Once More, With Stealing - On Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist (2015)

From the designer of The Stanley Parable, comes Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terrible Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist! It’s free! It’s short! I’d recommend playing both games first before reading this!

Now, onto our main attraction!

Once you’ve created something like The Stanley Parable (2014), what type of game do you do next? 

Apparently, you just make another first-person walking simulator that serves as meta-commentary on video games. You do it again.

Well, that’s not fair, to either William Pugh or Davey Wredon. After co-designing The Stanley Parable, which was a wry meta-commentary on linearity and narrative and authorship in video games, Pugh went off and started up studio Crows Crows Crows, while Wredon and Everything Unlimited Ltd. released The Beginner’s Guide in 2015. The Beginner’s Guide (apparently?  I haven’t played it, but I gather it's kind of introspective, and it's about the game making process?) does have something different to say, and this game, meanwhile, from Crows Crows Crows, is more focused on humor. It’d be easy to assume that, based off of their respective output since, that Wredon was responsible for the introspective elements of The Stanley Parable while Pugh was responsible for the more playful moments.  But I remember looking up playthroughs of the original, free, 2011 Half-Life 2 mod designed solely by Wredon, and the tone and a chunk of the dialogue was the same; they just expanded on everything in the standalone remake.

I liked the writing and humor of The Stanley Parable a lot, but I couldn’t completely jibe with it as a meta-commentary on narrative and linearity and authorship in games, and that was mostly because of the setup. Every review tells you about the two open doors it presents you with: there's a narrator that's been telling you about the protagonist you're playing, and then he tells you that the protagonist goes through the door to the right, and your choice is whether to follow or disobey the voice, Games don’t really have narrators, that tell you what path to choose. They have false choices, and invisible walls, and “Mission Failed: You left the area” messages, and flashing markers on your map or floating above your squadron commander. I couldn’t quite figure out what the narrator was supposed to represent: a game designer?  Why did he have a script?

I think I might’ve bought more wholesale into the concept if I hadn’t watched Stranger Than Fiction first. Stranger Than Fiction was a lovely little film released in 2006, starring Will Farrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Farrell’s a quiet, unassuming office worker who suddenly starts hearing a (British) voice narrating his life, as if he were a protagonist in a novel. And that setup works, works better, because movies have narrators, and books have narrators, and the movie does a nice job not wearing itself thin, as Farrell’s character tries to figure things out, and we meet other characters, and the movie pokes wry fun at literary conventions and manages to say something about inevitability and authorship and life, and the movie works just on a character and story level.

I couldn’t help comparing them, and thinking that the narrator premise worked better in Stranger Than Fiction, while playing through The Stanley Parable. It works better for its medium, and serves better as a conduit for commentary on that medium. But the narrator was thought up for a free game mod, so I can’t fault Wredon and Pugh too much for using it. Later rabbit holes in the full game, ones added for the remake, were able to go deeper and do something more, and they're the strongest paths.

Dr Langeskov rethinks this central conceit of the Stanley Parable; I wonder if Pugh came up with it during or after production. The omnipresent voice this time is explicitly a director, and games are treated as huge, physical, stage productions put on for the player, with costuming, and sets, and special effects, and as everything behind the scenes falls apart, I could draw the parallels to game development, and the metaphor just works better.

The game’s short, less than half an hour, and it ramps up the humor and tones down the meta-commentary from TSP. Simon Amstell, former host of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, serves as the voice this time, and his flustered, agitated delivery provides a much different tone from the initially distinguished narrator from TSP. Amstell’s nervous tics weren’t believable, exactly, but his quick pace lent a more frenzied environment to the proceedings and fit well with the more light-hearted game. You could imagine this guy directing a play, and doing it badly; what was the narrator for TSP doing anywhere near any sort of game at all?  For that matter, even Stanley the Office Worker didn’t really make sense as a game protagonist.

This time, there is no deviating from what The Voice tells you to do. There are no doors to choose between; you can perform small acts of petty disobedience, but in the end, you can either do what he tells you to do immediately, or hear him plead for you to do it for awhile first before acquiescing.
This time, there is no deviating from what The Voice tells you to do. There are no doors to choose between; you can perform small acts of petty disobedience, but in the end, you can either do what he tells you to do immediately, or hear him plead for you to do it for awhile first before acquiescing.

In most games, that wouldn’t work. In a longer game, that wouldn’t work either. But here, it does. I wanted to hear what dialogue would come next, and when I did reach a point where I started getting impatient, I could just pull the lever then without waiting around first.

The appeal, to me, is pretty similar to playing old Lucasarts adventure games, like Monkey Island and Sam and Max. Some of the puzzles in those '90s games were okay, and some were even clever, but what really kept me going was the writing. I wanted to talk to other characters just to hear what they had to say; I wanted to use things on other things just to see If I could get a funny reprimand. The greatest joys in those games was in the dialogue systems, poring over all the lines that you could get Guybrush to say, and then choosing one and seeing it acted out for you. Those choices didn’t “matter;” they’d all just circle back to the same point afterwards, and this was also a thing in games that the Stanley Parable also poked fun at, but that wasn’t the point. You still get something out of them.

That was exactly one of the things that bothered me about some of the Tales of Monkey Island (2009) episodic games. The budgets for those games was clearly pretty low – lots of time was spent in these small areas, and developer Telltale Games even reused some of them later on. But the big betrayal was when they presented you with five lines of dialogue to choose from, all starting with the same first couple words, then as Guybrush was speaking, just before the dialogue would deviate, they’d have something INTERRUPT him, and cut him off. This must have been done to cut costs. But false choices aren’t the problem for me; it’s when they’re blatant and clumsy. The area reuse, I didn’t mind too much, but in a Monkey Island game, the dialogue’s the main attraction!

I still enjoyed Tales of Monkey Island; I seem to recall episode 3 being particularly strong, and 4 being good too. Charm can smooth over a couple of cut corners. Some narrative seams are always going to show in all games, because it's all inherently a team of people letting a litany of players trample all over their game worlds held together by duct tape. They have to make sure every trigger, every script, every loading texture is going to work in the right place, and the player never even notices all the things going behind the curtains. They have to watch with bated breath as these players proceed to stomp over all their hard work, ignoring the story, throwing crates at the heads of the NPC trying to give instructions, and jabbing at every glitchy object and unkept geographic corner.

Dr. Langeskrov is a lot more linear than The Stanley Parable. You have to follow what The Voice tells to you do, and the game can’t continue without it. But that matters less when you want the game to continue; whether you’re given one door to walk through or two that lead to the same place, as long as you want to take that step.