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Six Silver Bullets
Author: William Dooling
Date: 2018
ADRIFT 5.0
Reviewed by Daza
This game is well written which is one of its strengths, it has dynamic
aspects and goals but similar format each play through. There is a sense of
tension as some encounters can waste one of the six bullets. Some of the
commands are not obvious, usually just one keyword which is often shown in
capital letters to give the hint this is what it expects.
You have to
keep track of each hour that passes as there is a deadline to get to your
extraction point in time and sometimes you might not get all the objectives
done. With each play through you learn the map and discover some new things. I
haven't completed the game, I came close. I did get stumped in some areas that
maybe will make more sense later on. Its a game you can play in short burst or
all evening.
I hope this game gets a sequel in the near future, with the
same style of writing and perhaps the gameplay expanded further.
Reviewed by Mike Spivey (Spike)
I spent more time playing Six Silver Bullets than I did any of the
other IFComp 2018 games during the competition period. Its immersive, addictive
gameplay kept me engaged for hours.
The game itself is parser-based and
written with ADRIFT. You wake up in a hotel room with your memories gone, a
locked safe, a mysterious note, a silver gun, and six silver bullets. It turns
out you're "Silver," one of several secret agents with colored code names.
The story is written in a noir-like style, complete with six-shooter, a
femme fatale you meet early on, and short, clipped sentences. Also, the
locations are more like archetypes than they are locations in some real world.
For example, there are The Restaurant, The Church, The Hamlet, The Library, etc.
As is usual for a game featuring amnesia, the goal is to figure out
what's going on. The mysterious note may or may not be from someone you can
trust, and the people that you meet may or may not be looking out for your best
interests.
The gameplay, though, is what kept me sticking with Six
Silver Bullets for hours. It is very easy to get killed in this game. But
that's intended: On each playthrough you gain more information about what's
going on, and you can use that information on subsequent playthroughs to uncover
even more of the story. In this sense it's a lot like Ryan Veeder's game The
Lurking Horror II: The Lurkening from last year. However, Six Silver
Bullets is MUCH larger and has a much more complicated plot than The
Lurkening. In fact, there are all kinds of plot twists and turns; I kept
changing my mind about which of the characters were trustworthy and even what
goals I wanted to pursue.
The endgame is satisfying, providing you with
a narratively consistent explanation of the entire setting, as well as why you
can continue to die and replay the story.
The only thing that kept
Six Silver Bullets from being one of my very favorite IFComp 2018 games is
its implementation. Some of this may be ADRIFT's parser, but there are lots and
lots of issues here - ranging from minor to serious to very frustrating. For
example, you often have to type the entire name of an object, even when it's
quite long. I really got tired of typing
(Spoiler
- click to show)"the gray
microfilm canister" over and over. Sometimes you can just type one or two
of the words, though. Also, sometimes you have to include "the" in front of a
dialogue option, and sometimes you don't. More serious problems include dialog
options that characters don't respond to, as well as several guess-the-verb
issues. There was even one instance where the parser only accepted a particular
misspelling of a word, not its correct spelling!
Still, frustrations
aside, I very much enjoyed Six Silver Bullets - enough to keep playing
the game for many hours. If these implementation issues could be fixed I'd
easily rate this game as five stars. Even with the parser frustrations, I'd call
it a four-star game.
Reviewed by Christopher Huang
We wake up in a hotel room knowing only that we are the Silver Agent. We
remember nothing else. Here is our weapon, a silver gun with six silver bullets.
And here's a yellow note from the Yellow Agent telling us what our mission is.
The mission consists of four parts, each changing randomly from game to game;
there's some suggestion that there's some weird Twilight Zone-ish force at work,
and that each time we "restart" the game, it's actually the same character being
resurrected to try the whole thing all over again with a bunch of things
switched around. Nothing is quite what it seems, and the use of knowledge
gleaned from previous playthroughs actually feels somehow justified.
It's
a phenomenally neat concept.
There are a couple of flaws in the
implementation, though. For one thing, the parser's rather picky, especially
when in conversation with someone else. I noted a couple of times where "Ask
about [something]" wasn't understood, but "Ask about the [something]" was. It's
as if the author wrote up several of the key verb-noun actions as ...
incantations, if you will. The game doesn't understand these particular actions
as verbs coupled with nouns, but as strings of letters, and you better get them
all right. And then, after offering a bunch of possible conversation topics,
half of them seem to be unimplemented. On one occasion, I found myself in a
conversation with no way of getting out -- and the game insists that you leave
an "encounter" properly before doing anything else. It got a bit frustrating.
Still, the writing was interesting. As a secret agent, our view of the world
looks like a series of quickly jotted notes: nouns of interest, listed
objectively. It's pretty effective. And the various agents all seem to have
their own stories and connections to us, and their own personalities as well.
Except perhaps the Blue Agent, who I suspect is only our own paranoia being
projected onto the local police force.
I imagine this breakfast as kind
of like a Western omelette that's gotten unfortunately stuck to the pan. The
ingredients are good and it's still delicious, but the execution's gone a bit
wrong and you'll have to proceed carefully. The accompanying tea is on the tepid
side: stir vigorously or the sugar will all end up at the bottom of the cup.
Reviewed by Mathbrush
This is a game that was hard to play during the competition, for a few
reasons, and those same reasons make it much better to play now.
-It is
a large Adrift game, and Adrift is an engine where a lot of commands don't work.
This game gives you hints about the commands in the text, but this requires
careful reading of the text.
-This game is randomized, so you can't just
repeat commands from memory. The map is the same, however.
-This game is
big. It has a few dozen locations, runs on a timer, and has many NPCs with many
interaction options. There are little encounters too that happen frequently.
-This game is hard. Really hard. I played it 5 or 6 times before completing
one of the biggest mission objectives. You have to keep track of tons of things:
where stuff is located, where people are, what times things happen.
So
this is definitely a game to be savored. But it is rewarding.
Reviewed by
Herr M.
Escape the nameless city in a thrilling spy story
+ Ambitious scope,
elaborate background
+ Distinct characters, lots of interaction
+
Mysteries within mysteries, multilayered story
+ There is a greater secret
which is worth unravelling
+ Multiple endings with very different outcomes
- The blurb slightly undersells the game
- Stingy parser
= Warning
Spoiler! : Just like playing an interactive Philip K. Dick novel… and one of the
better ones to boot!
One of the most exciting things about unravelling
a mystery is piecing your clues together and trying to make sense of it all.
Just think of the fun you can have while coming up with your own interpretation
of what is going on or your very own version of the truth. You do not have to be
right, on the contrary coming up with a theory which turns out to be wrong can
be even more entertaining because it only makes the mystery deeper. And the
deeper it gets the more curious and therefore involved you get.
Reviewed by Sam Kabo Ashwell
Six Silver Bullets is a parser-based spy game. It’s weird and uncomfortable.
It’s an odd duck, difficult to assess. I expect to get at least one game a year
completely wrong, and this seems a strong candidate for that.
You
awaken.
You know nothing about yourself. If you had memories, they are
gone.
So part of the reason why amnesia tends to suck as a device is that
it’s often paired with a story that takes a very long time to get going, because
the author doesn’t really know what’s going on and therefore doesn’t know how to
get to it. This is not the case here: it is impressed on you that you have to
start doing shit immediately. There’s limited time. There’s someone knocking at
your door right this minute and they might be here to kill you.
This is
the rare amnesia game in which it actually feels as though something really bad
has happened to your brain. The world… doesn’t lack detail, and indeed it often
seems to be going for a lurid Lynchian aesthetic, but it’s described in a
cut-down way that gives the impression of tunnel vision. There’s a sense of
foreboding and paranoia; your mistrust is often justified, and there’s an
overwhelming sense of doom. You constantly need to know things that you don’t
know. You are often forbidden to do things because of psychological
conditioning.
In the meantime there’s a bunch of spy-vs-spy shit in which
you have to guess at who to trust (almost nobody) and who’s going to try to kill
you (almost everyone). It verges quite a lot into cliche – more than once I was
put in mind of the conspiracy-theory sequence in Psychonauts – in ways that aim
to transcend cliche and go right on into epic. The setting is The City; key
players include the Enemies of Freedom, the Organisation, the Resistance. Every
Agent is identified by a colour codename, and naming them is implied to have
power. I found, I think, one real name.
There’s a lot of violence, and
it’s pretty brutal, but it feels risky, high-cost: those six bullets make me
think of violence as a limited resource, one I wasn’t happy about spending at
random. And there’s a lot of randomness in the game. Apart from the inerrant six
bullets, combat and sneaking are subject to random chance. Your Mission
objectives are different each time, although they form a pattern: kill two
random agents, protect another, and perform one further task. At least once I
had already killed the agent I was meant to protect before I read the mission
briefing. Doing the Mission may not be the correct thing at all. You are
expected to replay, a lot. Like if Varicella‘s puzzles were randomised. It’s
strongly implied that this recurrence is part of the plot. It is not a game that
anybody is likely to make much headway on in two hours.
Houses
cluster close, the rain drives them together. Beats against bay windows and
peaked roofs. A village was here, before the city took it. Many houses: a
victorian, a brownstone, a colonial. Water washes through gutters. No one is out
in this. Why are you?
The clipped-down writing lets it pack in quite a
lot of detail, and this works well in context. You don’t feel slowed down by the
text, and the images it summons up are often striking.
It does quite a
lot of things that I’d usually consider bad design. The map layout is
unintuitive. Randomness is deployed in ways that are intentionally unfair;
sometimes this is made clear, sometimes not. (Your gender is randomised, and
this has effects, but this is not immediately obvious.) UNDO is disabled, except
immediately after death. Moving to a place often doesn’t automatically LOOK.
Exits are often unlisted or described ambiguously. Time matters, a lot, but
there’s no easy way to check it. The implementation is decidedly rough in
places, in that way that Adrift pieces are often rough – you can go INSIDE and
OUTSIDE but not IN or OUT, and referring to “it” in commands often gets the
wrong thing. The opening instructions say (Type HELP or CREDITS at any time),
but CREDITS doesn’t work; sometimes commands offered to you don’t work, either,
particularly in conversation. It all adds up to feeling like a lot of effort to
play, and some of this is absolutely intentional, and some of it almost
certainly isn’t.
A potent and strange experience. One of the more
striking pieces of the Comp, though I’m not precisely sure how to score it.
Reviewed by McT
This is an unusual game. We are a spy – the Silver agent. We wake up in a
hotel room with no memory, but we quickly are given a mission to undertake. Then
there is a knock on the door.
It becomes apparent very quickly that we
can’t complete this game in a single play through. Time is limited. Death is
frequent and immediate. Choices are random – we don’t know what the result of
our actions is going to be. It’s audacious. After 2 hours, I still have not
reached a ‘winning’ ending.
I’m not sure exactly how to classify this
game. I’m not seeing many puzzles, as such. In effect, the whole game is a
dynamic puzzle system of exploration and choices. With randomization. We wander
around a large city map, occasionally meeting agents – we get to ask them about
things we have no idea of – the cyclotron, the bomb. We have a mission which
varies from play through to play through. Gradually, after several plays, things
start to slot into place. Our choices become more considered as we decide which
side we’re going to take.
The text is written in short, sharp, breathless
bursts. it’s effective in introducing an immediacy to the game play. There is
also a genuine feeling of paranoia and danger. It is also deliberately unfair.
Things which kill me and/or advance the game seem to be randomized. Searching.
Death. All the choices I have when I meet another agent. It’s tempting to kill
everyone, but I only have six bullets.
The game does have a few
implementation problems to be honest. The text could do with another once-over –
there are some grating grammatical problems here. The commands you type need to
be absolutely precise and include ‘the’ (I never type ‘the’ in IF!). A couple of
issues with game logic. For example I was hiding from someone and they picked up
and examined an object I was holding. Some sensible actions are not implemented.
‘Wear the cloak’ – “you simply cannot do that”. Am I already wearing it?
And….aargh….exits are often not mentioned in room descriptions! On moving around
the map, sometimes room descriptions are not given till I look. Error messages
are not at all helpful. The credits command doesn’t work.
Occasionally,
commands just don’t work at all: “You could SEARCH the restaurant.” >search “If
only you could.”
Despite the problems, there is something….I don’t
know…compelling and addictive about this game. I can’t put my finger on it. But
it just…works as a game. 7/10.
Reviewed by
dgtziea
I had the ADRIFT 5.0 runner set up already, so why not try
another ADRIFT game?
So this one's definitely got a concept. It's a
cloak-and-dagger spy game. You are SILVER AGENT. Wiped memories, a gun. Six
bullets. And a CITY of color-coded spies out there. Some of 'em might be willing
to help, many more are out to kill you. And there's a shadowy ORGANIZATION in
the background...
What you're actually doing is moving around locales in
the city. The Skyscraper, The Bar, The Alley, The Nightclub. Not a lot of
descriptions in all of them, but there are some seemingly random encounters as
you explore. And you can choose various actions to take. Do you TRUST the GREEN
AGENT, THREATEN them, KILL them? SNEAK past the guard, or BRIBE them?
INFILTRATE, or IGNORE The Mansion? This ends up feeling almost choice-based, in
a way, because all the actions at each place is listed for you. Some minor
issues with not knowing whether I was inside or outside of buildings, or some
commands not being understood even following exact syntax. The ADRIFT auto-map
helps a lot (I had to turn it on under Window). There are places to hide, and
you'll find some agents and locations will be able to give you more information,
about who to trust maybe, or what secrets some locations might offer. So there
are a lot of cool ideas here.
Conceptually then, it feels like it should
be a limited information game, where you use deductive reasoning based off of
incomplete data as you move around the city. In practice, it can feel a bit
random, because the info isn't sequentially given to you. You might not have
found any info on an agent you're facing down, so you'll be told that they're a
good fighter, that they seem to be looking for someone, but you're just rolling
the dice a bit beyond that, sometimes literally, because KILLing them or
SNEAKing past have percentage chances to fail. If you do find someone willing to
talk to you, a lot of the questions don't seem to be based on stuff you already
know, so you're a lot of the time choosing from a bunch of questions on places
and agents you haven't even encountered yet, which also sort of doesn't jibe
with the whole notion of this being about info-gathering. Any encounter that
goes awry can end with your death, or their's. Some stuff is randomized, but the
map, and what each location offers, seems to be set, and it seems like some of
the agents are stationed at specific spots as well, and that knowledge
definitely helps a lot on subsequent playthroughs. I never did get to the point
where I felt like I could enact much of a strategy for most encounters, though
(and knowing some useful places to visit first doesn't feel necessarily
strategic). It seems like it'd be difficult to finish without at least playing
through a couple times to get a layout of the city and the story, at which point
both the amnesia angle and the do-or-die one I feel would get diluted?
The prose definitely goes full-bore noir, and it hits it well overall, although
sometimes there's an overloading of the terse sentence fragments, and the rhythm
gets a bit off as a result. There was one line like "this is a nightmare" which
most stood out as not fitting in with the curt, clipped delivery of the rest of
the text. But when people start talking, it feels conspiratorial, it feels like
there's just a glimpse of a web being untangled in front of you, and that does
sell a lot of this concept to me.
Overall, then? Tone works: it feels
like a shadowy, oppressive city. Paranoia sets in. You second guess. The pieces
of info you do get, really do feel like meaningful pieces of a larger puzzle,
the only issue being the puzzle itself is maybe a bit too large, especially when
so many of the pieces you flip over are landmines (ah, metaphor breaking down,
but you get the idea...). I dunno, there are gameplay choices here that seem
really at odds with each other, but the pieces of lore are actually pretty
enticing, and I like quite a bit of what this is going for. If the setting
sounds interesting, maybe give this a try at least.
So I wrote most of
the above before reading dfabulich's review. The 10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal problem
seems mostly aimed at describing same-y, meaningless randomness. The randomness
in Six Silver Bullets actually seems very meaningful overall, in a way that
severely impacts your run-through, while still not being something the player
can always seem to play around (the mechanical connection). I played through a
third time, quickly, just now, and for example, there's an agent right outside
the hotel room when you wake up, and it turns out they're random too. First
playthrough, I died very quickly to them immediately, did UNDO, then had to
shoot them. Nothing on their body. Second playthrough, I avoided them. Last one,
they were friendly, so they actually gave me A LOT of background, then an item.
Starting off the game, you can get a lot of info immediately, or none, or an
immediate game over. So... if the randomness of the results of these encounters
were actually a bit more same-y -- more standardised, less all-or-nothing -- I
think, maybe, it'd feel more like I was making progress as I played, and less
like I was wandering around the city gathering as much as possible for a
"serious" future run before my luck (and bullets) ran out? Thinking about this
more, I think I was treating this more like a story where I was very much trying
to keep alive, and maybe instead this actually should be treated fully as a
roguelike/Varicella?
Reviewed by
Thomas Mack
In addition to math and interactive fiction, I
also spend a significant fraction of my time playing board games. One particular
genre of game in the rotation is the RPG-like adventure game like “Arkham
Horror” or “Mansions of Madness”, in which characters traverse a map and have
scripted encounters using their stats and whatever items or abilities they’ve
found in their previous exploration. “Six Silver Bullets” is a game in that
spirit, with the encounters mostly concerning enemy agents the protagonist
encounters.
Gameplay: The protagonist is some sort of secret agent or
assassin with amensia. As he wanders around game space, he frequently encounters
other agents, who may be friendly or hostile. It’s unclear which on first
meeting them, though he starts out with a few hints about particular agents.
Although the game is ostensibly parser-based, there are a few explicit options
given at each encounter. Because of its randomness, size, and amensiac plot, the
game can be a bit confusing. There’s an undo feature to reduce frustration at
the randomness of encounters, but it’s often unclear how to proceed in the game.
5/10.
Mechanics: Although there are others in the game, its core is the
set of encounters with other agents. Those events are randomized, though the
player is often given indications about how difficult the rolls will be for the
various outcome. The gameplay feels a bit opaque as a result, especially with
the difficulties in figuring what the player should be doing in the game. One
particularly interesting mechanic is the set of titular bullets, each of which
lands an automatic kill against an agent when used. 4/10.
Presentation:
The terse, clipped style of the game suits its protagonist, even if it’s a bit
overdone. The agents’ descriptions appear to be randomized, but that doesn’t
detract from the game. Fundamentally, it feels like a board game, with randomly
generated missions, randomized outcomes for encounters, and some basic state for
the world. It’s a novel style of play I haven’t seen much in interactive
fiction. (It’s particularly compelling to me because of the main drawbacks of
games like “Arkham Horror” is its long play time, which a single-player
computerized version neatly avoids.) 5/10.
You might be interested in
this game if: You enjoy games like “Arkham Horror.”
Score: 5
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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