It's so encouraging when the writing in a comp game immediately provokes not a groan, nor a wince, nor a muffled yawn, but instead a tinge of envy. The prose in Delightful Wallpaper is crisp, energetic, playful and witty in a rather annoyingly effortless way. It aims to capture the mood and milieu of Edward Gorey (with a touch of Fool's Errand and Christopher Manson's Maze); but while most efforts in the genre achieve at best a mere whimsy, Wallpaper crosses the line into actual wit. It made me smile many times, but not half as often as it made me green with admiration.
On top of that, Andrew Plotkin's latest work (and if Wallpaper isn't by Andrew Plotkin, I will eat my Edwardian hatstand) opens with exactly the kind of puzzle I like: a space relations puzzle. A puzzle that makes you think about the structure of the place you're exploring, and the way you explore it; not just the relative positions of rooms, but the connections between them, and the directions in which you approach them. In short, it's a really, really good maze.
"A good maze?" you may ask in horror. Surely a contradiction in terms? Not at all. What people -- and yes, I'm including you here -- hate about IF mazes is not the mere fact that they are mazes; it's that they are bad mazes. Mazes where the scenery and writing are desperately repetitive, where the solution involves tedious mapping and randomly hitting on the right exit, where the gimmick is that two (or more) different rooms look exactly the same and you can't tell. The maze in Wallpaper couldn't be more different. You can see all the exits, you know all the rooms, you can work out where you should be going. The notepad helps you realise what your movements are doing; you can work your way logically. The fantastic and unlikely country mansion is full of locations (with wonderful names like "The Rarely-Used Room" and "The Other Cellar") that are genuinely a reward to find. And the design is elegant enough that you don't have to repeat all your moves again once you uncover each key new area.
But isn't it also one of those puzzles where you manipulate a big machine? Also not true. Indeed, in this game you play some kind of immaterial entity and can't manipulate anything. (It's wonderfully liberating not to be able to pick anything up -- you can wander around without the slightest concern of encountering a combinatorial object puzzle.) The house can certainly be considered a contrived 'big machine' puzzle, but it's not a puzzle that makes you stand still and fiddle with levers and control panels. Instead, you explore new places as you solve it -- indeed, you solve the puzzle by exploring new places. The world yields its secrets as you interact with it.
It's the kind of puzzle I'd like to see embedded in something larger, but Delightful Wallpaper strips it down more or less to its essentials. Much as I enjoy exploring the house, I can only believe in it as a puzzle space; witty as the descriptions of its decor and inhabitants are, they are clearly in service of a pure puzzle game.
Not that there's anything wrong with a pure puzzle game every now and then -- especially when the first puzzle gives way to a second, more original and no less ingenious puzzle. Sometime in the future of the house, an aristocratic family will fight over their inheritance and end up killing each other. The PC is aware of various events that will occur in certain rooms, various intentions that are lying around, and is sketchily aware of a piece of Goreyesque doggerel that describes the whole thing. Using these clues, the player must match intentions to motives and piece together the sequence of murders which will occur; as each potential murder is identified, the relevant verse gets filled in.
There are many ways of filling in some of the verses, many possible combinations of murderer, victim and motive; though as far as I can tell, only one way of filling them all in correctly. And as I'm playing Agatha Christie in this grotesque Edwardian mansion, I begin to realise who my shadowy player character is. He is a writer of Goreyesque verse; in the game, he is exploring his imagination. In the first puzzle, he is working out the setting; the house is presumably inspired by the memory of a real place (in the foyer, he "shifts his perceptions from the now to the maybe"), but its precise layout, and the significance of the rooms, he must figure out for himself. In the second puzzle, he is assigning intentions to different characters, tinkering with the plot, getting the verses just right.
This is a brilliant metaphor, because in a sense all writers are IF players. Before there is fiction, there is the "interactive fiction" of the writing process. The writer is constantly trying combinations of events, working out his characters, solving literary puzzles. Hidden inside every fictional world are lots of potential stories that don't quite work, lots of promising paths that come to dead ends, lots of unsatisfactory resolutions. And just like the PC in Delightful Wallpaper, it's the writer's task to find the one true path through the maze of stories that are possible, the one story that makes everything snap together and rhyme perfectly.
Rating: 10 (First Place). In my opinion, the best comp game since Comp 2000.