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.