Where Nothing Is Ever Named

The brain is a pattern-making machine, and so while it’s of course ridiculous to assign any particular weight to the first game that the randomizer coughs up in any year’s Comp, I can’t help but feel that it’s appropriate Where Nothing is Ever Named led off my 2024 lineup – because what better way to inaugurate the thirtieth year of an event dedicated to games that were considered obsolete even when the contest first began, than with a piece that absolutely, positively, could only work in a text-only format?

The game both does and doesn’t provide much in the way of context: upon launching the story file, you’re simply told that you’re in the eponymous place where etc. and then that “you can see something and the other thing here”, before being turned loose to use your parser skills to suss out what’s going on and what you’re meant to be doing. The blurb, more merciful, does inform the player that the third chapter of Through the Looking Glass is the major inspiration, which I went back and reread; it’s not a section that I remember well, mostly having to do with a strange train whence Alice is ejected for lack of a ticket, and a large gnat who’s reticent (with good reason) to start a career in comedy. But there is a short episode towards the end where Alice is lost in a wood where everything loses track of what it’s called and what to call anything else – and there’s none of your “a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet” nonsense here, as in a Hermetic turn ignorance of names means ignorance of substance, as Alice doesn’t know what anything is when she sees it.

So what we’ve got here is a language puzzle, not miles distant from the Gostak or Suveh Nux; if you figure out what the “other thing” is and what to do with it, you’ll win the game, and if you also figure out what the “something” is you’ll get a happier ending. It’s a lovely setup for a text game, since visuals would of course kill the thing (as would audio, actually); all the Ubisoft studios in the world would struggle in vain to render this ten-minute metaphysical riff. And it’s quite satisfying to trial-and-error your way through two paired games of twenty questions, matching the default parser actions to the responses you elicit from the things in order to narrow down their identities.

In practice the metapuzzle is a little too simple to make this philosophically-charged premise really sing, however, and some implementation quirks add some unneeded frustration. I suspect most players will uncover the identity of one of the things in a half-dozen moves at most, and the other one possibly even quick, though in my case it took me longer because I was referring to the two objects as THING and OTHER THING; turns out this was just two different synonyms for the other thing, and I had to type SOMETHING to interact with the first. Similarly, I would have finished Where Nothing is Ever Named a few minutes earlier but for a reasonably-game-winning action generating a facially-bizarre and unhelpful response (Spoiler - click to show) (in retrospect I can reconstruct why “you can’t ride unmounted” is a plausible response to RIDE THING, since it’s indicating you’re supposed to MOUNT or CLIMB ON the thing first, but this is slicing the salami awfully thin).

These implementation niggles are quite small-scale, though, worth mentioning only because the game is so compact and they interact confusingly with the guess-who gameplay – really, my main critique is just that I wanted a more robust incarnation of this concept, one that really teased my brain and addressed the existential question of what’s in a name head on. That’s not Where Nothing is Ever Named, but that’s not its fault; on its own merits it’s a winsome little piece, and a worthy justification for the existence of text-only games at the opening of the Comp.