WITHOUT corporation

It’s not actually a complaint to say that I don’t feel like I can remember a time when I wasn’t playing WITHOUT Corporation. It was the eighth entry the Comp randomizer handed to me, and most of the games that came before it were pretty short, so my initial transcript is dated September 3; “without mr.txt”, is the optimistic file name. Flash forward to today and that directory has added installments up to “without mr 7.txt”, plus “without XX mr.txt”, “without XX mr 1.txt”, and “without XX mr 2.txt” as well as three or four transcripts from the play-online option that I haven’t gotten around to downloading. Just about every week since the Comp has been one, I’ve taken a run at the game, gotten myself locked into this compelling, ambitious piece of meta parser horror, only to be stymied by crashes and progression-blocking bugs. I’ve gone through the main gameplay loop twenty or thirty times, at a conservative guess; I could quote chunks of the opening text from memory; even though I’ve barely gotten past the starting blocks in terms of the main plot progression, I’ve pretty much mastered the game’s systems and even tracked down an easter egg I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else even mention (hit me up if you want to know more about “the second puzzle piece”). But finally, yesterday, staring down the calendar and demoralized from yet another set of failed attempts at the prize, I gave up and just read through some other players’ transcripts so I could see what I was missing.

This should be a recipe for frustration, and I’m not going to lie, it kind of is – I’m a big fan of House of Leaves style fourth-wall-breaking horror, and the storytelling here is so wide-ranging and audacious that I’m bummed I only got to experience it in full second-hand. But even in all my flailing I still found plenty of moments of satisfaction, and, delightfully, in some ways the game itself had anticipated that I would run into these kinds of challenges – I won’t spoil the details, but actually said anticipation was remarkably personal and uncanny. If I didn’t get the intended experience, well, I still got something very memorable out of my five and a half weeks with WITHOUT Corporation, so what more can one ask for than that?

To attempt to summarize what this game is doing is a marathon in itself – but I’ll make the attempt all the same. At the most superficial layer, it presents itself as a horror game written, as is the package overall, in ZIL, called “Climbing Up the Walls”; the title’s of course a head-nod to Radiohead, and references to that band’s engaging yet ontologically threatening music are threaded through the substance of the plot. The protagonist starts at the bottom of a muddy hole in the middle of a thunderstorm, their husband looming above in the darkness, either vulnerable or strangely threatening, before this is revealed to be a nightmare; actually he’s safe in his bed, but now his child is tugging at his sleeve to wake him, because there really is a storm, and his husband really is missing. And after putting the kid to bed and getting ready to brave the elements, he finds that the events presaged in his dream are coming to new, and terrifying life.

You don’t play the protagonist, though! You, it appears, are some kind of temporary employee, tasked by the eponymous corporation to be the ghost in Climbing Up the Walls’ machine. The game was left unfinished and buggy by the untimely demise of its author – a fictionalized extrapolation of the thankfully-still-among-the-living Max Fog – and so your job is to lurk behind the curtain and keep things running, a digital dungeon-master triggering the appropriate timers, routines, and daimons to paper over the gaps in implementation. You can move objects and people from one location to another, or entirely off-screen; speed up or cancel queued events; stage-manage the various spooky special effects; and bury your face in your hands as the idiot player does everything except the one obvious thing that will move the plot forward, again and again.

And that’s not the only layer, because you’re not alone in there: all of this is explained by another entity who’s stuck in there with you, an LLM that’s been assigned to hold your hand, but isn’t otherwise sure of its origin or purpose – which doesn’t stop it from peppering you with questions and speculation about the game, itself, and the state of the world in amongst the tutorializing. And you can zoom back two or more steps further than that even, one of which I won’t spoil, but the other of which allows you to interact with a command-line shell to access other files and programs running alongside the game.

It is a whole whole lot to take in, but the game somehow manages to provide a reasonably gentle learning curve to the player while miraculously having writing engaging enough to keep the family drama at the center from being swallowed by so many coatings of pomo excess. And while the ideas are individually familiar – trauma, betrayal, artistic frustration, LLMs making a travesty of creative work – their arrangement into this particular constellation felt novel and enticing, leaving me eager to see how it all fit together.

Which is good because this is a game that does require some stick-to-itiveness. Even leaving aside the bugs I ran into, the player needs to run through at least a couple mostly-complete playthroughs of Climbing Up the Walls to see what’s really going on, and that’s not a mechanical task: while it certainly gets easier as you deepen your understanding of your capabilities, so much is dependent on the random decisions of the PC that you need to be patient and stay on your toes. I spent many, many turns waiting for him to just pick up the ^%$#^# flashlight I’d played underfoot, and then many more turns idly looking after the frustrated LLM decided I was being too passive and disabled Z. Sometimes multiple PC turns will trigger at once, but none will accomplish anything, and since you often need to keep hammering the enter key to progress the text, it can make for remarkably slow going. I also found that despite the initially-intimidating palette of controls you’re presented with, the player doesn’t actually have very much to do on most turns, which means this really is primarily a waiting game.

Still, I’m very aware that I spent probably ten times as long in this repetitive purgatory as I was meant to, which surely must be coloring my views. As mentioned, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, and as best I can determine, you need to do some clueless floundering to set up some tutorial messages and necessary triggers that otherwise gate progress. Because I started over a couple of times due to progress-erasing interpreter crashes, I think I was unable to convincingly reinhabit a beginner’s mindset and used my knowledge from previous runs to jump ahead, over the gates I was supposed to progress through at a more plodding pace. With new plot revelations and gameplay elements coming into play, I think the baseline experience of playing Climbing Up the Walls would have been considerably enlivened.

This isn’t a game I can really fault for being buggy, though, given its incredible ambitions (did I mention it was written in ZIL?!), and even though the recipe was incomplete, the individual ingredients were satisfying to taste. Heck, given the themes it’s juggling, the story might actually be more compelling if it was meant to be fractured and cut off midway: we don’t know what the future holds for our families, we don’t know whether AI will be threatening or pathetic, we don’t know whether we’re going to drown in a pit of our own making or somehow, miraculously, struggle out. So perhaps there’s something apt, something with an aroma of grace, to be stuck forever arriving at that moment of decision.