Locked Door Puzzle

Vespers comes with a disclaimer noting that, despite the religious themes of the game, the author is not Christian and it is not an attempt to promote any theological agenda. Now I don’t have any strong opinions on religion so I’m happy to take the author at his word and enjoy Vespers as a piece of entertainment, and entertaining this is. Vespers by Jason Devlin deservedly won the 2005 Interactive Fiction competition along with many other wins in the XYZZY competition, which of course also means no one’s heard of it.

Set inside a 15th century Italian monastery besieged by the plague, you play an abbot who five days earlier closed the doors denying sanctuary to the sick in attempt to save himself and the rest of the priests from exposure. However all is not well inside the monastery and the suspicious demise of one of the priests along with the arrival of a strange young woman sets in motion a murder mystery that threatens to lead the player towards eternal damnation.

Like all IF competition entries it’s designed to be completed in under 2 hours although I’ll admit it took me a little longer than that, but there’s built in help and hints which should make the whole thing a little more accessible to those of you who don’t generally play Interactive Fiction. The game play for the most part involves exploring this small monastery getting to know its inhabitants and solving fairly logical puzzles as the pieces of the mystery slowly fit together. The quality of writing is excellent and the story is pretty damn compelling. So all in all it’s a top package, and of course it’s bloody well free!

Choices That Matter

Now I’ve finished the sale pitch I’ll get back on topic of this blog. What I really want to talk about is a couple of the really interesting interactive storytelling techniques used in Vespers.

Many of the puzzles in Vespers have multiple solutions, and you could simplify many of these as a choice between the easy way out and the harder but more satisfying solution. However these are more than just alternate paths through the game, they’re also moral decisions and your approach to solving the challenges you face will determine the game’s ending. I’ll admit I tried to do something like this in the white chamber but Vespers does it much better than I did. What makes it feel even more weighty is the character and setting, you’re not a typical gaming hero, you’re a man of god who wouldn’t whip a weapon out of his inventory at the first time of trouble. If you can get into that mindset while playing the game I found it added a real sense of dilemma to each problem.

Many video games that boast about tremendous choice typically only offer very shallow control over the story. Recently in BioShock you’re asked to save or harvest the “Little Sisters” of the game and it’s one of the least satisfying things about the game. Whether you choose to save them or not only really effects which of the two equally disappointing 1-minute FMV sequences closes the game. The extra upgrades you’re supposed to get by ‘harvesting’ are mostly given to you as gifts for ’saving’ them anyway. It’s also only really one decision repeated over and over.

Eye of the Beholder

The other really interesting thing about Vespers is the way it sets the mood for the story. The game is necessarily dark to fit the bleak scenario, and in the world of interactive fiction much of this comes from the descriptions of rooms, items and characters. Although the game presents little hope from the offset, the oppressive and doomed feeling within the monastery is amped up bit by by as the story unfolds and the descriptions become increasingly depressing. While one game description starts off as “The church commands from the north, its spires reaching up to Heaven.” as time passes it eventually reads: “The church rolls and laughs to the north, pointing Her sharp fingers in a perpetual mock at God.”. This approach makes a lot of sense because the descriptions provided in IF are usually presented as what the player character is seeing, often with their own thoughts and bias included. Vespers just takes it one step further than most by showing how the character’s mood and predicament affects how they perceive the world around them.

This approach to presenting a game world where what the player is seeing, through the eyes of their character, changes as the story progresses is something I’d love to see adapted into a video game title. The potential to see this visually instead of just through text is astounding, which leads me directly on to Vespers 3D.

Now With Added Shiny

A small team of indie game developers called Orange River Studio are currently working with the Torque Game Engine to build a graphical remake of Vespers. Surprisingly they are keeping the text based interface of the original but are adding in an animated 3D game world, music and professional voice acting. They’re calling this fusion of text and graphics 3Dif and I’m very excited to see what they come up. I contacted Michael Rubin, the man behind the project, who told me they’ve worked closely with the original author who is supporting the project and has provided guidance to maintain his original vision. He also confirmed that they were planning to replicate the way descriptions changed in the original version in the new 3D visuals. There’s no fixed release date yet but the developer’s blog shows encouraging progress and this is definitely one to watch.

As I’ve said before I’m quite strongly of the view that there’s a lot of great ideas being spawned in the IF community that the wider gaming community should see and that IF writers could reach a wider audience by taking advantage of modern gaming technologies. So I’m hoping projects like this will be a starting point for that cross pollination.

Resources

To finish up I’m going to give you links to everything you’ll need to play Vespers for yourself. You just need the game file and the interpreter for your OS.

Vespers Game File:

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/vespers.z8

Windows Interpreter:

http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/frotz/WindowsFrotz.zip

OS X and Unix Interpreter:

http://www.logicalshift.co.uk/unix/zoom/