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Navel-gazing voyages, December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
So here’s a deeply thought-out model for adventure stories that I’ve just thought up this second: imagine a line that says “external conflict” on one end and “internal conflict” on the other, then plot out various stories along the continuum. There’s a range of what works, certainly, but probably most of the really successful stuff lies somewhere around the middle: your Lords of the Ringses, say, where the business of orc-slaying is balanced by Frodo and Gollum undergoing their mirrored crises of self-doubt; or your original-flavor Star Wars, a bit further towards the external side what with all the laser-swords and pew-pew-pew stuff but still slowing down to deal with Luke’s journey towards white-guy Zen enlightenment and Han emerging from his solipsism. If you get really fancy, of course, you set things up so that the external conflicts rhyme with the internal stuff, but that’s not strictly necessary for a satisfying adventure, just gravy that moves you upwards on the orthogonal literary/unpretentious axis.
But shifting too far on the conflict continuum does risk pushing the formula to the point of breakdown: not enough internal conflict and you’ve got bubble-gum pulp that evanesces as soon as it’s consumed; not enough external conflict and you’ve taken the “adventure” part out of the adventure – which is my second-biggest critique of The Ship. This big choice-based game is pitched as a journey into mystery, with two captains charting their respective courses into uncertainty and danger, with only a cryptic poem to guide them, in search of a transcendent experience beyond mere treasure. And that’s a great pitch! But the game doesn’t really sell the high-stakes nature of the voyage; most of the challenges you experience aren’t about testing your wits against a hostile nature or devious foes, but rather getting a recalcitrant ship and querulous crew to keep moving in pursuit of the goal.
These are technically external obstacles, I know – maybe my model is not as ironclad as I thought – but they feel decidedly low-key. The game’s first puzzle involves winning a game of liar’s dice against a crewmember to win back the astrolabe he borrowed from the ship’s navigator, which is fun enough in itself but of course feels like busywork since you’re the captain and could just order him to give it back; others require you to fix damage to your ship (largely inflicted offscreen), investigate a spate of thefts, and fetch some soup for a prisoner. There is a minigame that sees you navigating through a series of treacherous passages, but it plays as a highly mechanical programming puzzle where you input your moves ahead of time and see if they bring you through; it’s reasonably engaging, but fairly bloodless. It’s all stuff that could work well if the game was attempting to provide a low-key simulation of shipboard life in the early 18th Century, but both from the blurb and the structure of the game, it’s clear that it’s aiming at, but failing to reach, a more dynamic, epic feel.
The game’s biggest issue, though, is its inappropriate prose style. Skillful writing could have perhaps bridged the gap between The Ship’s ambitious premise and its quotidian reality, and period-appropriate prose could have livened up the historical tourism aspect of the game. But instead, what’s on offer is informal and contemporary. Here’s a bit of the main character’s journal:
"All my life, I never truly belonged. Never had a family, a job, or something else that would make me a normal person. Hell, fuck normal persons, could not even be a half-decent pirate to earn my living! The sea was too much of a hassle for me."
Modulo the pirate-orphan stuff, this sounds more like a middle-class emo teenager from 1997 than a dashing ship’s captain from 1719. As that awkwardly-inserted f-bomb indicates, there’s also a fair bit of profanity, but it doesn’t sound anything like what I’d imagine someone of the captain’s background would actually say; I couldn’t help but compare the game’s use of language to that of To Sea in a Sieve, and the Ship sadly comes up wanting. And while I’m probably more of a stickler for period detail than most, for a contemporary style to work in this story, it would have to be more engaging, and again, epic – while it does reach for big-picture imagery in a few sequences, the writing is largely content to stick in this low-key dear-diary sort of mode.
So these are the reasons why the game didn’t fully work for me, but I have to admit there’s a lot to like here. The cast of supporting characters are quite one-note, but they’re generally pretty appealing, and the various minigames are skillfully programmed and change up the gameplay, even if they do get a bit repetitive and the navigation one dearly needs a function allowing you to edit your movement queue rather than just delete everything back to where you made a mistake (the biggest of these puzzles is almost fifty moves long! I confess I consulted the walkthrough for a couple of these). It also ends strong, with a climax that unites the two strands of the plot and posits a resolution that would externalize the internal conflicts that came before in a way that could have worked, if the earlier segments had been stronger. And speaking of the second strand of the plot, I haven’t said much about it because it actually functions as a pretty cool reveal. But there isn’t enough ballast to keep The Ship fully afloat.