AdventureX 2017 round-up: Part 2
Don’t Make Love
It is an age-old story. A young couple, deeply in love, are pondering taking their relationship to a more physical level. However, for this particular pair, that creates a peculiar difficulty. Being praying mantises, they are only too aware that having sex may lead to one of them not surviving the experience. Can their love prove stronger than animal instincts?
Maggese’s Don’t Make Love presents a love story with a difference. Players are given the choice of controlling either the male or female partner at the start. The meat of the gameplay is a text parser through which you type your side of the conversation. To a certain extent, the natural flow of conversation makes likely player responses predictable, but I was still impressed by how well the parser worked. It also avoided the “I don’t understand that” response so prevalent with lesser parsers. Instead, your partner’s response to an unrecognised sentence is to try getting the conversation back on track, indicating a suitable subject to use.
The graphics are a slightly stylised representation of the couple standing in a field of grass. The format is a slideshow presentation, with a soft fade between images. To break up the text-only conversation, you are able to change your mood or undertake actions via on-screen buttons. Moods such as happy and angry logically affect the tone of conversation as a result. Actions include hugging and kissing, with a brief series of images representing them. These choices also impact the music, with the simple tune going from joyous to melancholy as your mood changes.
The game is available now for Windows PC on Steam and itchio.io. You can also find more information on the developer’s website.
Detectiveland
It is 1929, and in the fictional city of New Losago, private investigator Lanson Rose faces another full day. Three cases present themselves: a simple missing person case, a house that may or may not be haunted, and a problem with the city’s liquor supply. With none of these cases proving as simple as they first appear, Lanson will have his work cut out for him.
If that story sounds familiar, that’s because it is the basis of the winning game from the 2017 Interactive Fiction competition. Having achieved well-deserved success with Detectiveland last year, Robin Johnson (aka Versificator in interactive fiction circles) is now looking at expanding on his original entry to make a bigger and more complex commercial game. The new version will include additional background art and an array of sidequests, discovered both by simply explore the city and as part of the main cases. Players who seek out and complete all the sidequests are to be treated to an enhanced ending, revealing more of New Losago.
For the convention, the demo was restricted largely to the original competition entry, though there were some minor graphical enhancements in the form of pictures of your locations showing as background to the action. The left side of the screen displayed the story text, presented in a font that looked like it had been printed with a broken typewriter with smudged and misaligned letters. The right-hand side included the interactive portion of the game, including your inventory, general actions and conversations with highlighted topics. Interaction is handled through these highlighted words rather than a full text parser, but the simpler control system definitely does not mean an easy game. Whilst the story appears at first to be a typical noir thriller, the content is decidedly tongue-in-cheek.
The game is on track for an early 2018 release. Further information, including a download of the original version, can be found on the developer’s website.
True Legacy
The year is 2084, and advances in detecting technology have resulted in most criminals being apprehended quickly. The same cannot be said for progress in other areas, with many in Hong Kong living in squalor. As a homicide detective, you are in a relatively privileged position, but it doesn’t feel like it tonight. You are at the scene of a murder, and the killer appears to be highly sophisticated, having used a DNA shroud – a device intended to strew lots of extraneous genetic material to cover up the perpetrator’s own DNA – of extremely high quality. This is not going to be a simple case.
Blindfire Limited’s True Legacy is entirely text-driven, though it comes with minimalist semi-realistic stills to illustrate the action. Transition between locations is achieved by having a block of text with a black background scrolling to cover one picture and reveal another. This future Hong Kong is not a happy place, beset by constant rainfall and bearing more than a little resemblance to the dystopian world of Blade Runner. As well as the background pictures, there are some close-ups of devices you must employ.
Designed for tablets, the game text is scrolled, with decisions appearing at various points in the narrative. These are presented as a list of options to choose from to determine the next part of the narrative. There are occasional alternate avenues of investigation, indicated by on-screen arrows pointing off to the side in the location illustrations, indicating it is possible to reveal more story and clues in those directions. Players need to keep a close eye out for these, as the side routes often contain vital information. Highlighted words within the text can also be tapped to bring up definitions of the futuristic technology referenced. These should also be read carefully, as one contained a vital clue to resetting the AI device I was using to analyse the crime scene.
The game’s release is not far off, but no launch date has yet been announced. More information can be found on the True Legacy website.
Returning Games
Last but certainly not least! With so many new games on display this year, it was tempting to skip the ones that Adventure Gamers has already reviewed or I’d seen and covered before and were making a return trip. But, with their creators’ enthusiasm for the genre adding to the overall convivial atmosphere, it seemed only fair that their contributions are duly acknowledged, if in a slightly less traditional way.
The Adventures of Bertram Fiddle: Episode 2 – A Bleaker Predicklement
Already available on Steam and the App Store, the second part of this tale of a Victorian gentleman detective is as humorous a spoof as the first. For AdventureX, lead designer and artist Seb Burnett produced a four-page paper, The Evening Burble. This included tales of pre-eminent crook thwarter Sherlock Holmes, adverts for upper lip stiffeners, and a stimulating word puzzle on the back. Sadly, Seb was unable to convince his daughter to dress up as an authentic newspaper-selling street urchin. His own attempt at filling the role in her absence was also less than convincing.
More information can be found at the Bertram Fiddle website.
Lancelot’s Hangover
Immediately recognisable in his bright yellow t-shirt, Jean-Baptiste de Clerfayt brought his naughty knight tale back to AdventureX. His attempt to emulate his game hero at the post-convention Saturday drinks did not go as badly for him as might be expected. (Apparently our British beers are generally weaker than the Belgian kind.) He also had a friendly rivalry with Seb Burnett, whose paper included a less-than-flattering advertisement for Belgium. Whilst the game has been in development for some time, it was previously greenlit on Steam and is now aiming for a release in the first quarter of 2018.
More information can be found at the Lancelot’s Hangover website.
The Mystery of Woolley Mountain
Development on the cartoonish tale of Victorian scientists on a grand quest continues apace. Two parts are now considered complete, subject to final testing. With the final part also well along, the hope of releasing the finished product in early 2018 is looking increasingly achievable. Whilst taking up the same space as last year on the Saturday, a sudden illness prevented developer James Lightfoot from returning on the Sunday. I wish him a speedy recovery and hope we can look forward to seeing the finished results of Lightfoot Bros’ work soon.
More information can be found at the Mystery of Woolley Moutain website.
The St. Christopher’s School Lockdown
With their school-based drama released in October, the development team from Classroom Graffiti Productions took two very different approaches to dressing for AdventureX. Roger Benoit donned a smart dress shirt whilst his partner, Laney Berry, wore a more retro outfit that wouldn’t look out of place in the ‘60s student setting of their game. The very British location of St. Christopher’s was made clear by a tablecloth covered in patriotic imagery used on their display table.
The game can be purchased through Steam or itch.io.
Unforeseen Incidents
Whilst the original planned launch date of early 2017 was not quite achieved, this tale of a small town handyman facing a big conspiracy is headed for release soon on Windows, Mac and Linux as well as Android and iOS devices. Exhibiting at the show with their publishing partner, Application Systems Heidelberg, developer Backwoods Entertainment promise players an intriguing classic mystery with a unique art style and unusual setting.
More information can be found on the Unforeseen Incidents website.
Four Last Things
Having greatly enjoyed Joe Richardson’s original freeware version of Four Last Things, I was looking forward to checking out the commercial version at AdventureX. This was, of course, entirely because I wanted to see the results of the hard work of a talented developer. The thought that I would publicly look like a genius thanks to my knowledge of the puzzles from the earlier edition hardly entered my mind at all. When I came to play this collage-based parody game about having to commit the seven deadly sins to gain absolution, my expectations were only partly fulfilled. On the positive side, Richardson has undoubtedly taken a brilliant and original idea and made it into a great looking and fun full game. On the negative side, in doing so, most of the puzzle solutions I thought I knew were changed to become harder, resulting in my not looking as brilliant as I had hoped. I still got a lot of enjoyment from this clever and humorous game, though.
Four Last Things is already available on Steam, and the developer hopes to release it on iOS and Android in the near future. Further information can be found on the developer’s website, and you can read our full impressions in our review of the game.
The Frostrune
Over the course of the convention, I kept meeting up with professional game translators from various countries. Unfortunately, they all stuck to translating modern languages, so no-one was able to help me understand the Old Norse used for all the dialogue (including some songs) within The Frostrune. That being the case, it is probably a good thing that the developer, Grimnir, saw fit to include English subtitles in their game. Both their posters and the cards they were handing out displayed, as their central feature, an image of a female spirit. Sure enough, with a modicum of exploration, I was able to locate the spectral lady herself within the game. Given her prominence on promotional material, and the stern command she laid upon me when we met, I have no doubt that she is central to this mystic first-person tale of the time of the Vikings.
The game is available on Steam, the App Store and Google Play. More information can be found on the developer’s website, as well as a detailed analysis in our complete game review.
Final Thoughts
It was another great year at AdventureX, with a wide variety of fun games to play. With some careful planning of my coverage this time, I even managed to get to some of the excellent talks as well. I managed to see Jon Ingold’s hilarious tale of the highs and lows of the procces of creating Inkle’s new game Heaven’s Vault, illustrated by a handy graph. I also caught Brian Moriarty’s intriguing story of how one of his game design lectures became an Easter egg in The Witness. I also finally achieved my dream, after many years of attendance, of being on the winning team in the quiz (a feat achieved through the cunning ploy of sitting on the same side of the lecture theatre as people who could answer the questions). As always, the atmosphere was friendly, with gamers and developers hanging out together to share their love of the genre. This convention shows just how much the genre is thriving, and I look forward to having more excellent games to write about next year.
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