After IFComp last year I had a curious realization: In each of the four IFComps in which I’d participated up to that point, my absolute favorite game from each year had not made the top ten. I’ve enjoyed lots of the games in the competition, but my personal #1 game in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 placed eleventh or worse. I thought it might be fun to post somewhere a non-top ten top ten list—my ten favorite games from the 2017-2020 IFComps that did not make the top ten, together with explanations for why I liked them so much.
I never did write that post, but I did get as far as a shortlist of about 15 games that I was considering. One of those games was Mike Carletta’s Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night!, which took 25th place in IFComp 2018. It features a well-drawn setting, strong implementation, and the kinds of intricate puzzles that I really enjoy. I was quite surprised when it placed 25th. However, it is very easy to die in Dynamite Powers, the game throws a rather difficult puzzle at you right at the beginning, and learning-by-death is necessary at least once. I suspect these aspects of the game had something to do with it receiving a ranking lower than I had expected.
So when I saw Mike Carletta had a new game, The Song of the Mockingbird, for IFComp 2021, I was eager to try it. It appeared to be a Western, though, and so probably not much like the pulpy space opera that is Dynamite Powers.
And then I started up Mockingbird. Yes, it’s a Western, but it is framed like an episode from a 1930s radio serial, just like Dynamite Powers. The first scene requires our PC hero to escape from a life-or-death situation, also just like Dynamite Powers. Has the author made the same type of game as before, merely switching genres?
No, not really. The Song of the Mockingbird is merciful on the Zarfian scale, not cruel. Despite the life-threatening situations in which the PC finds himself, the game won’t let him die, nor will it allow the player to put the game in an unwinnable situation. The puzzle structure isn’t linear, either, which means players will be stuck less often and so overall less frustrated. The puzzles are less compartmentalized, and the solutions are generally more streamlined. (Sometimes the game finishes solving the puzzle for you when I was expecting to have to perform another step or two.) Overall, then, The Song of the Mockingbird is a much more player-friendly game than Dynamite Powers. Is that an improvement? Most players will find it so, and I mostly agree.
The “mostly” is because I do miss some of the risk inherent in playing a character in a life-or-death situation. If I know the PC won’t die when someone’s shooting at him, there’s less dramatic tension. On the other hand, this certainly does (as I mentioned earlier) make the game more player-friendly. Moreover, it’s even true to those old radio serials: There’s no way that a show from that era was going to kill off the hero. Audience expectations for the 1930s were still decades away from Game of Thrones.
On the whole the puzzles are quite good. The major ones tend to be intricate, requiring multiple steps to solve. The cattle puzzle was probably my favorite, in that I had one of those satisfying a-ha! moments when I hit upon the solution. There are also multiple uses for some of the items in the game, which is always a nice feature. However, there are, for my taste, a few too many hidden items (that is, items that you only uncover by examining everything in sight carefully). I’d generally rather spend my playing time figuring out what to do with the objects I’ve got than going over the scenery with a fine-toothed comb. Also, for one of the puzzles (the bandit in the hayloft) I had something close to the right idea in mind, but the game’s responses led me to believe that my idea wouldn’t work. It would have been nice to have the game’s responses indicate that I was on the right track. In general, though, the puzzles are one of the game’s strengths.
The Song of the Mockingbird also shines in another way that Dynamite Powers does: attention to setting details. The game is full of wonderful pieces of just-past-the-Civil War Texas history, from the songs that the PC sings to some of the newfangled contraptions that he finds and uses, to the slowly revealed explanation of what’s really going on. The post-game notes give further detail on many of these aspects of the game. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, and I read every one of them.
Other plusses: Mockingbird features a tight implementation, with solid responses to even out-of-the box actions I tried. There’s a nice hint system, with the hints carefully calibrated to your progress. And, even though I started to suspect what was really going on before the game was halfway over, I still found the ending beautiful and moving in a way that brings the PC’s character arc full circle.
Overall, The Song of the Mockingbird is a solid piece of puzzly parser IF, well-implemented and with plenty of historical detail. It’s also more player-friendly than the author’s previously published work. I predict lots of folks will enjoy this one.
An Exercise for the Reader 