Ferryman’s Gate

(some major spoilers near the end)

Since I finished Ferryman’s Gate I’ve been trying — and failing — to think of another work of IF that appeals so directly to my idiosyncratic tastes. Ferryman’s Gate is explicitly educational, with content taught via puzzles integrated into a story. Not only that, its educational focus is on grammar rules, which I appreciate. It features multiple quotations and imagery from the most profound work I’ve ever read, Dante’s Divine Comedy, as well as a few other Christian references. It’s even a treasure hunt, set in and around a sprawling Southern mansion. If you mashed up A Beauty Cold and Austere and Sugarlawn, swapped the mathematics in the former for comma rules, and tossed out the timer in the latter, you might get something close to Ferryman’s Gate. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

In Ferryman’s Gate you take on the role of a child whose uncle has died, leaving your family his large mansion in Georgia. The uncle was a bit of an eccentric, though, with an obsession for proper grammar. You soon discover that he was also the guardian of a secret. In order to meet the idiosyncratic requirements he’s laid down for his successor, you’ll need to demonstrate repeatedly your knowledge of correct comma rules.

The author states in the “about” text that the game is unabashedly an attempt to reinforce proper comma usage. The author goes on to say, “‘Educational’ games often involve seemingly arbitrary puzzles that interrupt a lame narrative. This game attempts to avoid such problems.” I think this analysis is correct; in fact, I’ve expounded on this point before. Ferryman’s Gate‘s approach to avoiding this problem with educational games is to use traditional IF-type puzzles as the vehicle for teaching comma rules. In order to solve many of the game’s major puzzles, you have to realize which of several options contains the comma error or the correct usage and then act accordingly. Moreover, the game increases the difficulty over time, leading to a final puzzle near the end where you must put all of your comma knowledge to use. In addition, there is a comma book you find early in the game that serves as a reference. It’s all quite similar to the puzzle design I used with mathematics in A Beauty Cold and Austere, and (not surprisingly) I think it’s an effective way to do educational IF. Ferryman’s Gate did it effectively for me, at least: I was reminded of multiple comma rules I had learned in eighth grade English but had long-since forgotten. Having had them reinforced for me with the game, I think they’ll stick with me for a while.

Ferryman’s Gate’s world is decent-sized but for the most part sparsely implemented. Lots of times EXAMINE (something) produces the response “You see nothing special about (the thing).” I was somewhat surprised to discover that I mostly liked this. After playing for a bit and finding few bugs in the game, I took this spare implementation to mean that I wouldn’t have to examine everything in sight in order to make progress. Instead, I could trust the author that everything I needed for puzzle-solving would generally be in plain sight; I wouldn’t have to scour the entire mansion and grounds when I got stuck, examining everything carefully to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

(Time for an editorial: While I do think placing important features of a room or object in an EXAMINE (something) text rather than in its initial description can be effective puzzle design, I also think it’s overused. And it can – sometimes – even be a sign of laziness on the part of an author. A puzzle whose solution basically entails examining everything in sight until you find that one object hidden under the furniture is an easy puzzle to write, but it isn’t a very interesting puzzle for the player. It can also be frustrating when you’re stuck and you think, “Am I going to have to go back through a couple dozen rooms with four or five objects in each of them and examine all of them carefully to make sure I haven’t missed anything?” As I player, I’d much rather know which elements I have available to help me solve a puzzle and spend my time thinking of creative ways to use them rather than scouring the game map looking for something I missed. End editorial.)

There are some places in Ferryman’s Gate where the implementation could be improved. You can turn on the radio, but then LISTEN produces “You hear nothing unexpected.” LIGHT FLASHLIGHT doesn’t turn on the flashlight. EXAMINE and READ do different things, which is O.K., but it’s rather misleading when EXAMINE produces the “You see nothing special…” response yet READ produces a long paragraph or more of text. A more important one is that the butler Rudolf is set up to be a villain, yet he never manages to do anything (that I could see) particularly villainous. Still, even in this relatively sparsely implemented game there are some nice touches. These include the compass rose in the status bar as well as multiple characters, each of whom has several conversation topics.

A game like this requires sentences in order to discuss comma usage, and that raises the question of source material. Ferryman’s Gate uses sentences from classical Christian texts. Some (and I think all, although I didn’t check) of the plates you’re collecting in the game contain quotes from The Divine Comedy, and I think they might even be in the order that they appear in Dante’s poem. Several of the other quotes in the game appear to be from an older translation of the Bible. The religious nature of the source material plus the cadence of the older style of these sentences gives them more weight than they would have had if they had been chosen from modern sources, a choice that I find entirely appropriate for a game of this kind.

In addition, Ferryman’s Gate uses Christian themes as a unifying leitmotif. Besides the source texts, there’s a scene out of the The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. More importantly, your uncle Ferryman’s secret was that he, like the ferryman Charon in The Divine Comedy, was gatekeeper to hell itself. As a Christian, and especially after a string of four games I played earlier in this IFComp in which three of the four featured religious belief or a believer as an object of mockery or a source of humor, I greatly enjoyed — and appreciated — seeing Christianity featured in a positive way in Ferryman’s Gate. Plus there’s something amusing in Ferryman’s Gate‘s implication that correct grammar can give you control over access to hell.

I do think a game about grammar could have done a little better at making sure there are no actual grammar mistakes in the game. I didn’t see many, but I did unfortunately find two (both apostrophe errors) in the prologue text. In addition, I found myself pondering the puzzle possibilities of intentional placement of comma errors in the text of Ferryman’s Gate itself — not just in sentences you find written on objects in the game. Some meta puzzles, in other words. Perhaps that’s material for a sequel.

Overall, while Ferryman’s Gate has some room for improvement from a technical standpoint, it’s a really good first game. It particularly gets certain design aspects right. I could point to several other games in this IFComp that are in some sense objectively better. But, partly due to my particular IF tastes and partly due to the game itself, I don’t think I’ve gotten as much sheer pleasure out of playing an IFComp game this year as I have with Ferryman’s Gate.