Zarf Updates

I guess I'm going to have to change my mystery game tagline. I'm playing more of these and getting better at them. Or maybe more designers are picking up the Obra-Dinn-ish static deduction model, which is the format I'm most simpatico with.

(Speaking of that model, the next Golden Idol game will be November 12th. And the revamped Roottrees is coming on January 15th! With new material and new puzzles. I probably won't write a full review post, since I wrote up the original last March, but I'll definitely play it.)

But right now...

• No Case Should Remain Unsolved
• Thalassa: Edge of the Abyss

A couple of months ago, I posted this on the sociality:

Every once in a while I listen to “Hog-Eye Man”, a fine sea shanty. Lots of versions online:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfMhy-Er-_Y [Martin Carthy]
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCIM_shahkI [The Longest Johns]

But... it’s noted as one of the filthiest shanties ever collected.

Of course, every published and recorded version is cleaned up! Ass-cheeks and bit of double entendre are all that remain. (Maybe the N-word if you go back to 1960.)

https://mainlynorfolk.info/watersons/songs/hogeyeman.html

I have been curious about the truly filthy original version for years. Never found it.

[@zarfeblong, Mastodon post, July 14, 2024]

If you follow that Mainly Norfolk link, you'll see an amazing number of quotes about how unprintable the original was, but nothing about what the unprintable lyrics actually were. Such a folk-tease!

This is one of the Shanties where authors seem to be obsessed about obscenity. Whall: “much of this shanty is unprintable”; Terry: “Of the infinite number of verses to this fine tune hardly one is printable”; Colcord: “None of the versions can be printed in anything like their entirety”; Hugill: “Many other shanties were just as obscene, and even worse.”

[Quoted from the notes to an album called Short Sharp Shanties Vol. 3, 2012. Performance on that album sung by Jackie Oates.]

So, cutting to the chase, I've found some of the original "unprintable" text. But not all.

Obvious content warning! The rest of this post will have lots of crude language. Mostly genitalia slang. Racial slurs. The F-word will be deployed.

Now, I know this is mostly a gaming blog. I sometimes go freewheeling off into folk songs and other topics as may grab my interest. I hope you're along for that ride! But a blast of sailors' language may be more than you signed up for. Furthermore, I'm syndicated on Planet-IF (an IF news aggregator) and going blue there would really be bad manners.

Therefore, just this once, the full text of this post will not appear in my RSS feed. (I had to tweak my blog software to allow this! Yay writing your own tools.)

If you're reading this on Planet-IF or your RSS reader, please continue to my web site for the full post.

I am, in some weird sense, a standard-bearer for a kind of retro adventure game, a particular kind that I played obsessively as a kid. I sometimes realize how uncomfortably particular I am. Such as when I played The Crimson Diamond, a paean to a slightly later era of retro adventure game that I didn't play and have no nostalgia for.

He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" and I pushed him over.

[Emo Philips, of course]

I enjoyed TCD! But, look, EGA colors are ugly and giant pixel fonts hurt my eyes. The most important moment in Infocom's history was when they realized they could support the Mac's beautiful proportional fonts with only the slightest change to their virtual machine.

Okay? Now forget about me and let's talk about The Crimson Diamond.

Canada -- the 1920s. Junior museum clerk Nancy Maple is dispatched to investigate rumors of a massive diamond found in the boreal wilds of Ontario. You and your traveling companion Kimi arrive at the Crimson Lodge, where... mysteries ensue!

We're a little behind the book this time, but the game is now in progress!

Coming soon on Steam and Itch.IO! Wishlist today!

The Beyond is an adventure beyond the boundaries of life, death, and the covers of a book. Romance! Pirates! Probably a giant squid lurking somewhere!

When can you play The Beyond? No promises, but you might want to keep an eye on the AdventureX Steam sale in November.

The hardback edition is already available. (In fact, so is Samurai vs. Ninja, Adventuregame Comics #3. Yes, there will be a game release for that too -- probably next year.)

By the way, I apologize for the fact that Leviathan still isn't available for iPhone. I started the port last year, but something about the UI didn't work right and I just haven't managed to dig in and track it down yet. I promise it'll happen.

Anyhow, here's the traditional sneak peek of The Beyond:

Powell's is rightly famed as a destination for book lovers, and I finally made my pilgrimage last weekend. The perils of air travel limited the inevitable splurge -- I had to fit my haul into a single backpack -- but I wound up with some nifty volumes. Including this surprise:

The world is awash with choice-based gamebooks, each with its own clever paraphrase of "choose your own you-know-what". A book based on the old Oregon Trail idea isn't a surprise.

No, the surprise is that bit about "tabbed pages". Tabbed?

Yep! This isn't a "turn to page 8" gamebook. It's a pipe-and-tab gamebook, which is a very uncommon format. Meanwhile is the first and, I thought, the only example. Here's a second book that does it!

Let's back up a bit, though.

It was a sharp grey London morning that begins my story. I was meeting my friend at the Xenocrates Club -- not my habitual retreat, but Xerloc said he had a matter for my memoirs.

The doorward squinted and eventually allowed me to the Club's sanctum, an indefinite smoke-stained sprawl of nooks, books, and gaslamps. The low tables were covered with scraps of paper and half-eaten crumpets. But the only figure in evidence was Xerloc, peering around with evident satisfaction.

"Ah, you are just in time. Everyone has left."

"I know these social clubs are often more like anti-social clubs, but really, Xerloc. What are you on about?"

"I'm sure you are aware of the famous Chess Mysteries of my famous cousin Sherlock Holmes." (My friend is of the O'Xolmes branch of the family, distant relatives of Basque extraction.)

"I am, indeed. Chess problems of retrograde analysis. I find them impenetrable."

"As do I, as do I. Thus I thought we might repair here for a more tractable challenge."

I gestured him to continue, but of course he already had. "You stand in the meeting place of the infamous Xenocrates Noughts-and-Crosses Club!"

"You mean to say--"

"Yes! The most devoted Tic-Tac-Toe players in all of London. And this," (he waved around the room), "is the remains of their latest tournament. A fiendish affair!"

"Great Heavens, Xerloc. What are the stakes?"

"A round of drinks at the nearest pub."

"At ten in the morning!?"

"I said it was fiendish," Xerloc said, rubbing his hands. "At any rate, they have all decamped. We may inspect... the evidence."

I'm bad at mysteries but I love games where you're a detective. This sounds silly, but detective games aren't always about interrogating suspects and drawing conclusions. Sometimes it's all about scouring an immersive world for the evidence and letting the pieces -- or the narrative threads -- fall where they may. (See The Flower Collectors, Dahlia View, and yep there's Paradise Killer smirking in the corner.)

So I was happy to run into Nobody Wants to Die. Narrative-heavy, easy on the detectiving, and thoroughly soaked in rainy noir vibe. The devs are Polish but the scene is Times Square: a Gilded Age future where everybody lives forever thanks to "ichoryte". The catch? You spend your eternal life in eternal debt for the mandatory body subscription plan, hoping to scrape out enough savings for a replacement before your current clogs pop. Fall behind on your payments and your body is repossessed -- probably by the millionaires who glitter in New York's unreachable upper crust.

As promised, the Cyan report for 2024, straight from Mysterium.

Cyan update

We started with the fireside chat: Rand Miller, Hannah Gamiel, and Eric A. Anderson giving us an update from Cyan HQ. (Hannah is the Development Director; Eric is the Creative Director. Rand is still Rand; more on that later.)

We had some audio issues on Friday morning, but the entire session is now posted on Youtube.

No big surprises or announcements this summer. Riven is out! Yay! The reviews and responses are extremely positive, both from fans and from the greater gaming audience.

The sales (so far) are not, well, not extremely positive. "We hope that sales cover things. Riven response has been phenomenal from a review point of view. [...] But that doesn't necessarily correspond to equal amounts of sales," said Rand.

This is of course tricky to communicate. In game dev, you never say "sales are bad" to a journalist -- everybody knows this. If you do, every journalist after that will start by asking you "Why are sales so bad?" and that's what all the headlines will be about. In particular, Cyan didn't directly compare Riven's sales to Firmament or Obduction or even Myst. They're really just telling us that they need to work on the PR. And it's early days anyhow.

They talked a bit about the process of redesigning Riven. As I noted, much of the game is the same but the changes go deep. Everything from the progression sequence to the core puzzle structure has been at least rethought, if not always changed. Rand noted that they started with lots of wild redesign ideas. In development, they winnowed them down to changes that directly supported the game experience, the puzzles, or the narrative. "If we couldn't answer 'why', if there wasn't a good reason, we didn't do it."

They also talked about the launch, which was apparently a nailbiter. As late as mid-June, they were still fighting bugs and glitches. (Rand mentioned Atrus's closing cutscenes as having a creepily lipless "Doug Henning" look.) It was only a few days before launch that QA started coming back and saying "This is good, we can ship this."

What's next?

In my Riven comments, I said that I didn't like the way one bit of a puzzle plays out. That discussion was too deep a dive for the review post, so I'm breaking it out here. Flippers up!

This is a full-on SPOILER discussion of one particular Riven puzzle. Stop here if you intend to play the game.

I haven't blogged about NarraScope, even though it's eaten the bulk of my energy and attention for the past two months.

(This is the silver lining of having been laid off in April. Free time to work on the conference! Mind you, that was also the silver lining of being laid off last May. At this point I'm full up on silver linings and could use some clear sunny skies for a while.)

Anyway! NarraScope went great. We ran it at the Strong Museum of Play, a pretty fantastic venue. I visited in 2013 but they've expanded since then.

The Strong was more expensive than Pitt was last year. See our financial report for the breakdown. But IFTF is a donor-funded organization, and our supporters came through, so NarraScope happened.

Yes, there were some scary moments. I opened the conference by quoting the movie Shakespeare in Love, which I happened to rewatch in April. Early on, one character says:

Allow me to explain about the theater business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstables on the road to imminent disaster. But strangely enough, it all turns out well. I don't know how. It's a mystery.

That line is a leitmotif of the movie. I had it stuck in my head through April and May and June. But somehow everything turned out well.

Now NarraScope 2024 is in the bag. (Except for posting the videos of the talks; we'll get to those as quickly as possible.) The finances are settled. We have started the email threads about finding someone to run NarraScope 2025.

And now I have a different line in my head.

Slowly he built up the image until it lived apart from his will, no matter where he turned his attention.

This is a description of ritual magic from a fantasy novel called Darkspell (Katharine Kerr, 1987). I don't particularly remember anything about the story -- I read it a long time ago -- but that line somehow caught in my head. "Until it lived apart from his will."

See, I first posted about NarraScope in early 2018. We hadn't even picked a name; it was just "Narrative interactive fiction adventure games convention." (NIFAGNCAAP?) It was a thing I really wanted to do, and I talked to people and passed out flyers and found more volunteers and... eventually we had a group of people who launched a conference.

Adri and I were co-chairs of that first conference. I did not chair again for the next few years. And the wacky part is, the conference kept going. It wasn't "Zarf's conference" any more. It happened because everybody wanted it to happen. It was a thing that lived apart from my will.

It's a mystery, or ritual magic, or something that we do.

Yes, I jumped back in as chair in 2023 and 2024. So my will has been pushing pretty hard for a couple of years. And, you know, I can feel the burn. Two years in a row is a year too many. But the point is that I can step back. Someone else will be there. Everybody will be there, come the day. The show will... you know.

Thank you all so much for doing it.