No More

I helped test this game. This is a brief one-room parser game with a well-written atmosphere. You are in a carriage with your father who has come to a grim decision regarding your future.

The game lets you talk and look around as well as several other actions. The issue with parser games with puzzles in ectocomp is that it can be hard to correctly clue things in a way that people can naturally follow the puzzles; fortunately, while the main game isn't too hard, the author managed to fit in Story Mode, which you can activate by typing STORY and which basically types in a walkthrough for you. I found it to be useful even after completing the story itself since it helped me key in on important things.

I definitely like the setting and the nuances here, the focus on the details of the wood and cloth and expressions.

No More is a short, narrative-heavy Inform game that largely uses the EXAMINE command to advance a story about (Spoiler - click to show) a werewolf's transformation. Its sentences do not go to waste. Everything is either providing important background or else advancing the action.

As the story begins, the protagonist, a young woman, is forced by her clerical father into a horse-drawn carriage. Her sisters cry. The father handles her roughly; this is obviously an abusive situation. (Spoiler - click to show)In the carriage, the protagonist examines her setting: herself, father, a tantalizing window. After a few moments, the young woman draws open a curtain, letting moonlight in, transforming into a werewolf!

A lot has been written regarding monstrous entities and the way they can represent or reflect a person's status of an outsider or marginalized person. The father perceives the daughter as monstrous, and, rather than change, (Spoiler - click to show)she embraces her inner monster. This sort of immediate reversal is ideal for a short story; it's punchy and resists dilution. That isn't to say that there aren't shortcomings to this No More's implementation. A player with bad luck might miss a cue for examining something, which can stall the narrative.

If I had a nickel for every time I read a review lamenting the lack of interaction in a game, I would be writing this review on a newer laptop. Why don't I ever see anyone complain about the lack of fiction in our games? What is at the back of this inconsistency? Please don't mistake me; games without an emphasis on narrative have their place. But it often seems that there is a double-standard when it comes to critical responses to works of interactive fiction without a narrative emphasis.

What really strikes about No More is its unapologetic presentation as a narrative-first parser game. Having tried to work in this space myself, it's my experience that linear narrative is a hard thing to do well in a parser game. No More's narrative focus is realized by using an Inform feature, scenes, to manage the way the game's world appears as the story progresses. It's a very effective programming tactic, and we as players experience this narrative strategy as a developing understanding of the protagonist's circumstances. While the approach might have shortcomings, it is a novel and productive approach to solving a challenge in parser design.

I also want to acknowledge the use of story mode here to offer an accessible option for player's who struggle with parser gameplay or, alternately, just want to read the story. A story mode allows to read an author-curated transcript by pressing the "enter" key. This activity is different from reading a printed transcript, and I feel it comes closer to the played experience. Since No More is, after all, a story, I found the availability of this feature appealing. Story modes are not common, and only a few parser games offer them at this time, but I think the value proposition is very clear.

A short snack (heh) that is certainly worth the modest investment of time it requires.

The camel's back is broken, the end of the rope has been reached. "Get thee to a nunnery" is an idea that has reached its time, at least in the mind of the angry little clergyman who had it. Unfortunately for him, the subject of the idea is not going to go quietly...

No More is a compact experience that is packed full of personality and detail, and even though it plays out in a single room - the inside of a carriage - the description of it changes as the story unfolds and the situation becomes a bit more clear.

I appreciated the option of having a story mode, and although I would have liked more interactivity or variability in the ending, it plays out very well and is, on the whole, a satisfying little read. Four beams of moonlight out of five.