Just completed an interactive fiction title called “Violet”. It’s been a while since I played an IF game from start to finish so my puzzle-solving is a bit rusty. Fortunately, Violet is one of those games where the focus is not so much on the puzzle-solving, rather on the entertaining prose and bizarre situations you find yourself in.
It’s a “one-room” game, meaning you’re confined to one place for the duration of the game and have a number of challenges to overcome. In this case, you’re a struggling PhD student trying to write your dissertation. Your Aussie girlfriend, the titular Violet, has issued you an ultimatum to spur you into action against your own procrastination: write a thousand words today, or she’s flying back to Australia, never to return.
It sounds simple. The instructions at the start of the game tell you that “all you need to do is WRITE”. So you type “WRITE”… and thus begins a long sequence of hilarious distractions from the job at hand, which I won’t spoil for you here. Suffice it to say, by the end of the experience you’ve suffered a number of amusing mishaps that do nothing for your dignity.
The interesting thing with Violet is its writing. Most IF is written in a second-person perspective, with an omnipresent, omniscient narrator that tells you what you’re doing and whether what you’re trying to do is successful. Violet, conversely, is written from the perspective of Violet, or more specifically, “your” memory of Violet. This means that the narrator’s attention is just as likely to wander as your own, with a number of cheeky asides about your coworkers, old flames and seeming inability to get anything useful done cropping up throughout the course of the story as you desperately do something – anything – to keep your mind on your work. It also means that there’s a lot of character in even the simplest of interactions – the traditional “Taken.” prompt upon picking something up is replaced by Violet saying something like “Yours, wallaroo” or a variety of other pet names. Despite Violet not being physically present throughout, her comments (or rather, what you imagine her comments would be) on the various things you do and the objects you look at give you a good insight into the characters of both the protagonist and Violet herself.
It’s a great little story that starts with a vaguely serious tone and ends up somewhat farcical. It’s pleasantly short, too, with a hint system (and no penalty for using it) for those who simply want to enjoy the tale without having to think too much.
You can download it here – there’s full instructions on how to get it up and running on your system on that site. If you have Frotz for iPhone, you can download it straight into the app.
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