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Anton Chekhov short story with lightly interactive framing story, October 24, 2022This is, I believe, the third 'stateful narration' game I've played, and the first I've figured out how to get a reaction on. Edit: It was in fact the second, I have lied.
These games have an engine where you type something in a box (the game requires it to be in its internal dictionary) and then it parsers that output.
In all the past games I pushed the boundaries of it, like typing 'fart' in every box, and the game didn't respond at all. Even this time, I used words like 'deciduous', 'petrochemical', and 'brobdingnagian', and it didn't respond at all.
So I decided to just give in and type clear words like 'happy' and 'sad'. The game seemed to understand those, as well as 'despondent'. Given a couple of similar projects I've seen recently, I suspect that what's underneath the hood is 'sentiment analysis', where there is a database of dictionary words with a score associated to them about how positive and negative they are. Or not; I could be completely wrong. But that's what it feels like.
Like the other games, this has a classic short story inserted uncut and unchanged with a framing story around it. I'm not sure why this is the pattern; the short story is interesting, but it doesn't affect my feelings about the new parts of the game. It's kind of like buying a car and entering it into a car-decaling competition and putting a realistic copy of the Mona Lisa on the hood and then adding your own work around it without altering the original in any way. I think I rather prefer remixes of originals more than juxtaposition; A Fifth of Beethoven is a great remix of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for instance.
The framing story has some interesting elements, but I found it hard to find a narrative thread or two outside of mimicking the lottery element of the chekhov story. It's possible the main purpose of the sauce story is just to provide several opportunities for the stateful interaction that is mostly about reacting positively or negatively to something.
Fun fact: the image used in the cover art is from a picture of a baby lottery held in early 1900's Paris and featured in Popular Mechanics. Pretty wild!
For my rubric, I find this game both polished and descriptive, but the interactivity could use a little more pushback on words with neutral sentiment; my main emotional impact was from the Chekhov story rather than the surrounding material; and there's not a lot of replayability here.