Look Around the Corner

This game, for better or for worse, simulates the drudgery of waking up to a new day.

It plays with the expectations we have as we go through our morning rituals, but the prose betrays its own optimism. "Another day is here," the narration greets its players, "rise up!" This seems too bright, too cheerful for the player to take the text seriously.

Even before I typed in a command, I anticipated some layer of irony around the corner. I looked for a corner to no avail -- no "corners" were implemented in the parser -- and examining myself simply reassured the player character they'll always stay as themselves until the end of time. Going to the light as the game wanted only repeated the cycle.

"Another day is here," the game says again, "rise up!"

Even though the player is locked in these two rooms, the game does not induce anxiety or even the feeling of being trapped. Rather, a sense of ennui and regression permeates the air. The player character must constantly mask their exhaustion with the most false language as the cycle repeats itself over and over again.

Until the player figures out the solution, Look Around the Corner is a rather melancholic experience. It captures the somber violin tones from the song it's based on through the player's gentle struggle with the parser. There are only vague clues provided by the sparse implementation, and this evokes a gloomy spell on the morning I spend playing and writing about the game. It's such a dour experience that the cloudy morning I see out the window seems so appropriate: I look for the rays of sunshine, but everything feels so gray.

The solution, on the other hand, is a clever throwback to the song, but I don't think it extends its exploration of the liminal state between waking and sleeping. It ends without any buts or ands. The idea of endlessly waking up to a new day is nipped in the bud.

What would a respite from the drudgery of looking around the corner would look like? Or is there no way out? These are tantalizing questions that cease to be once the player reaches the end.

Indeed, I wished Look Around the Corner could have been a little more curious since it did a convincing simulation of waking up in the short time it had. The game is doing something very clever with the idea of "new day" as a vague promise, but I'm not sure what it is. With a little more looking around the corner, I suspect the answer could be very interesting.

As it stands, this is a very cute game that is worth your time. I just think it could have been something very special.

Look Around the Corner has one gimmick, but it's an effective one, because it helps open up a bit more story. You get up from your bed, go into the hallway and ... well, you get overwhelmed by eternity. In several different ways. Whether or not you look around the corner!

This creates an interesting set of perspectives and feeling of being overwhelmed. It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but it sort of captured the general feeling of waking up when you weren't really ready.

Hidden in these ways you are hit with eternity is the solution. If you are a smart-aleck kitchen-sink tester, you may stumble on the solution without realizing how or why you were supposed to. Indeed, back during ShuffleComp, I did so (I think I was in tester mode from testing other entries,) and then I figured how I was supposed to be reasoning, and the contrast was pleasing. When I replayed just now, years later, I was not in tester mode. I'm glad I didn't remember the solution, or the reasoning behind it, and I got to work it out again.

It would be neat to be able to chain a bunch of very small, focused efforts like this into a row of puzzles. I'd guess something like this would be a good break if you are stuck on a bigger game and need a legitimate reason to feel clever again. We all need the perspective this brings.

Oh, and contemplating eternity is good, too, in moderation.

Two games after playing an entry planned for 2023’s ShuffleComp revival, the randomizer gave me an entry in 2014’s OG ShuffleComp – I am really enjoying how wide-ranging the thon feels! Once again, this is inspired by a song I’ve never heard before and didn’t get around to listening to, but hey, this isn’t actually a ShuffleComp, so I’m telling myself this is a reasonable approach to reviewing (I’m also telling myself that it’s totally understandable that I spent ten minutes flailing around trying to get the game to work – turns out that the first file listed on the IFDB page is an HTML TADS one that doesn’t work in modern interpreters or web browsers, but fortunately the second one listed plays just fine in QTADS).

There are probably two basic ways to make a game inspired by music. The first, taken by Not Just Once, is to assemble a linear narrative out of the lyrics and bits of plot implied by the songs, filtering a mélange of story-content through the Aristotelian unities. Look Around the Corner takes the more dangerous course, and tries to capture something of the experience of listening to a song while sticking to a largely-traditional IF approach. In particular, it deploys repetition and novelty to mirror the verse-chorus-verse structure familiar from music. This is a time loop game, in each of which the player must perform the same sequence of events: getting up out of bed, leaving their room, catching sight of a ray of light coming around the hallway’s corner, and then experiencing one of five wildly-disparate visions – the only bit of text that changes from iteration to iteration – before the whole thing resets.

The focus is clearly on the set-piece visions, and they range over an intriguingly broad territory, alternately invoking the primum mobile, Sumerian myth, the fractal structures of nature. Here’s that last one:

"The light of the dawn filters through an enormous tree, whose trunk divides into branches, whose branches divide into twigs, whose twigs carry leaves. Each leaf has veins that branch into smaller and smaller veins, bringing water and minerals to every chlorophyllic cell."

The writing is fine enough to communicate the ideas, but I did wish the author had leaned even more into poetry; five different sequences of two sentences isn’t a lot of time to make an impression, and getting a little less linear, a little more allusive, would have made these pieces more memorable and helped the player intuit connections between what felt to me a bit of a random grab-bag of themes. I also found the ending a bit of an anticlimax – there’s a fun little puzzle, clued with increasing obviousness as visions start to repeat, but your reward for untangling it is little more than “and then she woke up.” Again, perhaps listening to the song would mean that all these choices would make sense, as I’d see how the music provides a unifying ground to the whole experience, but I can’t but feel that there was a missed opportunity here to make a song-like game that doesn’t rely on anything else for its impact.