Narcolepsy: some random thoughts
Magnus Olsson
comments, not necessarily very profound or even coherent. Readers
proceed at their own risk. Here be spoilers.]
This must be one of the most original works of IF I've seen, and one
of the funniest as well. Fast, witty, surrealistic, with pelenty of
attitude, and chock full of IF in-jokes and pop culture references
(though I probably missed half of them) it's reminiscent of the best
of SpeedIF - but much more polished and fleshed-out.
The PC: Eugene Oregon is quite as memorable and has quite as strong a
personality as Varicella or Tracy Valencia. Somewhat unexpectedly, I
felt that his narcolepsy played a rather minor part in the game,
except for the running gag of his falling asleep just when something
important is going to happen. I got the feeling that his brain damage
shows itself not only in narcolepsy; he's seeing the world in a
slightly different way than "normal" people. Perhaps it's just that
the narcolepsy makes him generally confused, perhaps he's got a touch
of Asperger's, but I had the feeling that he takes the increasingly
surrealistic events in the game as something just as ordinary - or
extraordinary - as his everyday life. An innocent - but an innocent
with attitude - and this, makes him a perfect straight man to the
cruel pranks the author is subjecting him to.
Surrealism: Somebody has compared that the surrealism of Dali isn't so
different from that of the Marx brothers. _Narcolepsy_ may be on the
"Marxist" side of that comparison, but the dissolution of reality -
reality turning itself inside out - has much of the same effects as a
Dali painting.
Interactivity and stuff: People have criticized _Photopia_ for not
being interactive enough, for just being a static story masquerading
as an adventure game. There's something similar here: the world model
is perhaps more adventure-game-like, in that we have a (reasonably)
fixed map to navigate, items to manipulate and pick up, and freedom to
move about and explore; but there isn't really very much one can do to
influence things (except at the start and the end). The reason it
works so well most of the time, I think, is pacing: when things
happen, Eugene tends to be swept along by events.
Sometimes this doesn't work so well, though, and the player is left
wandering around aimlessly, trying to find the random trigger that
starts the next plot event. This is never too bad, though, thanks to
the small size of the map.
The playing experience isn't quite like that of traditional IF,
though. The limited interactivity coupled with the first-person
narration and the very strong narrative voice sometimes made me feel
more like that I was riding along on Eugene's shoulder, gently
(or not-so-gently) nudging him in the right direction, rather than the
usual feeling of getting inside the head of the PC. It's not that I
didn't identify with Eugene, just that I didn't become him, as in
most IF with strong PCs.
Still, most of the time I felt like *I* was solving the mysteries of
the strange events, together with Eugene, not just doing the hypertext
equivalent of turning the pages of a static story (which is an easy
feeling to get in puzzleless IF).
Less successful things in the interactivity department was a certain
lack of detail and unimplemented objects. It's one thing that the
strong narrator feels that an object isn't worth describing in detail
or fiddling around with; it breaks the fourth wall in a bad way when
the parser refuses to acknowledge that the object in question
exists. Plus the setting was so vivid that I simply wanted to explore
it at more depth.
And one design choice which I found a bit irritating was that Eugene
would only describe a room once - there didn't seem to be a way of
getting the long description of a room except when entering it for the
first time, and that's a bit frustrating when you're used to being
able to see it as many times as you like just by typing "look".
While we're at negatives, there was one part of the game where the
pacing broke down for me, and that was the scene in Snappy's
lab. There were simply too few things to do (my being trapped in a
tube of Windex and all), and the plot triggers were too sparse and too
unobvious for me. And it wasn't at all clear what I or the monkey
could do - this may be a bug, or just insufficient cueing, but it felt
a bit too random that some verbs were intercepted by the monkey while
others weren't ("eat banana" causes the monkey to eat it, but "drop
banana" gives an error message that I can't do while I'm in a tube of
Windex. And should "give banana to Snappy" really make the monkey give
it to Juan?)
Still, these are minor things.
Multi-linearity: Call me a square, but usually I don't like
multiple-ending IF. Here it worked for me, though, perhaps because it
was a) rather obvious that there were a number of different things to
do, and b) the way none of the endings were quite as happy as they
could be, so it felt natural to try to improve them.
And the three different paths - well, it's nice to get three games for
the price of one!
NPCs: As in _Varicella_, Adam excels at writing NPCs and
characterizing them through actions and dialogue. I was nice to meet
Tracy Valencia again (though sad to see her end up as an overworked
intern at the Evil Hospital from Hell (tm)). I liked the way Rainbow
and Starchild took over things when I hesitated in the Chud part and
even solved puzzles for me. And the way the game kept dropping hints
about Eugene's sister (beats people up, reads Seventeen and porn), it
was quite a treat to meet her (by chance I played that path last) and
find out that she was even more of a character than I'd expected.
User interface: Original, but not really a hit - putting important
text in the "thought window" to the right of the text window means
that the player's eyes have to jump too much; sometimes, I actually
missed conversation options because I was too intent on the game
text. And I don't know if the separation between what Eugene thinks
and what he says is so important - after all, static writers have been
able to handle internal monologue in a single text stream for a long
time.
The dreams: Didn't do much for me, actually. The skin sequence was
creepy as hell, with an odd, poetic beauty, but the other dreams left
me fairly cold, especially when they started repeating. Thanks for
providing the "wake up" command - especially since some of the dream
sequences were a bit too sparsely implemented and left me floundering
for the right action to proceed.
In a more realistic game, the dreams may have been just great, I
suppose, but here the waking world was just a surrealistic as the
dreams, and much funnier.
Deep and Important Message: Beats me.
Catharsis: Not really, though two of the paths can be interpreted as
Eugene's way of coming to grips with his narcolepsy. On the other
hand, the third path (the Chuds), is more a straight-forward adventure
game parody. Who cares? I had fun.
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se)
PGP Public Key available at http://www.df.lth.se/~mol
Magnus Olsson
Magnus Olsson <m...@df.lth.se> wrote:
>[Not a review, really; just some random and rather spontaneous
>comments, not necessarily very profound or even coherent.
...and, I see on re-reading it, poorly edited as well. Sorry.
Hope there's something of value hidden in the verbiage.