[IF Comp 2013] Ollie Ollie Oxen Free
Ollie Ollie Oxen Free, Carolyn VanEseltine,
version 2013-09-29
This is a technically ambitious piece about serious matters, which is good to see; everything I've played thus far has been very conservative about its mechanical goals, its writing and subject-matter, or both.
This opening doesn't fuck around. The scene opens in a very-clearly-American primary (grade?) school on a military base that has come under air attack, targeted with both bombs and chemical weapons. (Considering that this comes from an author of One Eye Open, a game in which you are set on fire and your eyeballs explode and you are slurped down a giant oesophagus and then eaten by a giant sphincter with teeth, it shows remarkable restraint about the blood and guts and veins in your teeth side of things.) You're an art teacher, apparently the only surviving adult; you have to gather the surviving kids and get them out of trouble. It's set roughly in the present: the protagonist is in a same-sex marriage but feels the need to be circumspect about it, there are references to contemporary musicians.
The protagonist has been left shocky and weakened by the attack, and as an art teacher doesn't have a skillset particularly well-suited to emergency situations. So most of the early game is spent stumbling hopelessly around the school, failing to accomplish anything whatsoever: even picking things up is too much for you. Fairly early on, the game hints that the key to success will be to gather the surviving children and tell them to do the things that you're too weak to manage. This is a slightly tenuous premise - the player has the strength to walk up and down the school all day, but not to hold on to a paperclip. My suspicion is that the original design premise had the teacher's arms maimed, and that this got rewritten as too restrictive or too horrible.
The world of the school is knowingly observed. The protagonist's viewpoint is very much that of a teacher, concerned even amid the burning wreckage with the shortcomings of the school and the troubles of individual students. They're a troubled lot: there's a smart-and-bored boy who puts his spare energy into fighting, a boy in denial about his mother's death, a girl who's been held back two years running because the school doesn't have the resources to offer support for her dyslexia. I've been complaining a lot recently about games that avoid distinctive detail in favour of fuzzy universality: this manages to have it both ways, both picking out solid, believable individuals and painting a setting that, with a few superficial details moved around, could be a more-or-less-middle-class school anywhere in the West.
The mechanical premise of a team of NPCs, each with particular strengths which the player coordinates, is one that has a solid pedigree in IF: Suspended is perhaps the best-known example, the Frenetic Five series was wholly based around it, and last year we had Escape from Summerland. Usually, some sort of justification is necessary for why the team doesn't cooperate all that smoothly: two of those games have no human team-members, using robots or animals instead, and the Frenetic Five are shown as people who don't cope too well with life in general.
This is a large-map, relatively slow-moving game; I spent a good deal of time early on figuring out the layout of the place and where everything was. I think the design intent was that my first action would be to walk around the place SHOUTing for students, but (as so often happens) I used the non-standard verb once and then promptly forgot about it, leading to some odd results. (I realised only in reading other people's reviews that the game's title is a big hint about the main thing you should be doing early on: but as a Brit, that phrase is totally not part of my schoolyard vocabulary. I recognise it as an American phrase associated with some game or other, but that's about as close as I get.)
I also had some clash-of-expectations issues from spending too much time around first responders. My immediate instinct was that, before I did anything else, I should get the obviously shocky protagonist calmed down enough to recover his strength. My immediate instinct with Keiko was not to splint her leg - she's still going to need help moving, even with a splint - but to get her out of that water and dried off, because wet + shock will kill you. The wisdom of getting Samir to crawl through unknown ducts (that might very well have been rendered unstable in the attacks) rather than remaining in place for rescuers seemed pretty questionable to me, given that he was unhurt and not at immediate risk. (In theory there's a fire burning somewhere, but this is a pretty slow-paced game, and it's never mentioned as a motivation to act quickly, so I assumed that it wasn't spreading.)
There's a great deal to investigate very early on, but not a lot of things you can do with any of it, and it's easy to start feeling overwhelmed: I think that some streamlining of the early game and perhaps a little more gating might have helped introduce the player more smoothly. Of course, feeling overwhelmed and helpless is a pretty reasonable response to this situation.
A big problem facing this game is that it has a number of NPCs and a lot of systems about interacting with them, many of which have not gone through nearly enough testing to really iron all the kinks out. This is layered on top of play which would be fairly laborious even if working perfectly, because of the PC's need to relay almost every command through students; the upshot was that it was kind of exhausting to play, and I had to keep coming up for air. Eventually I quit in frustration when it came to working out how to enter combinations into George's locker. (It kept telling me that I didn't have a combination yet when George had given me one.)
I am curious about where this game is going, I think that mechanically it's a cool idea, the prose and observation is solid, and it's handling difficult topics. But it's committed to a mechanic that's always going to be fairly hard work for the player, which means that it needs to have a pretty high level of interaction polish; instead, it's got some serious problems with bugs. (And it hasn't seen an update since the start of the comp, which is faintly ominous.) I would like to give this a high score, purely because I'd like to motivate the author to go back and really test the hell out of it post-comp; on the other hand, I really don't want to encourage people to enter things in this kind of shape into the comp.
I expect that an adequately-polished version of this would deserve a 7 at the very least; it tackles considerably more interesting and thorny subject-matter than the better-polished games that I've given 6s. But I've got to vote for the games that got entered, not the games as I wish they were. (And this hope kept me sticking with Ollie for longer than I would normally have done, thus creating the most frustration I've had all comp). So this is a 5, maaaaybe a 6 when I reassess the field.
I have sucked at keeping transcripts this year, and Gargoyle doesn't really let you copy-paste an entire game, but here's a sample of the issues I had with the game:
> move keiko
You’re weak and trembling from the toxic gas. Better to ask one of the students to push it for you.
(Example: Keiko, PUSH Keiko.)
> ask keiko about leg
Which do you mean, Keiko’s right leg or Keiko’s left leg?
Contextually, that should disambiguate itself.
One recurring problem is that responses often mention students as if you've already been introduced to their general situation, before you even know they exist. (The game's relying on the assumption that you will SHOUT in every room before you do anything else.) At this point, I didn't even know of Tyrone's existence:
You hear a hard thump from the boys’ bathroom door, suggestive of someone kicking it from the
other side.
You shout, “And lay off kicking the door!”
Tyrone says unrepentantly, “Yes, Mr. Ginsberg.”
Shortly thereafter, trying to get into the boys' bathroom to free Tyrone (I was a bit confused about which side of the door the wedge was on):
> knock on door
You can’t see any such thing.
> talk to tyrone
What do you want to talk to Tyrone about?
> door
Which do you mean, a bathroom stall, the lab door, the blocked door, your door, the double doors, the cafeteria doors, the kitchen door, the closet door, the girls’ door, the boys’ door, the equipment room door, the gym office door, or the swinging door?
Way too much of this. I suspect that the conversation system would be a lot smoother if it dealt with topics, rather than things in the world; either that, or an awful lot of judiciously applied 'does the player mean' statements.
When the following exchange took place, George was absent:
> ask ashley about george
You ask, “Ashley, what do you think of George?”
Ashley answers, “He’s lonely because his mom is away and most of the other kids won’t play with him.”
George says, “She’s in space! It’s really important.”
When talking remotely (usually to a trapped child), the conversation system responds with "[child] isn't here" if you ask about an unimplemented topic, even when you could otherwise talk to them.
In some places, it just needs a healthy dose of Plurality:
> samir, push cabinet
You call, “Samir, I want you to shove that cabinets.”
Double-printing speech events:
> samir, e
You shout, “Samir, please go out the grate.”
Samir hollers, “It won’t open! I think it’s screwed shut!”
Samir yells, “It won’t open! I think it’s screwed shut!”
version 2013-09-29
This is a technically ambitious piece about serious matters, which is good to see; everything I've played thus far has been very conservative about its mechanical goals, its writing and subject-matter, or both.
This opening doesn't fuck around. The scene opens in a very-clearly-American primary (grade?) school on a military base that has come under air attack, targeted with both bombs and chemical weapons. (Considering that this comes from an author of One Eye Open, a game in which you are set on fire and your eyeballs explode and you are slurped down a giant oesophagus and then eaten by a giant sphincter with teeth, it shows remarkable restraint about the blood and guts and veins in your teeth side of things.) You're an art teacher, apparently the only surviving adult; you have to gather the surviving kids and get them out of trouble. It's set roughly in the present: the protagonist is in a same-sex marriage but feels the need to be circumspect about it, there are references to contemporary musicians.
The protagonist has been left shocky and weakened by the attack, and as an art teacher doesn't have a skillset particularly well-suited to emergency situations. So most of the early game is spent stumbling hopelessly around the school, failing to accomplish anything whatsoever: even picking things up is too much for you. Fairly early on, the game hints that the key to success will be to gather the surviving children and tell them to do the things that you're too weak to manage. This is a slightly tenuous premise - the player has the strength to walk up and down the school all day, but not to hold on to a paperclip. My suspicion is that the original design premise had the teacher's arms maimed, and that this got rewritten as too restrictive or too horrible.
The world of the school is knowingly observed. The protagonist's viewpoint is very much that of a teacher, concerned even amid the burning wreckage with the shortcomings of the school and the troubles of individual students. They're a troubled lot: there's a smart-and-bored boy who puts his spare energy into fighting, a boy in denial about his mother's death, a girl who's been held back two years running because the school doesn't have the resources to offer support for her dyslexia. I've been complaining a lot recently about games that avoid distinctive detail in favour of fuzzy universality: this manages to have it both ways, both picking out solid, believable individuals and painting a setting that, with a few superficial details moved around, could be a more-or-less-middle-class school anywhere in the West.
The mechanical premise of a team of NPCs, each with particular strengths which the player coordinates, is one that has a solid pedigree in IF: Suspended is perhaps the best-known example, the Frenetic Five series was wholly based around it, and last year we had Escape from Summerland. Usually, some sort of justification is necessary for why the team doesn't cooperate all that smoothly: two of those games have no human team-members, using robots or animals instead, and the Frenetic Five are shown as people who don't cope too well with life in general.
This is a large-map, relatively slow-moving game; I spent a good deal of time early on figuring out the layout of the place and where everything was. I think the design intent was that my first action would be to walk around the place SHOUTing for students, but (as so often happens) I used the non-standard verb once and then promptly forgot about it, leading to some odd results. (I realised only in reading other people's reviews that the game's title is a big hint about the main thing you should be doing early on: but as a Brit, that phrase is totally not part of my schoolyard vocabulary. I recognise it as an American phrase associated with some game or other, but that's about as close as I get.)
I also had some clash-of-expectations issues from spending too much time around first responders. My immediate instinct was that, before I did anything else, I should get the obviously shocky protagonist calmed down enough to recover his strength. My immediate instinct with Keiko was not to splint her leg - she's still going to need help moving, even with a splint - but to get her out of that water and dried off, because wet + shock will kill you. The wisdom of getting Samir to crawl through unknown ducts (that might very well have been rendered unstable in the attacks) rather than remaining in place for rescuers seemed pretty questionable to me, given that he was unhurt and not at immediate risk. (In theory there's a fire burning somewhere, but this is a pretty slow-paced game, and it's never mentioned as a motivation to act quickly, so I assumed that it wasn't spreading.)
There's a great deal to investigate very early on, but not a lot of things you can do with any of it, and it's easy to start feeling overwhelmed: I think that some streamlining of the early game and perhaps a little more gating might have helped introduce the player more smoothly. Of course, feeling overwhelmed and helpless is a pretty reasonable response to this situation.
A big problem facing this game is that it has a number of NPCs and a lot of systems about interacting with them, many of which have not gone through nearly enough testing to really iron all the kinks out. This is layered on top of play which would be fairly laborious even if working perfectly, because of the PC's need to relay almost every command through students; the upshot was that it was kind of exhausting to play, and I had to keep coming up for air. Eventually I quit in frustration when it came to working out how to enter combinations into George's locker. (It kept telling me that I didn't have a combination yet when George had given me one.)
I am curious about where this game is going, I think that mechanically it's a cool idea, the prose and observation is solid, and it's handling difficult topics. But it's committed to a mechanic that's always going to be fairly hard work for the player, which means that it needs to have a pretty high level of interaction polish; instead, it's got some serious problems with bugs. (And it hasn't seen an update since the start of the comp, which is faintly ominous.) I would like to give this a high score, purely because I'd like to motivate the author to go back and really test the hell out of it post-comp; on the other hand, I really don't want to encourage people to enter things in this kind of shape into the comp.
I expect that an adequately-polished version of this would deserve a 7 at the very least; it tackles considerably more interesting and thorny subject-matter than the better-polished games that I've given 6s. But I've got to vote for the games that got entered, not the games as I wish they were. (And this hope kept me sticking with Ollie for longer than I would normally have done, thus creating the most frustration I've had all comp). So this is a 5, maaaaybe a 6 when I reassess the field.
I have sucked at keeping transcripts this year, and Gargoyle doesn't really let you copy-paste an entire game, but here's a sample of the issues I had with the game:
> move keiko
You’re weak and trembling from the toxic gas. Better to ask one of the students to push it for you.
(Example: Keiko, PUSH Keiko.)
> ask keiko about leg
Which do you mean, Keiko’s right leg or Keiko’s left leg?
Contextually, that should disambiguate itself.
One recurring problem is that responses often mention students as if you've already been introduced to their general situation, before you even know they exist. (The game's relying on the assumption that you will SHOUT in every room before you do anything else.) At this point, I didn't even know of Tyrone's existence:
You hear a hard thump from the boys’ bathroom door, suggestive of someone kicking it from the
other side.
You shout, “And lay off kicking the door!”
Tyrone says unrepentantly, “Yes, Mr. Ginsberg.”
Shortly thereafter, trying to get into the boys' bathroom to free Tyrone (I was a bit confused about which side of the door the wedge was on):
> knock on door
You can’t see any such thing.
> talk to tyrone
What do you want to talk to Tyrone about?
> door
Which do you mean, a bathroom stall, the lab door, the blocked door, your door, the double doors, the cafeteria doors, the kitchen door, the closet door, the girls’ door, the boys’ door, the equipment room door, the gym office door, or the swinging door?
Way too much of this. I suspect that the conversation system would be a lot smoother if it dealt with topics, rather than things in the world; either that, or an awful lot of judiciously applied 'does the player mean' statements.
When the following exchange took place, George was absent:
> ask ashley about george
You ask, “Ashley, what do you think of George?”
Ashley answers, “He’s lonely because his mom is away and most of the other kids won’t play with him.”
George says, “She’s in space! It’s really important.”
When talking remotely (usually to a trapped child), the conversation system responds with "[child] isn't here" if you ask about an unimplemented topic, even when you could otherwise talk to them.
In some places, it just needs a healthy dose of Plurality:
> samir, push cabinet
You call, “Samir, I want you to shove that cabinets.”
Double-printing speech events:
> samir, e
You shout, “Samir, please go out the grate.”
Samir hollers, “It won’t open! I think it’s screwed shut!”
Samir yells, “It won’t open! I think it’s screwed shut!”