Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Cragne Manor source code (some of it)

You may remember Cragne Manor, the collaborative exquisite-corpse IF game that launched in 2018. (My post about it at the time.) The project was a tribute to Mike Gentry's Anchorhead, organized by Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna. It turned into an absolutely absurd agglomeration-fest of eighty-four IF authors. Each author wrote a separate game in Inform 7, following certain guidelines, and then the editors stitched them together.
Cragne Manor includes contributions from many of the IF authors of the '90s and '00s, as well as more recent years. It's a really interesting snapshot of a variety of styles. However, the original project didn't encompass releasing the source code. We talked about it! But Jenni and Ryan had enough on their plates trying to make the game work. Asking them to create a source release too would have been ingratitude.
As it happened, a couple of weeks ago, Jason Love -- one of the 84 Cragne authors -- up and posted his source code on the forum. Jason's post set off a wave of other people doing the same.
Seize the moment, right? I got permission from each of those people to archive their Cragne source files on my own web site. I include my own, of course.
As of today, my page includes thirteen of the game-files which constitute Cragne Manor. I started the weekend with five. There's a bunch more. Let's put the word out!
If you want your Cragne source on my site, please send me the source file. (The raw code -- that's Source/story.ni in your I7 project folder.) Or, if it's already posted somewhere, pass me a link and let me know I have permission to include it.
Thanks! I doubt this will ever be a complete collection, but it would be nice to gather as much as possible.
(But please don't harass Ryan and Jenni about this. This is my effort, not theirs.)

Monday, May 30, 2022

Recent puzzly games: summer 2022 edition

Sephonie

Three scientists of Taiwanese descent explore a mysterious ecology. This is an oddly lumpy hybrid of parkour metroidvania, tetromino puzzles, and character-centric story game. Each mode is pretty enjoyable but switching felt like an interruption.
This didn't bother me too much, and I progressed through a large part of the game. (Through four key species.) Unfortunately, I could not get my head (or fingers) around the wall-running-and-jumping mechanic. I got as far as I did through sheer bloody-minded flailing, but I never really understood how to chain moves to get where I wanted to go. This is a pity -- the parkour mechanics are puzzle mechanics; I was enjoying the challenge of looking around and figuring out how to proceed. Like the best Prince of Persia games -- except that PoP made you feel great at executing moves, and this game does not. Eventually I fell too many times and quit.

The Inheritance of Crimson Manor

A pleasant first-person puzzler in a creepy Victorian mansion. The puzzles never get very hard; nor do they achieve the hands-on haptic satisfaction of the Room series. But there's lots of them. You can have a satisfying wander around, happily overwhelmed by an abundance of locked doors and mysterious puzzle-boxes.
(There is one sliding-block puzzle, but it's quite easy of its kind, so I didn't have to flip off the developers.)

Skábma: Snowfall

An action-platformer in the traditions of the Sámi people. You fell asleep on reindeer watch -- oops! While pursuing an errant doe, you discover a noaidi drum, the tool of the Sámi shaman. Good timing, because the village is falling ill from some strange infectious ooze...
This is really well done! You run around a big, knotty mountain landscape, chasing spirit familiars and gaining metroidesque powers. The platforming is puzzly, not reflex-oriented; you are trying to figure out what to do, not trying to execute it. It's not on rails, but the margins of error are extremely generous.
You can explore freely -- plenty of collectibles to root out -- but you're meant to follow the trails which are revealed by the beat of your drum. The drum is central to the game, just as it should be: besides showing your goals, it also lets you manipulate ooze outbreaks, illuminates dark caves, restores your health, and keeps time with the background music. (That last always put a smile on my face.)
My only complaints are, first, some of the cave and forest scenes are really too cramped for the camera mechanics. Yes, you need those narrow tunnels and dense trees to contrast with the mountaintops and vast caverns later on. (Landscape: gorgeous! Highly varied!) But when you're scurrying through a rabbit warren and the camera can't see around corners, it's more annoying than atmospheric.
And, second, they fell victim to one of the classic blunders: the climactic action scene is the hardest. You have to use all your jumpy powers, fine -- but with a giant kicking your butt! That's not how you've been practicing. Sigh. I powered through but it threw the tone off.
(Third, there are ooze zombies. I usually have a no-zombies rule but these aren't the really threatening kind. They're very slow. You just have to drum and sometimes jump on them.)
Satisfying, beautiful, educational -- if you're unfamiliar with Sámi traditions, which certainly describes me -- and very approachable. Try it.

Recursive Ruin

A first-person puzzle game with a "nested" world. The space contains itself at a smaller scale, and so on infinitely inward (and outward). Now you're recalling Maquette; but Recursive Ruin feels quite different.
RR has a glitchy fractal aesthetic rather than cozy toy tilt-shift, but that's not the main difference. In Maquette, you stayed the same size as you walked inward or outward. So each copy of the world was smaller or larger than the last. In RR, you shrink or grow to match the world-instance you're entering. You can go inwards/outwards forever.
This is brain-twisty from the get-go. Maquette allowed you to distinguish where you were by size; but in RR, every instance is the same size. Sort of. You really have to visualize the world as cyclical. On top of that, you have a "shift" button which slides the inner/outer world up or down, changing the relative locations of everything.
RR's mechanics drag you into its warped reality -- and they just work better. Maquette's scaling meant that you couldn't go very far inward; the world got too small and crowded to deal with. Similarly, going outward, the world became vast boring stretches of pavement that you had to run through. RR avoids this problem and feels much better laid out.
RR tends to flip back and forth between pure-puzzle mode and a narrative about an artist's traumatic past. Plenty of games have alternating scenes like this, but RR has alternating chapters -- sometimes you get a full-length walking-sim episode in between puzzle chapters. Mind you, it's a good walking sim (in the psychological-horror mode). A bit heavy-handed, but mostly I just wanted smoother pacing.
At any rate, the puzzles are pretty solid. Not extremely difficult once you wrap your head around the geometry, but a good variety of stuff built on that basic idea.
And, hey, after Maquette I thought "That is a cool mechanic but I bet more could be done with it." Now more has!
(Sorry, this whole review comes off as backhanded shade on Maquette. I enjoyed Maquette! It did interesting story things! The last chapter had clever puzzles! But the puzzles felt hit-and-miss before that point, and you had to spend a lot of time running across vast boring stretches of pavement.)

Platonic

A first-person puzzle game in an abstract low-poly world. This would be Yet Another One Of Those except that the puzzles are really well-designed! I finished it a couple of days ago and now it's high on my puzzle recommendation list for the year.
It's definitely in the Myst sphere of influence rather than Talos/Xing/Portal. Every enviroment, every mechanic, and every puzzle is unique... except that's not true. Each idea comes back deeper. You'll solve a puzzle, move on, and then realize there was more to the original mechanic than you thought. So you return to it -- or solve a similar puzzle -- but now you're working at a different level.
(I suppose a better comparison is Antichamber or the recent Sensorium. Abstract world; simple visual style; not a trace of story; a deep, serious focus on the puzzle design.)
The "progression by learning" idea recalls Outer Wilds. I don't mean that Platonic is a pure-information game. It's not; when you unlock a door it stays unlocked, when you solve a puzzle it stays solved. But there's still that sensation of space opening up around you. And this happens a lot. The designer has done a really creditable job of having every puzzle idea recur and build on itself. They get tangled up with each other too. Sneaky stuff.

Tuesday, May 10, 2022

Patricia McKillip (1948-2022)

This afternoon, Locus posted an obituary for Patricia McKillip.
I have trouble finding what to say. Really a large part of everything I've written has started with "Maybe I could do that too." After reading Riddle-Master or Changeling Sea or Fool's Run or just remembering a line or a phrase or a turn of thought.
I'm gonna just go back into my book room and pick out some words.
"If you hate the sea so now," Mare asked in wonder one day, "why don't you leave?" Mare was a few years older than Peri, and very pretty. She came to work in the morning with a private smile in her eyes. Down at the docks, Peri knew, was a young fisherman with the same smile coming and going on his face. Mare was tidy and energetic, unlike Carey, who dreamed that the king's son would come to the inn one day and fall in love with her green eyes and raven tresses. Carey was slow and prone to breaking things. Peri attacked her work grimly, as if she were going to war armed with a dust cloth and a coal scuttle.
That same smile.
He woke in the morning, face-down in a book. Nyx was stirring the fire.
"You should never sleep between two spells," she commented.
Witches and magicians turn out to be the protagonists. It's common these days but back then they drifted on-stage as helpmeets and quest-givers and destinations. McKillip's could be confused, arrogant, ignorant, and central. Sometimes the sorcerer ran off with the girl or the boy rather than vice versa.
"...Then, outside the seventh door, his name was called again; but the Thing did not touch the door. He waited in despair for it to enter, but it did not. Then he grew impatient, longing for it to enter, but it did not. Finally he reached out, opened the door himself. The Thing was gone. And he was left to wonder, all the days of his life, what it was that had called out to him."
He stopped. Elliard said in spite of himself, "Well, what was it?"
"Kern didn't open the door. That is the only riddle to come out of Hed. The stricture, according to the Riddle-Masters at Caithnard is this: Answer the unanswered riddle. So I do."
So I do, when I'm most myself.
The walls flickered around them at the changing hour. The chartreuse heated to a vibrant orange that caused them both to duck over their beers.
"Lord," Sidney said painfully. "I had no idea what goes on here at this time of morning."
My virtual space on IFMud runs in those times and colors. Well, my colors, not the Constellation Club's. Later, I put them in Dreamhold. I may yet run them up the walls of my house.
Calyx made a satisfied noise. "Here we are. According to Chrysom, the power to move Ro House is passed from generation to generation of Holders' children, who are born with an innate ability, for the Holders instinctively seek out as mates those who may inspire the power within the child conceived."
...They all gazed at Iris. She put down her needlework uncertainly, flushing. The Holder's brows had risen. She pulled a pin out of her hair absently, her mind running down the past; a smile, reminiscent, wondering, touched her eyes.
"Mother," Iris said accusingly.
"Well, I didn't know," the Holder said. "He seemed a very practical man."
Just look at them.
Peace, tremulous, unexpected, sent a taproot out of nowhere into Morgon's heart.
For us all.