Sunday Afternoon

(I originally published this review on 3 October 2012 as part of my blog of IFComp 2012. This was the 2nd of 26 games I reviewed and it has been revised at least once since my review.)

It's 1892 in England, and also in all the other countries of the world, I expect. You're a formally dressed little boy whose mummy and daddy are away at Oxford, and you're trapped in the house with boring Uncle Stephen and Aunt Emma this Sunday while summer goes begging to be had outside. Your goal in this game is to escape the cloying weight of the very proper world of these adults and to get out of the house. Some postmodern interruptions stop it from being entirely straightforward, but I concede I might have preferred a straight telling of this story. It's a clever and finely written game, nevertheless.

My favourite element of Sunday Afternoon is its demonstration of the intelligent persistence of the child protagonist. Initially you're not even allowed out of your chair in the parlour, but with excruciating tenacity you can ask your aunt about each item on the mantel in turn from a seemingly endless series until (Spoiler - click to show)any kind of a gap in her concentration can be found, allowing you to slip away. There's a vaguely Babel Fish puzzle-like quality about this initial obstacle which was just beginning to induce stress in me when it relented. You can also ask your aunt and uncle about an extensive range of topics suggested by props in the house or snippets of prior conversation, and you will find that they have a proper observation to make on almost every one. The pair could be potentially cartoonish in their starchiness except that it's easy to believe in the united front they put up in the face of a child of a very upper-class family. And then there's also the complication of ENTERING SPOILINGTON HEIGHTS (Spoiler - click to show)the story being revealed as a role-playing meets recollections session shared by the grown-up hero with his comrades in the trenches in World War I. The flakiness of the aunt's character in particular is commented on, and the episode comments on the looping, gullible behaviour of NPCs in adventure games in general.

After that I was thinking: In the reality of this game, to what extent did the stuff that I'm doing in 1892 happen in the manner I'm performing it? Does the extent matter? Does the question matter? Other quotes from contemporary language pop up during the game ("weapons of mass destruction") and occasionally an appropriate third person quote will materialise in the centre of the screen. Some will enjoy these whimsical movements but I found they distracted me from acquiring a focused sense of this game.

My other problem was that I eventually sank to cleaving to the hints. Not out of great exasperation or because I think this game is extremely difficult, which I don't, but because it does demand some actions be performed at quite a fine scale. For instance, (Spoiler - click to show)having to arrange the particular letter amongst the contents of the sermon folder. I felt the same about trying to clean the chimney or trying to (Spoiler - click to show)make the object with which to clean the chimney. Having a sense of "OK, that's what I meant," a few times in a row does grate on me when I have to keep returning to a nested hints menu to tweak my commands to success. I'm much more in favour of adaptive hints in general, and not having to go in and out of menus whenever possible.

In spite of my wobbly feelings about the aesthetic of the game as a whole, I did like the fineness of the social puzzles (though they were also too fine-grained for me) and Aunt Emma's patience in answering my questions about her ceaseless catalogue of mantel knickknacks.

This review was previously published on a blog in connection with IFComp 2012

Sunday Afternoon is a short but atmospheric game, set somewhere in Victorian England. It is both well-written and well implemented, but is a bit too short and simple to achieve greatness.

(Spoiler - click to show)In Sunday Afternoon you play a young boy stuck at home during a beautiful sunny day, forced to stay inside and read a sermon while being watched by your stuffy Aunt Emma. Your mission is to escape the house, so you can go play in the countryside. I found this objective to be a pleasing diversion from most IF, which usually involves trying to accomplish something really important.

At first, the game is confined entirely to the parlour, and your first objective is to distract Aunt Emma so you can access the rest of the house. The implementation is pleasingly deep – so much so that I thought the game might turn out to be a one-room game for a while. The mantelpiece in particular is loaded with sentimental knick-knacks, and talking about these turn out to be the key to escaping the room.

The mantelpiece objects are implemented several levels deep, and also reward careful examination by displaying boxed literary quotations when you examine objects more than once. Most of these seem to be references to children’s literature; your aunt even owns the painting of the Dawn Treader from the Narnia books, and I was pleased that the author remembered to implement a proper response to “enter painting.”

Anyway, talking about these objects is the focus of the first part of the game, and the conversation is also well implemented, using the standard ASK/TELL system. Talking to your aunt about her things will reveal new possible topics of conversation, and I never felt like I had to play “guess-the-topic” to proceed in the game. Unfortunately, typing “ask Emma about X” got tedious pretty quickly. Conversation heavy games will often implement a short-cut, by allowing the player to type something like “A TOPIC” to ask the current NPC about the topic. I believe Emily Short’s Galatea was to first to come up with this, and I wish it had been part of this game as well.

Luckily, this was a very minor annoyance as conversation is not really a big part of the game once you get out of the first room. Once Emma has been distracted, you get access to the rest of the house, and have to figure out how to prevent Aunt Emma from taking you back into the parlour.

Here the game introduces an interesting twist: After a few failed attempts to escape, the game suddenly shifts to the trenches of World War I, and it turns out that the events so far are just part of some sort of role playing game to pass time among the soldiers. I thought this was a really cool twist, and was looking forward to seeing how the two stories would interact. Unfortunately, you never really visit the trenches again, except for a short comment at the end, so I felt this was a bit of a wasted opportunity. Perhaps it is there to show the contrast between the innocence of youth and the problems of the adult world?

After you figure out how to placate your aunt, the entire house opens up to exploration. The house as a whole is not quite as deeply implemented as the parlour, but I never felt like anything was missing that ought to have been there. You also get to meet the other NPC in the game: Your uncle Stephen, who is a priest, and wrote the boring sermon you were forced to read in the beginning of the game.

Uncle Stephen’s study is full books, and studying these was one of my favourite parts of the game. His bookshelves are full of exciting adventure novels, and all sorts of other interesting stuff, but the main character stubbornly expects it all to be boring religious stuff because that’s how he sees Uncle Stephen – he assumes “King Solomon’s mines” must be some kind of boring biblical history book. It just goes to show how our prejudices often prevent us from seeing what is right in front of us. The main character is looking for excitement outside, but refuses to see all the interesting stuff inside the house. If I was him, I would have probably stayed in the library.

The puzzles you have to solve to escape are all well clued, without being too easy, and when I checked the hints I always felt stupid for not figuring out the solution myself. The solutions never seemed arbitrary, or illogical as is all to often the case in adventure games. I just can’t help but feel that the reason you can’t leave the house to begin with is a bit silly. Would getting into trouble for running away really have been any worse than getting into trouble for flooding the house with soot and then running away?

After escaping from the house there is a brief call-back to the thing with the soldiers, and the game then ends abruptly. I really enjoyed playing through the game, but I just wanted more, somehow. The game is well-written, and well-coded, and I discovered no major flaws, but was the point of it all? You learn virtually nothing about the main character, and what was up with the soldiers? Was that soldier the main character as an adult, and is it supposed to say something about the contrast between childhood and adulthood?

Then again, not everything needs to have some deep ponderous “point” to it. Exploring a cosy Victorian household was relaxing and atmospheric, and I thoroughly enjoyed every second. I can heartily recommend the experience.

Your devout and upstanding uncle and aunt probably have nothing but the best intentions for a young boy like you, but being cooped up reading a sermon while the sun is shining and the birds are whistling is hellworthy torture.

How to get out from under your aunt's watchful eyes to enjoy what's left of this wonderful afternoon?

Sunday Afternoon is a very small game if measured by its map. Five rooms total. Two of those rooms however are so chockful of things to examine that they count double at the very least. A lot of souvenirs and books and bric-a-brac, all with a history.

This ties in to the kind of puzzles in the game. Rather than manipulating some machinery, you have to deal with the people keeping you indoors, and the objects in the rooms hold the key. Finding your uncle and aunt's weak spots, their buttons if you will, requires careful attention to their reactions in conversation and a certain knowledge of their habits and character.

While it is (in theory) entirely possible to finish the game successfully in a flawless runthrough, it's actually recommended that you do a fair amount of flailing around and trying unsuccessful actions multiple times. In a framing story flash-forward reminiscent of Spider & Web, the hapless player will discover a bitterweet justification for the unrealistical behaviour that is typical of the protagonist in a text adventure. It's worth taking a moment to let the circumstances of this framing story sink in. Think about what it means for the actual game/story you're playing/reading.

A very clever small escape game with unexpected depth.