#hperspace

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2024: Phil Riley's "Bureau of Strange Happenings"

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2024, the thirtieth annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 67 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of October for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

This was an oddball entry and, having finished it, I'm still not sure how I feel about it overall. There's an awful lot to like about it: a huge world (not a lot of Comp games top 100 rooms, and I didn't explore all of the maps extensively), laugh-out-loud funny writing, a weirdly absurd setup that's mostly pulled off well. But there were some teeth-gnashing frustrations, too: how little signposting there is for the path that leads the plot forward, especially in the beginning; how long it takes the plot to really hit its stride; the way that the early actions that need to be taken before getting to the fun part feel like level-grinding on an 80s JRPG. All in all, I liked it; but I would have liked for it to be balanced differently, all in all.

So it's a story about a secret agent at a minor government spy agency that's just become a lot more minor; the game begins on the day when the agency is moving its office out to a strip mall in the outer suburbs of DC. You play Agent Faraji, an employee of the Bureau of Strange Happenings, an X-Files-like organization, but one a lot closer to the writing of Douglas Adams than Chris Carter. Agent Faraji starts the game needing to accomplish some mundane unpacking-related tasks on their first day in the agency's new office, but the basic tasks that the game immediately presents are immediately frustrated by a lack of tools, which motivates the player to explore the immediate area on the map.

So far, so good; it's not an unusual opening for a piece of parser IF. But the necessary tools are not readily available, and the basic tasks that need to happen are continually deferred until Agent Faraji is sent on an assignment to rescue a colleague who has disappeared. The basic tasks remain on the player's radar throughout the game, and a running gag is that you can ask pretty much any NPC in the game for the screwdriver you started off the game needing; it's not available until the very very end of the game, when you can finally answer the ringing phone that you couldn't answer before because you needed a screwdriver to disassemble the desk in which the phone had accidentally been locked. So far, so good; in a lot of ways, this resembles the basic plot structure of Infocom's Bureaucracy (if I'm remembering that game at all accurately a few decades down the line).

The real problem with the opening isn't that it's not reasonable, nor that player frustration isn't a fair thing to motivate early, but just that it sticks you wandering around what winds up being the least interesting part of the game map. The NPCs are plausibly written and sometimes rather funny, and the initially available locations are described with humor and verve, but starting off a game with time travel and conspiracy theories and lizard people and secret agents and hyperspatial travel and technology indistinguishable from magic by having the player unsuccessfully seek a screwdriver, meet their coworkers, and get a cup of coffee feels like a missed opportunity. It's frustrated by a lack of indications about how to move forward; there's a lot of having to examine everything. Once you find a necessary item or two, the possibilities for exploration really open up, and the use of the items is relatively obvious once you find them, but finding them takes a lot of carefully examining everything. It would have been nice for the boss assigning Agent Faraji the rescue mission to have simply handed them the astral glasses and given a brief overview of their use, to my mind. (Too, there's a rather cavalier attitude on the boss's part to "how am I expected to accomplish this mission once you send em back in time"; the absurdist tone doesn't quite work for me.)Similarly, the exploration of the hyperplane seems like overkill; I went ahead and used the walkthrough instead of trying to decode the symbols on the compass, and doing so takes the player through 37 spaces with virtually no variation on, say, 33 of them; this feels like overkill to me. (Maybe there is a faster route if you figure out how the compass coordinates work; I didn't stray from the walkthrough, though, going through a three-dimensional cross-section of five-dimensional space).

Once it really gets going, though, the game is an awful lot of fun; much of the late game takes place in a fictitious small town in 1954, with a whole lot of implementation over the 45 or so locations that the town is implemented on. This is where the game feels to me like it finally hits its stride; there's a nice set of fair-but-occasionally-tough puzzles all oriented around the central goal of foiling the plans of a cabal of sinister lizard people. This part of the game is well-written, reward exploration, has a good bit of momentum, and kept my interest up to the point where I found myself pondering it when I was away from my computer. In some ways, it had a lot in common with Anchorhead, where the overall goal is to avert a catastrophic series of events by manipulating devices involving beams of light. (Though it was, thankfully, a smaller task than in Anchorhead.) This was a blast, and I really enjoyed it.

One of the few genuine problems, for me, in the later parts of the game was the dependence on random gaming elements: the movements of the lizard people around the town of Enigma Lake, of instance, and what amounts to randomized combat at the game's plot climax. Random combat is hard to do well in IF, I think; there are games that do an acceptable job of it (Leadlight springs to mind; and this year's Comp entry Forsaken Denizen); but I can't think of a game where I was so enthusiastic about the randomized combat that I genuinely felt it made the game better or was an unequivocally wonderful choice on the author's part. The problem with randomness is that it's the ludic elements of the game overpowering the narrative elements: in a traditional narrative, there's a reason, at some discursive level, for the sequence of plot events; nothing is truly random because narrative is a technique for structuring our understanding of why things happen. Inserting truly random events whose only motivation is "because that's what the computer's dice roll determined would happen" breaks this basic narrative contract, I think.

In a lot of ways, I think the main problem that BOSH wound up having is simply that it had so many good ideas that they never wound up being fully integrated into a cohesive, organic whole: here's a chance to explore a mathematically abstract space. Here's a conspiracy theory. Here's another one. Here's a set of fetch quests. Here's a set of enjoyably wacky NPCs. Here's a fun group of machines to manipulate. Here's two new dimensions to explore, plus time-travel. But they never quite settle down into a game that becomes a system that you can work with to tell a collaborative story; it's the kind of game that I cannot imagine finishing without a walkthrough.

Deviations from standard IF conventions made for a bit of friction, too; frankly, I'd rather see the location name flush against the left margin, above a room description, than worked into the text of a paragraph. Bolding the name helps too, and so does the way that the title bar is used, but neither is really as good a visual signal of IF "paragraphs" as just putting the name of the room first. Too, using third-person instead of second-person for the narration felt strange to me, and I never quite got used to it.

But, with a walkthrough, it was a good time, and I think that putting the work into pruning and shaping it into a more polished edifice would really pay off, which is why I'm glad that the end of the game announces that Agent Faraji will return in a sequel. I'll play it.

(I also drew a map of the game’s geography as I played; I'm less happy with it than with many of the maps I draw while playing parser IF, in part because translating a 3D imaginary space into 2D is hard enough; but this game had five spatial dimension and time travel, so I did what I could.)

(This review is based on the updated release of 2 September 2024.)