Zarf Updates

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.

I haven't played through Riven since 1997.

I've replayed Myst several times, once for each major remake. (RealMyst for Mac in 2002, iPad port in 2012, Unity remake in 2014, Unreal remake in 2020...) I replayed Myst 3 and Myst 4 when they showed up on Steam in 2018. I replayed Myst 5 on a whim in 2010 (it was five years old then) and then again recently.

I never replayed Riven. I'm not sure why. There was a high-def iPad release in 2013; I jumped in but drifted away pretty quickly. I suppose the slideshow interface is just exhausting to my 3D-adapted brain, and this was already true ten years ago.

But when I started to hear about a true-3D remake of Riven -- originally as the Starry Expanse fan project -- not replaying it became a thing. "Oh," I said, "I will save my re-experience for this upcoming new version. It will be great! I won't remember anything! It'll be like playing a whole new game!"

Of course that was 2013, or maybe 2012. I knew Starry Expanse would be slow. It crept along and switched engines and crept some more. Then in 2019, Cyan announced an official Riven remake, which was... either based on the Starry Expanse project or collaborating with it, they weren't real specific. Then another couple of years of awkward silence went by. And now it's out!

...Sorry; it's hard to find a narrative through-line. The timeline is lumpy, and if there was any drama, people kept it under wraps. I just kept waiting and one day a game turned up.

Then I replayed Riven.

Indika (Odd-Meter) is that Russian nun game. You're a teenage nun in 1900-ish (the setting is a bit fungible). You're not a very good nun -- relegated to a monastery for your sins, or perhaps because you hear the voice of the Devil constantly snickering in your ear and distracting you from your chores. Fed up with your twitchiness, the other nuns send you off to the city to deliver a letter. Thus your great adventure begins.

This is an odd one and I've been mulling it. It's almost a walking simulator. You do more than walk; you explore and collect icons and solve environmental puzzles and get chased by a dog. But the meat of the game, what it really loves doing, is walk-and-talk dialogue. You debate the nature of sin and free will, both with the Devil and with the dying soldier that fate (or God, or the Devil) throws in your path. He talks to God, or says he does.

All this in a game which is cheerfully unreliable about what is real anyway. Pixelly faux-Zelda interludes hint at your backstory -- but the same eight-bit rewards bleep forth from the religious icons you find. Find enough of them and you can level up. It's the most unconvincing portrayal of religious experience you can imagine, and deliberately so.

Even when the game isn't evoking 80s console gaming, the world is never exactly realistic. Right from the beginning there are unremarked touches of dreamscape. Hulking cows, inexplicable objects... in later chapters, factories and cathedrals grow into Social-Surrealist monstrosities. But then occasionally the world breaks down into explicitly hallucinatory hellfire. So is the rest of the game supposed to be literal? Or is the entire thing just Indika's broken mind? An RPG played on a bored girl's GameSwitch, for all we know.

I really want to compare this to Senua's Sacrifice. Wait, did I not review that one? Dammit. Anyway, Senua tried to portray the experience of a protagonist suffering from schizophrenic delusions. In the context of her culture this is a saga, a heroic journey into Hell. It was something of a mixed success. It was an engaging and powerful game (and I will certainly play the sequel!) But to some extent the portrayal of mental illness got jammed into the mold of a puzzle-solving superpower.

Indika is another take on this idea. It doesn't fall into the same trap, mostly because it refuses to be jammed into any mold. Like I said, it remains entirely unclear what is delusion, as opposed to fiction or metaphor or miracle. But also, Indika refuses to be pinned down as delusional. She doesn't just pray her way through puzzles. She is determined, forthright, mechanically handy (she fixed motorbikes before she took the habit). The core emotional moment of the story (I won't spoil it) is not solving a puzzle; it's Indika looking at a problem, exhaling, and choosing a solution.

But then the ending. (I will spoil this, in nonspecific terms.)

In the end, Indika gets hurt. She loses her faith. Or, if she had no faith, she loses her hollow faith-point rewards. The soldier loses his faith. They do not have a touching romance, or hot sex for that matter. There are no miracles. Did you expect miracles?

It ought to be an enormous downer. But somehow I don't feel like I played a depressing game. Or even an elegaic game about letting go (as so many walking sims are). It was... I was left thinking about the middle of the story, not the end.

In that story, Indika (the person) is better than the ending of her game. I think she's got somewhere to go after this. Maybe fixing motorbikes. Learning to play guitar. I don't know, it's not spelled out.

Indika ends optimistically because it's about letting go of what doesn't work. That's what I say.

I hate the red squiggle underline.

I know many people love it and many people rely on it. It's become a software standard, and for good reason. But I, personally, find it distracting and unhelpful. I spell pretty gud! So I always turn the feature off.

The problem is, there's no system-wide way to turn off the red squiggle on MacOS.

You can turn it off on a per-app basis. It's usually a menu item called "Check Spelling While Typing". (Under "Edit / Spelling and Grammar". Sometimes you have to right-click in the text window to get that menu.) Many apps, like Slack, have a custom preference that does the same thing. So I turn it off for every app, and...

...the off switch doesn't always stay off.

For many apps it works great. Pages? Safari? Slack? BBEdit, where I'm typing this? No problem! Turn the preference off once, it stays off forever. (Or at least until I buy a new Mac, but that's once every several years.)

But for many apps, it just doesn't stick. I am very happy with Mona, the Mastodon client; but the "Check Spelling" preference resets on every single message you type. In the Zoom desktop client, it resets on every new call's chat pane. Even TextEdit, Apple's native text editor, loses track of the preference when I reopen a document. And then the red squiggles reappear.

For a while I had the "Check Spelling While Typing" menu item bound to a keystroke (cmd-opt-semicolon). So I could switch off the red squiggles in a given window with one power chord. Sadly, with recent versions of some apps (Mona, Zoom) this no longer works. Contextual menu items are no longer bindable with Mac's keyboard shortcut mechanism. (Not sure whether this is the fault of the apps, or SwiftUI, or MacOS. Doesn't matter though.)

So I've gotten pretty upset with the red squiggles. I'm not the only one.

If you search for the problem, you see a lot of people telling you how to turn off the "Correct Spelling Automatically" preference. (Example: this post.) That is a system-wide preference, and I turned it off years ago. But it's not the same thing. That preference is for auto-correction of spelling errors. I want to turn off the underlining of spelling errors.

Well, this week the problem got on my last nerve and I figured out a real and system-wide solution, which is abominable:

I created a spelling dictionary that accepts every English word as correct and told MacOS to use it exclusively.

Here it is!