After Action Report - Sherlock Indomitable, by Brian Rushton
On Sunday, May 13th, Clubfloyd played Sherlock Indomitable (), a parser-based interactive fiction by Brian Rushton.
The game
"And that, Watson, is how I finished the business."
Sherlock Indomitable is a large game in which the player solves crimes as Sherlock Holmes. The game, fully released as part of the Spring Thing 2018 Festival (after its introduction version won IntroComp 2017), is naturally set in Holmes' London, initially in a sanatorium where Holmes is living his last days. Watson brings him one last gift, a book collecting Holmes' cases, and the mind of Holmes wanders back to two specific cases...
From here on, there will be spoilers. If you wish to play the game, you should avoid reading on.
The play
(Unfortunately, the ClubFloyd transcripts have not yet been updated, so I can’t link to this one yet.)
Sherlock Indomitable starts out in the aforementioned sanatorium, introducing the concept of linking two topics and saying these to people. After this short introduction, we wander into Holmes's mind, where we can explore his knowledge, or start one of the two cases - The Speckled Band, and The Six Napoleons (Brian Rushton's plans were originally more involved as seen in his postmortem but ran into technical issues).
All of your old mental paraphernalia for solving cases are here. Useless now, of course.
Since we played the Speckled Band case as part of IntroComp, we opted for playing the Six Napoleons. After some initial confusion about Watson's location and Lestrade's speech, we dove into the case, and were reminded that we do not play only as Sherlock - we also occasionally play as witnesses. In this case, we become the assistant in an art shop where one of the titular Napoleon busts gets destroyed, and a Doctor who had two of those busts, one stolen then destroyed, the second just destroyed.
We had to work through three potential motives - Revenge, hatred, and searching something - to cross off the first two while also investigating a murder linked to the busts, which then lead us to a search through a few London shops and the manufacturer of the busts to gather more clues. This leads to us setting the trap and capturing the culprit (in the process the fifth bust gets destroyed). What is left is filling up the slots of Means, Motive, and Opportunity. (Yes, that is literally a mechanic in this case.)
Means and Opportunity were quickly filled, but Motive gave us trouble. We tried every clue that was left to us, linking them, and looking them up in the relevant sections of Holmes's mind, to no avail.
It was unfortunate, but we had to resort to hints. After a few things we had already deduced and some that mislead us a bit, the last one hit us in the face - we had used the LOOK UP command wrong! We had typed LOOK UP (topic) IN (shelf), when the correct command was just LOOK UP (topic).
In conclusion
You grab Watson firmly by both shoulders and give him a smoldering, passionate, intense look of brotherly friendship, which he returns, as you continue your entirely platonic relationship in your romance-free life.
Overall, Sherlock Indomitable was an enjoyable visit to the world of Sherlock Holmes. Though I'm given to understand that the writing was, for a good chunk, Doyle's (with a couple of changes - the culprit was made American, and from a quick look, it seems they were Italian in the original), this did not diminish my enjoyment of the work, as it is clear that Rushton took great effort to complement the text with descriptions for things that would not be described in the story.
Beyond the frustrating end section, we only encountered few and minor bugs, such as Watson claiming that a witness we had not talked to yet had told us something.
We ended up not replaying the Speckled Band to see what changed in that case, at least at the time that I write this. As such, we did not see what the ending of the full game looks like.
On Sunday, May 6th, ClubFloyd played House, a parser-based interactive fiction by Karona.
Wait, what?
If the above sentence doesn't mean anything to you, the short of it is that Clubfloyd is a weekly event on a text-only MUD, the IFMUD, (usually) using a bot to play interactive fiction games, usually parser games in the tradition of Zork.
The game
The thought of losing you is my greatest fear.
House is a single room game in which the focus is the interaction with a single non-player character - Leah, the protagonist's wife. The game, released as part of the Spring Thing 2018 Festival, is set in a modern-day environment. The marriage of Ayumu and Leah is having troubles, and Leah seems to suffer from abandonment anxiety of some sort. The drive is then to figure out what is wrong, and how we can help her.
From here on, there will be spoilers. If you wish to play the game, you should avoid reading on.
The play
(Here, I would link to a transcript of the playing session. However, at the time I post his, the most recent batch of transcripts has not yet been posted. I will edit this post when that happens.)
House is heavily conversation-based. You won't get anywhere without asking or telling Leah about topics that come up, and remembering memories that surface as you talk to her. One of the first thing we noticed was that Leah wasn't wearing shoes and socks, because of her father's no footwear policy, and learned that he had custody of her after *he* had an affair. Something already seemed quite wrong here.
And the memories is where things get depressing - Leah does not share your memories, and this is one more thing we needed to figure out. At points, I feared that Leah was in a sanatorium, and we were simply visiting her there, indulging her. She talks about paintings and collages that are not there, doesn't remember the club we met in...
"I did not see the point of trying to convince Leah that we had been inside a club. She was certain that we had not--and for good reason."
"Where is the collage?" I asked.
Leah looked distressed and responded, "You really don't know?"
And as we talked to Leah further, more trouble surfaced.
"Leah interrupted and asked, "Are we still an 'us'"?"
"Could I give you a hug?" I requested.
Leah said, "Yes," and wholeheartedly received my hug. When I embraced her, I trembled. I had not anticipated that hugging her would be different after our last encounter.
In our quest to find out what the problem was, we were greeted by other oddities and an accusation.
> X UNIFORM
My uniform looked remarkably clean.
[clubfloyd] DavidW says, "I wonder how we went to a construction job and returned with a clean uniform and spotless white socks."
"How could your dad have been untrue?" I asked.
"Perhaps I should ask you that question," Leah said. She then turned a raised eyebrow towards me and responded, "You already know all about being untrue, don't you?"
"Tell me about the woman who wrote the letter."
At which point we got stuck. It took a wording suggestion from Karona to push us back on the right track. And that track? It changed everything.
"Why did you choose metamorphosis as a theme?" I asked.
"I was thinking of you," she said, "and from there it was simple to start thinking about seclusion in a cocoon and the emergence of a colorful new creature."
"On the wall I saw three paintings--one of two people dancing in a club, one of two people sitting on a blanket in a backyard, and one of two people standing near a Hanukkah menorah."
The problem was with us. Leah was not playing (or at least I assume so). This last sentence won't make much sense for anyone who hasn't played House to the end, but that's deliberate. I don't want to spoil the endings or the ending twist here.
In conclusion
Personally, I found House to be captivating. Leah's plight grabbed me, and I wanted to find a way to help her. Doing something else seemed wrong (though as it turns out, it also lead to giving hints), and did my best to ignore the option to go south and flee all over again.
Naturally, the game had its faults. It is an ambitious conversation-based game that requires not just asking/telling about topics, but combining them as well, and we stumbled around with that combining topics that apparently didn't go together. We did receive the in-game hint from Leah which topics to combine though, I believe. However, we also stumbled on the phrasing of the important question, and there we needed the author's help. A simple synonym in a subsequent should resolve this problem, though.
One review I read faulted the protagonist's "voice" as unemotional. While I can't call this false, exactly, I found that my own mindset was far more important to the feeling of the story than the voice of Ayumu.
The ending twist at first seemed to come very abruptly. With the benefit of a little hindsight, I believe it to be hinted quite well, without it being telegraphed.
