EYE

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forums during ParserComp)

The old saw about IF being a story at war with a crossword has always sat uncomfortably with me for a variety of reasons, one of the less commonplace of which is that actually IF puzzles aren’t very much like crosswords. Even in their cryptic forms – more common in the UK, where the author of the saw is from – crosswords tend to rely on the solver bringing in some outside knowledge, some bits of trivia to help get the process started, before the business of pattern recognition, deduction, and wordplay come in to supply the answers that you don’t know off the bat. No, IF puzzles to my mind are more like the logical games that give their name to a section of the LSAT, where you’re given a number of starting conditions (there’s a dinner party where someone whose name starts with A is sitting next to someone eating a vegetarian entrée and another wearing a purple dress; meanwhile there’s a pair of twins who dress alike but refuse to eat a dish if the other’s already eating something with the same number of letters in its name) and then need to work out the implications (which fashion-victim is wearing a bright red suit? If the person eating salmon leaned over the kiss the person eating beef stroganoff, who would they be awkwardly shouldering aside?)

EYE is very much in this tradition – a parser game that has a few tricks on its sleeve, but which largely relies on alternating cycles of induction and deduction to lead the player through a finely-calibrated chain of puzzles. Unsurprisingly for this author, it’s a limited parser game, but the twist this time is that you have quite a lot of commands at your disposal, and uncovering new ones and sussing out what they can do is the meat of the game. There’s not so much a story as a bit of narrative texture – the conceit is that you’re a kind of ghost, flitting around an academy and trying to learn the secrets of the various magical words they employ – and while reaching an ending reveals a bit of motivation for what’s come before, what drives you on to try again and reach for a better ending isn’t so much a desire for closure as it is an itch to complete filling out the grids of spells and locations that you’ve been developing (this is a game that requires notetaking).

I’m talking around the substance of the puzzles, because they’re quite fun to work through and I’m loath to spoil them. Most of them involve gematria of one form or another – that is, reading numbers as letters or vice versa – which is an age-old occult practice that also lends itself well to puzzles. Unlocking new magic words also tends to allow you access to new areas within the academy, with offer news sets of clues to help you suss out the next set of “spells”. Every once in a while this orderly progression halts as you encounter one of a few self-contained set-piece puzzles, and there are three different endings, with progress past each of the first two gated by a significant logical leap that opens up a significant new possibility-space to play with.

Those set-pieces are a highlight, and often reminded me of Sage Sanctum Scramble, a wordplay game that may be my favorite of the author’s previous works. There’s a nice variety, with the best reminding me of a description in Richard Feynman’s autobiography about how he approached mathematical transformations, picturing numbers turning colors or sprouting polka dots – except here you’re working out which magic words are Sandwiched or Primeval… I have more mixed feelings about the two leaps of logic: the first feels fairer to me, since it provides a handful of examples before it expects you to deduce a general principle, and a clear dangling thread prompting you to experiment in the right direction (Spoiler - click to show)(since you’re given the name of a room, but not the word that will take you there). The second one, though, only gives you two examples before expecting you to figure out what’s going on, and I didn’t notice any suggestions of where I should be focusing my experiments, making the solution feel like it requires brute-force effort more than intuitive inspiration (I looked at hints).

My only other misgiving is that while logical games tend to carry a bit more narrative texture than a crossword, they’re still not actually a story. There is a fun narrative hinted at in the various endings here, but they really have nothing at all to do with the main action of the game. All of the author’s other games are unabashed puzzle-fests too, but they often do a better job of grounding the gameplay in some kind of fiction; here that layer is so thin as to be nonexistent. Heck, there’s even a sort of puzzle attached to how much the narrative elements can feel like an afterthought – some clues require you to go back to the room descriptions and remember what they contained, which is hard because they’re generally perfunctory and irrelevant! Personally, I still very much dig this kind of thing – the logical games section was my favorite part of the LSAT, nerd that I am – but EYE does fall short of the very best pieces of IF, which tend to do a better job of integrating the form’s two constitutive elements.