Bali B&B

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

How can you be mad at a game that checks all these boxes?
- Amiable, pleasant protagonist
- Light, character-based humor
- Solid but non-urgent plot
- Lovingly rendered from a place of knowledge and affection

It hurts my heart when despite all that goodwill, I cannot connect with the material in the way the author does. I am a cold, emotionless husk it seems. My play experience was characterized by in-the-moment investment but tellingly, little regret when my gameplay led to unwanted/unintended places. I just kind of rolled with it.

Let me start by emphasizing the game’s superpower. It is chockablock with specificity, both in the setting, the characters that inhabit it, and the B&B that is the central location. The setup is, you are tasked to run your Grandmother’s B&B for a week, a job you are uncertainly prepared for. It is all painted so smoothly and effortlessly with straightforward, effective prose. All too often, I find IF text showy and distracting. Here, the text disappears and images and events are planted in your mind with economical aplomb.

The choice to make the narrator the main protagonists’ stream of consciousness is well taken. It allows for often wry comic observations to also simultaneously act as scene-setting and character building moments. It’s not a chuckle-fest, that’s not how the protagonist rolls, but there are smiles aplenty to be had from their understated comedic observations.

The NPC work is similarly effective - the array of guests and staff all have unique personalities and voices, and must be interacted with uniquely. As a writer, this is often much harder than it looks but plays out seamlessly here. As a hospitality host your job is to make them happy, and it does feel like the tasks (and results) are satisfyingly specific to the personalities involved. Really strong verisimilitude and world building.

So. With all that going for it, why did I feel at arms’ length the entire time? For one thing, early on you are asked to establish the protagonist’s goals. The scenario is very subtle and complex! It is overrun with NPC personalities and protagonist motivations! That kind of complexity itself is hard to do so well, and another reflection of the author’s talent. But the player choices are more constrained. I selected what felt best to me, but the ensuing gameplay kind of sidelined that choice in away that felt… ignored? The author painted a nuanced set up, but the IF-specific demands of player choice anticipation were just too great to honor those choices. It’s hard to get my head around. The day to day operation, much like life, is NOT preoccupied with overarching life goals and shouldn’t be. But the author is SO talented at soft word choice character building, even the phrasing of ongoing events pushed against my mental model of the PC.

The other facet that I think kept me at a remove was the problem set. Now, with this setup you can easily imagine a comedically escalating madcap farce of compounding, competing crises. This is not that, and doesn’t need to be. Instead, you get a series of low-key hospitality issues to manage, each with multiple reasonable and straightforward strategies to resolve. You may make a soft choice of prioritization, but nothing dire. I think maybe the protagonist specificity worked against things here. You make choices, yes, but the protagonist knows so much more about B&B running than you do (thankfully!) that they do the heavy lifting of problem solving once you nudge them in a direction. Often utilizing skills or knowledge it wasn’t clear they had when you made the choice. That gameplay decision had the effect of keeping me from fully inhabiting the protagonist, and more watching them work. Yes, I wanted good things for them, but I wasn’t convinced they needed me to make those happen.

There is a climactic problem to solve, again seemingly more under the protag’s power than my own, and then a final choice. The dramatic arc is there for sure, it just felt like my participation was more directorial than performative. “Sparks of Joy” is the measure I chose for my rubric, but how does that map to “Low, Pleasant Glow”? Was it Mechanical for me? Kind of, but not with the cold disappointment that metric implies. Implementation-wise it was mostly seamless - there was some wonkiness up front with version selection but clean after that. I guess I have to go with Mechanical, Mostly Seamless, but that rating really sells short the super strong writing and warm vibe of the piece.

Played: 10/4/23
Playtime: 1.25hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings:
Mechanical, Mostly Seamless, bonus for warming my cold heart at least a little.
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless