Swap Wand User

The mechanics of Swap Wand User are pretty simple. You're given a jumbled sentence, and you SWAP (WORD1) (WORD2). These words must be of the same length, which eliminates a lot of guesswork.

There are seven main puzzles before the denouement, which is a narrative of easier puzzles where you switch two words that almost create a story. The main puzzles evolve into four sentences by the end, which may sound taxing, but of course there are clues beyond what the sentence/paragraph's general purpose is. If you have a capitalized word, it probably begins at the start of a sentence. Proper names belong together. And so forth. These were small realizations, but they made me feel smart. I'm not sure if there are many more such strategies to be uncovered from this mechanic, but I wouldn't mind a sequel that showed off a few more or was even a bit of a retread.

The sentences and eventually strings of sentences lay out a story, one in tune with Getting Things Mixed Up. It has a healthy dose of instruction manual tone crossed with "okay, something clearly went wrong here in the game world." It's interesting to feel both relegated to the sidelines like this and like I'm changing things--we never physically meet the characters, but it's our word swapping that helps unravel their fates and learn about them. I caught myself wondering "should I SWAP X Y or SWAP Y X" even if it didn't make a difference, which showed some immersion.

The pace and scope seem about right. Certainly I had the feeling of "this can't go on/be too big" but on the other hand it didn't try to tie things up too quickly. The longest puzzle has a lot of tension in it, because you do want to unwrap the tragedy, which itself involves people getting things jumbled up in the game world, but you don't want to do so too fast. And I've found it made me focus--a lot of times I can play or read a text adventure/interactive fiction for speed, and this slowed me down about right to have time to think.

On the abstract side, SWR reminded me of how I enjoyed doing the word jumbles in the daily newspaper as a kid (e.g. "WHELIA" to "AWHILE,") until they got too easy and I really didn't, because they were just abstract and repetitive. (I moved on to crosswords and enjoyed being baffled there.) Word jumbles only had so much scope. I'd hoped for more, and with SWR I definitely found some more.

So I liked it a lot but my technical side couldn't ignore one option SWR had: I'd have liked to see a different sort of help toggle than the hard/easy given. Easy, indeed, made it too easy and left me open to the temptation of brute-forcing things (it puts correctly placed letters in BOLD,) and in hard mode, my energy was directed toward the pedantry of finding and remembering which words had the same length, which started to get in the way of the fun of solving the longer puzzles.

Given that you can only swap words of the same length, it'd be interesting to keep track of which can be swapped somehow. Perhaps

(4)best (1)I (3)the (2)am

Or

4444 1 333 22 (with 10+ using a, b, c, etc.)
best I the am

Perhaps this would put the game over the 500 word limit need for (I think) contributing to the Short Games Jam as well. In this case having the constraint helped the author produce something original that didn't muck about. So maybe Twine would ultimately be better for the very smoothest experience -- different word lengths could give different colors, and we could reuse them eventually as, say, nobody's going to confuse a 10-letter word with a 1-letter word. The JavaScript in the clicking interface there would likely be even trickier than Inform, where the swapping still seems nontrivial.

However, if SWR hadn't been in ParserComp, I'd likely have missed it! So I was glad it was there. So maybe this is better reserved as technical feedback for the author, and I think something released in Twine or even Python could give the puzzle a new dimension. And that I played and came back a few hours later to check off details (e.g. the puzzles always appear in the same jumbled order) before writing this review shows how involved I was.

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forum during ParserComp)

One of the canonical justifications for text-only interactive fiction goes back to an old Infocom magazine ad: no graphics can compare to the visuals the human imagination can conjure when prompted by evocatively-written text! It’s never resonated very strongly for me, though. There’s an air of flop-sweat and defensiveness to the claim, sure, and it’s maybe slightly less true now than it was in 1984, but the reason I shrug at the argument is simpler: I don’t tend to visualize stuff I read unless I’m specifically prompted. While in theory I suppose I could use my imagination to create a spectacular setting ever based on my interpretation of the words West of House, in practice I’m just getting the words. But! That’s no bad thing, because words offer aesthetic pleasures all their own (like, I really enjoy chalcedony, 90% because of the sound and rhythm of the word but only 10% because of what it looks like), and there are a whole host of experiences that can only be imperfectly captured in visual media – that, to my mind, is where IF’s competitive advantage truly lies.

Swap Wand User is a case in point. It’s a wordplay game, already a genre that plays to the medium’s strength, but unlike, say, Counterfeit Monkey, where you can kind of picture what a movie version would look like (albeit it’d be kind of terrible and people would have to say stuff like “to be clear, this stick is actually a twig!” three times a scene), this one plays out entirely on the page. It’s a series of self-contained puzzles, each presenting an excerpt from a different document that’s been scrambled up; you’ve got a wand that enables you to transpose one word with another, and so you’ve got to undo the scrambling to recover their meaning.

That’s a simple mechanic to describe, but the puzzle design here is very, very finely judged. There’s a clear progression as early puzzles ease the player into the basics, for example helping you to notice that capitalization and punctuation don’t change as you move words around, so you can use them as anchor points to figure out which words lead off sentences. New constraints get layered in as you go, notably a requirement that swapped words have more or less the same character length, which restrict your freedom but also provide additional clues by ruling out possibilities as the passages increase in size. Repeated words are also kept to a minimum, eliminating disambiguation issues – which is easy enough to say, but just you try writing a hundred words with at most two of them being “the”. Heck, in a just-showing-off touch, even the title is (Spoiler - click to show)the solution to the first challenge!

As for the content of all those documents, the story they tell isn’t nearly as novel as the game mechanics, but they work well enough. Between technical manuals, newspaper stories, and police reports, they tell a predictable yet effective story of scientific innovation and corporate greed. The structure requires that most of the narrative be left to implication – getting into too much detail would make for laborious puzzles – so relying on standard plot-beats is a smart choice, and there’s room for a bit of character-driven pathos along the way. There’s even a late-game shift into a more stream-of-conscious narrative voice, accompanied by a radical reduction of difficulty, allowing the player to barrel downhill through the final set of revelations (which boast a SWAP (Spoiler - click to show)WRONG (for) RIGHT command that’s incredibly predictable and on the nose but also awesome). All of which to say the pacing feels exactly right, and the artful semantic disarray leads to moments of clearly-intentional poetry:

"in a lucid moment, kathleen addled me to liberate her from that begged mind."

There are some weak spots to Swap Wand User, but I think they’re intrinsic to its approach. I made a lot of typos when trying to swap longer words, which is kind of inevitable, but I still sometimes wondered whether a mouse-driven drag and drop interface would have worked better (heresy since this is a ParserComp entry, but there you are). I also am frankly stymied when I try to think about how, diegetically, the word-swapping wand is supposed to work. Like, the game makes clear that this is a technology that’s been invented and being used in the game’s story, and some of the switches seem to have impactful real-world implications, like the possibility of changing one person for another – but when I swap “an” and “of” in a document, what exactly is supposed to be happening, and why is this tech any more impactful than a bottle of white-out?

But this is where that no-graphics limitation of IF becomes a superpower: I don’t actually need to be able to picture what’s happening, since this is a story told entirely in words – everything else is secondary. In other media, that wouldn’t be enough to be successful, but a reason I love IF so much is that here, it really really is.

In this game, you have to move words around with a special SWAP command. The opening move, in fact, can be deduced from the name of the game.

Part of the game is figuring out what to do, so I'll put the rest of the discussion of the game and story in spoilers.

(Spoiler - click to show)
This is a series of increasingly complex sentences where some words have been swapped with each other.

So, you're trying to get words in the right order. This is made a bit easier by the fact that only words of the same size can be swapped, and by capitalization rules.

It honestly must have been hard to ensure that words weren't duplicated (which could have caused some issues with commands being well-defined).

I was spoiled by an online review about the plot, but it's okay, because that's what made me want to play.

The plot is slowly revealed that transposition technology can swap the minds of living things around. This can, however, cause cognitive decline. The messed-up order of words can be seen as both representative of the wand and of the cognitive decline.

Near the end, sentences come faster and less-well-formed.

The final choice was interesting. I found two endings.

I liked the understated creeping dread of this game, great work.