Alphabet City

I’ve talked before about the culture shock that ParserComp can sometimes engender, sitting awkwardly as it does between the IF community’s norms of polished games made with an expectation of substantive feedback, and a more laissez-faire itch.io jam vibe where hacking something together in a couple of days is a praiseworthy act of solidarity and an opportunity to develop some new technical and design skills. There’s nothing intrinsically better or worse about either of these approaches, of course, but it can make the job of a reviewer somewhat awkward, especially since I’m very much of the write-a-couple-hundred-words-minimum school. Alphabet City’s blurb makes no bones about the fact that it represents its author’s very first steps with Inform, with some of its features included more to provide programming practice than for design reasons. In its favor, it boasts a gritty, underexplored setting (the early-80s NYC demimonde) and an endearing ambition, but it’s also got a long, long way to go before it could even be considered an alpha.

I assume the author is aware that there are a myriad of issues that would need to be addressed before the game could be considered ready for release – if indeed that’s the goal, and this isn’t meant to just be a learning exercise (nothing wrong with that!) So I won’t belabor the negatives; some are flagged in the attached transcript, but in brief, the combat and scoring systems both feel superfluous and arbitrary; scenery objects are often under-implemented, completely missing, and/or incorrectly marked as takeable (my inventory by the end included “the air in the Mudd Club”, “a motorcycle throttle”, “a pile of puke”, “a folding fixed in place three legged stool”, and “a Squeegee kid” as well as “a panhandler”); many conversations and other interactions are triggered bottom-lined when you simply examine a person or item; the game’s senses of place (a George Washington Bridge overpass is immediate adjacent to your Alphabet City apartment, which is in the Lower East Side; going south from the Fort Lee area somehow gets you to the Triboro Bridge) and time (despite being set in 1982, there’s a “thanks, Giuliani!” joke) are often loosey-goosey; there are omnipresent disambiguation issues; and the final (and only) puzzle is of the read-the-author’s-mind variety (Spoiler - click to show)(you have to LOVE JAYNE; more concrete attempts to HUG or KISS her, much less talking to her first to establish consent, go unacknowledged). And the fact that this is notionally a story about addiction, dependence, and relationship trauma makes the jank even more farcical, because Alphabet City in its current form is nowhere near up to the task of engaging with such weighty themes.

But! Judged as a couple days of work by someone brand new to Inform, what’s here is by no means bad. Lots of these issues are things that bedevil experienced authors, or would be smoothed out with a modicum of testing, and there’s even a certain charm to a few places where the game’s reach exceeds its grasp (there’s a subway ride that progresses by moving from one location to the next, rather than by waiting for time to pass, which is clearly just the fruit of not knowing how the rules for that work but made me smile regardless). And I’m all for more games with grounded milieus; okay, sometimes the grunginess here is a little much, but give me an incompletely-renamed Max’s Kansas City over a generic spaceship any day. The writing, even in its rough form, is also sometimes cleverer than it appears, like X ME telling the player that you’re “young, dumb, and full of romantic aspirations.” So as I’ve said before about similar games: as a competition entry, this is a disaster, as a thrown-together jam entry, it’s potentially promising, and while I can’t recommend playing it in its current form, I’m definitely curious to see where the author might be going next.

This game is very buggy and at least some of the room descriptions were written using ChatGPT. Still, it's a very characterful romp invoking a specific time and place and kind of social scene, and for all its many rough edges in implementation, the game is not hard to interact with and have an amusing experience.

Alphabet City is full of grime and grunge. The place just reeks of poverty, decay, desperation. You are all to familiar with the bottom, but things were starting to look up. But now your girl is missing, and you want to find her, and take her back home. All in all, this game has a good premise, great setting, interesting writing, but needs a lot more testing. This could really have been one of the best games of ParserComp if more work were put in on the parser responses to prevent some of the silliness that happens with Inform 7 objects that aren't classified correctly. I really dig the artwork that was included that really sets the tone for this story. Would definitely like to see a version 2 of this released that fixes some of the issues and perhaps adds a bit more to the story. I am giving 2/5 because for me that means a game with potential that has serious problems. That's what I feel Alphabet City is, a game with a lot of potential, but it needs some major work to pass as an enjoyable game I could recommend.

This parser game is the author’s first Inform 7 game, but is set in a larger series of Alphabet City games.

It’s pretty heavy stuff. Our hero is a recovering cocaine user who had a huge fight with his girlfriend over her refusal to quit using drugs. A torn earring is all that remains of the fight.

The game implements a chunk of New York City, including the weed-filled offices of the magazine our protagonist works for and a night club.

While you can beat the game without it, fighting is a way you can interact with a couple of people. FIGHT ____ or HIT ____ starts combat which you can continue until one person perishes. It’s also usable against (Spoiler - click to show)your girlfriend, surprisingly, although the game converts it to (Spoiler - click to show)LOVE.

The descriptions are vivid and raw, depicting a grungy life. I thought that the descriptiveness was well done. And there’s some fancy highlighting of keywords.

Some of the scenery is underimplemented in ways all too familiar to those who have started Inform 7 (I have done them many times). Things like objects whose names are subsets of each other (in this case ‘key’ and ‘studio key’) and so can’t be referred to easily; takable things that shouldn’t be takable; and objects just listed in a pile at the end of a paragraph instead of including them more discreetly in earlier paragraphs.

(to new authors: if you put the name of an object in brackets like [chair] in a room description, it won’t show up later on. Or, saying something like ‘the chair is scenery’ makes the chair not appear in the list at the end and keeps people from taking it. And finally after you define an object, if your next sentence is in quotese that becomes the ‘fancy’ way to see the object. Like:

The knife is on the table. “The knife you used to make your sandwich is still on the table, dirty.”

Then when the game runs, instead of saying ‘You also see a knife’. It will say “The knife you used to make your sandwich is still on the table, dirty.”)

I think this author has a lot of potential, and I think this game could be pretty great if it had some more polish, so I definitely encourage more experimentation, beta testing, and authoring. Good work!