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Review
The summer of my second year in law school, I got an internship in DC and needed to figure out where to live. My school provided a listing service through which I found someone at a school there who likewise had an out-of-town job for the summer, making her place available to sublet, but the dates didn’t quite match up, forcing me to find someplace to stay for the week between when my internship started and the sublet became available. In those pre-AirBnB days I just checked out Craigslist, and eventually found a room I could rent for a couple of days in a suburb just outside the city proper. I was feeling good about my resourcefulness as I threw my giant duffel over my shoulder and caught a bus from the bus station to my new home for the next week – feelings which curdled as I rang the doorbell to find there was no-one there to answer me, and that turned into a cold weight in my stomach once I realized that when I called the host’s number, nobody was picking up.
Fortunately, it was not a scam after all! The guy had just been out and his phone had died; after fifteen minutes he came over and we sorted it all out (okay, he had double-booked the room so I had to sleep on a futon for the first night, so I guess it was kinda scammy, but he was apologetic and knocked the price down as a result – compared to my fears of being left totally up a creek I wasn’t inclined to complain too much). Still, I remember the way my heart sank as I arrived and realized getting into the place I was supposed to stay that night wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought, which means the setup of Rain Check-in immediately had resonance for me. In the game, you’ve arrived at an AirBnB in a rural area, but all the lights are off, your phone is low on charge, and the host’s given you cryptically-translated instructions for finding the key that are only medium helpful. Oh, and there’s a thunderstorm on the way. Good luck!
It’s a fun premise, though in practice what we’ve got here is Standard Parser Scenario #7: “get into a locked house.” There’s a little bit of local color with some patio furniture and a squeaky gate held closed with a rock, but outside of a bonus area I didn’t find on my first playthrough (hint: try exploring around before heading to the house), there aren’t any characters to interact with, or much scenery to ground proceedings in any particular place or time, much less anything resembling environmental storytelling – the closest it gets are a few wry footnotes that do at least add a slight flavor of humor. The few puzzles are likewise ones you’ve seen before – it’s not quite moving the doormat to find the key, and then entering the combination that you find written on a post-it one room over from the safe, but it’s also not miles away from that kind of thing, either.
There are two departures from the generic, one good, one bad. On the plus side, there are more endings than I expected, and some puzzles have alternate solutions. These don’t fundamentally change the nature of the game, but it was fun to see that you could use brute force to get around some challenges, allowing you to reach a suboptimal ending. The other departure is less enjoyable, sadly: not only does the game have an overall time limit, you also have a light-source with limited charge, and when you run out you die. Mainstream parser-IF design has long since moved away from these kinds of timers, and for good reason – leaving aside questions of verisimilitude and Zarfian cruelty, they tend to disincentivize players from spending excess time exploring and checking out details, which undercuts one of the major strengths of parser IF. There are some ways of taking the sting out of them, but I think it would be hard to find these options on a first play-through, it’s galling to have to treat that initial play-through as initial scouting that must be thrown away to inform a subsequent run, though at least the game is short and simple enough that this only winds up being a minor annoyance.
Implementation-wise, Rain Check-in is more ambitious than other games of its length and simplicity: there are some robust features, like the aforementioned phone and endings. The former has some wobbles – it’s implemented via somewhat-wonky multiple choice menus, and I couldn’t actually get the option to display the phone’s charge in the header to work – but I didn’t find any out and out bugs, beyond a few Inform-standard things like an object whose display name doesn’t match what you need to type to interact with it, and the verb to enter the combination being a bit idiosyncratic. For an author who appears to have only made a few small prior parser games, it’s a pretty good showing.
As for the writing – well, the elephant in the room here is the use of ChatGPT to help generate the game’s prose, which the author discusses in the Comp blurb: as a non-native speaker of English, he used ChatGPT as a translation aid and to refine grammar and phrasing. While I usually find text straight from the LLM intolerable to read, here the writing mostly struck me as unobjectionable, I have to say; while I didn’t note down any especially unique turns of phrase, there weren’t any clunkers, either, and it mostly avoids the annoying tics LLMs tend to get up to when given free rein. I have to believe there are more ethical and sustainable tools for ESL authors to use to sharpen their prose – not least, volunteers from this very forum! – but at least as to the results in this game, it’s not too bad.
And that’s pretty much my judgment on Rain Check-in – it’s not too bad! Again, as a neophyte’s work it’s reasonably well put together, while its most annoying features (those timers!) would hopefully be easy to correct in a follow-up work. As a story, there’s not much there, just a sketch towards an anecdote, but it’s a good-natured enough predicament to be stuck in, and I did enjoy the footnotes. And while “not too bad” isn’t high praise, but sometimes, like when you’re locked out and expecting the worst, “not too bad” can feel like intense relief.
