Bizarre Weekend
Bizarre Weekend is our common Saturday column the place we rejoice PC gaming oddities: peculiar video games, unusual bits of trivia, forgotten historical past. Pop again each weekend to search out out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have turn out to be obsessive about this time, whether or not it is the canon top of Thief’s Garrett or that point somebody within the Vatican pirated Soccer Supervisor.
One measure of how onerous you’ve got fallen for a sport is the extent to which you may overengineer options to its puzzles, out of sheer giddiness. So it was with Counterfeit Monkey’s letter remover—a type of linguistic version of the sonic screwdriver. First I pulled a “chard” from its roots in a backyard, and eliminated its “h”, remodeling the vegetable right into a “card”. Then I deleted the “r”, inflicting a sputtering, ramshackle but functioning “automotive” to spring into being as a replacement.
From a chunk of “rubbish”, I magicked a complete “storage” out of nowhere, replete with a considerably bemused mechanic—who identified that my automobile wanted gasoline. And with a sprig of “sage” and the usage of a mirror, I finally managed to reverse the character of an object and wind up with “fuel” for the automotive. I used to be a wizard of phrases, disrupting the material of actuality with my mastery of language.
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Counterfeit Monkey is a textual content journey. To be particular, it is a parser sport—a kind of the place you kind in instructions to inform your character to GO NORTH or PICK UP CHARD.
Whereas it is nearly possible to think about Counterfeit Monkey as a point-and-click puzzler—and there is a specific amount of LucasArts spirit powering its absurdist conundrums—including graphics would slightly miss the purpose. This distinctive sport is an exploration of the that means we connect to phrases. It respects the symbolic weight of writing on a web page. In some ways, Counterfeit Monkey celebrates the facility of our brains to interpret a sequence of jumbled letters as vivid photos, to assemble scenes and motion and plot-twists from white squiggles on a black background.
It would all sound a bit lofty and unapproachable. However Counterfeit Monkey consists with the immediacy and electrical energy of an espionage thriller. It casts you out onto the road as a needed particular person, and duties you with discovering your approach off the island of Atlantis. Which, in an odd approach, is a reasonably oppressive place. In a world the place phrases may be weaponised, the Atlanteans have established their dominance by stranglehold: banning the usage of any language that is not English, in an effort to scale back the general public’s means to remodel objects.
The Bureau of Orthography assigns Atlantean names to all immigrants and neutralises foreign-language pets. It hoards letter inserters and depluralisation cannons—the latter apparently used to scale back a British fleet to a single ship in 1822, profitable the nation its independence. Extra not too long ago, the cannon has been used to decisively finish mass protests.
It is a land through which you may hear the argument for turning folks into issues, as a substitute for capital punishment: “The character of a person made inanimate stays behind within the modified object, able to be retrieved ought to new proof come to mild; and till that date he’s innocent to society, and prices nearly nothing to retailer, as in comparison with the prices of jail guardianship and upkeep.”
I would not suggest experimenting with such concepts your self, although. At one level, I met a bloke known as Mark in a bar, and turned him into an ‘ark’—an infinite boat underneath which I used to be crushed immediately. The Atlanteans could also be authoritarian, however they’re proper that phrase manipulation has the capability to be harmful if not correctly thought via.
It is the rigour of this worldbuilding that elevates Counterfeit Monkey from a novelty puzzler to a really memorable journey. Its author, Emily Quick, infused her sport not solely with good puzzles however a clear-eyed perspective on what humanity would do with the invention of a brand new type of magic, socially and politically. Then she laced what may have been a dense, dry journey with sexual rigidity, hazard, and sudden household drama.
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“Abruptly it’s borne in on me that this can be the final I see of my mom in a lifetime,” she writes, in a single disarming encounter. “And I am making an attempt to memorise the precise lower of her hair and the best way her costly Italian heels faucet on the ground, and in the meantime she is totally detached to the second.”
There’s one final aspect to Counterfeit Monkey’s magic. A science fiction conceit, that has you fusing with one other character proper at first. Name it a depluralisation. The sport’s narrator is, in reality, a second human being with whom you share a physique. “We’re Alexandra now,” they are saying. “Earlier than the synthesis, I used to be Alex. We’re meant to be one individual now, unrecognizable to anybody who knew us earlier than.”
It is a captivating method to carry humanity to the odd but elementary mechanics of the parser style, through which we have at all times shared our head with a stranger. Specifically, the voice that describes our actions again to us. They’ve simply not often had a reputation prior to now, or a background, or emotions and a gender to think about.
It is no surprise that Quick grew to become a luminary of the interactive fiction motion. She went on to put in writing for my beloved Fallen London, finest described as an ever-expending choose-your-own journey novel. And in 2023 she directed Masks of the Rose, a visible novel set within the Fallen London universe. The latter featured a central mechanic through which you composed tales by slotting in characters, motivations and actions to fulfil a immediate. It was a system that handled writing as if it had been programming—rooted in the identical mode of pondering that led to Counterfeit Monkey greater than a decade in the past.
To me, although, Counterfeit Monkey feels just like the purest and most private expression of Quick’s narrative brilliance. I discover that she uploaded the sport without cost on New 12 months’s Eve in 2012, and may solely think about how she felt, setting off that exact firework. Releasing a mission so fizzing with mind and literary aptitude. One that might solely be the product of a really explicit thoughts, unblinkered but hopeful. Maybe I am merely projecting, however relinquishing management of such a sport have to be like letting go of part of your self and handing it over to the general public. An act of grand pluralisation.
