Zarf Updates

I twooted about Type Help (William Rous), a new deduction-type game which is so full of awesome surprises that it's hard to review!

But, after mulling for a couple of days, I've come up with stuff to say after all. Lucky you!

You are handed an old laptop full of files concerning an old (1936) investigation. A houseful of people were found dead. What happened? You have audio recordings (or rather text transcripts of audio recordings) from the residents' last day. But most of the files are unlisted; you have to figure out the filenames to unlock them.

This is another offshoot of what I call the static deduction genre. (The ObraIdolTrees.) But the feel is closer to database narrative games -- think Her Story and Immortality and (going back) Portal. Right? You search through an old machine, using contextual clues to unlock new files; as you do, a story stitches itself together.

But unlike those games, Type Help makes a puzzle of this mechanic. Portal was effectively linear; you just had to select windows until a new entry appeared. The Her Story line of games involve active searching -- you have to think about what you're looking for -- but they're aggressively not puzzles. All the figuring-it-out happens in your head, or it doesn't. You're done when you decide you're satisfied.

Yes, Immortality has secrets. They all have narrative secrets. Uncovering a secret is a puzzle. But Type Help is a chain of these puzzles. To progress, you must work out who, what, where -- and then do it again for the next step. Which is to say: Type Help is a puzzle game, centrally, whereas Her Story is a searching game.

On the other hand, the game feels like a search. (Or even an offshoot of the "lost phone" genre.) You're not typing answers into the box; you're typing filenames. Progress is a new file, not confirmation of your previous deduction... But at this point I'm parsing vibes, not hard boundaries. (Roottrees, after all, had the search step and the confirmation step.) The sand-bars of new genre shift in the storm.

Have I mentioned how wonderful it is to watch this genre come to life? Every new entry is a creative take on the original "fill in the blanks" mystery concept. Maybe it's because the mystery is always a narrative. Nobody walks this shoreline unless they have a story to tell. It's not like, say, the Flash escape craze, where you could get away with cloning last week's furniture and rearranging the puzzle pieces.

And anybody can do one! Speaking of the Flash era. Cheesy pixel art? Fine. No art? Fine. AI-generated art? You're gonna get some pushback, but for a zero-budget free Itch game, it's an option. Static deduction isn't inherently text-based -- Obra Dinn was intensely visually-polished in its odd-retro way -- but there's a range of possibility open, and the zero-budget free Itch games are in the running.

One of which is Type Help, and let's get back to that. You know what Type Help does really well? Pacing. Pacing is hard in database-search games. The player can stumble across any topic at any time and you (or Sam Barlow, anyway) has to be at peace with that. I still don't understand when Immortality rolls its credits; there's some logic but it's not "when you've finished the story".

But Type Help, for impeccably structural reasons, rules on pacing. You start out in a haze of uncertainty; then you figure out a few things; then you inch forward. Then you inch some more. Work your way up and down the timeline, taking notes. And then you realize that you're walking forward, then striding... until it's a sprint to the inevitable end scene.

Where, to be sure, you probably get roadblocked on the Last Lousy Point. I did. The final puzzle is fair, I'm not complaining, but it takes considerably more guesswork and experimentation than you've needed since the first act. If you're stuck, I hereby give you permission to read the comments on the Itch page. They're full of people saying "Wow this last bit is hard" and then spilling the answer for each other. It's fine. It doesn't lessen the impact.

What else?

• I mentioned "taking notes". Take notes. Make a spreadsheet if you're into spreadsheets. You'll need it. This is not a game you can solve in your head.

• Someone referred to Type Help as a Twine game. I checked, and it sure is! (SugarCube.) Obviously that's Twine with a lot of custom coding. Or, really, a bunch of custom coding that uses Twine as a starting point. Nothing wrong with that; I've done it myself.

• I dunno about the title. It's appropriate, and yes (spoiler) it's the lead-in to the gameplay, but is it really the best hook? Maybe they should have gone with The Galleys Are Dead. Yes? No? (No.)

• Actually, it's the subtitle that annoyed me. As soon as I saw "The Unsolvable Mystery" I said "Guess there's no point playing it then" and closed the window. Didn't go back until sixty-eleven separate people told me I had to. I am a slow learner, but you can see where I'm coming from.

• Mac Safari doesn't agree with the way Itch handles cookies. (Or maybe it's my privacy settings?) Anyhow, the autosave didn't work for me. The game suggests the "Save to disk" option and so do I. That downloads a save file which you can later upload if your browser fluffs the autosave.

  • You can also work around the problem by using Safari's "Open frame in new window" option.
  • (Of course you could restore your position by retyping all the filenames you've found -- from your spreadsheet -- but that's tedious.)

• Yowza, I would pay money for a fully voice-acted version of this game. It'll never happen but it's a wonderful thought.

Okay, I think that's all I can say without being spoilery. (But I've thought that before...) Type Help is smart, sharply written, intensely compelling, and a great puzzle besides. I couldn't stop thinking about it until I was done, and then I wrote this post. Yay! It's good. You should play it.