Look Around the Corner

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.

For this next review, I began playing Teatime With A Vampire (which, along with Romance the Backrooms, could do with some reviews) - before realising it’s a lot more NSFW than I expected, so I pulled back, and I went for this game, which although I'm sure TWaV is good, I prefer this game for the above reasons.

Look Around the Corner is a much smaller, easier and simpler game than a lot of the ones I have played or like to play. There was not much to do, giving it the feel of a limited parser game. It wasn’t - you still got all the verbs (or the ones that I tried). It starts simple - waking up, light shining round the corner off to the north, and let to explore. Exploring involves simply going north and then east, over and over again as you get all the responses - of which there weren’t as many as I would have liked. However, there is a way to win. After realising that I should probably be listening to the song instead of 11 5 18 12 1 14 14 by Yann Tiersen. I quite liked the song, but it was there that I got the answer to winning the game. It’s a short, one-move, and just a little unsatisfactory ending, but it does the job.

I would say that, for sure, the best bit was the false ending (looking round the corner). I would wish there were more of them, though. For a game of this limited size, it's pretty good. It doen't quite match the mark, however.

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.