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.