Artful Deceit

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm probably not Artful Deceit's intended audience, at least format-wise. The closest I have come to interacting with a Commodore 64 is the other retro game in this competition. But the mystery and the interesting format caught my interest, and so after trying two emulators I jumped in.

Artful Deceit is an affectionately goofy detective game, the kind where a detective's job is more about solving puzzles than breaking alibis. It is emulating (so to speak) a very retro, barebones style of play, with crucial information to be found in the lovely feelies, and only a few verbs. But by that same token I was never majorly confused about what was interactable in the room. The puzzles in the sections I completed were sensible and didn't require any bizarre leaps of logic. (Although the hints allude to a puzzle where you (Spoiler - click to show)press buttons around the sculpture--somehow this did not happen when I played. The (Spoiler - click to show)magenta button was visible to me when I entered the room, and so I (Spoiler - click to show)pressed it and obtained the device right away.)

The biggest hurdle I encountered was simply navigating the house, especially when trying to get into and out of the garage. It is a very large space relative to the number of rooms that can be interacted with, and when the hardware/emulator takes 5-10 seconds to transition between rooms, the time added up. I also struggled with the emulator itself. I had several crashes, and at one point accidentally started editing over the text of the game. I don't know how much of that was the emulation vs. me (as mentioned at the beginning), but after a third crash that was fairly far through and running up against the judging time limit, I had to call it quits.

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

This was a work I super strongly WANTED to like. The cover art just sang off a specific set of neurons, so perfect in its capture of getting a new game back in the day. Now I was never a Commodore guy, so it wasn’t a specific yearning. That made it even MORE enticing I think, like inviting me into a subculture that shares a common language but with an evocative and appealing accent.

It kind of needed that charge, because there was prework: installing VICE on my Linux machine, figuring out how to work it!, a lengthy cycle of manual and feelies to consume all before starting. Despite chafing to GET STARTED, the material was attractively composed and fun to read.

The emulator experience was a quick shot of ‘coool,’ followed by a long, slow deflation of ‘oh no, its actually not that cool.’ I suspect this was an artifact of maybe full hardware emulation? I actually kind of hope it was, because the alternative is that the emulator coders lovingly recreated THE INSANELY SLOW LAG of early computing platforms. This would be like lovingly crafting fully detailed restagings of childhood bullying episodes. That is totally NOT the nostalgia experience I ever want! Verisimilitude is a LIABILITY there. I would have thought my modern, high powered machine could have managed that better. Towards the end I started ‘one-one thousand’ counting lag between command and response. The record was 11 - 11 simulated seconds. Rarely was it less than 2. And the lag didn’t limit itself to output - if I typed too fast, it would miss letters, requiring a backspace, then slower retry. WAS THAT WHAT IT WAS LIKE? Viva la progress!

I subsequently learned there are emulator hooks to ameliorate this. If you intend to play, I strongly recommend consulting this thread first.

Is it fair to penalize a work for its platform? No OTHER IF work I've played took me on this specific journey. Certainly, embracing this ancient platform is the most obvious thing about the work. I think yeah, it owns this.

The story itself is a murder mystery: fulfill the post-mortem contract of an art dealer convinced he would be killed, and yup! Spot on! He is! The style of thing is very much of its time, and precisely so. A mappable location (or two), no nouns except those called out in contents lists, short descriptions, limited dialogue, often reused between characters. Rudimentary manipulation puzzles. The promise of the game was deduction, and the means/motive/opportunity tracking looked like an elegant way about this, a mechanic I was eager to engage. I willingly shrugged away modern expectations to embrace it as was. Over time I think my resolve wavered because only being able to ask characters about nouns I had physically touched, and often hearing word for word identical responses inevitably brought me back to ‘well, thank goodness we fixed that at least!’ There were quite a few implementation holes: I used a flashlight before I had one, yet things were still “too dark.” Buttons disappeared yet were still present when examined. The Gallery navigation was complicated by N connections in one direction, but W instead of south to return. I uncharitably started to think, ‘ok, par for the course back then, but if you’re making me be super slow, couldn’t we quietly clean these up?’

For all its supplemental material, and there was a lot and it was cool, it somehow STILL fell short. The manual notes that X should alias to EXAMINE but it does not, and the full word must be typed EVERY TIME. This is not even a modern innovation, yet somehow missed! The command card does not document PULL, begging the question what other verbs did I not know were available? (And if not exhaustive, what was its purpose anyway?) Conversely, ANALYZE - a custom capability of the game - is never mentioned EXCEPT on the card, and unclear what it meant. That is forgivable certainly, but given the deep instructions felt like an out of place omission. There are feelie items outside the Feelie package, intended to be read only when uncovered in gameplay. There is no mention of these anywhere, and only after a vexing search through the download hierarchy was it clear what to do.

It is possible the above paragraph was addressed in a subsequent release, presence of PULL in the feelie might be a clue.

As you can see, I was powering through! Maybe at a snail’s pace but doing it! I’m the hero here! The one that really got me was a puzzle (maybe?) (Spoiler - click to show)Knowing I needed to "] DRIVE TO GALLERY" I could tell the ACT was possible from the command card, but nowhere else in gameplay or feelies could I detect any hint that this was not a one location game. Here I needed to add a specific noun and unlike ANALYZE, the game was no help cluing what that might be. Sure, given the background I could infer it existed, but I could infer a LOT of things existed that weren’t implemented! I had been trained to only try nouns explicitly mentioned! Consulting the walkthrough provided the answer, and it was not a joyous moment of epiphany, it was an ‘oh c’mon.’

I had like 15 minutes after that and thanks to the protracted command loop, my timer expired not close to finishing. I really WANTED to like this. I still really love that it exists, that so much effort was poured into this loving recreation. I hope it provides joy to those who remember their Commodore days fondly. For me, it was more a ‘rose-colored glasses off’ experience that made me grateful for modernity. I know. That’s not so fashionable these days.

Played: 11/1/23
Playtime: 2hrs, for maybe an hour of progress
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Intrusive emulation and gameplay
Would Play After Comp?: No, a glut in Nostalgia content available these days, will look elsewhere

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

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

I keep turning the title over in my head. “Artful Deceit” works on a literal level, sure, for a mystery centering on the death of an art magnate that at first appears to be an accident but ultimately proves to be murder most foul. But zoom out a step and it’s still got some apt resonance, since the game’s a retro artifact, packaged as a Commodore 64 disk image that requires an emulator to access. The two-tone blue startup screen, the noticeable delay when typing commands, the feelies that offload long text-dumps to pdfs to reduce the game’s memory footprint – all of these are integral parts of the experience that wouldn’t be replicable if the game were just another .blorb file. But where once these elements were the inevitable consequences of then-cutting-edge hardware, now they’re limitations affirmatively chosen to evoke a specific response: an artful deceit, you might say.

I don’t mean that to be a slam on retro gaming as a category, or this game in particular; heck, you could safely argue that “artful deceit” is redundant inasmuch as all art involves an artist creating an illusion that may make gestures towards realism but is nothing of the sort. But if the medium is the message, I always wonder why an author chooses to introduce the level of friction that comes with a game that’s an intentional throwback to a 40-year-old experience of playing a game: is it just nostalgia, or is it something more that explains why the player’s expected to wait over a minute for the game to load, or put up with typing LOOK INTERIOR GARAGE DOOR instead of X INTERIOR?

Artful Deceit isn’t an exercise in throwback annoyance for its own sake, I should admit. There are some notable player-friendly touches, like a means/motive/opportunity system that signposts to the player when they’ve gathered enough evidence to solve (and prove) an aspect of the case, and unlike many self-consciously old-school puzzlers, there are robust hints and a complete walkthrough. Meanwhile, if the lack of implemented scenery grates on someone used to more modern IF, and the NPCs aren’t especially interactive, that’s both authentic to the 80s experience and also helps keep the player focused on the core gameplay needed to solve the puzzles and reach the ending.

At the same time, elements of the design did start to grate, over and above the lack of the conveniences offered by a modern parser. Progress requires knowing that at some point you’ll need to leave the scene of the crime to drive to the victim’s workplace, despite the absence of any specific clueing that this is possible, for example; and a bug meant that I wasn’t able to complete the game despite having all the necessary evidence in hand (Spoiler - click to show)(I happened to search the corner of the sculpture that had the magenta button first, and when I pushed it, the hidden compartment popped open even though I hadn’t realized there were other buttons – much less that the correct combination was hidden in several paintings in an overly-literal interpretation of art having a message – which meant the game didn’t recognize that I’d fully solved this puzzle chain). Modern games have issues like this, too, but what feels like a forgivable oversight there can sometimes come off as deliberate obtuseness in a retro context, through no fault of the author.

The details of the plot also sometimes made me happy to have left the 80s far back in the past. The resolution of the mystery hinges on some fairly retrograde thriller tropes that struck me as insufficiently motivated, and left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth – it’s the kind of plot that could be palatable if viewed through a revisionist lens, but in my opinion isn’t much fun anymore when played straight.

All these pros and cons might just add up to the same thing, which is that Artful Deceit is successful at its aesthetic endeavor of recreating a long-gone moment in time. When writing these reviews, I generally try to be sympathetic to authorial aims and judge a game according to how well it meets its brief, so I suppose I should end things there. But – cards on the table – I was one in 1982, and didn’t really get into IF until I was almost 20, so in this instance the nostalgia of imagined time travel is lost on me, and I’m left going back to the question with which I opened the review: what’s the point of all this effort, really? If Artful Deceit is content to be a view back to the early 80s, but as far as I could tell it doesn’t use the perspective granted by age to say anything distinctive about the era, either in terms of the culture depicted, the experience created by then-current gameplay aesthetics, or the ludonarrative implications of contemporary hardware. Let me repeat: that’s not necessarily a failing, but in this case I was left wanting something more.