PixelVixen707

“Beats the fuck out of cleaning toilets.”

That’s the first line of Everybody Dies. It’s a good lede - strong, but it doesn’t stop you. The narrator keeps talking. I smoke a butt with him. I hear a few scenes from his life story. I want to hear more.

Everybody Dies is a work of interactive fiction. It’s written by Jim Munroe and illustrated by Michael Cho. (You can download the game and its interpreter here.) It just placed third at this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition. Making the top three is a good thing, because like almost everyone in the world who’s not a brilliant IF nut, I don’t have the time or the will to try every entry. One of them even bills itself as “The Absolute Worst IF Game in History” - but wouldn’t you know it, it got more votes than any other game.

Here’s another line from Everybody Dies:

Across the road the guy from the city is in his little go-cart clearing the sidewalk. He gives me a chin nod and I do the same. Don’t know him but it’s the Mustache Brotherhood.

Interactive fiction’s commonly pegged as a niche, art-game kind of thing. There’s no money in it, and not many eyeballs. The retro fads that brought back everything ever to grace the Super NES have skipped a form that used to dominate the PC. But every so often we poke at it a little, and try the big winners of the IF Comp. Part of it’s curiosity and guilt. But why do we stay and play one through?

That voice.

Graham, the first narrator of Everybody Dies, has an engrossing and genuine voice. Listening to him is like sleeping in someone’s flannel shirt. There are other voices too, that aren’t as distinct but that belong to good characters. The surreal twists the story takes are the least of it: I’m walking side by side with these characters, and I’m taking joy in their language. This just never happens in games.

I’m trying the other winners too; at two hours per, it’s an easy sell. I played the gold medalist, Violet (same link - or play in a browser, but it won’t look as good). It’s … fine. Make no mistake, Jeremy Freese’s writing is stuper super, and the puzzles were elegant and actually tied to the plot. But this time, the voice was actually too much for me. Violet is a game about a graduate student who can’t make himself sit down and work. (Are you listening, L.B. Jeffries?) He imagines his girlfriend talking him through the day as he steadily removes all his distractions, but the girlfriend is also part of the problem: she’s threatened to leave him for good if he doesn’t start cranking on his dissertation. That would be a loss for our progatonist, because Violet is oh so adorable. She has a queue of Australian pet names for him, and quirky, quippy descriptions of everything that’s happening, and the puzzles are built around little objects of affection she handmade for him, like a piece of origami, and - dammit, get your pokey little button nose out of my ear, Violet. Go jump Hugh Grant. He’d like you.

So Everybody Dies. I liked the puzzles: they were elegant, plus, easy. I don’t need a brainteaser to enjoy a game like this. In a graphical point-and-click adventure, playing with gadgets and trying new solutions is half the fun. But with a text adventure, I’ll admit that if I don’t get the answer in a few minutes or less, I wander off. Maybe if I’d beaten Infocom’s catalog back in the day, I’d be all about the challenge; but right now, I want to be stumped just enough to pay attention.

And I did, and I was rewarded in a rare and special way, with two games that felt like short stories. In fact, they were better. They were conversations.