Andy Chase

It's been one of those "too many personal projects to choose from, so I'll just nap all afternoon and not work on anything" weekends. Today I got to paging through the DM4, which prompted me to download a couple of games from the IF Archive and give them a try.

Once again, maybe it was just the games I tried, but I lacked the patience to see any of them through... the puzzles were too many/too complicated/too abstract and required so much exploratory interaction as to be tedious. At the other end of the spectrum are the stories that eschew traditional IF narrative/puzzle solving in favor of experimental/metaphorical interaction. ("Ooo, now it's a flashback! Now I'm underwater! Now I'm somebody else!")

I still need to take the time to finish playing Anchorhead, which I've started and dropped several times. In the case of Anchorhead, it hasn't been so much out of frustration as getting distracted by personal projects, practicing music, et cetera. The puzzles I've encountered so far in Anchorhead have struck a good balance of ease and satisfaction (read: they make you feel clever even when clues in the story made the solution perfectly obvious), and the Lovecraftian setting is excellent.

It's probably no coincidence, then, that the closest thing I've got to a fully-developed concept for an IF adventure is also somewhat Lovecraftian in nature. It's been kicking around the back of my head for two or three years now, and every time I pick it up and look at it, it gets a little more defined. I would definitely be guilty of using variants of the "Family Home Mystery" and "Magician's Nephew" devices, but as noted on the IFWiki pages that's not necessarily a bad thing if well executed. Besides, you'd be hard pressed to pay homage to Lovecraft without making heavy use of both. The most daunting thing about such a project is the knowledge that Anchorhead is the de facto gold standard, and all future releases in the genre will be judged against it.

My main goal for such a project would be to create an immersive atmosphere and mood... I have some vague ideas for puzzles to be solved along the way, but to my way of thinking puzzles should never be more than a mild diversion; something that requires a bit of thought or careful observation on the part of the player, but never something that requires a ridiculous Zork-like "Before you can get to room X, you have to carry the painting up the chimney and put it in the trophy case, of course" chain of events. My own tolerance for getting stuck on IF puzzles is so low that I would never want to inflict that on somebody else.

I haven't quite worked up the gumption to set pen to paper, so to speak, but I'm getting closer every time I devote some serious thought to the project.

Tagged:

• if
• interactivefiction
• lovecraftian
• inform