Grand Island Bank Robbery

I loved the unfolding layers of the endings. It's a delightful common trope in heist stories that the heist turns out to be not what you think it is, and pulling it off twice is really fun.

I wish hints had covered all three parts of the game. I guess it's quite common to have hints only for the mandatory parts of a game, and no hints for the optional parts, but that's frustrating, because the optional parts are usually harder (and often less fair), so I'd encourage authors not to do it this way.

Another thought: having freedom of action at the end of the game to talk to the big Boss made me think there was a puzzle / easter egg to find there. I tried to EMPATHIZE with the Boss, but it gave me an inappropriate message, "You detect only vague impressions. The boss said that most of the robbers aren’t in a relationship, so that makes sense." The Boss isn't a robber, so that doesn't make sense.

I searched the strings of the game with glulx-strings and didn't see anything interesting to find there; I suggest not having that last turn, or to have one last easter egg worth finding.

Credit where it’s due, the PC’s name got a laugh out of me two separate times, for entirely different reasons, and I can’t think of a more compact and elegant bit of writing in a piece of IF I’ve played this year.

Don’t get me wrong, I was pretty sure something was up from the very first scene; the way the opening narration made a big deal out of seeing Venus in the sky, and the reference to still getting used to cars, sure seemed out of character for a Depression-era gangster, and the classical allusions kept piling up from there. So I was congratulating myself for being too clever for the game when I won the first time and discovered that having correctly guessed the second twist meant I was completely unprepared for the first one. Similarly, I’d convinced myself that the other characters were likewise drawn from Greco-Roman myths (Pretty Boy, with his locket of a long-lost love, was giving Odysseus vibes, and surely every grieving widower is an emanation of Orpheus when you think about it?) so when it turned out that nope, they’re just people, and people with interactive backstories to play through at that, that counted as one more effective rug-pull.

I’m harping on the twists not because I think they’re inherently good drama – just the opposite, I tend to prefer stories that clearly telegraph where they’re going and commit to their axioms – but because they can help create a flow state that’s uniquely well-suited to IF: where you’re reading everything with close, careful attention, not just from enjoyment of the prose or narrative being presented to you, but because you’ve got a theory of the game and you’re trying to fit the pieces together. This kind of problem-solving while you’re problem-solving is part of why I really enjoy the IF of the early aughts, when it was very much in vogue, and GIBR very effectively scratches that long-neglected itch. It has good bones, too – the opening treasure-collection section is pretty easy, but the puzzles are satisfying to solve, and this easy-mode opening sets up the middle act, where you need to think creatively about how to create fake valuables, not just hoover up the real ones. And then in the finale, you’re forced to consider your extensive medium-dry-goods inventory not as puzzle-solving tools, but as vessels of history possessing emotional weight. It’s an effective series of reconfigurations, deepening and deepening the playing pieces as you progress.

The craft required to pull this all off, without making it feel forced or even particularly flashy, is deeply impressive. The implementation is unsurprisingly rock-solid, and the prose tosses out era-appropriate bons-mots like they’re cheap:

My parents had been farmers, and they left the place to my worthless older brother Jack, who had let the place go without repairs or development for years. The soil was poor, the crops poorer, and Jack poorest. So of course, he let me stay here when I offered to pay.

That’s from one of the couple’s vignettes in the last chunk of the game, where you learn more about the backstories of the characters who’ve largely just been either background detail or puzzle elements in your first two run-throughs – another way the game carries out its agenda of humanistic destabilization of IF tropes. These sections are perhaps a bit abbreviated, but better that than overly belaboring things as the player’s reaching the finish line, I think. My other critique-that’s-not-really-a-critique is that I’m not sure I felt a strong thematic link between the story GIBR starts out pretending to tell, and the one it ultimately does: why does Cupid descend into this particular tableau, besides the fact that the heist happens to be scheduled for Valentine’s Day? But trying to tie everything up in a cute little knot would have risked mawkishness, and gilding the lily like this is of dubious actual value, beyond scoring pretentiousness cred. No, I’m more than satisfied by what the game does offer, and I’m going to keep giggling at “Coop” for a while yet.