Tribute: Return to the City of Secrets

There’s a story I remember hearing about O Brother Where Art Thou?, the Coen Brothers’ The-Odyssey-by-way-of-Appalachia musical, which is that as they translated each of the famous elements from the source material into the 1930s context – the cyclops, the suitors, some dude named Menelaus – they intentionally did not refer back to Homer or reread the poem, the better to lock in on the pieces of the story that are archetypal and have fully entered the cultural zeitgeist.

(No, I haven’t gone back to verify whether or not this is true; that would go against the point of the anecdote, wouldn’t it?)

Anyway, if the Coen Brothers can make a movie about the Odyssey without reading the Odyssey, hopefully I can get away with reviewing a game about City of Secrets without playing City of Secrets. Tribute, you see, was an entry in 2020’s Emily Short Anniversary Contest (said anniversary being Galatea hitting the 20 year mark), and it directly riffs on CoS by borrowing its map and many of its scenery descriptions and then plopping a scavenger hunt on top of the geography. My dim sense of the original game is that it’s got a lot of conversation with a bunch of different characters, with an espionage kind of vibe, but little of that carries over into Tribute: there’s one character who contacts you via a telepathy-enabling pendant to say deeply un-Shortian things like “we really need your help. Evil is once again threatening our city. This time the enemy is in the form of dark magic.” I also suspect that the gameplay for CoS is more involved than just finding ten haphazardly-hidden gems in a nearly-empty map.

So yeah, playing Tribute doesn’t seem like it much resembles playing CoS, despite the fact that it seems like a large majority of the words here come from the original game. But writing prose as good as Emily Short’s is a high bar, to say nothing of designing challenges as tightly as she does, so I think there’s limited value in comparing the games directly. Really what the author is doing here is akin to doodling on a bunch of Caravaggios to create a hidden object game; the cartoons aren’t going to display quite the same mastery of chiaroscuro, but hey, you get to enjoy some great art while playing find-the-widget, what’s not to like?

Viewed in those terms, Tribute is… okay. I like Short’s descriptions as much as the next IF veteran, and there are some solid ones here that do entice me to play the full game so I can see what they look like in their intended context:

"The bottom of the hill, outside the train station, with its trolley tracks and the dulled statue of an ancient queen, hemmed on the east by the hotel and on the west by the health office."

But I couldn’t help notice that the map, denuded of characters and stripped of plot-relevant objects, is a bit sparse. Short often does the thing where you carefully mention as few nouns as possible in your area descriptions in order to convey the idea of a place without having to spend days implementing scenery; it’s is a canny technique to effectively create a backdrop, but it works less well when you take away the foreground. It also seems like the author hasn’t translated over everything that was in the original game, since I ran into far more unimplemented objects than I’d expect to see in a game from the same person who wrote Metamorphoses.

This art-appreciation side of Tribute is also undercut by the Where’s-Waldo side’s choice not to engage much with the original setting. In a map of 30ish locations, only ten feature a hidden gem, and only a handful more are involved with any of the puzzles. The pendant the player character starts with gives a warning when you’re in one of the rooms with a gem, as well as when you’ve found one of the plot-critical objects. This does avoid the tedium of aimlessly fiddling about with every unpromising bit of impedimenta, but unavoidably does make it easy to play on autopilot when you don’t get a bolded alert telling you to pay attention. It also means that I was stymied for a while when I hit the one or two puzzles that didn’t announce themselves (these largely had to do with unlocking exits that are mentioned in the text but don’t show up on the convenient automap – it makes sense that only currently-valid connections are shown, but I didn’t realize that was the rule so once again a helpful feature wound up being an obstacle).

The puzzles themselves are generally fine; they’re nothing to write home about, but I found it pleasing to poke and prod around until I found each gem. Many of them do involve that very Shortesque dynamic of fractally unveiling more and more details of an object by looking at successive pieces in turn, and a bit of messing around with the standard verb set is enough to solve nearly all (though I thought (Spoiler - click to show)SHAKE TREE was a bit underclued). Unfortunately I did run into a couple of bugs that rendered the game harder than it should be: there’s one object that should reveal a gem once you take it, but I was able to tote it around and pick it up and down a couple of times before the appropriate trigger fired, and I had to replay because the game didn’t register the first gem I found (they’re supposed to vanish once you touch them, but this one stuck around in my inventory after I grabbed it).

This is a lot of caviling, though, since I think Tribute did succeed in its most important goal: it made me want to play City of Secrets. Viewed through this imperfect reflection, CoS seems elusive yet enticing, filled with sweetshop robots, a surprisingly-large academic district, and a nightclub where I’m sure there’s at least one or two people I’d enjoy chatting up. If Tribute doesn’t stand on its own two feet as well as something like O Brother Where Art Thou, perhaps that’s partially because it doesn’t do enough to carve out its own identity – but then, this is a tribute, not a reinterpretation.