City of Secrets

Emily Short's longest and perhaps most ambitious game, City of Secrets wowed me completely for the first hour or two I spent with it. The plot has you, a rather naive tourist, arriving in a large city for the first time. Your sightseeing there is quickly complicated by a mess of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies that you discover. You must sort out what is really going on, figure out who are the real good and bad guys, and finally choose a side to support. While doing all this, you also get the opportunity to explore the City and learn something about its culture and history.

Indeed, it's the City that is the real main character of the game. It's part of a fantasy world of Ms. Short's creation in which magic and high technology co-exist, and are (predictably enough) frequently at odds with one another. The most obviously unique feature of the City is that there is no such thing as night -- it's daylight all the time, apparently due to some sort of human tampering. (This memorable little wrinkle of course has the added benefit for Ms. Short of saving her from having to code a realistic day-night cycle.) Short doesn't just depend on this one gimmick to define her setting, though. Her city and her whole world are worked out in impressive, subtle detail that includes not only the present but the last several thousand years of history as well. It's some of the best, most complete world-building I've ever seen in IF, and the greatest strength by far of the game.

Plot-wise, things start off almost equally strong. The early stages of the game perfectly capture the "stranger in a strange land" feel of a tourist in an unfamiliar city. When inexplicable things start to happen at the margins of your existence, the effect is suitably creepy, and then when you are taken before the head of one of the City's factions and enlisted rather forcefully into his cause, things get downright compelling. The writing is excellent, Ms. Short by this stage of her career having shed the slightly cloying preciousness that dogged her earliest work.

During the middle game, though, the plot machinery begins to break down. There's far too much wandering over a rather expansive map, far too much talking to a huge cast of characters about essentially the same topics again and again, and not really that much to actually DO. In fact, when Ms. Short wrote recently on her blog about the challenges of maintaining dramatic pace in games with lots of conversation, I thought immediately of this game as an example of said challenges. One problem is that the sheer number of NPC's here preclude anyone from really taking center-stage. There are lots of personalities, tons of conversations, but only the most superficial of relationships to be formed. This makes it hard to really care about the plot once the novelty wears off, and eventually even the hugely rich and imaginative scenery and back-story start to become mind-numbing without a compelling foreground story to enjoy there. I found myself on several occasions reduced to wandering around from place to place trying to shake something loose and drive the plot forward -- not exactly a compelling narrative experience.

I get the impression that Ms. Short may have simply bit off more than she could chew with this one. I sense a bit of authorial exhaustion in the latter stages. Regardless, its failures shouldn't detract too much from its strengths -- it's a near masterpiece of world-building. Every IF tourist should spend a bit of time wandering around inside it.

As other reviewers have said, the strength of CoS is the atmosphere of its setting. Though the author may have conceived the City as part of her own fantasy world; for me she manages wonderfully to capture the unmistakeable ambience of a middle-european capital during the later cold-war era. There is a polished, and almost luxurious veneer, but underneath, everything is curiously shabby and archaic. As the title implies, this is a city whose social structures are founded on lies and secrets rather than anything more substantial and enduring. Even the NPC interactions reflect the careful tones and phrasings of people living with the knowledge that everything they do and say may be observed.

The sense of place and time is so good, it seems almost churlish to draw attention to the slight flaws in the plot; a certain stiltedness that grows more marked the further we get into the story. To say that there were points at which I found myself becoming almost bored, gives a slightly inaccurate and rather picky picture. There was never any real danger I would give up, largely because the sheer depth and accuracy of the setting had me well and truly hooked.

Overall CoS was a very good game and a very enjoyable experience. I just couldn't help feeling that it had the potential to be even better.

I really enjoyed City of Secrets, my first Emily Short game, and spent several hours on it over a two week period.

It is very easy-going in the puzzles: this is more a game of conversation and exploration.

The world-building is impressive. I never felt like I was reading a wall of text, but I understand the world I was in and was not confused. The world she created here is rich and deep, and at times, written with sparse, minimalist prose. I mean to say that Short doesn't waste our time with over-wrought descriptions and backstory. Important information is communicated simply but eloquently.

I enjoyed this and would recommend it to anyone who is new to IF. You won't die at random, and it seems nearly impossible to get stuck. The writing and pacing are a treat.

I had some "guess the verb/guess the action moments" at the very end, but it wasn't hard to figure out what I was supposed to do--re-reading the text and thinking carefully, I saw that the appropriate verbs were at least hinted at. I wouldn't ascribe any of my late game confusion to the author or the piece.

If you are seeking something fiendishly difficult, I'd recommend moving on, but keep this in your queue: when you need a break from mind-benders, you can enjoy the writing and atmosphere of this game.