By All Reasonable Knowledge

Context, they say, is king, and here is proof number nine hundred: I enjoy testing IF, and will gladly spend hours cataloging typos, brainstorming ways to improve a puzzle’s clueing, messing around with the parser to try to catch the world-model out, and otherwise cheerfully folding, spindling, and mutilating a buggy, incomplete mess of a game. And to be clear I don’t just mean that I like to do it because it’s a useful task for the community, or that I just like to feel helpful – though both of those are true – but that actually, the process itself is fun for me. It’s almost like a meta-puzzle: using your knowledge of writing and coding, how thoroughly can you break and reconstruct a game?

Yet while my playthrough of By All Reasonable Knowledge involved finding a lot of typos, noting inadequate clueing, and manipulating the parser to get around its inability to understand reasonable commands, I was not having fun. Because yeah, when an author has asked you to do that, it feels different from when they force you to do that.

This is all leading up to the reveal that BARK (we’ll circle back to the pun) doesn’t have any testers listed in the credits, and boy does it show. This is a one-room Inform game with a bunch of different bits of furniture, fixtures, and scenery, but LOOK just tells you “You are in a dingy bedroom”, so you constantly need to scroll back to the top of the transcript to review the paragraphs-long description of what’s actually there. There’s a night light you need to grab, but you can’t because despite how the game writes it it’s actually implemented as a nightlight (holding the thing also enables you to unlock a container by trying to open it, with no clue or other indication about this entirely nonstandard interaction so far as I could tell). State-changing actions are inconsistently implemented (there’s a window that kept saying it was closed even after I’d opened it), the grammar for the HELP command is so abstruse I never figured out which prepositions are required (fortunately you can just type HELP and then the name of an object at the disambiguation prompt, which works like half the time), and of course there’s an object where the intuitive command for using it gives a useless, default response, because in that one case you’re supposed to guess that USE is the right command.

Oh yeah, and for a game called BARK, where the blurb tells you the inciting incident is barking dog keeping you awake, and where you can call no less than three hired guns to try to get them to kiss said dog to get it to cease its barking, it sure is surprising that I never heard a single soft arf in my playthrough.

Adding insult to injury, the game seems determined to take its shortcomings out on its players. If you exhaust the hints available for a particular object, you get told “Maybe interactive games are too difficult for you. I’m sure there’s a pinball table in a bar you might be better at,” which I confess made me annoyed – baby, let me assure you, it’s not me, it’s you. That snark is also of a piece with BARK’s edgy, incoherent tone: for all that the setup screams “zany parser game”, you’re treated to a series of flashbacks that attempt to situate things in a social realist mode, creating a bathetic contrast that goes about as well as you’d expect. And although I don’t think you can successfully kill the dog, as the assassination attempts seemed to rebound on me, it’s still a kind of gross thing to push the player to try (I tried to call in a hit just because I dialed a context-free – there’s that word again – number that I was told I’d memorized, with no indication of who was on the other end).

In the game’s defense, there is a FUCK TRUMP Easter egg, and I don’t think the idea of contrasting silly-puzzle solving with downbeat domestic drama is inherently bad, though it’s not well-realized here (and it’s especially not well-served by the “wacky” plastic-looking genAI art of the cover). But playing BARK is still exhausting, far more work than entertainment and with no indication that the author’s going to make updates based on feedback, continuing to slog away at it was hard to justify – so when I got to a point where I knew exactly what I was supposed to do, and confirmed my understanding was right via the hint function, but wasn’t able to actually do the thing due to the syntax’s failure to explain itself or accept reasonable alternatives that had worked in other similar situations the game presented ((Spoiler - click to show)I was trying to CLEAN CLOCK WITH SCREWDRIVER), I decided to call that good. I am curious how the various plot threads in BARK might eventually come together, but this one needs a lot more polishing – and testing – before it can fairly ask a player to give it a go.