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Number of Reviews: 4
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1-4 of 43 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Surreal and innovative, but a bit of a slog, April 11, 2023In Cygnet Committee, the player navigates an abandoned military compound and learns the story of an AI based on Joan of Arc. The opening scene, swimming to a beach and then avoiding mines on your way to the compound, seems like pretty standard spy stuff. Then I reached the compound and found the beanstalks growing ears, and I realized this game was going to be much weirder than I first thought.
In general, the world of the game is strange, and some things are definitely meant to be humorous, but it’s not a farce. It strikes a tricky balance between the objective strangeness—ridiculousness, even—of the situation and the sense that this is all deadly serious within the universe of the game, managing to be thought-provoking and elicit some empathy for the Joan AI even though a bare-bones summary of the plot would seem like a joke.
The gameplay is innovative: you have four audio tracks, visually represented on the screen, that play when you mouse over them, and you have to select the one that plays the correct sound (listening for a “click” when you’re picking a lock, for example)—or sometimes no sound at all (as when you’re navigating a minefield and need to avoid the tracks where your detector is beeping to indicate the presence of a mine). Sound-centric gameplay like this is rare even in video games, and in IF, to the best of my knowledge, it’s never been done before. It’s certainly unique and memorable.
The problem is that, for me, it wasn’t actually fun. With a few exceptions (about which more later), every single puzzle is the same “listen to these four tracks and select the one that’s different” task, which offers little opportunity for increasing difficulty or complexity over the course of the game. I got some enjoyment out of figuring out the gimmick on the very first puzzle, but after that it got repetitive very quickly, especially as the player has to redo previous tasks every time they want to revisit an area.
It’s not that I require complicated puzzles in order to enjoy something. I frequently enjoy works of IF and video games that have no gameplay to speak of. I’m happy to play a walking simulator or click links to advance a linear Twine story, as long as it feels like interactivity is serving some purpose in the game. But when a game has gameplay elements that are nominally challenges, but are so easy that completing them gives no real sense of satisfaction, it ends up feeling like busywork to me.
The timed segments are, I think, a bit more challenging; I was extremely bad at them, because I have poor reflexes/fine motor skills, so I feel a little weird saying that I think the game would have been better if there were more of them, but I do think that a game focused more around the timed segments would have felt more rewarding. (Although these segments would have benefited greatly from having a timer on-screen, I think.)
I can see how much work this must have been on the technical end of things, and it seems very polished, without bugs or places where the essentially-custom system gets noticeably wonky. But in the end, while I appreciate it as a technical feat and admire the delicate tonal balance that the writing achieves, I didn’t really enjoy the game.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Audiovisual puzzle game investigating a rogue Joan of Arc AI, January 26, 2022I beta tested this game.
This is a pretty long choice-based game with an expansive map. Each room has about 1 puzzle on average. The majority of the puzzles are the same: The screen is divided into 4 invisible stripes. Moving your mouse up and down will cue an animation filling that stripe (generally a sound wave) and play a sound. One sound will be different from the others; you must click that one.
There are other puzzles from time to time.
In addition, there are save terminals and other points that play scenes from the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc while a synthetic voice reads text in a heavy french accent.
The idea is that an AI company cloned/re-made Joan of Arc to use for commercial benefit, but things went wrong. You learn more as the game progresses, of course.
There are enemies, and defeating them drops 'bits' that you can use to buy shortcuts.
It's really clever and polished, and very descriptive. But the interactivity is a bit tedious, especially when re-crossing an area over and over again. For that reason, I've never fully replayed it after testing, but played the first few rooms again before writing this review.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Innovative sound-based explorathon, November 21, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
My initial foray playing Cygnet Committee was unsuccessful. A slickly-produced Twine game that from the credits and blurb seems to be mining Metal-Gear-Solid-adjacent territory, albeit with what might be a distinctive cult angle, Cygnet Committee requires sound to play -- and while I’m weirdly resistant to listening to any audio when playing IF in general, at the time of first playing I was in brand-new-parent mode where if I couldn't hear the baby’s breathing for a couple of minutes, I got anxious. I tried to see if I could bluff my way through the game with it muted, but the “sound required” tag does not lie.
Happily, I came back much later and played Cygnet Committee through, with the sound on this time, I can confirm my initial impression that this was going to be a high-production-value game with a lot of work behind it. It’s also got a novel puzzle mechanic that’s played out in a bunch of creative ways, a pomo plot that interrogates the uses and misuses of the historical memory of Joan of Arc, and a sprawling, metroidvania-y map. I’m still not sold on the use of sound in IF – and I wished there was a stronger connection between the puzzles and the plot – but Cygnet Committee is a confident, poised piece of work that makes a strong case for it.
Starting with that puzzle mechanic, it manages to be both brand new, but also really intuitive. As your operative infiltrates an island-based military installation, you’ll come across navigation challenges, patrolling robots, locked keypads, and spying drones. Each presents you with four different audio samples, and you need to pick out the right one to progress. Usually this just means choosing the one that’s different from the other three, though what this means diegetically shifts with context – the lock tumbler that clicks twice, the bit of the minefield that’s not beeping, and so on.
There are a few curve-balls that get thrown in, including some timed sequences, and a few more traditional find-the-keycode puzzles, but most of the hour and a half I took on the game was spent in these sequences, and I found the variation wasn’t enough to keep them from getting a little stale by the end. There’s a lot of going back and forth through the sprawling map – again, it’s got a kind of metroidvania structure, where you’ll get a new keycard or send power to a previously-visited area – and unless you use a slowly-accumulating currency to unlock shortcuts, you generally need to solve the puzzles all over again even when going back over already-trodden ground.
There are also some design choices in the back half of the game that exacerbated the drag, since you’ll repeatedly come across a device – a dam outflow wheel, a first-aid kit – a few locations before you reach the place it impacts, meaning that even though I figured out these puzzles pretty much immediately, there was still five minutes of tedious back-and-forth to implement the solution. This kind of thing is par for course in a metroidvania, of course, but much of this felt more like it was about padding the game length than offering cool new secrets to unlock.
My real hesitance with the puzzles, though, is that the gameplay didn’t feel all that deeply integrated with the interesting plot. There’s a complex backstory, involving the creation and deployment of a military AI based on Joan of Arc that’s gone mad and is now threatening the globe with nuclear war, which is related through stylish cutscenes that juxtapose text read aloud by a French text-to-speech program (like, it speaks the English words as if they were French, which is a neatly alienating effect) with clips from The Passion of Joan of Arc, a silent movie beloved by cineastes (I’ve never seen it but can confirm the images are very compelling).
Befitting the Metal Gear Solid inspiration cited in the credits, this narrative has some bonkers ups and downs, involving cyborgs, the intersection of warmongering and commerce, and an extended shaggy dog story about canned beans (there’s a note of humor here, though it’s played bone-dry). Careful attention also suggests that there’s more going on than meets the eye – in particular, the ending I got pretty strongly implied that (Spoiler - click to show)that the nuclear apocalypse threat isn’t real, the protagonist is just an aspect of the AI’s personality, and the game’s action is a pageant of persecution and immolation Joan has constructed for herself to satisfy the imperatives of history.
This is cool stuff, but again, it’s mostly fed to the player in cutscenes. There’s some thematic resonance between the audio-based puzzles and the fact that Joan of Arc was said to hear voices – plus the construction of the AI featured some gross stuff involving auditory nerves – but the separation between the gameplay layer and the narrative one feels pretty wide. With a deserted base and no other characters to speak to, and no clarity on how the various features of the island – there’s a chapel, a forest, a lighthouse – relate to the AI’s plans, I sometimes felt like I was solving abstract puzzles to unlock plot coupons. I did enjoy both sides of the equation, but stronger integration of these pieces would have made the experience more compelling.
Highlight: there are some cool secrets to find along the critical path – I turned up two, and am pretty sure I missed a bunch more – getting these was really rewarding.
Lowlight: winning the game gives you the option of unlocking a new “hard mode”, but to access it you need to have accumulated 500 of the game’s chip currency, and I only had like 100 left over at the end. Better secret-finding would have helped, but I think you’d also need to pass up the various options to spend chips to make navigation easier, so I doubt even the most thorough player would finish with the requisite chips, and requiring two full playthroughs to open up the option to play a third time feels like inaccessible design (though the author clarified there's no additional plot in hard mode).
How I failed the author: as I mentioned in the stub I wrote before I played, my current setup is not conducive to playing games with sound – I was constantly pulling off my headphones to listen for Henry’s noises, or talk to my wife, and these regular interruptions probably undermined my immersion in the game.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Custom engine uses sound-based puzzles to good effect, November 2, 2021This review was moved from the authors' forum, where the author helpfully pointed out some oversights: most notably, hints are written into the game text, and I missed some places to mine credits. But I want it up here so people will have an idea how to approach a worthwhile game that may feel intimidating. The TLDR is, even if you miss some of its neat features, it's still a smooth, rewarding effort.
Cygnet Committee is a big download at 140MB, and I admit I was intimidated by the size and 2-hour playtime suggestion, which was accurate, but I’m glad I pushed through with it in the end. The concept is intriguing: infiltrate a cult that worships Joan of Arc’s AI and destroy it. There’s a good deal of backstory here, which is shown as you get further into the base, where you reach save-points that give you small videos. You learn why Joan of Arc is so appealing and why she rose to prominence. You have a map at the game’s main screen, which is useful to show you how far you’ve gotten. It’s tidy and well-organized and purposeful.
The map’s not intimidatingly big, and the main mechanic is this: you move your mouse to detect sounds. There are four ranges on the screen, and one of them gives the right sound, and the others give the wrong one. Sometimes it’s no sound that’s right, as when you’re crossing a minefield or rotted bridge, and sometimes you want a sound, when you’re fighting a drone or guiding your helicopter. Other times, you’ll start with the same sound, but it changes at the end–punching in a keycode, for instance, or listening for a robot patarol. And in some cases, the same sound in all four sectors means you probably need to solve a puzzle so things quiet down.
This is something that isn’t nearly as dramatic with text. Any sort of typing would drag things out. It’s a neat streamlined way to give you a feel for the game and the mechanics without having instructions, which is handy, because having to remember controls and such would get in the way of the big-picture instructions as you weave your way through the base. Overall, the tension worked well, though I’m not sure if it was fatigue or anticipation that had me anxious at the end. I do think the timed puzzles were ultimately a good idea, though I wish the game had started with 20-second intervals to make 7 successive moves instead of starting at 15 and moving up. I was immersed enough that, on the one-minute puzzle, I faced a drone, and its voice made me think “Ah, I’m surrounded? Not really! But I bet I would’ve been, if I’d tried to make a break for (that one protected area.)” Then when I figured how I goofed, I was a bit scared to do the puzzle. But I had no choice. Similarly I liked the ending–it felt appropriately dramatic. I won in plenty of time. I realized, looking back, the game had more of a sense of humor than I gave it credit for.
So in the big picture, it’s a very strong game. I ran into a few pitfalls here and there, and looking at the long list below, they don’t cancel out the positives above, but they may help people push through bits that seem rough.
In one place, I thought I made a mistake, but a trap was unavoidable, and I took the wrong branch to find healing the first time. The purpose of the trap was to direct you to (Spoiler - click to show)a small cabin off to the side with information and supplies, and once I realized that, it was okay–but since I hadn’t saved in a while, I panicked.
On winning, I was notified I could only replay hard mode if I got 500 credits, which is a lot, because random combats give you 14 or so credits for each win, and while you find some credits, it’s just way too fun to disable cameras or electric fields or whatever so you can skip over the sound-tracking parts. It was a steady enough process–I never expected to mess up, and I was sort of curious what happened if I did, but too often I was a bit worried because I forgot when I’d last saved. Instead of hard mode, I’d have preferred some notes on how to get to the final map area, (Spoiler - click to show)past the waterfall and on top of a cliff, where the sound barriers were the same in all four areas. Or maybe how to fight drones more quickly, so it took less time to unlock hard mode. I couldn’t seem to get the in-game temporary for-x-moves hints (also a neat idea) too work. (I’d also like the option to skip videos–especially the ending one once you’ve escaped–the second time through. I mean, the second time you see them in-game, you can skip, but I’m just impatient like that. It’s a case of, get me to the next good stuff.)
Still I hope to come back and see about all the possible deaths and places I missed and gadgets I couldn’t quite afford–gadgets that let you bypass sound-puzzles you’ve mastered. I admit a walkthrough would help motivate me to revisit the game, with all the others I want to see in IFComp. And I think, sadly, the file size and potential system requirements will leave Cygnet Committee underplayed and undervoted-on in the comp. Which is too bad. On finishing this, I was reminded I did not finish Dr. Sourpuss, the author’s first offering, and I probably proceeded too cautiously with it. I started that way as well with Cygnet Committee, but once I jumped in, time flew–and I still got done in under just two hours.
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