Richard's Online Journal
Emerald City Confidential
Dave Gilbert’s >Blackwell games were a couple of my favourite adventures over the last couple of years, so I’ve been looking forward to Emerald City Confidential for a while. Hell, the basic concept did it for me. Raymond Chandler… in Oz. Download. Play.
“...exporting American McGee to China before he could make his Oz movie.”
It’s an interesting release, and arguably the first old-school adventure to really be built as casual game. That’s not just down to the difficulty, although it is probably the easiest I’ve played in recent memory. I was halfway through it by the end of the trial period, and the second half didn’t take a whole lot longer. Even if you do get stuck, there’s a hint book built into it which gives you chapter and verse on every puzzle you encounter. Compared to the hours and hours you get out of other casual games, or a couple of Telltale Games’ episodes, $19.99 is a bit expensive. Not insanely — I’m looking at you, Not Even Half A Vampyre Story — but more than I’d have liked.
The key casual features come in three forms, two of which are reasonably unique. The first is the most standard — it automatically saves your progress in the background. A small thing, yes, but I’ve retrudged enough adventures to welcome it when I see it.
Second, there’s a collection element to the game, with each screen hiding a coloured button that occasionally glints at you. I wish these could have been traded in for something other than concept art pictures, giving a real reason to bother. Still, it makes for a good way of encouraging people to pay attention to exactly what’s on each new screen, and possibly spot things they might otherwise have missed. In addition, you get Achievements (not called that, but I don’t care), although these seem very slapped onto the game, being awarded for things like taking a certain number of taxi rides rather than actually ‘achieving’ anything. They’re more Completionist points than anything else.
Finally, a string of gems at the bottom of the screen shows you precisely how much of the game you’ve finished, with each gem representing a new quest. I hate the word ‘quest’ in this context, but only because I hate it in just about every context. It’s a surprisingly effective system. Unlike most adventures, where you can easily be stuck on something or get flustered, you’re constantly making visible progress. The gems are colour-coded for the game’s main sections, offering a real ‘one more sparklie’ feel. A side bonus of this system is that while there are no discrete chapters in ECC, a new gem colour makes for an excellent break-point in the action.
Throw in the lack of death, arcade sequences and time limits, not to mention little touches like only relevant areas being shown on the world map and very few superfluous hotspots, and you’ve got an excellent starter adventure for people who haven’t tried the genre before. For more experienced adventurers, it’s not ‘dumbed down’ so much as streamlined, with the only real catch being that yes, you can be done and dusted in an evening without ever having had to strain your leetle grey cells. The puzzles may be extremely easy, but they’re also pretty clever. More than a couple made me think back to Zork: Grand Inquisitor, and that’s a good thing.
All this said, ECC is clearly an adventure made for the casual market, not a casual game borrowing from adventures. I’m not convinced that the standard object-dialogue-model is the ideal one, given the lack of length and replay value. Fun as the adventure is, it’s not one you’re likely to come back to very often, and the extra achievements and so on aren’t well enough integrated to make doing so a rewarding process.
It’ll be interesting to see what the reaction is like from both camps, but I suspect future adventures will benefit from some fairly hardcore re-engineering of core principles to create stories that benefit from multiple cycles through the plot, and more of a focus on smaller, tighter designs with less intensive production needs.
Meddle not in the affairs of wizards, for they are both subtle and swift to anger. Don’t even ask about evil sorceresses…
Back to ECC itself though. Plot-wise, I’ve read a couple of the Oz books, but not all of them. That’s enough to know that just about everyone aside from the main character, Petra, is straight from at least one of them. That said, it doesn’t actually matter, especially since you almost certainly have a grip on the basics through cultural osmosis, regardless of whether you’ve ever read/seen anything set in the world. Petra re-introduces everyone as and when they appear, along with any necessary history lessons. If you recognise Jack Pumpkinhead, great. If not, a couple of well-written lines tell you everything you need about his smuggling ways.
(If you really, really must have an infodump, there’s a machine that’ll serve up the who and what of just about everyone, but with no offence meant, no thanks. That’s what Wikipedia is for. Luckily, you only need the machine for part of a more general, non-research related puzzle. Twice, for some bizarre reason. More often, we get the same clever Gilbert atmosphere that makes everyone who plays a Blackwell game walk off convinced they know Joey’s backstory, no matter that he’s yet to share it.)
Where the classic characters show up, it’s as part of their own little stories, temporarily intersecting with Petra’s for a bit and both moving on. They typically work on two levels — primarily as a character archetype, with their original roots secondary. Only a couple, like the sorceress Mombi and the Wizard himself, sorely needed a bit more oomph.
The most disappointing part of all this is that while the noir aspect of the story never fully goes away, it’s only the focus of the first half. After a particular plot point lets you leave the Emerald City itself, the game morphs into your fairly standard magical fantasy quest to save the kingdom, slamming on the accelerator and not looking back. This didn’t bother me too much, mostly because it continued to be fun, but it still felt like a shame. I’d have loved to have seen Gilbert really go to town on the underbelly of his reimagined world, much like Discworld Noir did to my favourite fantasy books.
Still, it quickly becomes clear that it’s not so much the noir element per se that makes the story tick as having a fresh pair of eyes to see the world through. Despite all the familiar and not-so-familiar bits and pieces, it’s Petra’s motivations that really make the story work — arguably better than it should, given the speed at which it whips past your eyes. There are lots of bits you can pick holes in if you want, like having two consecutive sections end with exactly the same basic sequence, but the pace of the story means that most of the problems are over and done very, very quickly.
The Lion, now a ruthless lawyer, isn’t actually a major player in the story, but is one of many parts of the game that give the world its texture.
For my money, I’d have preferred something a bit more challenging, and something that had played a bit more with the film-noir model than the more general magic adventure ECC ultimately becomes, but I’m not exactly Playfirst’s target audience. I had a fun evening in the Emerald City, and my wallet doesn’t feel too sore as a result. I just hope it’s not too much longer before the next Blackwell game. I miss those characters.