The Frankenstein Wars - The Hard Part Is History

You could make a solid argument that it's more challenging to write good interactive fiction than good literary fiction. In a gamebook, say, all of the requirements of high-quality literature must be present - such as plot, pacing, character; those old chestnuts. And yet you have to work within a very specific form, one that emphasises the meaningful choices within the text. This creates a great big decision tree, and for practical reasons of space, you can't spend a lot of time exploring the nuances of every specific route within that tree. Sadly, that means you can't devote a lot of words to dialogue, say, or inner monologue, or exploring complex socio-political situations. Out they go.

Oh, the consequences of complex socio-political situations can stay. The great big, bloody battles, and soldiers getting smashed to smithereens - all of that stuff can make the final edit.

Fantasy settings work great in gamebooks. In a really strong fantasy setting, everything can be expressed in such a beautifully shorthand way that you have a ton of room left over for the really important stuff, such as telling a great story. Don't misunderstand me - I'm not saying that the worlds themselves are simple; far from it. A handful of gamebooks have been set in Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and that's mind-blowingly rich. In more purist gamebook terms, Joe Dever's Magnamund isn't so far behind when it comes to sheer detail. But these worlds are inspired by legends that tap into the familiar, satisfying tropes of absolute light and dark. When it comes down to it, there are guys who worship good gods, and guys who worship evil gods. A sword is a sword, a big metal helmet will stop you getting bonked on the head, and wizards are mysterious and difficult to trust.

You know which setting is even more realistic than Magnamund, or Middle-Earth?

That's right. Reality.

The Frankenstein Wars gamebook app is an ambitious project in several ways. Dave Morris's concept of the reanimated lazarans as intelligent, feeling beings is a dramatic step beyond the majority of interactive fiction that currently exists. And the guys at Cubus Games are performing technical miracles with the game - I think, in terms of visuals and gameplay, we'll be able to create something that's right up there with the Sorcery! apps, or the best of the Tin Man adaptations.

But, perhaps most challenging of all, the game will be rooted in real-life history. We hope to successfully capture the discontentment of France during the reign of Charles X, the incompetent king. This is a game that will feature a host of characters who really, truly existed - such as Marshall Ney, Ada Lovelace, Lord Blakeney, and a certain deceased (and somewhat petit) former emperor of France.

And yet this is no documentary. Make no mistake - the star of the show here is Victor Frankenstein's resurrection technology, and the world-shattering power it grants to those who possess it. The game focuses on the schism between brothers Tom and Anton Clerval, yes - but it focuses too on the schism between Britain and France, and between the living and the once-dead.

Let the big, bloody battles commence. Let the soldiers get smashed to smithereens - and let Frankenstein's technology stick them back together again afterwards.

Sound interesting? At the time of writing, The Frankenstein Wars Kickstarter is hovering at around 54%, with just a few days to go. Why not click on over that way and back the project right now?

(Post by Paul Gresty)

Weaponising Frankenstein's Monster

The military gets to play with all the best technology before it filters down to the general public. The ironing board in your cupboard is made from heat-resistant materials originally developed for the engines of the Mirage 2000C jet fighter. Your toaster only knows when to pop up because its timer is based on the guidance system of Reagan-era Hawk anti-tank missiles. Or maybe not. I haven't done a lot of fact-checking on this. 

In the forthcoming gamebook app The Frankenstein Wars, Victor Frankenstein's resurrection technology emerges in France, in the early nineteenth century. And it is immediately seized upon for its military potential. It makes sense - what fighting force is more durable than soldiers who can be blown apart, then reassembled and resurrected, and thrown back into combat once more? The options are better yet for a general willing to mix and match the living raw materials under his command. A soldier with four arms, and two brains, will likely slaughter twice as many enemies as a regular soldier. A soldier with enlarged lungs, and three hearts, will be able to run far faster than a normal human, and shrug off injuries that might cripple or kill a lesser man. These resurrected soldiers - these lazarans - are living weapons.

There is one potential drawback: the lazarans are not mindless zombies. They are living, feeling people. Imagine yourself in the place of such a lazaran for a moment, dear reader. Perhaps you love your job, or perhaps you don't. Regardless, one morning you wake to learn that your boss has grafted an extra head to your shoulders, and given you one extra arm. He's severed your own scrawny legs, and replaced them with the brawny limbs of a champion sprinter. Not just one champion sprinter, mind - they are quite clearly mismatched in colour. All because he feels it will make you more effective in your work. How would you fight the wave of madness that such a change would surely engender? Could your husband or wife understand this transformation? How could you explain it to your parents, or your children?

The Frankenstein Wars is a tale of revolutionaries who believe that the ends justify the means - and of those who suffer for such fanaticism. In this world of murky morals, you can play as exploiter and exploited. The revolutionary Zeroistes use Frankenstein's technology to wage war against the French government and its British allies. The conflict threatens to tear apart the heart of Europe. And yet the damage to humanity's soul may be far greater still.

Sound epic? Check out The Frankenstein Wars Kickstarter project page. At the time of writing, we've just passed the 33% mark - a strong start, but still with some distance to go.

(Post by Paul Gresty)

An interview with Kyle B. Stiff

How's it hanging, gamebooklings? Excellent news: Sol Invictus, the sci-fi gamebook app and sequel to last year's award-winning Heavy Metal Thunder, is available for download. To celebrate this momentous occasion, I've managed to rustle up an interview with the game's author, Kyle B. Stiff. Read on for wily words of wondrous wisdom...

What's with the name? 'Kyle B. Stiff'? That's a pseudonym, right?

If only! No, I was blessed with an absurd name by my parents and sisters. I thought about changing it so that I could be taken seriously, but all my ideas were even more ridiculous than Kyle B.Stiff, so I figured I should just stick with that. I may put something in the front to sound a little more respectable… Doctor? Reverend? DJ? Lots of people put Doctor in front of their name to sound more respectable, so I’ll probably end up going that route.

Can you talk a little about the villains from HMT/Sol Invictus, the satyr-like Invaders? Why create this specific type of alien antagonist?

The inspiration comes from the same thing that inspires all art: Satan. Just kidding… or am I? I guess the horns work on a couple of different levels. The first really is that its Satanic, its scary, its very heavy metal. The second is that the Invaders aren’t that “alien” compared to us. So its kind of like when you’re a kid and you learn about Satan, hell, demons, its all pretty terrifying, but then when you grow up, you do a little research and you find out that the “horned god” was what we worshipped before Christians started burning our lady shamans at the stake.

So it comes from the idea of “demonizing” the enemy. From the perspective of the humans in Heavy Metal Thunder, nothing is more terrifying than a heavily-armed, black-armored Invader with two rune-carved horns curling around either side of a featureless black mask. The humans don’t know anything about the Invaders' culture, homeworld, philosophies, religions; they just represent a hostile, demonic, alien presence.

But the Invaders are a lot like us… alright, this isn’t a spoiler, this is just a train of thought. The Invaders have to expand because their economy is a pyramid scheme just like ours. They could have sent a handful of diplomats to Earth and said, “I know it’s exciting to find out there’s life on other worlds, yadda yadda yadda, but let’s get down to brass tacks: We need resources X, Y, and Z, more land for our booming population, and LOTS of slave labor to keep the whole thing running. Is there a way we can peacefully get all that from you guys?” But that’s not how life works. Empires find out pretty quick that it’s better to send an army if you want to be taken seriously. The Invaders have a moral compass just like ours, and some of their civilians may protest the idea of endless expansion and endless war, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure their leaders pull the same tricks ours do. I’m sure they have all kinds of televised broadcasts showing how bad things were on Earth, so instead of thinking, “Our people went to Earth to conquer another species and take their world,” it’s a lot easier for their citizens to sleep at night when they think, “We had to go to Earth to stop all those evil dictators.”

What are the last 3 books you've read?

DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman (I admit I had to skip ahead to the mind-blowing parts), Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away (which was very interesting, and the version I found had some cool illustrations by Esteban Maroto), and the incredibly badass Thor God of Thunder: The God Butcher by Jason Aaron (and beautifully illustrated by Esad Ribic).

Any time a writer is asked something like this, I always wonder if they’re lying. “Last three books? It would have to be The Collected Works of Shakespeare… let’s see, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style…” I guess if I was really being honest I would fess up and admit to reading a novel’s worth of social media notifications.

There's a fairly pessimistic flavour to Heavy Metal Thunder - it's science fiction that focuses on the losers of war rather than the winners (à la Firefly, or Battlestar Galactica). Is there still room for an optimistic, Star Trek-esque tone to science fiction - a message that everything is going to be okay?

I’m reminded of early 19th century thinking. They saw how the industrial machine was taking off, and they thought, “People can make more with less effort, therefore people are going to work four hours a week and live lives of wealth and ease. Things can only get better!” Fast forward a few years and the newly-invented machinegun was tearing people to pieces on battlefields of unimaginable, nightmarish proportions, and the common man found himself looking at a stack of bills that no one could possibly pay. Instead of thinking “Well this certainly sucks,” they figured that if they went deeper into the machine then they would find utopia at the end of the tunnel. Now we’re clicking on Facebook notifications out of habit, the battefields have gotten even more nightmarish, and the stack of bills have turned into something like that cube from Hellraiser. I can’t even imagine a Star Trek-flavored future when our inner world of emotion is either unexplored, suppressed, or in complete turmoil.

There’s got to be another way, but I don’t know “the way”. So in my stories I like to show people wrestling with that. Life is a hellacious struggle, and the big goals that we aim for are mostly delusions that keep us going. That sounds dark, but the other side of the coin is that, to me, heroism only makes sense in a world of darkness. The biggest badass in the world would have to be someone who simply is not affected by all the different mind control schemes constantly being thrown at us. He de-programs himself. He taps into the power that lies at the root of all good things. He finds a way to be happy even while enduring incredibly intense suffering. That’s what makes a hero even more terrifying than the monsters and the freaks that rule the world.

What do you think the future holds for gamebooks, or for interactive fiction in general? Are we going the way of the mobile app?

Of course I’d love another renaissance of gamebooks, but even with the popularity of CYOA back in the day, it’s one hard sell of a genre. It has a lot of trouble gaining traction in the public consciousness. If you want to make money as a game developer, make a game about a shiny thing that spins around or goes into a hole; if you can make it zombie themed, that’s even better. Otherwise, the land of gamebooks is a freezing tundra where only the most merciless, die-hard entertainers can survive. You have to care about this stuff to be here. We have to adapt the way of the mobile app, otherwise we won’t be noticed. I truly appreciate any readers who follow us along the way. I’m going to dig in and keep doing what I do; I promise all the readers out there that the tale of Cromulus has a lot more twists, turns, and gore-drenched action in store before the war ends!

Pertinent links: -

www.kylebstiff.wordpress.com

http://www.amazon.com/Kyle-B.-Stiff/e/B005I56W3Q/

www.cubusgames.com

(Post, and interview, by Paul Gresty)

Fun Stuff for 2015: Sol Invictus

Happy New Year, my gamebooky buddies. All across the world, a hangover fug is lifting, and men and women everywhere greet a shining new age free of dehydration and aspirin.

So, let's kick off this wondrous era with a look at some of the gamebooky goodness coming our way in 2015. First up: Sol Invictus.

Eons ago, in 2014, a company called Cubus Games created an app adaptation of a gamebook called Heavy Metal Thunder, written by an improbably-named man called Kyle B. Stiff. It was awesome. The story was dark and moody; you take the role of an elite jetpack soldier, part of the Black Lance Legion. Humanity is beaten; the war against the extraterrestrial Invaders is lost. Wounded and suffering from partial amnesia, you have to find your home unit and warn them of an impending attack, before everything you know is lost forever.

It was atmospheric, well-written science fiction. It had a great bit where your character went a bit mad, because he had to fly through space with a little jet pack for months on end. I really enjoyed it - I wrote a review of it, in fact, which you can read here. Nor was I alone in that. The app won a Pocket Gamer Silver Award

Sol Invictus is the sequel to Heavy Metal Thunder, and the continuation of the story that began there. Three years into the war against the alien Invaders, humanity manages to launch an offensive against its oppressors - an offensive spearheaded by Admiral Franks and his Black Lance Legion. And yet, might Franks himself be as great a threat to humanity as the aliens?

As I'm writing these words, Sol Invictus is just five days away from being released, on 8th January.

I'm thinking it's going to be great.

(Post by Paul Gresty)

Necklace of Skulls

Necklace of Skulls was first published as a part of the Virtual Reality Adventure series in 1993, and has lately been given new life as a smartphone/tablet application by Cubus Games. Dave Morris recently mentioned that he began writing Necklace of Skulls shortly after a visit to Central America. And, man alive, it shows. In this story, you take the part of Evening Star, whose journey across the world to save his twin brother is a trip through Mayan legend, and even through the fearful, dark parts of the Mesoamerican psyche that give birth to such legends.

In short, it's an extremely distinctive, evocative story. You won't find any battleaxe-wielding dwarves here. And what Cubus Games have done right is to precisely match the tone of the app to the atmosphere of that story. Visually, the artwork and overall feel here have their roots in the contemporary art of the period, and so the blend of story and artwork comes across as wholly natural. The app's sound effects are apt, as well. Sound is something I'll rarely pay much attention to in an IF app - incessant bleeping or sword-swishing noises usually just get on my nerves. But Cubus have done a great job here in terms of ambient sounds, and with the dull drum beats or tambourine rattles that greet you whenever you tap options or commands. It all adds to the story experience, and that's a tricky thing to pull off.

(Evoking a certain ambiance is really a strong point for Cubus, in fact. The same was true for their previous apps The Sinister Fairground and Heavy Metal Thunder.)

We have a strategic, diceless combat system, here. Each round, you get to choose three actions - attacking, defending or resting. If you attack when your opponent is defending, he'll take very little damage. If your opponent attacks while you're resting, he'll gut you pretty quickly. If you try to attack-attack-attack, you'll get tired out pretty quickly. Anticipating your opponents' strategies is a little tricky, but you get the hang of it soon enough. There isn't an excessive amount of combat, either. My first playthrough, I only fought two opponents.

Any real criticisms? Considering the app by itself, no. It's a solid contender against the other gamebooks-as-apps that are out there just now. Comparing this app version of Necklace of Skulls to the dead-tree gamebook of yesteryear, however, I see the app is a bit less flexible in allowing you to choose or create your character (maybe I want the AGILITY and SPELLS skills, dammit!). This is, I suspect, a choice on the part of Cubus to prune out any rules-lawyering, and to present this app as a streamlined, 'one-tap-does-all' experience. And that's no bad thing - frankly, if interactive fiction is to make any headway as a mainstream medium, I think that's the right way to go.

So, another strong entry from Cubus Games. Now I start counting the weeks and days until their next app, the sci-fi Sol Invictus...

(Post by Paul Gresty)

Heavy Metal Thunder

Okay, so this punk-ass tries to cave in your skull - crack - but you're, like, too badass to die, so you break out a shotgun and point it right between the poor mofo's eyes, and you're like, "Yeah, bitch, you think it's that easy to - "

Whoa. Sorry. I've just been in a really gung-ho mood ever since I read Heavy Metal Thunder. Let me take a minute to calm down...

Okay, so this time around I'm talking about Kyle B. Stiff's Heavy Metal Thunder. It's the second app from Barcelona-based Cubus Games. Their first release, The Sinister Fairground, was in a comedy-horror vein. And it was excellent (read my review of it here). This time around, they've gone sci-fi.

And what great sci-fi it is. You take the role of a member of the Black Lance Legion of elite jetpack soldiers, humanity's first and only line of defence against the nebulous extraterrestrial Invaders. You play Mr Wiggles (the name isn't permanent), a wounded amnesiac who struggles to recover his memory, and to return to his home before the Invaders can destroy it. It's grim stuff - what small pockets of humanity remain are on the run; you aren't fighting for victory, but for revenge.

Throughout, there's very much a theme that only the strongest can survive - and as Mr Wiggles strives to do just that, the story presents some probing choices weighing mercy against practicality. Will you kick a man off your spaceship so that you have more food for yourself? Or will you welcome him on board, even though he doesn't seem to have any useful skills? And there's a dark undercurrent that hints that you've been somehow 'programmed' to feel a certain aggressivity in specific situations. That's just begging for more development in sequels to come.

There are some lovely, original touches throughout the story - without being too spoilery, my own favourite would be the long-haul flight through space wearing only a little short-range jetpack, and towing a huge net of food and supplies behind you. Excellent stuff. Or, for instance, a section in which another jetpack soldier's radio is broken out in the vacuum of space, so you have to touch your helmet against his in order for them to convey sound. There are a bunch of fantastic little details like that. Of course, you should expect some pseudoscience with your sci-fi, and the pseudoscience here is well thought out, and credible - the 'fat mass' generators that create gravity aboard spaceships, for example. Kudos to Mr Stiff for that (that must be a fake name...).

Okay, a few technical points. Game mechanics: stats are a bit D&D-esque (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Will, Charisma, as well as Zero-G Combat and 1-G Combat), but alongside that you can also learn a bunch of skills (Jetpack, Computers, Xenobiology, Piloting etc.). You gain experience as you go along, and level up, allowing you to increase stats and pick new skills. And it's all pretty well balanced; as with a lot of good RPG systems, you often find yourself just a little short of the next level up, and craving more Exp, more Exp, more Exp... Combat and skill/stat tests require you to roll virtual dice - and, while I'm not a big fan of dice-rolling in apps, these are some pretty funky digital dice. Also, just like in The Sinister Fairground, you gain Hero points as you go along, which allow you to retry, or automatically succeed in, failed tests. Unusually for a gamebook (and this is adapted from the Heavy Metal Thunder gamebook), the story is dialogue-heavy, and each 'page' is usually quite long. Me, I quite like that, and I suspect that Cubus have intentionally tried to do away with a lot of redundant screen-tapping. The artwork is good, overall - the pictures of spaceships, or planets, or machinery, are beautiful; the pictures of people are a mixed bag. And the game motor looks great, and is simple to use - it's another step up from The Sinister Fairground, in fact.

Does the game have any bad points? Not so many. As I hinted at above, sometimes the tone of the narrative and dialogue is just suuuuuper-macho, and it gets a bit tiring. And there are a few too many T-junction choices for my taste. Also, I felt a bit frustrated that a certain key plot thread regarding Wiggles' amnesia seemed to go unresolved. Maybe that's just the way I played the game, though. Maybe I did something wrong; only future playthroughs will tell.

So, overall verdict: great, great, great. Even better than The Sinister Fairground, which was brilliant. Cubus are really starting to establish themselves as makers of awesome interactive fiction apps. Congrats to them, and to the spuriously-named Kyle B. Stiff for writing such a great story.

Trivia of the day: 'Heavy Metal Thunder'? Also an album by Saxon.

(Review by Paul Gresty)  

The Sinister Fairground

Okay, so in this episode of Scooby-Doo, Shaggy wakes up an Incan mummy that begins to terrorise...

Hold on. No. That's not right.

Let me restart. This is my review for The Sinister Fairground, the iOS gamebook app released in May by Barcelona-based Cubus Games.

Here's my short review: The game is great. If you own an iOS device, or if you have occasional access to one, buy it.

Here comes my longer review.

In The Sinister Fairground you take the role of a young man who unwisely chooses to meet his girlfriend Sophia in the diabolical Fairground of the Extraordinary. You quickly realise that the fairground's dastardly denizens have stolen Sophia away, and that you'll have to search through an array of macabre attractions if you ever hope to see her again. It's grisly, horror-themed hi-jinks - though you'll also come across a fair amount of self-conscious, genre-savvy comedy as the game pokes good-natured fun at various horror and fantasy tropes, and even the medium of gamebooks themselves.

There's a lot of good stuff here. The in-game map features 11 main areas to explore - such as the 'Circus of Monsters' or the 'Hall of Mirrors' - and a handful of other mini-areas besides. And there's a ton of content in each one. You won't see everything in a single playthrough. Some encounters and enemies are played for laughs. Others are genuinely eerie. Personally, my most chilling in-game experience so far has been sharing a car with a Portuguese serial killer - though, curiously, this Dexter-esque foe didn't try to harm me in any way (on this particular playthrough, at least - I'm sure I could have easily attracted his ire if I'd been more careless). Each area is essentially independent of the others, though there's some crossover in the clues and items you can pick up that can prove useful elsewhere. You also get a few Easter eggs sprinkled about the game (one of them even gives a shout out to fellow gamebook app developers Tin Man and Inkle).

Cubus has developed a lovely game engine. It's pretty, and it's easy to use. I'm not a huge fan of virtual dice rolling around the screen of your device (Grr...), and a lot of dice-rolling - or rather, dice-spinning - does take place here. But that's not so frustrating, as the game allows you to amass 'Hero Points' that can be used to reroll or even automatically pass failed tests. Similarly, combat is dependent on rolling to hit your enemy (Grr...), and rolling to see if your enemy hits you (Grr...) - but there is also a tactical element, in that you have to choose which weapon to use (Chainsaw? Katana? Magnum 44?) and whether you want to use various one-off items or spells to help you, from round to round.

And, best of all, IF YOU GET KILLED YOU DON'T HAVE TO START AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING. I love this feature. Instead, the game boots you out of the current area, and pretends that the last few encounters never took place. Brilliant. It's so much more fun to play when you don't have that ever-present risk of total failure hanging over you.

Another great feature - you can use your Hero Points to automatically beat any really nasty enemies. Even big, plot-important foes. It's a sort of 'cheat-if-you-want-to-without-feeling-bad-about-it' mechanism, and it's inspired.

The game isn't perfect. There are a few weak spots. They aren't biggies, but they include: -

• The story is sometimes flimsy. For instance, you never get much information about Sophia, your girlfriend. Why do you like her? How did the two of you meet? What sort of personality does she have?
• I'm disappointed there's no option to play as a girl, or as a gay or bisexual character. I know that coding a lot of different variables like this takes more work, but I'd have liked to see something a little more progressive.
• In the English-language version of the game, there are occasional proofreading problems - typos, misused words, clumsy-sounding sentences. But none of this is serious. It doesn't disrupt the flow of the game.
• A personal bugbear: I dislike inventory management. Yes, it's more realistic and it increases the game's challenge. I just find it a pain in the backside. Here, you're limited to carrying five weapons and ten objects.

So, overall verdict: I refer you back to my short review above. The game is excellent. Cubus have really done well with this one, and I absolutely recommend it. At the time of writing, their second game - Heavy Metal Thunder, by Kyle B. Stiff - is due for imminent release. And I'm really looking forward to seeing what they do with it. Even though it might not have as many scary ghosts.

(Post by Paul Gresty, cross-posted at his blog.)