Like a Sky Full of Locusts

A return to the weird world of Castle Balderstone. Specifically, the "weird west" world, in this cowboy horror where the protagonist packs heat to take on a demonic invasion of a frontier town. It's a shoot-em-up with trivial levels of puzzle difficulty: the only real challenge is equipping the right gun for the right enemy (and maybe preserving ammo, but it almost grows on trees in this game). But this is story-focused IF, and the most important element, the writing, easily carries this to greatness: you can almost taste the sawdust and spittoons. And there are multiple, impressively lengthy bits done entirely in rhyming verse. Yee-haw!

For all its heavy metal silliness whereby “blasphemous pinnacles scrape against an eternally black and stormy sky” and its nods to weird scifi icons like Harlan Ellison, Like a Sky Full of Locusts is ultimately an even some more drunching of Veederlore, blusters of Balderstonia and mechanical rebakes of the Little Match Girl series overriding any pip of difference that might holler out of “what if Doomguy was a cowboy”.

Which isn’t to say that Veeder’s once-again-with-feeling approach to tropes doesn’t elicit some memorable mashup winks, like this Eastwood squint at the occult: “It was real angular and complicated, in all the wrong ways. I didn’t like the look of it, and I figured it was bad news for the kitchen in particular and Fort Hugh in general.” A japeous grinthrough enthuses the tone consistent enough to secure against any yes-and nausea, from the colonel’s amusing manifesto to gamey damage counters to action hero puns like when you kill a specter and “it gave up the ghost, so to speak.” Leaning into this silliness, Like a Sky Full of Locusts can overload its lightheartedness to deliver a few genuine sufficient-in-themselves jokes, such as “The Army didn’t tell us what to do with it, so we used it for doing whatever the Army didn’t tell us to do.”

This humor helps give purpose to a game which otherwise lacks it. The arcade shooter gameplay stales parodic when it consists merely of >shooting several times, spiced up occasionally with obviously inert drama: “It took one hundred eight damage, which I guess convinced it to take me seriously, because it started galloping across the hall on all fours, aiming to trample me—or else to rip me up like it’d ripped up all those tables. I got out of the way in the nick of time, and the thing stalked back to where it’d been pacing the floor earlier.” And to the extent that descriptiveness could give the affair animatronic themeride thrills, a delightfully Halloween restaging of Old West cardboard cutouts, the game instead lumbers on almost listless: pressing into the chapel, awaiting no doubt some sacrilegious archdemon inverting a rich array of traditions, there’s instead, uh, a giant lobster? You just like shoot a giant lobster. In fact, as often as not the game shrugs away the need to offer you enemies: “A monster like a giant bat was perched on the cannons. No, it wasn’t a bat, exactly. I don’t have the words.” Unfortunate for a text game, alas.

The resulting effect implies perhaps mass production out of a busy workshop, a game that exists to exist just in time for the holiday season. Even the strings of narrative poetry that thread the chief artistic grasps at mood are largely workmanlike. So we’re left voracious for the promise, fulfilled anon no doubt given our indefatigable author, of being “treated to a selection of nightmarish visions deemed too dangerous for public consumption.”

This game is set in the world of Castle Balderstone, but is a standalone entry as opposed to the large anthologies usually found with Castle Balderstone.

It's a western, a genre of IF I enjoy as it traditionally wasn't very common (although more have popped up recently!) (although now that I think of it it's set on a military base, so it doesn't have to be a western, but it has western themes kind of, like a solo hero with a gun, musical elements, a jail with a single cell, etc.)

The idea is that literal hell on earth has appeared at a military base, and monsters roam around. You have a pistol and can acquire more weapons.

Most of the gameplay for me was finding demons and then shooting them a lot. There's a little bit more (like puzzles) but I found that the main appeal of this game was the overall aesthetic, with the mechanics mostly serving as a way to flavor your experience of the aesthetic. In that way, it resembles Winter Storm Draco and The Ascent of the Gothic Tower out of Ryan Veeder's other works.

I enjoyed the writing and its demons, and the excruciating moral quandary that our hero encounters in the final verse.