For A Change

The sun is gone. It must be brought. You have a rock.

these are the opening words of for a change by dan schmidt. it is about as straightforward as this game gets. you begin the game in a resting, near a high wall, where there is shade and sweetness and fod. you can walk around, exploring the world and its extents, seeing the sights. the room descriptions have a consistently strange tone. for example, the first room is described thusly:

Sweetness fills the shade of the High Wall to your east. Under this sweetness lies a small expanse of fod. A mobile releases mildly to the west; far in that direction a tower proudly plants itself, while the ground rises more slowly to the south and relaxes to the north.

examining the sweetness yields:

The sweetness slowly shortens and expands.

what i’m trying to get at is that this game plays in very “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” territory. this isn’t its only mode, and its endgame is fairly comprehensible. its rules are strange, but it plays by them.

in general the puzzles are pretty good. there were things the game expected me to do i didn’t know i could, and an action i couldn’t phrase correctly. the former seems to be a consequence of the game being so oblique and empty. a less oblique game would suggest more directly what’s possible, and a more fleshed out world would encourage deeper interaction.

there are interesting ideas here. the writing style definitely warrants further study to see if there are any lessons i can take from it. i’m torn between finding it compelling and thinking the randomness is shallow and arbitrary. this reaction is, of course, a shallow recapitulation of old internet mockeries of spork-style randomness, and thus the criticism ouroboros devours its own tail.

in the end it accomplishes its goals. i’d like to see more meat to this game, more ways to interact, more elaboration… but i think there’s a good chance elaboration would ruin it. make a dragonfly larger and it can no longer breathe; remove the sparseness from for a change and you injure it.

overall: worth playing, and worth studying to see how its prose ticks.