One Way Ticket

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).

There’s just something about trains, perhaps because they’re the very archetype of the liminal space: in a train car you’re halfway between where you were and where you’re going, not tied to your past and not yet able to make progress on your future. So it is for the protagonist of One Way Ticket, who’s bought the eponymous unidirectional fare in hopes of finding a new life, but who can do little but speculate as to what that life will be about so long as they’re riding the train – all the more so when the train tracks are blocked by a mountain of freshly-harvested corn, and they have to descend and solve the quotidian-yet-cryptic problems of the magical-realistic town where they’ve fetched up.

Maybe magical realism is the wrong comparison to invoke, though, since the vibe I get from the game is less South American literature and more European art film. This is one weird town – they use gold sand for currency, the local shop moves from place to place, the inn only serves food made from corn, people change names depending on what time you visit them, and there are omnipresent jackals who make travel a dangerous business. While you’re simply trying to unblock the tracks, the goals of the inhabitants are far stickier things: an inventor wants to raid the stopped train for part to build a machine of inscrutable purpose, while an unlucky gambler’s on the hunt for the aces missing from his deck. Everyone’s playing an angle – except the tavern hostess, who seems perhaps a little too interested in you, and the train driver and conductor, who’d rather drink and gamble than do their jobs and help you get the train moving again.

It’s not just the existentialist substance of the narrative and characters, though: for that authentic foreign-movie vibe, the text seems translated into English, with the occasional ungainliness, but also occasional uniquely-turned phrase, that entails. Here’s an encounter with a woman trying to enlist the player’s help in finding love, in a dialogue taking place over a shell game:

“The problem with our city is that people have stopped listening to each other. And topics for conversation are another story!”

“Have stopped listening?”

“Well, yes,” she continued the chaotic round dance of cups, “once, probably, people listened to each other, but now everyone is on their own wave — and, to be honest, these waves have already overgrown with mud.”

“What do you mean?”

She abruptly stopped the run of the cups:

“I mean that people discuss the same thing all the time, but everything is so everyday, mundane, boring, trivial… I could list a few more synonyms.”

“Perhaps I understand you.”

“Well I hope.”

“And you need to talk about the sublime?”

“Everyone needs to talk about something sublime from time to time. Especially me.”

(The shell game, like everything else in this town, isn’t on the level, natch).

Similarly, sometimes you come across a simile that makes the prose come to a lurching stop – as the protagonist makes their way through the dining car, they note that it’s “long and empty, like my intestines” – but there are some great images too, like the train station being described as “a low building with a platform, long as a bayonet, cutting the cornfield in two.”

Mechanically, this kind of story seems like it’d be a good fit for a choice-based system, making it easy to read long passages of sometimes-opaque text and present options allowing the player to progress without requiring them to completely understand everything that’s going on. Subverting expectations, though, One Way Ticket uses a very adventure-gamey approach, with quite granular actions, rather than the broader strokes allowed for by less systemic choice-based interfaces. A location typically boasts three or four links for the important objects or people there, and clicking each will usually change the final paragraph of the passage to provide for detail on whatever you selected. Often this paragraph will have additional options for interaction – moving or talking or taking something or what have you – meaning the rhythm of gameplay proceeds sort of like it does in a parser game, where you examine each item in turn and then decide what to do. You also have a modestly-sized inventory, as well as a much larger list of facts or questions you’ve accumulated in your notebook. At certain times, the graphics for these will highlight, indicating that you can choose an item or topic to try to apply to your current circumstances: when talking to the hostess, for example, you can go to the notebook to mention that the Mayor told you there’d be free lodging at the tavern.

It’s a solid system, similar to ones I’ve liked in games by Abigail Corfman or Agnieszka Trzaska. I’m not sure it’s a great fit for One Way Ticket, though, since it serves to slow down the pacing quite a lot: while the inventory is relatively compact, the topic list quickly reaches a dozen or more entries, and sometimes the proper choices to pick are relatively obscure due to the often-confusing nature of the situation and the prose. Exploration is also challenging because sometimes clicking on the name of an object will lock you into choosing an action and progressing, meaning you need to leave and then come back, hopefully remembering which choice was the booby-trap, to fully plumb the depths of each location. Relatedly, the map is big, and often you need to click through several links to get to the travel options in a location – plus, several puzzles have a fair bit of busywork, requiring you to go from one end of the town to the other, sometimes going to the tavern to wait for nightfall too, before you can make much progress. And while this is a big game with lots of stuff to do, the first portion of it seemed fairly linear, with only one puzzle that’s possible to solve at a time even though you’ll quickly unlock a dozen locations (with different night and day locations) and twice as many items and notebook topics.

All this means that after spending an initial hour enjoyably but bewilderedly exploring my way around town and solving a few puzzles, I began to worry and checked the helpfully-provided walkthrough, which indicated I’d barely gotten a quarter of the way in. I started consulting the walkthrough more regularly after that, but still, I’d only gotten maybe 2/3 of the way through when the two-hour judging deadline hit. Usually I’m not shy about scribbling down a rating then pressing on to the finish line for longer games, but here, I found myself anxious to move on. Partially that’s because it’s only the first game in my queue and I’m very aware of the distance to go to play all of them by November 15th, but partially it’s because while I like the ingredients here, the sheer quantity of options and obstacles feels overwhelming – going back to the movie metaphor, what would be a cryptically compelling 85-minute film can get quite exhausting once it rounds the two hour mark, in my experience.

If I wrap up my Comp before the deadline, I’ll definitely try to get back to One Way Ticket, since there is a lot here I’m enjoying – if I do, I’ll go back and update this review accordingly. Part of me, though, almost hopes I don’t; there’d be something apt about leaving the protagonist mid-quest, with one of the gambler’s aces found and halfway through a flirtatious dinner with the tavern hostess, eternally poised on the threshold of resolution, forever stuck between stations.