The Little Ugly, Evil Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:
You know this guy killed his parents, don’t you? He’s breaking out so he can dig up their skeletons and have a little tea party with them. AND YOU HELPED HIM DO IT!
The Little Nice, Handsome Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:
What a fun adventure! It’s a short game, but there’s two whole worlds to explore!
My Verdict:
David Hughes totally ignored the main question everyone who plays this game will have. I can respect that.
Game Information
Game Type: Inform
Author Info: Who is this guy? What’s his plan? I don’t know, but he seems to have also written a game called Sporkery 1: There Will Be Sporking. I’m not touching that one with a ten foot spork.
Download Link: https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/parallel.z5
Other Games By This Author: Sporkery 1: There Will Be Sporking
Parallel is a game that is set in an asylum. It puts you in the role of a patient at the facility who wants to escape. You just happen to be able to travel to a parallel world where analogues of objects and people in the “real world” appear in different forms. Altering the parallel world also causes changes in the real world. Ostensibly, your goal in the game is to use your special power to get out of the loony bin and go back to your family. David Hughes seems to want to make you think that’s what you should do, since that’s how you win the game…but should you really go along with it? That’s the question that has plagued me both day and night ever since I first played this game.
I mean just stop and think about it for a moment. The protagonist believes a gypsy granted him the ability to travel to a parallel, often disturbing world. When he tells his family about this, they alert the authorities. Abuses in the mental health system set aside, that sounds perfectly reasonable to me — we don’t need another guy thinking he’s slaughtering orcs in Middle-Earth when he’s really shooting up a school. This is where the story starts to fall apart. The dude in the asylum claims his parents want him back and the asylum, especially the evil supervising nurse Maggie, is unfairly trying to keep him confined. Think about things from his parents’ perspective here for a moment. Do they REALLY want this kid back? Imagine the conversation:
Dad: “Gee, honey, the house feels so empty these days. Do you remember when little Billy would come back from his ‘trips’ upstairs and tell us all about how everything was a different color and looked really desolate up there?”
Mom: “Oh, yes, dear, that was really creepy. Uh, I mean I sure do. I’d do anything to have little Billy back home. I’d even harbor him from the authorities if he managed to escape the asylum. I totally don’t have Nurse Maggie on speed dial in preparation for that event ever happening.”
Radio: “We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to inform you that Maggie Slater, head nurse at Silver Fountain Asylum, has been brutally murdered with a toy action figure by one of the patients at the asylum. A different patient has escaped from the facility and is believed to be responsible for locking Nurse Maggie in the room of her murderer. The escaped patient is highly delusional and should not be approached under any circumstances…”
Dad: “LITTLE BILLY’S COMING HOME!!!!”
Mom: “Oh God, oh God. No. This cannot be happening. Not again…”
The subject David Hughes seems intent on ignoring is the one everyone who plays this game is going to be wondering about: is this guy (the main character, not David himself) crazy? Those of us who have read or seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest know that not everyone in an asylum is actually going to be sick. We also know that nurses in positions of authority in asylums are completely unlike other types of nurses because they are totally evil and actually enjoy torturing people who are sane. So, yeah, it is certainly possible the protagonist is someone we should feel good about saving. On the other hand, what he’s going through sounds a lot like a delusion. The parallel world he visits isn’t very fleshed out and feels a lot like the asylum itself with some restrictions removed and some unsettling elements inserted. There’s nothing in the text that makes it clear that the game is set in a mental patient’s delusion, but you can’t discount the possibility. That certainly tempered the satisfaction I felt upon “freeing” the protagonist in this game. There’s also the potential that our hero is not just sick but actually dangerous because he definitely ends up putting his nemesis in a very perilous position when it seems like he could have theoretically used his powers to just stick her in a bathroom or something. The revenge was satisfying, but I still felt guilty. All that said, we do have to remember magic can be real in adventure games. You don’t play Enchanter and assume everyone’s nuts. Maybe I’m just reading too much into the whole asylum thing. Maybe our narrator really is reliable. Maybe he’s really being persecuted despite being sane and really needed to get out of this nuthouse so he could go live a happy life with his family again. I have to try to believe that no matter what my reason and that ugly guy on my shoulder are telling me. The alternative is just too disturbing to contemplate…
Dad: “Hey, that’s funny…what did I do with my axe? I was sure it was right around here somewhere.”
Little Billy: “I’ve got a gift for you, Mommy. It was a rose in the parallel world!”
Mom: “No, no, no! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
I do think parallel worlds can be a great element in interactive fiction, and Parallel uses about the simplest way to switch between worlds you’ll come across: you simply go “up” to go to the parallel world and “down” to go back to Earth (or whatever it is). This choice of directions is certainly provocative since the parallel world seems kind of hellish, but maybe the message is that asylums are worse than Hell itself. Your actions in both worlds are essentially limited to the movement of objects (the choice of what object to move where is the only type of puzzle you’ll find here). The fact that most things I tried to do didn’t work made me hate the parser, but this is a game that deliberately allows for only a very limited range of activities. You’ll probably enjoy it more the sooner you discover and accept this. Three verbs ought to be enough for everyone! The descriptions are about as sparse as the command list but do seem to fit the bleakness of the asylum and parallel world. All in all, Parallel is pretty decent for a really short game: it perhaps inadvertently makes you think and it’s pretty entertaining to travel between worlds.
Simple Rating: 6/10
Complicated Rating: 26/50
Story: 6/10
Writing: 5/10
Playability: 6/10
Puzzle Quality: 6/10
Parser Responsiveness: 3/10