[IF Comp 2013] Robin & Orchid
Robin & Orchid, Ryan Veeder & Emily Boegheim, Glulx
version 2013-10-06
This is a game about a very small mystery: you play Robin, one of two high-school journalists investigate a haunting in a church. At first - almost too quickly to be plausible - it seems as though the haunting might be authentic, but later you discover that the whole thing was a hoax orchestrated by the other journalist, Orchid, to boost interest in the school paper. As the photographer of the duo, you have to explore the church and its extensive basement and photograph anything suspicious.
Both of the authors have a record of making games that focus on the small, ordinary nastiness of ordinary people, so it's not very surprising that there's a certain amount of interpersonal friction here. Sharon, the chaperone, is a bore and a killjoy. Orchid is a cliquey, self-centred snob and a false friend. Co-conspirator Aiden seems to take great pleasure in gloating over Orchid's downfall. Robin has an adolescent's intense, deep-seated sense of Right and Wrong that hasn't matured into something less prissy and rigid yet, and the game constantly puts her in situations where being short makes life a lot harder.
A lot of the motivation here seems to be about the church setting, which Robin as a non-Christian sees with an outsider's eyes. It's an untidy, much-used, community-centre sort of church, full of the clutter of old projects. The juxtaposition of a church setting and a ghost-investigation story made me wonder whether this was going to be a parable about scepticism, but that never really came through one way or the other. The game's attitude to the church is a little like that of Bee, though if anything it's even less interested in justifying or criticising that culture; the church is just the locus of a community, one that's active, participatory, fusty, deeply uncool, and as much about activities for the kids as it is about, y'know, the whole God part. Its members are neither monsters nor saints; their goodness and badness are alike modest in scale.
Still, I never quite warmed up to Robin & Orchid, and it's a little hard to put my finger on why. In retrospect, I think that Casey's notes must have contained considerably more backstory and character-development stuff than I ever saw, but for whatever reason I didn't really feel drawn to use them extensively. From other reviews, it looks as though the game wants you to look up everything in the notes - I suspect that it would have been a good idea to introduce a single-noun verb for using the notes, making it more like a secondary EXAMINE. The game does some things early on to encourage you to use the notes, but it's hard to impart the expectation that Casey would have written notes about everything.
I was never enormously convinced by the ghost - the tone felt too realist for this to be that kind of story, and nobody in the story seems very convinced either - but the elaborate mechanical arrangement that was used to fake it didn't seem like something that two teenagers could pull off, either. (Perhaps my ignorance betrays me here, and suspended wire-work is more common in high-school drama clubs than I imagined.) The result was that it always felt kind of low-stakes.
Unlike Ryan Veeder's previous work, it isn't trying for biting comedy; it's observational, yes, a little sharp in places and considerably gentler in others, but it's not really meant to be funny. It occured to me after the fact that it might have been intended as young adult fiction, but I'm not sure that it has that vibe either. I think possibly the game put too much reliance on understatement and show-don't-tell for characterisation; these are normally excellent techniques that I want games to use more of, but here that approach was so much in effect, and opportunities for the Show part sufficiently scarce, that I felt as though the characters, particularly Robin, were kind of distant. And that fed into the impression of things being low-stakes: I didn't have a really strong feeling for what all these events meant to Robin, and without that the events of the story are a very minor incident.
(Discussion follows of a particular puzzle, which apparently drove everybody else nuts too.)
The puzzle in Storage East kind of stumped me. There's an obviously-interesting container on top of a set of shelves, which are described as being six feet tall. You can climb onto one of the arks (two feet high) and from there onto a cabinet (three feet high), but at this point you still can't reach the container. Robin's described as short, but it doesn't make a lot of sense that she can't reach something three feet above the thing she's standing on.
The puzzle's obviously about height, because all the objects in the room have their height carefully mentioned. Robin can climb up onto an object two feet tall, but not onto one three feet tall unless she's already off the ground. But if you stack two two-foot objects on top of one another to make a four-foot object, she can't get onto that from a starting point of two feet up. That's not very consistent. There might be reasons for this inconsistency - perhaps you're less confident about clambering onto a stack, since it's less stable and you're higher off the ground - but it'd have been a lot clearer if you were actually told as much. Similarly, it seems likely that the shelves are six feet tall but start some distance from the ground - but we're not told that, or how far it is off the ground, and since the heights of everything else are shown as important it's kind of misleading to mention the height of the shelf that way when, as far as I can see, it's never directly relevant to the puzzle.
From the walkthrough, it turns out that the thing you're aiming for isn't to get the container at all - you just have to get high enough to photograph it. But that's not a very obvious motive for all the clambering - you can already see the thing from the floor, so it seems logical that all this climbing would be to allow you to take it.
Score: 5.
version 2013-10-06
This is a game about a very small mystery: you play Robin, one of two high-school journalists investigate a haunting in a church. At first - almost too quickly to be plausible - it seems as though the haunting might be authentic, but later you discover that the whole thing was a hoax orchestrated by the other journalist, Orchid, to boost interest in the school paper. As the photographer of the duo, you have to explore the church and its extensive basement and photograph anything suspicious.
Both of the authors have a record of making games that focus on the small, ordinary nastiness of ordinary people, so it's not very surprising that there's a certain amount of interpersonal friction here. Sharon, the chaperone, is a bore and a killjoy. Orchid is a cliquey, self-centred snob and a false friend. Co-conspirator Aiden seems to take great pleasure in gloating over Orchid's downfall. Robin has an adolescent's intense, deep-seated sense of Right and Wrong that hasn't matured into something less prissy and rigid yet, and the game constantly puts her in situations where being short makes life a lot harder.
A lot of the motivation here seems to be about the church setting, which Robin as a non-Christian sees with an outsider's eyes. It's an untidy, much-used, community-centre sort of church, full of the clutter of old projects. The juxtaposition of a church setting and a ghost-investigation story made me wonder whether this was going to be a parable about scepticism, but that never really came through one way or the other. The game's attitude to the church is a little like that of Bee, though if anything it's even less interested in justifying or criticising that culture; the church is just the locus of a community, one that's active, participatory, fusty, deeply uncool, and as much about activities for the kids as it is about, y'know, the whole God part. Its members are neither monsters nor saints; their goodness and badness are alike modest in scale.
Still, I never quite warmed up to Robin & Orchid, and it's a little hard to put my finger on why. In retrospect, I think that Casey's notes must have contained considerably more backstory and character-development stuff than I ever saw, but for whatever reason I didn't really feel drawn to use them extensively. From other reviews, it looks as though the game wants you to look up everything in the notes - I suspect that it would have been a good idea to introduce a single-noun verb for using the notes, making it more like a secondary EXAMINE. The game does some things early on to encourage you to use the notes, but it's hard to impart the expectation that Casey would have written notes about everything.
I was never enormously convinced by the ghost - the tone felt too realist for this to be that kind of story, and nobody in the story seems very convinced either - but the elaborate mechanical arrangement that was used to fake it didn't seem like something that two teenagers could pull off, either. (Perhaps my ignorance betrays me here, and suspended wire-work is more common in high-school drama clubs than I imagined.) The result was that it always felt kind of low-stakes.
Unlike Ryan Veeder's previous work, it isn't trying for biting comedy; it's observational, yes, a little sharp in places and considerably gentler in others, but it's not really meant to be funny. It occured to me after the fact that it might have been intended as young adult fiction, but I'm not sure that it has that vibe either. I think possibly the game put too much reliance on understatement and show-don't-tell for characterisation; these are normally excellent techniques that I want games to use more of, but here that approach was so much in effect, and opportunities for the Show part sufficiently scarce, that I felt as though the characters, particularly Robin, were kind of distant. And that fed into the impression of things being low-stakes: I didn't have a really strong feeling for what all these events meant to Robin, and without that the events of the story are a very minor incident.
(Discussion follows of a particular puzzle, which apparently drove everybody else nuts too.)
The puzzle in Storage East kind of stumped me. There's an obviously-interesting container on top of a set of shelves, which are described as being six feet tall. You can climb onto one of the arks (two feet high) and from there onto a cabinet (three feet high), but at this point you still can't reach the container. Robin's described as short, but it doesn't make a lot of sense that she can't reach something three feet above the thing she's standing on.
The puzzle's obviously about height, because all the objects in the room have their height carefully mentioned. Robin can climb up onto an object two feet tall, but not onto one three feet tall unless she's already off the ground. But if you stack two two-foot objects on top of one another to make a four-foot object, she can't get onto that from a starting point of two feet up. That's not very consistent. There might be reasons for this inconsistency - perhaps you're less confident about clambering onto a stack, since it's less stable and you're higher off the ground - but it'd have been a lot clearer if you were actually told as much. Similarly, it seems likely that the shelves are six feet tall but start some distance from the ground - but we're not told that, or how far it is off the ground, and since the heights of everything else are shown as important it's kind of misleading to mention the height of the shelf that way when, as far as I can see, it's never directly relevant to the puzzle.
From the walkthrough, it turns out that the thing you're aiming for isn't to get the container at all - you just have to get high enough to photograph it. But that's not a very obvious motive for all the clambering - you can already see the thing from the floor, so it seems logical that all this climbing would be to allow you to take it.
Score: 5.