Zarf Updates

Borneo, 1941: rich white Brits run the show for tobacco, pearls and the opium trade, while World War Two creeps up around the edges. Who is sneaking onto the Goodwill plantation and why?

The Red Pearls of Borneo (Bushmonkey Games) is an interesting take on the deductionizer format. It's patterned after Type Help; your challenge is to figure out which people were where and when. But it adds a layer of search mechanics to the logic. I don't think it's entirely successful, but it's an instructive try.

The new gimmick is that you have to identify people by name (first and last) before you can start placing them in scenes. But you can only use a name after you've heard it in a scene already found. This is unlike Golden Idol, where you have to collect the words but they're all lying around the scene free for the taking. In Red Pearls the names are a gating mechanic.

To soften this, the game lets you track objects as well as people. You have to associate the object with its owner. Then it lets you peek into still-locked scenes and see part of the dialogue -- the lines spoken by whoever is holding the object. (Not necessarily the original owner...)

The result is a search experience that feels more hand-scripted, or even on-rails. You have to find certain things in order to unlock other things. But it's also more soft-edged and tactile. You might find one name in a partial view of one scene, then another name in a different slice of a different scene, then put them together. It's more nuanced than Type Help's scene-by-scene progression.

I can see why they tried this idea. I love search tools. Nothing gets me jazzed like finding a magic lens or a UV flashlight. Point it at all the things! The partial unlocking of the search space is a great addition. The problem is that using the objects feels perfunctory and mechanical. It's just a row of icons. It's easier to click through them than to think about which one might work.

To some extent this is true for the entire timeline. When you try a combo (room / time / list of names), the game might say "right", "wrong", or "nothing happened here at that time." That third option is important; it saves you a lot of pointless clicking. But the way you get there is... pointless clicking. I'd click through an entire row or column of the grid, just to fill in the grey "nothing happened" squares. Logic doesn't start until you know where it's worth looking.

In some sense this is the element that's analogous to Golden Idol's word-collection stage. But in GI, mechanically clicking everything is when you learn the story! It's interesting in its own right; the words are just a way to check that you didn't miss something. In Red Pearls, the lawnmowering is just a chain of nopes until you hit the right spot.

I'm not saying it's a bad game. It's good! The deduction framework is solid and the historical background is dense and engaging. The characters are great, consistently surprising and human -- probably the best-drawn crew I've encountered in this shiny-new subgenre.

My design suggestion is just to drop the click-click-click phase. Grey out all the "nothing happens" squares in a row as soon as it appears. (Or perhaps the first time you select one.) When focused on a location, highlight the active objects; grey out the rest. And once you select an active object, permanently add its lines to the location's dialogue. Unlocking an object will feel like a big advancement, and you still have the fun interaction of selecting locations to see where it works. You can almost always guess which slots are likely, so that's not mechanical. (Unless you're really stuck. But you always brute-force when you're really stuck.)

The other peculiar aspect of Red Pearls is its overall shape. This goes back to my Game Narrative Kaleidoscope thesis of "the player should know how far they've gotten". (You don't have to buy the book to read my chapter; it's what I just said.) (Feel free to buy the book though.)

The game begins by showing you a two-day, hour-by-hour timeline. It is very clear that the game, and the story, consists of filling in those two days.

So you do that. Except that's not how it goes. When you reach the "Conclude your story?" option, the timeline isn't entirely unlocked. One character is still nameless. But that person only arrives at the end; they're not part of the main story. Makes sense, right? You can roll credits, or try to 100% the last few details and win your puzzle-sicko trophy.

...Except that's not how it goes. If you continue, you unlock a completely new timeline, in which some of the characters escape the plantation and try to make it to civilization. It's not a whole new puzzle chapter, mind you. It uses the same unlocking mechanic, but in a narrative mode. You track the group from place to place, learning what happens, with only a few logical hops.

And yes, the new timeline provides some clues that unlock the remaining bits of the original chapter. Which opens up a third timeline!

So really this is a puzzle game plus two short stories involving the same characters. They're excellent short stories. I was on the edge of my seat. But what a weird choice! The whole history of narrative games has been "how do we mix the storyline in with the gameplay so that players don't feel stuck behind a glass pane?" These chapters aren't non-interactive; they require active reading and selection. But switching from a puzzle-centric Type Help model to a nearly-hypertext epilogue feels unbalanced.

Actually, the comparison to Type Help is interesting. I won't get into spoilers, but Type Help features a gradual shift in modality. In the beginning, progress is slow; you're groping blindly into the story. But as you learn more and possibilities narrow down, the gameplay accelerates, until you fly into a genuinely propulsive climax.

(And then an interesting change of pace, in the upcoming Galley House remake. But that's a different post.)

So I'm not objecting to the idea of a gameplay shift. It's just that "accelerate and go whoosh!" is a classic audience-pleaser, whereas "stop gaming and read" is a much harder sell.

Do I have a design suggestion here? Man, I don't know. Release the two story chapters as DLC? I don't mean for purchase; the original game is free. But positioning them as separate experiences, rather than surprise chapters, might make sense. Or maybe it would be a complete flop. (They'd be spoilery, for a start.)

The chewy solution is the "standard" narrative design: figure out how to interleave the story sequences with the puzzle sequences. Perhaps as flashbacks. But now I'm suggesting a complete redesign, so I won't push too hard for it!

The designers are hard at work on a full-scale Cold War followup, Green Mist over Portland. We shall see how their design toolkit evolves. In the meantime, Red Pearls is worth playing.