Bureau of Strange Happenings

You are government agent Larch Faraji (they/them) of the Bureau of Strange Happenings, tasked with investigating aliens, ghosts, and other potentially paranormal goings-on and keeping the citizens of the United States safe from all manner of horrible things. And you'll get to that just as soon as you can answer your phone. You see, budget cuts have forced the Bureau out of its nice, cushy Washington DC headquarters into a hastily-converted department store on the edge of a swamp in Maryland. And the Bureau's new secretary has managed to lock your new phone inside your new desk, and the hex key has fallen down an air vent, and your boss is more interested in sixteenth-century alchemists than here-and-now logistics, and…

Structure-wise, this is an Inform parser game with some interesting quirks (the narration is entirely third-person, for example, and room headings are integrated into the descriptions), which is structured as a bureaucratic farce that quickly turns into lighthearted occult-horror pastiche. I'm pretty sure at least parts of it are riffing on The X-Files, which unfortunately I've never seen. It wears its colors on its sleeve, starting out with a very solid bout of participatory comedy—where the jokes are funnier because the game is making you an active part of them instead of just telling them to you—involving trying to answer that damn phone, which quickly leads you into a tunnel to four-dimensional hyperspace in order to access the abandoned laundromat next door.

It's a long game; I barely finished within the two hours allotted, with ample use of the built-in adaptive hints and David Welbourn's excellent walkthrough. And overall, I very much enjoyed it! My big complaint is that it's a game with a lot of potential, and I wish it had gotten more polish to let that potential show through.

For example, there were some truly excellent puzzles hampered by (in my opinion) just a little bit too much obscurity. I loved the puzzle involving a strange way of encoding numbers on a map (well, "map"), for example, and would have loved to solve it entirely myself, but the fact that the key clue says "love is all you need" instead of "you need to get to zero" (relying on the player's knowledge of tennis scoring, and—more importantly—the player connecting this clue to tennis in the first place) sent me to the hints. An important widget is hidden behind a tapestry, but there's no cue that you need to MOVE TAPESTRY to find it, and variants like TAKE TAPESTRY have (custom!) messages saying it shouldn't be moved.

The polish gets thinner and thinner as the game approaches its end, until when you finally have the vitally-important screwdriver to retrieve the vitally-important hex key, this happens:

> \> unscrew vent
> It is fixed in place.
>
> A phone is ringing somewhere to the west.
>
> \> open vent
> Faraji unscrews the four screws and removes the vent cover. They take the hex wrench from inside and put the cover back on.
>
> A phone is ringing somewhere to the west.

And with one particular hidden easter egg (which I won't spoil here), I'd figured out exactly what had to be done, but wasn't able to make the parser accept it until I resorted to emailing the author for help with the syntax.

I enjoyed this game a lot, and I think it's solidly done, with a great tone and very enjoyable puzzles. I just wish it had been given more time for testing and polishing, to keep little obstacles like this from getting in the player's way—because I would have enjoyed it even more if I didn't have to keep returning to the hints and/or walkthrough.

(I beta tested this game)

Pretty much every geek of a certain age, I will confidently assert, had their hearts broken by the X-Files. For a respectable chunk that’s because of the way they botched the Mulder/Scully relationship in the later seasons, but for the larger portion it’s because of the way the originally-compelling “mythology” story arc that spanned the show’s full run, which promised revelations about alien colonization, high-level government conspiracies, a mysterious mind-controlling oil, UFO abductions, and more, eventually petered out with the saddest of sad trombones as it became clear the writers had no idea what they were doing and were forced to make up more and more stuff whole cloth as the show somehow kept failing to get canceled (admittedly, I haven’t watched the latest revival seasons, so maybe they actually fixed all this and it did reach a satisfying ending? [googles] yeah looks like that’s a no).

Points, then, to BOSH, for being an X-Files homage that’s unapologetically and intentionally built as a shaggy-dog story. Soon after Agent Larch Faraji reports to their paranormal-investigation-unit’s new strip-mall headquarters, they realize that their new cell phone is ringing; unfortunately, said phone is in a desk whose key has been lost, and while the desk is one of those IKEA numbers that should be easy to disassemble, the only Allen wrench around fell down an air-conditioning vent… in most other puzzley parser games, unearthing the screwdriver to pop open the vent to pop open the desk to answer the phone would be a simple puzzle marking the close of the first act and getting you the infodump necessary to start the plot in earnest. But despite a few tantalizing teases – surely the pawn shop next door has a screwdriver? Or scraping together enough money to buy the one in the convenience store shouldn’t be hard, should it? – that drawer is going to remain inviolate through the game’s fourish hour running time, with Faraji successively having to engage in some light breaking and entering, master interdimensional hypergeometry, conduct an eldritch ritual, and out-fight a band of lizardman assassins (lizardmen assassins? The Chicago Manual of Style is less helpful on this point than I’d like it to be) on a cross-time rescue mission that’s important in its own right, I guess, but mainly just serves to get you that $#%@ screwdriver.

I admire the chutzpah of this structural joke, though I hasten to add that BOSH isn’t all metatextual shenanigans at the player’s expense: while the opening runaround section is maybe a bit too long and involves a few too many challenging puzzles to fit comfortably into the Comp’s time limit, the meat of the game is a reasonably traditional and well-designed IF experience that delivers a large serving of satisfying puzzling, with some neat surprises courtesy of the aforementioned hypergeometry gimmick. And this is a lavish production beyond just its length; there’s an extended, interactive tutorial, robust hints, multiple characters with plenty to talk about, and very solid implementation that means you can poke and prod into every corner of the large, detailed locations without fear of breaking something. Meanwhile, the every-conspiracy-theory-you-can-think-of-is-true setting provides a lot of laughs, courtesy of the wry authorial voice, while still staying sufficiently focused that you can figure out how the particular subset of weirdness this game is concerned with is supposed to work.

Make no mistake, this can be a tricky game – though again, the hints are there – and I suppose I can see how for folks who are less enamored of shaggy-dog stories than I am, the opening hour’s hiding of the ball might be frustrating, so BOSH probably belongs on the list of Comp games better enjoyed once the Comp is over and the two hour time limit and FOMO about 66 other games has receded. But hey, we’re less than 72 hours away from the voting deadline, so there’s good news on that front – and even in its short-form, two hour version, it’s still more satisfying than the X-Files…

**The Bureau of Strange Happenings** by Phil Riley

This is a long, polished parser game that took me around 4 hours even using copious hints.

You play as an agent with they/them pronouns in the Bureau of Strange Happenings, a government agency that has recently been defunded due to political shenanigans. You end up in a small town strip mall and, even worse, all your devices have to be turned in and replaced.

Unfortunately, your phone has been locked inside your new desk. Getting it out is, in many ways, the big puzzle of the game.

I was excited to see a game about supernatural happenings, but I was kind of bummed because for the first 30-50 minutes I was met with a series of mundane challenges and events--trying to get into a laundromat, using a pawn shop, etc.

Using hints to get past that, I realized that it went so long without supernatural shenanigans because it was the prologue for a much bigger game. I remember after a couple hours of play landing in a large suburban town with over a dozen locations and thinking, 'okay, I'm going to bed, I'll handle this in the morning'. There's a lot of content, and it's super-polished; I didn't encounter any bugs.

I do think the entrance point for the supernatural was perhaps too obscure; I had to find one of many rooms, and in that room which had many objects examine something that was only briefly mentioned, and then go to a specific location to use it. I don't think I would have ever figured it out without either using hints or careful examination (which, to be fair, is true for a lot of parser games).

I enjoyed the unusual directions in this game. I also enjoyed several slow realizations about what is going on; this game really includes a lot of 'delayed punchline' or Chekhov's gun moments.

The difficulty level is high, and I relied very heavily on hints. There is a large proliferation of keys, knicknacks, red herrings, books, and so on.

Story-wise, it's heavy on atmosphere and world-building over pure plot. The game makes use of (Spoiler - click to show)lizard people as the main enemy; while some have used this concept as anti-semitic conspiracy in the past, that doesn't seem to be the case at all in this game, which has a much more X-Files feel.

To me, the roughest part of the game was frequently not knowing what to do. The best parts of the game were the innovative directions and compass system and the big suburban puzzle.