Spring Thing 2016: The Xylophoniad; Foo Foo

I’ve been playing more of the games from this year’s Spring Thing. (You too can play! And vote! And review, if you wish!)

The Xylophoniad is a parser adventure by Robin Johnson, a good-natured spoof of Greek mythology with cameos from Achilles, Sappho, Daedalus, the Minotaur, and assorted other crowd favorites. Unlike the author’s recent Draculaland, it’s not relying on a choice-based representation of the parser options, but in other respects the two games are fairly similar in tone and difficulty level: light-hearted, relatively straightforward puzzles that tend to involve thinking of the right item to use in the right situation; an invisiclues-style hint system complete with misleading fake hints; a sizable world map with relatively few items per room, brief room descriptions, and explicitly listed exits. The characters will answer ASK/TELL conversation gambits on a number of topics, but in a fairly old-school style: these are more like Infocom characters than like new-school NPCs, and they don’t have long memories or detailed dialogue scenes. But that suits the genre this is going for.

I found The Xylophoniad took me roughly an hour to play, and that I only had to look at the hints a couple of times, mostly because there were two specific objects whose size and shape I had envisioned incorrectly. However, a couple of the other puzzles amused me considerably, and a couple have multiple solutions. (I was particularly pleased by trggvat n oyvaqsbyqrq oneore gb tvir Zrqhfn n gevz, and also that gur gharf lbh cynl ner Terrx-gvgyrq irefvbaf bs ahefrel fbatf.)

I just recommended ASCII and the Argonauts apropos of Johnson’s last game, but it’s even more apropos here — if you liked this, you might well like that.

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Foo Foo (Buster Hudson of Oppositely Opal et al) was originally a game for The Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction, and in fact it won that competition. It’s not hard to see why: it’s a charming, light puzzle game that honors Veeder’s work in both style and specific content. The protagonist is the Good Fairy of the Little Bunny Foo Foo song, and is trying to collect evidence that Little Bunny Foo Foo is not actually responsible for the massacre of field mice in the area. There’s a cameo from the descendant of Captain Verdeterre; there’s a former flame who keeps a dessert shop, reminiscent of the ice cream shop owner in Taco Fiction; there are stuffed dinosaurs as found in The Island of Doctor Wooby; there’s a rock band called “They Might Be Humans,” a nod to Veeder’s contributions to the They Might Be Giants tribute compilation, Dig My Grave and The Statue Got Me High.

From time to time the narrator addresses the player directly about what you should attend to and what you should ignore.

Your detective instincts are telling you to focus on the establishments on the north side of Lumpen Lane. Of course there are businesses across the street, but you aren’t concerned with them, and therefore they won’t be mentioned.

This kind of thing is a classic Veederism, possibly seen most extensively in Nautilisia but present even in his earliest work I know of, You’ve Got a Stew Going!

I also thought this bit was a good nod to Veeder’s style:

He winks at you in precisely the way you hate being winked at.

Overall, I think Foo Foo is probably the most fun for people who know their Veeder canon well, and it’s hard for me to know exactly how you’ll respond to it if you don’t; but it felt to me like it was well enough constructed that even someone without that background might have a good time.