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.

**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.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

In my relatively short reviewing lifespan I have thrown a LOT of words at this community. I have reviewed, what, 300 some odd games at this point? Not a lot against the titans of the field but feels like a lot to me. Sure a lot of it has been goofing. A lot of it has been misguided. Some of it has been unaccountably aggressive. Underpinning it all has been real thought and reflection, such as I am capable of, and attempts to not only capture my reflexive responses to games, but to explain them to you and myself.

There are a class of games I run into periodically that I just don’t vibe with - whose gameplay, implementation, conceit or prose collide with my particular chemical stew of a brain in awkward, off putting ways. Usually, on reflection, I can extract and isolate the elements that produce that response. As often as not, it devolves down to “it’s not you, it’s me.” What is relatively new ground for me is dissecting a work that ON PAPER should be a no-brainer hit, practically engineered specifically to my brain’s exacting specifications, yet still leaves me cold. Let’s first take a look at BOSH’s spec sheet:

-Punk Rock Protagonist
-Supernatural investigation (these two caused me to proclaim “I’m Bucaroo Bonzai!”)
-wry bureaucratic comedy (promptly followed by, “ooh, no. No I’m not.”)
-experimental gameplay elements (“maybe?”)

I love all these things! Fire up the blender and let’s GOOOooo!

I then proceeded to flail around for like 45 minutes before ‘solving’ the first puzzle. By which I mean bouncing between HINT and HELP for an unaccountably long time. Look, I’m not a noob in these things. I know you have to ‘examine all you can/take whatever the game lets you.’ I’m still human though! Every now and then, parser basics elude me. Usually (as here) because of a mix of randomly non-firing neurons, plot cues that tell me ‘that’s a weird thing to do here,’ and implementation issues that have trained me to avoid some levels of detail. And yeah, a lot of that is in play here, but I’ve powered through much worse.

I think what really got me about this first puzzle is that it introduced a FUNDAMENTAL gameplay element, required to navigate this game, yet was content to sit quietly on the shelf until I stumbled into it. This is a single item, no more or less attractive/weird than anything else in the world, that was so critical to the plot that it’s absence left a canyon before me, with progress smugly laughing on the other side. There was literally nothing to accomplish before I somehow stumbled across it. My advice would be: narrative chokepoint items deserve more deliberate, redundant in-game cluing. I have in the past advocated for a ‘rule of three’ clues in open world mystery games, maximizing the player’s chances of navigating solution chokepoints. That advice feels relevant here also.

Consulting the HELP/HINT system was insult on injury for me. The two are decidedly different experiences. HINTs are reasonably traditional, though with a command-line engagement paradigm it took a moment to orient on. HELP was another thing altogether. HELP transported you to another dimensional world to explore (with no narrative justification, which ehh ok…). This other world? Required exploration, object manipulation and NPC interaction to wring information out of. This seems to fundamentally misunderstand something about HELP/HINTS: when you engage them, you have resigned yourself to defeat. The objective is to get the nudge you need and return as quickly as possible to the source of your humiliation, never acknowledging your shortcomings again. A long, drawn out side quest, THE RESULT OF WHICH IS NO HELP WHATSOEVER, is exactly the WRONG thing to shunt that impatient player into. I am quite sure, btw, that this choice has a purpose, and that there are classes of blockage that HELP can resolve, and maybe even with some humor and aplomb. In particular, players new to parser gameplay might find this a sly training/orientation scenario. (Seriously though, are there any of those here? Enough to justify this level of mini-game?) Here’s the thing, as a player you have no way of knowing WHICH problems HELP is engineered around v standard HINTS, and boy is consulting it a chore when it’s not appropriate.

Once that particular problem (finding that keystone magic object) was ungated, it was back to a more traditional experience, but everything was just a bit more difficult than it needed to be. One NPC’s behavior seemed to change, such that what had happened once or twice on its own, now needed opaque actions from me to goose. (It is certainly possible that the first two times were NOT automatic, but the text cluing sure let me believe that.) There was a little more friction in discovering just how central the new mechanism was to proceedings, and then, only then, did things blossom into a real mission of sorts.

Oh wait, no, not just yet. First you had to navigate a 4-dimensional space! Ok, as a gameplay mechanism and conceit this was legitimately interesting. The MECHANICS of discovering and decoding it, however, were not. It involved reverse engineering a series of repeated moves 10s/100s of times, with a ‘clue’ that legitimately had multiple interpretations to test and reject. I probably spent another half hour or more fiddling with this because it took that long mechanically, not intellectually. Yeah, I did it, because that’s how my just-shy-of-OCD brain works, but the enjoyment ramp was a slowly descending one. I knew I was in trouble when, after believing I had decoded things sufficiently, I analyzed a remaining clue and said “that probably means X. Wait. There’s no way it means something that obvious, given the sisyphean task I just completed. Let me noodle for another 5-10 minutes… nothing. ok go to HINTs.” You have probably already sussed out it was in fact X.

Quick check: probably 3/4s of the judging time elapsed, and only now getting to the ‘true’ story to solve! While I deserve the lion’s share of the blame for this for sure, it is my nature to blame to others for my shortcomings. There is an argument that gameplay choices are partially to blame. Also partially to blame are implementation gaps. These are not overwhelming, as these things go, but were low key present throughout, blossoming to this exchange, right at the 2hr mark:
Extended game quote

> x obelisk
Which do you mean, the ladder or the obelisk?

> * wot? [note, ladder never mentioned before]
There’s nothing like that nearby.

> x ladder
There’s nothing like that nearby.

> read names
Which do you mean, the obelisk or the names?

> read obelisk names
Its faux Egyptian design is incongruous adjacent to the adamantly
traditional town hall. Faraji can just make out a small crystal adornment
rising from the top.

I think my frustration with this game was not only (or not specifically) that I struggled with its puzzle construction and hint system and implementation so much, but that because of my struggles it did not deliver on the promises its conceit made to me. Let’s review:

-Punk Rock Protagonist: never really factored into anything, narratively
-Supernatural investigation: got only a small flavor of this by the 2hr mark
-wry bureaucratic comedy: let me flounder here for waay too long, apparently only engageable AFTER the supernatural portion
-experimental gameplay elements: so fiddly as to mute their appreciation

Ok, in spite of what amounts to a VERY extended whine-fest about this work, I can for sure say it was never mechanical. Its setup fully engaged me. Even as I was cursing the particulars of its 4D navigation puzzles, I did very much like the fact of it. There is a consistent wry humor that, during moments I was not clawing at my eye sockets, did land for me. I went a LONG way into a DARK hole to just say “Sparks of Joy” but yeah, that’s where we top out. In deference to my own limitations, it even earned a generous “Notable” rather than “Intrusive” gameplay.

Played: 10/9/24
Playtime: 2hr, unfinished, captured by lizard folk
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable vocab/gameplay difficulties
Would Play Again?: There’s like a whole essay worth of thoughts here. A 2.0 version of this game, filed, sanded, buffed and polished… probably? I mean it is STILL engineered to my brain pan. But if I do, how do I shrug the weight of these two hours and give it a fair shot? If I encounter a remaining rough spot, how generous can I be? WHY AM I THE VILLAIN HERE???

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