[IF Comp 2013] The House at the End of Rosewood Street
The House at the End of Rosewood Street, Michael Thomét, Glulx
Rosewood Street is a small suburban cul-de-sac, with neatly-tended gardens and mildly eccentric residents. You play an indistinct janitor-type, whose duties consist of delivering papers to every house, every day, and occasionally also doing a small task - retrieving lost items, fixing broken appliances - for the residents. None of this is challenging or mechanically notable in any way whatsoever: it's very, very mundane and tedious.
Slowly, though, odd things start to poke at the edges. The not-at-all-evilly-named Caius Smythe moves into the mansion at the end of the street, and the PC warms to him in a rapid and creepy manner. The residents seem spacy, as if they're not quite there; some things suggest that you're close to them, appreciated, even a confidant, but in person you seem to understand more about their gardens than about the people themselves. You have strange dreams every night. An extra house with a new resident, Elisabeth, appears between two existing ones, and you assume that it's always been there; then it vanishes again. The newspaper gradually unfolds the story of the disappearance and murder of the Governor's daughter, Lisa Kaiser.
(The dreams are the best writing in the game. In general, dreams in fiction are Really Terrible, either irrelevant to the plot or full of ham-fisted foreshadowing, and totally lack the strange disproportionate power of actual dreams. Dreams typically either bore me senseless or make me angry at the author for wasting my time with self-indulgent waffle. These are really not bad, which is a rare accomplishment; but they're so disconnected from the main plot that they don't really impart much to it.)
The game is skewed a little way away from normal IF implementation conventions: the street is weirdly oversized for what's essentially a small cul-de-sac; where most IF would have a single room for each section of the street, Rosewood Street is three rooms wide - the street itself and the pavement on either side. Many scenery objects are mentioned but none actually exist. Characters repeat themselves, often in short greetings or responses that would have been trivial to make varied. It wasn't clear to me how much of this was the game trying to unsettle me, and how much was the result of unsteady design.
Then... the weirdness increases, you are seduced by Caius, and then there's a Groundhog Day thing where you're back at the start of the week. At this point I was, frankly, ready to flip over the table and abandon the whole thing. I had put up with a substantial amount of tedious play that seemed necessary to trudge through the plot, and now the game seemed to indicate that I'd have to do the whole thing again. It wasn't clear whether I'd have to do things differently - if so, I had no idea how I'd go about that, since the level of implementation is not deep outside the fairly narrow set of tasks you're required to do, so I didn't feel as though poking around at the edges of the world would be rewarding. But I equally didn't feel much expectation that the plot would vary on its own, this time around. And there was no sodding way that I was going to go through the whole process again without.
So, maybe there's a cool idea at the heart of this. Possibly the appearance and disappearance of Elisabeth's house, and the general creepiness of Caius, have something to do with the death of Lisa Kaiser. But if the delivery of this cool idea requires the player to do repetitive and boring tasks over and over, with no very clear idea about what their other goals are, I am not going to grind through it all over again in the hazy hope that something awesome will eventually show up. Pleasant Suburbia Is A Creepy Illusion is a pretty well-established trope, and Plato's Cave IF is also really common. Neither of them constitute an amazing idea capable of sustaining the whole exercise. Authors: you need to give the player things to do, and you need to ensure that they're interested in doing them. If your concept for a game includes an element of 'now the player repeats very boring things for quite some time', you need to step back and ask yourself whether the broad concept justifies doing a Thing Players Hate, or whether you have totally sabotaged yourself. When in doubt, assume it's the latter.
At this point I gave up and decided to go and look at some other people's reviews. And it seems that my instincts were pointing in more or less the right direction. It's the sort of thing that I might plausibly have figured out in another pass or two - but I wasn't going to take another pass.
Games are about reciprocity between author and player. The author makes some demands of the player: the player extends trust to the author, accepting the author's demands in the expectation that there'll be a payoff that justifies their effort. Here, I think that the author seriously overestimated how much tedium they could demand of the player without giving them something in return. By making you carry out tasks that are tedious and repetitive, a promise is being made: 'look, trust me, I'm going somewhere with this, it'll all be worth it.' And then the game gets reset, and you have to do it all over again - that's Lucy taking away the football. That's undermining trust, then asking for more trust to be extended.
That's a big request, and not one I'm really willing to go along with. A game that offered more rewards along the way - more engaging descriptive writing, more responsive characters - might have made me more willing. But I didn't feel as though I was in the hands of someone who knew precisely what they were doing, and I wasn't prepared to invest any more time in that.
In conclusion, can we have a moratorium on "the game starts out really boring, but THERE'S A TWIST" concepts, please? And this goes double if the twist ends the game before the player gets to do any non-boring things - that makes it look as though the whole exercise was just a way to avoid coming up with actually-interesting gameplay.
(I suspect that Shade was a big influence on this. I liked Shade less well than its general reception, but even accounting for that, I think it's safe to say that it's not really a repeatable pattern.)
Score: 4
Rosewood Street is a small suburban cul-de-sac, with neatly-tended gardens and mildly eccentric residents. You play an indistinct janitor-type, whose duties consist of delivering papers to every house, every day, and occasionally also doing a small task - retrieving lost items, fixing broken appliances - for the residents. None of this is challenging or mechanically notable in any way whatsoever: it's very, very mundane and tedious.
Slowly, though, odd things start to poke at the edges. The not-at-all-evilly-named Caius Smythe moves into the mansion at the end of the street, and the PC warms to him in a rapid and creepy manner. The residents seem spacy, as if they're not quite there; some things suggest that you're close to them, appreciated, even a confidant, but in person you seem to understand more about their gardens than about the people themselves. You have strange dreams every night. An extra house with a new resident, Elisabeth, appears between two existing ones, and you assume that it's always been there; then it vanishes again. The newspaper gradually unfolds the story of the disappearance and murder of the Governor's daughter, Lisa Kaiser.
(The dreams are the best writing in the game. In general, dreams in fiction are Really Terrible, either irrelevant to the plot or full of ham-fisted foreshadowing, and totally lack the strange disproportionate power of actual dreams. Dreams typically either bore me senseless or make me angry at the author for wasting my time with self-indulgent waffle. These are really not bad, which is a rare accomplishment; but they're so disconnected from the main plot that they don't really impart much to it.)
The game is skewed a little way away from normal IF implementation conventions: the street is weirdly oversized for what's essentially a small cul-de-sac; where most IF would have a single room for each section of the street, Rosewood Street is three rooms wide - the street itself and the pavement on either side. Many scenery objects are mentioned but none actually exist. Characters repeat themselves, often in short greetings or responses that would have been trivial to make varied. It wasn't clear to me how much of this was the game trying to unsettle me, and how much was the result of unsteady design.
Then... the weirdness increases, you are seduced by Caius, and then there's a Groundhog Day thing where you're back at the start of the week. At this point I was, frankly, ready to flip over the table and abandon the whole thing. I had put up with a substantial amount of tedious play that seemed necessary to trudge through the plot, and now the game seemed to indicate that I'd have to do the whole thing again. It wasn't clear whether I'd have to do things differently - if so, I had no idea how I'd go about that, since the level of implementation is not deep outside the fairly narrow set of tasks you're required to do, so I didn't feel as though poking around at the edges of the world would be rewarding. But I equally didn't feel much expectation that the plot would vary on its own, this time around. And there was no sodding way that I was going to go through the whole process again without.
So, maybe there's a cool idea at the heart of this. Possibly the appearance and disappearance of Elisabeth's house, and the general creepiness of Caius, have something to do with the death of Lisa Kaiser. But if the delivery of this cool idea requires the player to do repetitive and boring tasks over and over, with no very clear idea about what their other goals are, I am not going to grind through it all over again in the hazy hope that something awesome will eventually show up. Pleasant Suburbia Is A Creepy Illusion is a pretty well-established trope, and Plato's Cave IF is also really common. Neither of them constitute an amazing idea capable of sustaining the whole exercise. Authors: you need to give the player things to do, and you need to ensure that they're interested in doing them. If your concept for a game includes an element of 'now the player repeats very boring things for quite some time', you need to step back and ask yourself whether the broad concept justifies doing a Thing Players Hate, or whether you have totally sabotaged yourself. When in doubt, assume it's the latter.
At this point I gave up and decided to go and look at some other people's reviews. And it seems that my instincts were pointing in more or less the right direction. It's the sort of thing that I might plausibly have figured out in another pass or two - but I wasn't going to take another pass.
Games are about reciprocity between author and player. The author makes some demands of the player: the player extends trust to the author, accepting the author's demands in the expectation that there'll be a payoff that justifies their effort. Here, I think that the author seriously overestimated how much tedium they could demand of the player without giving them something in return. By making you carry out tasks that are tedious and repetitive, a promise is being made: 'look, trust me, I'm going somewhere with this, it'll all be worth it.' And then the game gets reset, and you have to do it all over again - that's Lucy taking away the football. That's undermining trust, then asking for more trust to be extended.
That's a big request, and not one I'm really willing to go along with. A game that offered more rewards along the way - more engaging descriptive writing, more responsive characters - might have made me more willing. But I didn't feel as though I was in the hands of someone who knew precisely what they were doing, and I wasn't prepared to invest any more time in that.
In conclusion, can we have a moratorium on "the game starts out really boring, but THERE'S A TWIST" concepts, please? And this goes double if the twist ends the game before the player gets to do any non-boring things - that makes it look as though the whole exercise was just a way to avoid coming up with actually-interesting gameplay.
(I suspect that Shade was a big influence on this. I liked Shade less well than its general reception, but even accounting for that, I think it's safe to say that it's not really a repeatable pattern.)
Score: 4