Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter

It has been 15 years since Textfyre released this work, the first in its intended lineup of introductory interactive fiction targeting a young adult audience. Although at the time it was shipped with a novel graphical user interface for playing it, the technology stack on which it was based has since aged into obsolescence, making it hard to experience the work as originally intended. Fortunately, the work itself is not lost, as David Cornelson, the moving force behind Textfyre, decided to release the game to the public in normal Glulx format after its day as a commercial offering was done.

It took me some time to pin down the reason why I was so disappointed by this game, which is that it systematically reneges on its implied commitment to the reader/player at every stage of the story. Let me explain: I believe that a well-written story engages in a kind of contract with the reader, i.e. "If you spend the time to experience me, I will make it worth the time that you spend." This is the basic idea behind the dramatic principle of Chekhov's Gun, i.e. that the author shouldn't place a potentially plot-significant item into the scene without making it plot-significant in some way -- by placing it within the fictional world the author cues the reader to think about it, think about its potential uses, and watch with anticipatory tension for which of those potentials will be realized. There are many methods by which a good story cues the reader to certain expectations, with the implicit promise that it will later either fulfill those expectations or deny them with deliberate artistic intent.

Again and again, Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter implies things about character, setting and plot that are simply not followed up or which are flatly contradicted later in the story. Some examples, but in no way an exhaustive list:

* (Spoiler - click to show)The player character styles herself as a top-notch street thief, but she never demonstrates those supposed skills. Every one of her thefts from market stalls is spotted. Is this intended as comedy, i.e. that she only imagines her capabilities? Is she just in such a rush that she's not using her usual subtlety? It's not clear. She later barely manages to pick a lock, seeming unused to the process.

* (Spoiler - click to show)Early characters made to seem important such as Teisha, the baker and the butcher, are never seen again despite substantial conversation menus that invite significant engagement with them. Additionally, at least one of these characters introduces an implicit subplot (the butcher's love interest in one of the PC's caretakers) that is never subsequently mentioned.

* (Spoiler - click to show)The player character's heritage is supposedly a secret, but a surprisingly large number of people in the town seem to know about it -- even the servants of the main antagonist.

The result is that there is no point at which the reader/player can properly "settle into" the story and become part of it, and thus it ultimately fails as both fiction and as interactive fiction.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the gameplay is rather devoid of actual play after the first chapter, which involves the player character escaping from a group of ill-intentioned mercenaries in pursuit in a crowded marketplace. Upon reaching the end and looking back, there were only three things that seemed to count as puzzles in the whole game(Spoiler - click to show): the escape from the market, refinding the secret entrance to get into the ball, and optionally escaping from your bonds in the climax scene. In a work that has about 140,000 words of source code, that's surprisingly few, and of the three, only the first feels properly designed for its target audience. (Spoiler - click to show)(The second is obvious enough to an experienced player, but I would expect some fraction of newbies to get stuck. The solution for the third just doesn't really make sense given the described physical situation. While solving it is technically optional, failing to do so results in a wholly unsatisfactory ending.) The first chapter implies that the rest of the game will be gated with similar light puzzles, but it presents the "hardest" mandatory puzzle of the entire game. Functionally, this makes it the climax of the game part -- which in the long run leaves the game feeling over before it started.

On the plus side, Michael Gentry's writing is very good. At the microscale of words, phrases and sentences, it keeps one's interest and keeps one reading. I doubt that I would have managed to finish the entire game if it weren't for the steady reward of being able to read another paragraph by that very skilled author. The IFDB entry lists both David Cornelson and Gentry (of Anchorhead fame) as authors. I can't be certain, but my impression is that Mr. Gentry was more or less writing to spec for this game, with the story and puzzle design largely originating with Mr. Cornelson.

One very interesting design element was the way that NPC conversations in Chapter 2 imply the passage of time as the player character moves west-to-east through the town for the first time. The earliest conversation with the baker has an out-of-breath tone reflecting the fact that the PC has just escaped the market, while later conversations imply that there has been time for the PC to calm down and rumors of the happenings at the market to make their way along the grapevine to the other side of town. It seems a risky device -- I'm not sure that the conversations are responsive to the actual order in which they occur, so it counts on the human player following the path of least resistance -- but the writing does a great job of guiding the player along the intended path.

On the minus side, the implementation of NPC conversations as a whole is particularly poor in this work, for the most part amounting to little more than the menuization of an ASK/TELL model over a relatively small set of standard topics. Only a handful of choices result in additional context-sensitive branches of the conversation, and this for only one or two successive replies at most. The result encourages a repetitive lawnmower approach that eats up time without offering much in return beyond extensive confirmation and reconfirmation of certain background information. One of my co-players joked that the PC seemed to be secretly conducting political polling for the fictional town's upcoming election.

About that election, which is central to the plot: It is very hard to suspend one's disbelief enough to experience any tension. The ostensible political situation is the fulcrum on which the whole plot balances, but it took me and my co-players quite a while to figure out how it made any sense at all. (Spoiler - click to show)(The PC is the daughter of a well-liked but long-gone regional leader... but so what? Are we really to believe that an unacknowledged, illegitimate daughter would be given the slightest consideration during a vote by an insular aristocracy? Or that mysterious beneficial forces would be content to let the naif whom they are backing wander through the volatile political scene without firm guidance?) Direct lampshading of the plot issues in later scenes doesn't actually resolve them, and in the end the entire plot seems to be chucked aside as irrelevant in a cliffhanger conclusion implying that much deeper political machinations are underway -- leaving the player unsure about what the point of it all was.

This game is historically significant and worth studying, but I can't say that either I or my co-players particularly enjoyed it. Anyone enticed by the premise of young adult interactive fiction in a fantasy setting may be better off exploring another work -- perhaps Textfyre's second release The Shadow in the Cathedral or the relatively recent The Princess of Vestria. (Yes, the latter is written in Twine, but really there is little about this work that leverages the parser.)