I’ve been horsing around a bit with Echo Bazaar. The game itself is nothing special: It’s a clickfest in the idiom of Mafia Wars and Vampire Wars and presumably any number of Wars preceded by a compelling noun or perhaps adjective.
This is me. If you see someone dressed like this bearing down on you, prepare to be watched, or maybe seduced.From a setting perspective, Echo Bazaar is an amazing piece of work. It’s a shining example of broad-strokes worldbuilding, in that each piece of the lore you discover illuminates one point in a gaslamp-dim world. The prose is exceedingly well-written, with attention not only to the spoken word, but to the cadence of those words. The writers understand the weight of adjectives, but don’t pound you with them. The sentences build momentum. The images leave enough unspoken to let the reader fill in the lacunae with his imagination.
The construction of the challenges themselves loop back upon one another, referring the player back to certain “chapters” after he thought them complete, or left their avenues unexplored due to other interests. Something the player finds early on might be a mere trinket, or it might be the key to a new adventure that draws him in with an expectant, “Oh, yeah, I remember that!” Discovery and exploration are the meat of the game. The PVP experience is moodily titled “The Game of Knife and Candle.”
Where it starts to unravel is in the actual gameplay. Again, this is a “clicker.” A challenge appears as described by the text, with mostly charming colorized line art illustration. The player clicks a button that amounts to “Deal with the challenge in an appropriate course of action.” A probability engine works some boojum behind the curtains and the player receives the results.
I find this nigh-criminal game design, which is a shame, because so much of the rest of the Echo Bazaar experience is so enthralling.
First, stuff that happens behind the curtains is horribly disempowering and disengaging. Should I see what’s happening? Shouldn’t I be able to affect it in some way? I’m the player… isn’t the game about my participation? At best, I can use the standard item buff, but even that simply augments the randomized result, rather than having a reliable effect that I can control.
Passing gossip is the same click-click-click as knife-fighting in the gutter or reading a demon’s True Name scrawled on a wall.Second, the system is the same for all interactions. I click a button to fight. I click a button to seduce. I click a button to spy. I click a button to eavesdrop. This… this is a heartbreaker. Obviously, this isn’t a simulation, but the only thing that indicates that I have chosen a particular style of resolution is the result text. At its grossest reduction, this doesn’t need any fancy supportive text or interesting art. It could just be carried by a simple “SOLVE” button. The result is that combat feels like stealth which feels like persuasion which feels like investigation and they’re all as bland as instant grits. A note to designers everywhere: If you’re making a computer game, you can’t fall back on the tabletop game convention of tying all your game interactions to a single mechanic. Tabletop games have a human referee to creatively interpret the results of the single-engine die rolls. Video games need to create different interfaces for their different experiences so it doesn’t all boil down to doing the same thing. (You know part of why I’m crushing so hard on Puzzle Pirates? This is another thing they do well.)
Still, despite the repetitive, uninspiring gameplay, I find myself compelled by the setting. I want to find out more, in the wonderful bits-and-pieces way the experience doles out its scraps of precious world lore. I just wish despondently that the actual play was as engaging as the environment.
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