained by Mr. Beaver’s eclectic taste, so the worst excesses of kitchen-sink aesthetics are avoided. I did find the very ending fluffed the balance slightly and drifted into more slapstick wackiness than I prefer, but save for those last couple paragraphs I enjoyed the vibe; the humor’s more likely to raise a gentle smile than a sudden guffaw, but there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.

As for the puzzles, they’re cleanly in the medium-dry-goods tradition, though similarly a bit more grounded than is typical for the genre: there are secret passages and some devices to fiddle with, but with reasonable diegetic explanations and, usually, enough clueing to help the player understand what they should be trying to do and why. A few of the more esoteric puzzles did require highly-specific phrasing to get the parser to understand what I meant – there were a couple of these, but I’m thinking especially of a puzzle where you have to manhandle a reasonably-large object but PUSHing and MOVing and LIFTing didn’t register, with only TIPing did the business. My frustration was increased by the fact that every time I made an attempt, I had to struggle with a disambiguation prompt because typing the name of the object wound up getting it confused with the similarly-named table it was resting on top of. This is a custom parser system, and while it’s generally solid, this and a few other issues (notably, default responses printing out right after, and contradicting, the results of successful actions) make it a little less smooth sailing than the major platforms.

On these fronts Mr. Beaver is perhaps unexceptional though certainly unexceptionable. But it does have its one unique twist, the desperation-meter. Throughout the game, there are a series of actions that the average comedy-parser protagonist would perform without thinking twice – things like knocking over a shelf to get at a blocked passage, or opening up a sealed sarcophagus – but which here fail, with a pointed note that you’d only resort to such measures it were clear that the situation were especially dire. And as you conduct your investigations, you’re occasionally informed that your worries are increasing, allowing you to go back and try some of those formerly-blocked actions and succeed this time.

Functionally, of course this is just another way of constructing a puzzle dependency chain – you must solve X puzzle before solving Y. But building things this way helps take some of the arbitrariness out of the parser puzzler. I’m sure we can all think of examples where solving a puzzle makes a heretofore-hidden object incongruously reveal itself, or advance time in such a way that a previously-inaccessible area opens up. These contrivances are part of the genre, but too many of them can cause the player to roll their eyes, and also make it harder to make a plan, since you never know what might happen next. So there’s a benefit to having much of the gating depend on the protagonist’s mental state rather than seemingly-random circumstances. Similarly, this also helps mitigate the adventure-game-PC problem of the character who’s meant to be heroic, but nonetheless steals everything that’s not nailed down or engages in motiveless mayhem.

So in concept I’m a fan, but I think the implementation here could be smoother. For one thing, the choice of what actions are verboten can sometimes feel arbitrary – breaking open a coffin requires less disquiet than looking under a doily, for example, and no matter how worried you are that Mr. Beaver’s time is running out, nothing will persuade you to risk disassembling a Jenga tower. For another, there are I think five levels of escalation, which is probably too many to be qualitatively distinguished – it felt like a few times, I ran across information that felt mostly redundant with what I already knew, but was told that his had ratcheted up my desperation another quantum; combined with the previous issue, this wound up requiring a bit too much tedious lawnmowering of previously-forbidden actions to see what had opened up this time. And there are some places where the mismatch between player-knowledge and what the protagonist is willing to do gets sufficiently wide as to cause frustration: any player who glances at the cover art for half a second will realize that the aquarium – and by extension the diving suit and related paraphernalia you find about the shop – will be important to the endgame, which is quicky confirmed by messing about with it, but you’re prevented from doing much to start in on that puzzle chain until very late in the game (since the cover art is AI generated, if you glance at it for more than half a second will note that the crab has seven legs, no claws, and no mouth; for all that the text portrays Crusty as a charismatic little arthropod, as a result I shuddered any time I had to interact with him).

I’m sharing these quibbles less because I think they’re significant flaws, though, than because I did find this novel gameplay system an interesting, worthwhile one, and as with any system in its infancy it’s worth giving detailed feedback to help figure out best practices. It’s not the only reason to play Mr. Beaver – as I’ve said, if this is a kind of IF you like, there’s much to enjoy here – but it did give me something more substantive to chew on after the farce was done.