[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Losing your Grip (discussion) (LONG)
This post doesn't contain a lot of explicit spoilers but I'm planning
on rambling about the whole game, so don't read on if you haven't
finished it yet.
Anyway. So I figure (hope) enough people have finished this to make a
discussion worthwhile by now, because there's some points I'd like to
thrash out. I don't really have a good organized way to present them,
though, so I'm just going to put them down as they come; bear with me.
Programming stuff:
- Frankie asks, "Which sphere do you mean, the pile of spheres, or
the light sphere?"
I'm not quite sure if I like this or not. I think it's an "I like
it, but let me get used to it" sort of thing. I'm also not sure if
this would be better if it was a personalized message for each actor,
just like the "I don't know anything about that." message is
personalized for each actor. The way it is now makes it feel vaguely
like it's just a retooled parser message and not real dialogue,
because every NPC does it in exactly the same way. On the other
hand, how many different ways can you ask for disambiguation?
- >ASK FRANKIE ABOUT DSADSADF
There is no reply.
>DSADSADF
I don't know the word "dsadsadf".
This one I'm not so sure about. It seems to me that you should be
consistent, one way or the other. One way to maintain consistency
would be "Frankie says, 'I don't know the word "dsadsadf"', but
you easily get into stupid situations that way.
- >NAME THE DOG "Rex"
Cool. (IIRC this has been done before (Zork 0?) but I haven't played
whichever game it was done before in.) (Though doesn't this make
Marie's question later on about which do you prefer, cats or dogs, a
little odd? More about that later.)
- There are various other neat gizmos and stuff in the game,
primarily in fit 2-school and 4-rational, but I don't have
anything special to say about them. Mostly a case of "You don't
notice it unless it screws up"
Puzzles:
- There were quite an assortment here. We had solidly story-based
puzzles (ie, getting the syringe or the dragonfire), puzzles that
were purposeless with regard to the story but got my
crossword-solving blood up (ie, all the puzzles in fit 4-rational
or the machines in fit 2-school (to a lesser extent)), and
regrettably a few puzzles put in just to annoy the player (getting
the novocaine* in fit 2-hospital) (though this sort of
classification is rather rough; it's possible that with more
solutions, this puzzle would become more intuitive).
* Spelling due to a survey of ifMUDders. It's their fault if it's
wrong.
- Special notice goes to the orange crystal puzzle. Can anyone tell
me what the heck was going on there? I got the solution, but only
by accident. Later trials gave me a vague idea of what was up, but
I still don't really understand it.
Plot:
- Good news: _Grip_ is good about providing multiple solutions to
problems, in some places (especially in fit 3, when you're grabbed
by the grey man and again when you're hanging on the cliff, but
also stuff like the different ways to interact with the head at the very
beginning.)
Bad news: It doesn't seem to matter which solution you choose.
Whether I kick the head or dig it out, I still go through the
same personality do-wop with it (er... speaking of which, the head
_is_ daddy dearest, isn't it? This is one of the things I'm not
clear on) Whether I climb up the cage, let myself fall, or open
the cage to let the faeries out, I'm still too afraid to cross the
bridge.
- The division of the game into separate fits that we go through in
linear order was a good idea, breaking a sizable game up into
managable chunks. But that's a pretty standard technique. What was
especially nice in _Grip_ was having the interludes in between the
fits. This worked _very_ nicely in the lead-in between fit 3 and fit
4 (calling, for the moment, the bit with Jefrey and Marie fit 4
and not an interlude).
Story:
- Hmm. When I started up _Grip_ and got to the big marble building,
I confess my first thought was "Oh no, not _another_ game about an
amnesiac wandering through an archetypal setting which is actually
Their Own Mind." But it got better. Still, I think fit 1 is
clearly the weakest part of the game; this is especially
unfortunate since, at least IMO, the purpose of the starting area
of a game should be to draw the reader in and encourage them to
continue, not to shut them out. This weakness seems to me to stem
from two basic problems: first, the aforementioned (fairly common*)
archetypal in-your-head setting, and second, the extreme
difficulty of the puzzles. Well. Not all that extreme, I guess,
but it does seem to be hard for new players to score any points
straightaway, which is always a discouragement to someone just
starting.
- Another good news/bad news thing about _Grip_ is its thematic
consistency. Internally, all the fits feel very tight. The school
is a deserted school in every room, the faerie forest is
definitely a magical forest that has dragons and talking trees, and
yet also manages to pull off being the forest I hung around in
when I was six (eight? whatever). However, once you start
wandering between fits, it's not so strong. I almost hate to
mention it, but one of the things _So Far_ did amazingly well was
to have cross-scene consistency as well as interscene consistency,
or at least that's how it felt to me. The castles-and-mold area
really resonated thematically with the area with the silent
people, even though they were totally different settings, and this
let both areas survive in the same game. If you don't have that
sort of strong tie, then a game runs a strong risk of being just a
bunch of separate places stuck together.
This is not to say that the areas in _Grip_ are totally
disconnected; far from it. The most obvious example of a
cross-area connection is the dog (which I'm going to call "Rex",
because that's my Nethack dog's name). Not only does Rex appear in
all the fits, but there's also the tie that Rex physically
connects the fits by bringing your possessions along. Furthermore,
Rex provides an, um, _temporal_ connection by aging as the game
progresses, up to dying in the final climax (I don't suppose
it's possible to prevent this? Doubt it.) Also, there are the
funky pyramids and spheres and things that appear in both the
first and second fits, though, like Rex, they change from one fit
to the next.
But it seems to me games like this need a major link, not just
relatively small ones, and as far as I can tell the thing that's
intended to be that link is Terry's relationship with his father,
and that doesn't altogether work for me. It works well intrascene, in
fits 1-3, but on the whole, as an overriding skeleton for the
game, it doesn't work for me.
- It's entirely possible I'm missing something major here. The main
reason for this post (yeah, finally yetting to it with the last
point) is to see if someone can explain to me what's up with Terry
and his dad. If this fit directly into the classic model that I'd
assumed it did, the moral of the story would be something like
"ok, your dad was a bastard but you can't let it be an excuse for
fucking up your own life; you have to deal with it and move on"
And, to a certain extent, this is born out by the story. The
interactions with Terry and his dad that I can think of are the
following:
(fit 1) The head, buried in mud, which blames Terry for having
put it there. (assuming this is really the dad)
(fit 1) Rex was given to Terry by his dad.
(fit 1) The grey man first appears, staring at Terry and then
vanishing. The relation of Terry's dad and the grey man
is, I'm positive, central to understand the relation of
Terry's dad and Terry, but I admit it totally eludes me.
In fit 3, the grey man claims to be a messenger from
Terry's dad, sent to punish Terry, but Terry has a rather
twisted subconscious and this may not necessarily be the
case. Sort of.
(fit 1) The voice from the sphere, revealed in fit 3 to be the
voice of Terry's dad with cancer, which sends an
avalanche at Terry (to which he reacts by killing
himself).
(fit 2) We find out that Terry's dad forced him into trying to be
a doctor against his wishes.
(fit 2) The grey man says something for the first time, blaming
Terry for, essentially, selfishness and denial of the
outside world, either by disregarding his friends (fit
2-school) or generic needy people (fit 2-hospital).
(fit 3) Terry's mother dies. Terry is locked in his room for some
misdemeanor, but sneaks out the window. Later pursued by
his father.
(fit 3) In order to get the blood necessary to dip the laurel (a
victory wreath?), Terry has to trick his dad into cutting
himself with the knife. There is possibly a slight
attempt to suggest vulnerability on the dad's part
through his fear of blood, but it didn't work for me,
since the dad was so recently such an asshole.
(fit 3) The grey man (presumably) destroys the faerie palace and
imprisons the faeries. Not very nice, but then, neither
were the faeries.
(fit 3) Final confrontation with the grey man. A few points:
- note that the confrontations have been escalating:
first just a stare (fit 1), then the grab and the
lecture (fit 2), and here we have the attempt at
murder.
- the grey man is not just taking his wrath out on Terry,
but also on the faeries. I'm fairly unsure what this
means, since the faeries seem to be anti-Terry or at
best neutral about him, not his friends.
- I guess the grey man is _not_ intended to be identical
to Terry's father, else why would he speak of being
sent by Terry's dad and not himself? Furthermore,
Terry's dad appears later on, not dead yet, so by
destroying the grey man you don't destroy Terry's dad..
so who did you destroy?
(fit 4) As far as I remember, in a fairly inexplicable twist,
Terry's dad is absent for the entire fit. Slightly more
on this later.
(fit 5) Obviously, this is the big confrontation scene. Terry's
dad kills Rex, then there are three possible outcomes (as
far as I know)
- you get killed by him, and "lose"
- you kill him, and go straight to the end scene.
- you avoid getting killed by him but don't kill him, and
go to see your dad in his hospital bed before going to
the end scene.
(fit 5) (assuming you picked the third option) Your dad is lying
in a hospital bed, dying. He starts to apologize, then
abruptly disclaims responsibility for his actions. You
notice strings protruding from his wrists. If you examine
the strings, it turns out that the controller on the
other end of the strings is you; if you don't examine
them, your father apologizes before he fades out. From a
writing standpoint, this is incredibly clever the way
this last action can totally change the meaning of the
scene; but what does it mean in the big picture? I'm not
sure. Also, note the symmetry here: at the beginning the
head is saying "after all, you put me here". At the end,
the person on the other end of the strings is you. Are we
intended to take this as confirmation that _Terry_ is
the real villain here? Surely not! What little facts we
see about the dad suggest that he's not a nice guy, but
this closing scene seems to deny him culpability for his
actions.
I'm not sure what to make of all this. If someone else could, that
would be good, because if this part sags then the whole game does.
- Finally, fit 4. This fit feels odd for two reasons. First, because
it doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the game. As mentioned
before, it's the only one in which neither Terry's dad nor the grey man
appear. It also feels a little weird because I wasn't sure who
Jefrey and Marie's questions are directed to, me-the-player or Terry?
If Terry, many of the answers seem obvious: Terry has a dog and
not a cat, so which do you think he prefers? If me, where's the
relevance. And speaking of Jefrey and Marie, who _are_ these people?
What are they doing here? Why don't they appear again (or do they,
in another guise? Are they your _parents_? Surely not..) Why, when
you give answers that let Marie "win", do you end up following
Jefrey's path, and visa-versa? This whole fit really feels out of
place in the game, and I'm not sure what the relevance of anything in
it is.
Ok, that's all I have to say. Everyone start talking now.
(This was not intended to be a review so much as a request for
discussion. If it were a review, I would have made much more of an
effort to point out the numerous things I liked about the game,
instead of just the ones that perplexed me. But even though it's not a
review, I'm definitely going to close by recommending that everyone
play it. It's a good game, even if it does confuse the heck out of
me. (Of course, no one who hasn't played it will read this, but oh
well.))
--
(Dan Shiovitz) (dbs@cs.wisc.edu) (look, I have a new e-mail address)
(http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~dbs) (and a new web page also)
(the content, of course, is the same)