An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There

Among my bad habits is my tendency, upon first visiting the house of an acquaintance, to ignore my host and make a beeline for the bookshelves to see what’s on offer. Of course I’m even less restrained when no actual people are involved, so I love nothing more than to look at book after book in a game’s library, the author’s dedication typically wearing out well before my interest wanes (er, my incomplete exploration of Forbidden Lore’s obfuscated stacks notwithstanding). So believe me when I say that I think An Account of Your Visit… gave me the most pleasure I’ve ever derived from an IF book-browse.

First off, the shelf in question is depicted in delightful ASCII art; there are fat books and thin books, interchangeable ones and unique ones, volumes lined up ramrod-straight and others tilted at a careless angle, making for an aesthetically pleasing invitation to click on all the titles to see what they are. And oh, what a smorgasbord! There are creepy classics like Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, with older antecedents like Machen and Dunsany, but by no means is this a hair-raising collection or even one restricted to real-world texts: there are books by Threepwood comma Guybrush as well as Threepwood comma Clarence, a deep-cut Quest for Glory reference in Healing Herbs by Erana, and to top it all off, you can even find the Joy of Cooking (well, a Joy, it’s got some recipes Julia Child never contemplated).

I don’t mention this admirable collation just for its own sake, though, but because it’s also something of a synecdoche for the game as a whole. While the framing is pure haunted-house – you get an invitation from a mysterious benefactor who’s mysteriously absent once you roll up to the eponymous manor, and of course no sooner has the door locked behind you than you’re waylaid by a talking cat, with a lively skull just one room over – the vibe is far more cozy than horrific, with characters like the fussy librarian Basil Fink-Nottle explicitly invoking Wodehouse and easygoing puzzles that would be at home in one of the friendlier 90s point-and-click adventures.

The game’s older-school inspirations are also visible in how it motivates the player – or rather, how it doesn’t; you don’t have any particular agenda in mind when you arrive and it takes a while for broader objectives to become clear. So at first you pretty much need to explore the house just because it’s the only thing to do. Fortunately, the gregarious characters and sprightly prose are all the draw I needed. The writing is peppered with risky but ultimately successful imagery, like the description of the driver who drops you off as a man “whose drawn down features bear the characteristics of wilting lettuce”, or saying of the building that “[i]t stretches toward the sky unevenly, like a cat arching its shoulders - cordial, but cautious.” And the already-fun cast I mentioned above is shortly joined by an adorable octopus, a raucous gang of furniture, and a raven, who seems to be the only one taking the proceedings even slightly seriously.

All of them, of course, either have something you need or are standing in your way until you’ve procured something they want. The main business of the game is thus just the standard IF loop of going to a new room, rifling through all the scenery, exhausting the conversation topics, and then moving to the next room to do it again, until you hit the limits of where you can explore and loop back to see what the knowledge and/or items you’ve gained in the meantime will unlock.

Structurally, An Account… is a parser-like choice game, but a very streamlined one. There’s an inventory but you rarely have more than four or five objects at a time, and almost always all you need to do with them is give them to somebody. The game also helpfully eliminates already-clicked options when you’ve exhausted them, which is a nice convenience but also means that revisiting locations to see if there’s anything new to do is a very quick and easy process. The result is a quick-playing game whose puzzles more or less solve themselves – it’s the kind of system ill-informed critics have in mind when they say you can’t do hard puzzles in Twine. They’re of course wrong about that – witness the work of Abigail Corfman and Agnieszka Trzaska, among many others – but also, sometimes easy and amusing fetch-quests perfectly fit a game’s vibe, as is the case here, and there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.

There is a serious note introduced towards the end, as well as some long-deferred answers as to what exactly is going on, but the author avoids treacle and schmaltz. It helps that underneath their surface wackiness, the supporting characters are all loveable in their own way, and the literary antecedents the game isn’t shy about invoking primed me to look for some heart under the light comedy. It’s not an emotionally-effecting climax by any means, but it winds up tying a neat bow around the experience, adding just enough depth to make the hijinx stick in the memory. Sure, this is a game that’s content not to innovate and wear its inspirations on its sleeve, but it picks good inspirations, and integrates them with an impressive deftness of touch, like a jumble of exciting, enticing books crammed into an IKEA Expedit. I repeat: nothing wrong with any of that.