IFComp 2008: Everybody Dies<\/p>\n
(This is another Interactive Fiction Competition review <\/a>.)<\/i><\/p>\n This next review is of Everybody Dies<\/cite>, in which everybody dies. Actual spoilers reside past the link.<\/p>\n Illustrated interactive fiction has been around since the commercial days, but Everybody Dies<\/cite> does something new: it combines IF with comics. (IF trivia mavens might object to the “new” part, and bring up Infocomics<\/a>. They weren’t the same thing.) No matter how good the actual game was, this was going to get my attention. I have a not-actually-professional<\/a> interest in comics. (Is there a phrase equivalent to “professional interest” for amateurs? If not, I’m voting for “unprofessional interest.”) Everybody Dies<\/cite> interleaves an IF game with cut scenes made of sequential, narrative illustrations—in other words, comic strips. This is something I haven’t seen before.<\/p>\n Everybody Dies<\/cite> switches between the points of view of three employees at a big box store who slip back through time to prevent their own deaths. Their three souls inhabit one body at a time, able to take certain actions and provide different perspectives on the scenes. The comic sequences are a silent, symbolic parallel story that comments on, and expands on the themes of, the main game. They eerily recast the old comic image of a progressively bigger line of fishes eating each other. These fish, we find, aren’t being eaten—they’re nesting<\/em>, like matryoshka dolls. Their killer is a right-wing lunatic living in a fish-eat-fish world of racial hierarchies, imagined slights, and hair-trigger vengeance. The victims, nearly strangers, don’t consume each other but shelter each others’ souls.<\/p>\n Both the writing and the comics are great, as you might expect given the talent involved—author Jim Munroe<\/a> is a professional writer, with published novels to his credit; Michael Cho<\/a> is a professional comic artist. The art style, to indulge in the time-honored hack critics’ tradition of comparing artists to other artists, rests somewhere in a triangle whose vertices are Dan Clowes, Adrian Tomine, and David Mazzucchelli. Cho uses a limited palette of black, white, and an accent color which is also an informational cue: the portrait of each character has its own color which reappears in the cut scenes to clarify the metaphor.<\/p>\n The writing is the best I’ve so far encountered in this year’s IFComp. Which may be faint praise considering some of the competition—the guy who wrote Press Escape to Save<\/cite> is back, I see—but it really is<\/em> good. Everybody Dies<\/cite> establishes characters with a few paragraphs. Each character has an immediately recognizable voice. Get through one short scene and you know<\/em> these guys.<\/p>\n The implementation of the game is shakier. Everybody Dies<\/cite> isn’t hugely buggy, though bugs do exist—for example, if Ranni examines the graffiti in the third chapter he gives a response in Graham’s voice. The biggest problem is that details are lacking. You don’t notice right away just because what writing there is is so good, but Everybody Dies<\/cite> is sparse<\/em>. There are few objects in each scene and some of them still have the default “I see nothing special about the [thing]” description. Seeing things from different viewpoints is a major part of this game’s charm. Taking a few more weeks to enrich the game-world could have pushed Everybody Dies<\/cite> from “great” to “a classic of the form.”<\/p>\n Which leads me to a bigger question. Occasionally the IF community grumbles that the yearly competition has warped the medium around it like a z-code black hole. Everybody wants to be in the IFComp; nobody pays much attention to the few games released beyond its borders. This year I’m starting to think these people might have a point. There’s a theme running through this year’s games. They seem empty. Underwritten. Undertested (or just underfixed; I beta-tested a couple of last-minute games whose authors clearly didn’t allow themselves enough time to put in the work they needed). Unfinished<\/em>. Many of this year’s games were just plain rushed out before they were ready. And this isn’t the first time: I’m reminded of last year’s truncated game Varkana<\/cite><\/a>, which for its first three-quarters looked like a new classic but ground to a sudden halt and infodumped the rest of the plot. Think we’ll ever see a finished version? Or, even if we do, that anyone who played through the first wreck will pay any attention? Neither do I.<\/p>\n If Everybody Dies<\/cite> was rushed, it didn’t suffer much. I’ve tried less than half the games but unless the other half contain an unlikely amount of life-changingly great literature this will be in my top three. But many games did<\/em> suffer—I’m looking at you, Freedom<\/cite>! And you too, A Martian Odyssey<\/cite>!—and now they’re making the players suffer along with them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" IFComp 2008: Everybody Dies (This is another Interactive Fiction Competition review .) This next review is of Everybody Dies, in which everybody dies. 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