The Copyright of Silence is a choice-based entry by Ola Hansson.
(PRO TIP: You have to click on the word "Welcome!" to begin the experience, which took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out.)
This entry is laid out like a board game, taking place in a four-room apartment where you interact with the composer John Cage, his dog, and his parrot. Text tracks the four of you moving from room to room, and different actions become available depending on who is where.
I appreciate the effort involved in implementing these characters. Their behavior is governed by logical rules that can be deduced through observation — you are expected to understand and apply those rules to engineer a specific result.
The blurb for this entry hints that it's like Elsinore or Varicella, where you are expected to fail many times and learn from your mistakes. However, those games immediately establish that a catastrophe is imminent and encourage the player to start working towards victory from the beginning.
If Copyright of Silence explained what it wanted during my first visit with Cage, I was too dumb to notice. There's a stopwatch in the kitchen that suggested a course of action, but the how and why only became clear after my visit ended and I endured the triumph of Cage and the failure of my own character.
The success of this entry relies on an accretive player character who can play through the scenario quickly and have fun learning new things each time. That's where I stumbled.
I might have spent too much time thinking through each of my character's moves, or I might have missed substantial parts of the environment and the characters' interactions, but I felt burned out and frustrated from failure long before I had accumulated enough knowledge to reach the best possible ending.
Artwork from Donald Conrad:
A very well -considered review – thank you!
ReplyDeleteNo, you weren’t too dumb to notice. If you are insanely lucky it IS possible to learn the specifics about your objective (and to accomplish it) during your first visit, but the first play-through is meant to be confusing and a little overwhelming.
I consider it a prologue that is there to set up the joke (and objective) for the main game, which begins for real during your second visit. So, yeah, you are an accretive player character. If I manage to make it work according to Emily Short’s criteria (great article btw) is of course doubtful.
I guess it depends on how much you get into the conversation and the search for clues and objects that illuminate things hinted at there. They might be too subtle/obscure/uninteresting for the majority of players, and I would certainly approach it differently if I were to make a more commercial “sequel”.
Thank you for creating Copyright of Silence!
ReplyDeleteI did think that the conversation options with Cage were clever, which I should have mentioned in my review. That parrot, though, was an absolute nightmare to deal with.