Counterfeit Monkey

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Counterfeit Monkey is a 2012 interactive fiction espionage game by Emily Short.

Contents

Plot and gameplay

The game is set in Anglophone Atlantis, the world's greatest center for linguistic manipulation, and where the danger of the shifting reality has resulted in a police state run by language pedants trying to restrict language in order to keep an orderly reality. [1] : 13m  The state had become independent in 1822 by shooting a depluralizing cannon at attacking ships to make it one ship, and then shot that ship. [1] : 14m9s 

The player has been merged with another person. They are equipped with one full-alphabet "letter remover" and are tasked with getting off the island [2] and thwarting the bureaucrats. [1] : 13m49s  Other tools are "homonym paddles" and an "umlaut puncher". [3]

Short identified three categories of puzzles: [1] : 31m39s 

Transformations can be completed by several steps, removing one letter at a time but only as long as each step results in an actual word.

Development and release

The game was inspired by Leather Goddesses of Phobos and expands on that game's T-puzzle. [1] : 19m38s 

It was developed in Inform 7 and is licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Short said of the game that it has merciful design (with an optional hard-mode) with multiple solutions and achievements for esoteric solutions. [1] : 22m40s 

It was first released in 2012 [2] and the latest release was in February 2023. [4]

Reception and awards

Rock Paper Shotgun appreciated the joy of "gazing on your environment with the knowledge that it can be linguistically reshaped" and that puzzles had multiple solutions thus making success feeling personalized, ending the review with "With over eight hours of delicious wordplay, Counterfeit Monkey is a powerful start to interactive fiction in 2013.". [5]

GameTrailers gave the game a score of 9.4, summarizing the game as "consistently surprising and adroit, engaged with its own core without drowning in witty self-referential winks [...] Successful, smart, and fun". They wrote about it that "Counterfeit Monkey [is] a delight, displacing the age-old 'guess the verb' mentality and challenging you to excise your inventory to perfect noun", and appreciated the ease of navigation and the conversation system. [3] They wrote further that "Beyond the novelty of language, the game resonates with its setting and story, a mixture of Orwell and Steampunk, but not quite either, with a dash of modern allusions making this crazy world seam real." [3] Of the design they wrote "while the game doesn't sport polygons or physics, it's a complex piece of code". [3]

The Short Game, in their 192:nd episode, called it the best reviewed free game they had ever covered. [1] : 1m46s  They noted how the appreciation for the game had increased further over the years since its release and said that "anyone who pays attention to the scene has realized [it's] one of the games that will totally truly stand the test of time and is a true classic in the medium." and very influential. They praised the game's tutorial, the flexible and intuitive parser, and how the game was intended to be approachable for players new to interactive fiction while the central mechanics was described as unique, mind-blowing, and explored in great depth. [1] : 6m16s  Raygan Kelly referred to the saying "the dev-team thought of everything" and added that he had never played a game where that were more true. He appreciated how Short, even when an option was not allowed, had something funny or clever to say about it and with a wink of "Yes, I see you! I see what you're trying, and I like it." [1] : 14m50s  Kelly said the game succeeded in striking a balance with the massive city where the player never felt lost and that the huge inventory did not feel overwhelming. Instead these were aspects that made the player feel free. [1] : 30m50s  Other highlighted descriptions for the game are "word play puzzle game", "crossword puzzle on steroids", "scrabble tiles for real life", "first-person-parser-shooter", and a "portal for the English language". [1] : 9m44s 

The game won "Best game" in the 2012 XYZZY Awards, is (2023) listed #1 in the Interactive Fiction Database top 100, [6] and was voted #1 in a member vote in 2023. [7]

Related Research Articles

Interactive fiction (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.

<i>Zork</i> 1977 video game

Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.

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Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. Inform can generate programs designed for the Z-code or Glulx virtual machines. Versions 1 through 5 were released between 1993 and 1996. Around 1996, Nelson rewrote Inform from first principles to create version 6. Over the following decade, version 6 became reasonably stable and a popular language for writing interactive fiction. In 2006, Nelson released Inform 7, a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor.

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The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film. The awards were inaugurated in 1997 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of XYZZYnews. Any game released during the year prior to the award ceremony is eligible for nomination to receive an award. The decision process takes place in two stages: members of the interactive fiction community nominate works within specific categories and sufficiently supported nominations become finalists within those categories. Community members then vote among the finalists, and the game receiving a plurality of votes is given the award in an online ceremony.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Short</span> Interactive fiction writer

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Raygan Kelly, Laura Nash. "192: Counterfeit Monkey" (mp3), The Short Game, 12 August 2019.
  2. 1 2 "Counterfeit Monkey" at the Interactive Fiction Database.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "Counterfeit Monkey - Review?", GameTrailers , 1 April 2013.
  4. ↑ "Counterfeit Monkey", github.com.
  5. ↑ Porpentine. "Live Free, Play Hard: The Week's Finest Free Indie Games ", Rock Paper Shotgun , 6 January 2013.
  6. ↑ "IFDB Top 100" (archived), ifdb.org, 13 November 2023.
  7. ↑ "Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2023 edition)", ifdb.org, 15 September 2023.
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