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Review
Between last year’s THON and this one, I’ve played a bunch of super-short games, which has been a novel experience for me – since I mostly just play things I’m going to review, I don’t typically seek out jam entries as my sense is the typical entrant isn’t necessarily looking for a nitpicky review longer than their game was. It’s been illuminating to see different theories about craft play out – or fail – on the unforgiving stage of a game whose text could fit on one or two pages, and Habeas Corpus is no different. This 1,000 word Twine game has cool visual design reminiscent of the early 90s, all pixelated fonts and chunky buttons, and some parser-like gameplay elements allowing you to visit different areas and solve a (simple) inventory puzzle. It’s also got some individual moments of arresting imagery. But the lesson it teaches is the importance of focus: without a strong central spine around which these pieces can cohere, I was left feeling like the game is less than the sum of its (each quite cool) parts.
Start with the title: the great writ of habeas corpus is one of the foundational legal protections against tyranny, as allows the sovereign to be brought to court to confirm whether it’s detaining someone, and if so, what authority justifies their incarceration and where they can be found – the Latin literally means “you have the body”. It’s a title pregnant with possibility, but any relation to the game is hard to suss out: rather than a crusading lawyer, you play a (amnesiac?) cipher exploring a mostly-deserted base. One ending allows you to rescue a harpy-phoenix whose torment seems to provide power to the facility, so I suppose there’s kind of a thematic link there if you squint, but the other ending sees you go to sleep forever in a bunk next to a dying man, which feels farther afield. Meanwhile, the blurb reveals that the theme for the jam that produced this game was “ENVIRONMENT”, so I guess the harpy is actually a fossil-fuels allegory? And who knows what this has to do with the 90s, or the subtitle of “abandoned spaces, perpetual motion.”
A really strong prose style could do a lot to knit things together, but while there are some individually memorable phrases, there’s frequently an indeterminacy to the writing that’s frustrating in a piece that’s in need of nailing down. Like, here’s a line from the opening:
"The room around you feels still as a held breath despite the ceaseless motion of the structure itself."
That’s an interesting idea, but it’s sure self-contradictory, and the implications of what it says about the PC or the situation aren’t explored. There are similar oppositions embedded in this description of the facility’s doors:
"The remaining doors each bear plaques beaten from dark, glittering alloys. Light seems to drip from their deeply engraved words."
The puzzle, meanwhile, is about as stripped-down as it can be (there’s exactly one takeable object in the game, and exactly one situation in which you’re prompted to use it), and of the five room you can visit, one seems to exist just to hold the aforementioned object, while enough doesn’t even have that much going on. Thin gameplay in a short game is no big deal, of course, but in the absence of compelling characters or a dramatic plot or electric writing, it’s one more opportunity to provide a strong central element that the game passes up.
The counterargument here would be to argue that sometimes heterogeneity has a charm all its own – some acknowledged IF classics are more or less pieces of bricolage, going back to the crazy-quilt that is Zork. And that can work, I agree, but even in those cases I think there’s typically some unifying vibe structuring the experience, and, crucially, enough time for the player to settle in while they consider which elements resonate for them. In a short game, the need to grab the player is commensurately higher – my main complaint about Habeas Corpus is that it ended before I had a chance to decide what I think it’s about, which isn’t an issue I’ve run into even with Neo-Twiny Jam entries that have half the word-count. Maybe 1,000 words is just a tough length to work from, since it’s too much for a sharp spike of a punk song, but too short for a prog epic; still, I can’t help feel that a catchier hook could have made the disparate pieces of this game sing.
