19 Once

It’s a truism that there’s a lot about being young that only makes sense in retrospect. One can interrogate whether that’s actually, y’know, correct, or if it’s just a way for middle-aged people to feel superior to their past selves, but the lovely thing about truisms is that it doesn’t really matter if their true. Anyway, one can certainly cherry-pick examples – the reasons why you messed things up with your first romantic partner are probably going to be painfully obvious at just a couple of years’ remove – and I think high school graduation also falls into that category: at the time you think it’s a uniquely important change as you embark on your adult life, but the truth is there are very likely to be much bigger pivots waiting in your twenties and even thirties, and most likely you’ll still be cluelessly failing to figure yourself out all through your college years (reader, do I project? I think I do). No, with the benefit of perspective, we can see what’s special about high school graduation is that everybody you know is clumsily trying to change who they are all at the same time, and the tensions of trying to hold old social arrangements together across that maelstrom of becoming can be as poignant as they are doomed.

19 Once sees its protagonist caught by this dilemma, a first-year university student unable or unwilling to turn the page on her old life (is that why she’s called Paige? Almost definitely not, but it might be fun to agree that I’m being insightful rather than just making a dumb pun). Her four closest friends have all gone their separate ways – high-achieving Sofia’s off at a different uni imbibing critical theory, Esther’s repeating a year to try to get into a better school, Nora’s entered the workforce, and Wesley’s moved into the attic and is devoting himself to dank memes. But back in the day they were all fans of a YA book franchise whose final film installment has just come out, so maybe it’d be possible to bring everybody together for one more, or one last, hurrah?

The translation of this social puzzle into parser form involves considerable abstraction, but I found it overall successful. Navigation commands let you initiate a text chat with each friend – going north gets you to Nora, south to Sofia, and so on. This is a limited-parser game, so just about all there is to do once you’re in one of these “rooms” is to engage in conversation, which proceeds via a keyword system that flags when you unlock a new topic. Unsurprisingly, nobody’s initially excited to buy a ticket to the film – Wesley prefers video games now, Nora’s stressed at work, Esther’s skint, and Sofia finds the whole thing a bit bourgeois (Sofia was my favorite). You need to change their minds, but rather than persuading them one at a time, instead you need to hop from conversation to conversation to progress, because the topics unlocked from speaking to one friend will only allow you to make inroads with another friend – talking to Nora reveals that she’s pressed for time because of her job, and then asking Sofia what she’s doing with her time reveals that she’s been journaling, which opens up the memories keyword.

It’s a mechanical approach, I suppose, but it works to mimic the structure of online conversation – rather than unfolding as a linear discussion, instead you’re hopping between windows, always with your head half-stuck in the previous topic as you broach a new one with someone else (this also functions as another metaphor for Paige’s ambiguously-post-graduation mindset, perhaps). It also winds up dulling the danger of lawnmowering, since you can never brainlessly plug through the topic list with a single character; you need to rotate through, building out new keywords as you go. With that said, this admittedly-simple gameplay model puts pressure on the writing to deliver, which happily it does. It’s all jokey, of course, swerving pleasantly from highbrow to low humor:

"Sofia, she went to uni too, we haven’t spoke much since school. She was always very intense, always had a paperback sociology book in her back pocket. Pelicans. Wesley called her pelibutt."

There’s also the odd moment of pathos:

"WESLEY: I’m a neet, what do you think?
PAIGE: You’re not neat.
WESLEY: not in education or training. you know, not like you or Nora or Sofe"

I’ll admit that Esther didn’t make much of an impression on me, but the other three characters are drawn with verve, boasting distinct voices and grappling with prosaic but engaging dilemmas. 19 Once is a slight game (it’s over in perhaps fifteen minutes), and the stakes are low because of course we know that whether or not this quintet manages a fun night at the cinema, none of them will be hanging out when they’re 20. But part of the perspective that comes with age is realizing that moments still matter even if they don’t actually change anything, and 19 Once is a winning, wistful collection of such moments.

Spoilers now for the endgame:

(Spoiler - click to show)If you check out the ParserComp 2024 entries page, it doesn’t take much perspicacity to notice that the cover art, itch.io blurb, and author names for two games rhyme in peculiar ways: 19 Once and Zugzwang both have a cruciform grid as the central element of their cover images, the author names are anagrams of each other, and the credits blurb listing how the cover art was made are word for word the same. And despite the variation in their genres – post-high-school nostalgia-fest and dark-fantasy action thriller – the gameplay in both involves navigating to a single-room location and gaining keywords you can use to unlock still others if used at a different point of the compass. It’s not shocking to learn, then, that they were both written by the same duo of authors, and that their plots are more connected than they appear: Zugzwang depicts the climactic sequence of the movie that the friends in 19 Once are all going to see. There’s also a series of nested Easter eggs that unlock a secret coda for the pair of games: the end text of 19 Once has a certain phrase bolded, which if you type it into Zugzwang will unlock a new commentary mode, where you can see the 19 Once crew banter as they follow the pawn’s progress. This in turn leads to one more keyphrase that leads to a secret ending for 19 Once (at which point the trail ends, as far as I can tell).

(Spoiler - click to show)This is a fun way to braid the two games together; it’s perhaps a bit on the simple side, though it probably needs to be given that many people are likely to play one or the other game outside of ParserComp and might not otherwise easily notice the similarities. And bringing the irreverent voices of the 19 Once folks into Zugzwang’s grim world of perilous adventure makes for an entertaining juxtaposition. With that said, while I laughed at many of the extra jokes, I didn’t feel like I learned too much more about the characters than I’d picked up from playing the initial segment of 19 Once; similarly, while I appreciated the secret ending, it doesn’t feel like it culminates the stories of both games so much as it provides a punchy alternative narrative that loses some power inasmuch as it focuses on Esther, who as I mentioned in my 19 Once review I found the dullest of the buddies. But not everything needs to be a narrative puzzle that clicks into place; I think both games work well on their own terms – it’s just better to think of their intersections as a series of DVD extras rather than the narrative climax.