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1-12 of 12 Atmospheric horror game set in Venice, but needed smoother implementation, January 4, 2024This is an atmospheric horror parser game, where you play a film actress, and end up caught in a bizarre series of events in 1970s Venice. If you’ve seen the film Don’t Look Now it absolutely has the feel of that. And the terror is real. Especially for me as a woman playing. Yet it was still an appealing world that I felt happy to be immersed in, as much as I didn’t want bad things to happen. Venice is one of my favourite places in the world. We go there in the depths of winter, when it’s so spooky. And quiet.
Where the game falls down is in the implementation. Timing is critical in many scenes, so it’s a special problem if you run into fight the parser problems. So many logical alternative commands are not supported. It makes it less smooth to play than it should be. There are also quite a lot more typos than I expected. I wonder if the game writing time was a bit tighter than the author might like. More playtesting could definitely have helped.
However it was a very atmospheric game. It captured much of the Venice I recognise. And I enjoyed playing. I just wish the implementation had been a bit smoother.
Film Theory 101 - Lesson 6, Italian Giallo, December 21, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
“I love your work.”
“You mean, you love to watch me die.”
Students? This is how you start a film. Crisp dialogue, like a punch in the chest. Get the audience enthralled from the get go. Today we are studying a retro-Giallo, Barcarolle in Yellow. I trust you have done the required reading, and viewed the background Argento, Fulci, Bava. You’ll want that background later when we cover DePalma as well.
First thoughts. Anyone? Hm, let me prime the conversation a bit. Note the playful opening credits, the rapid single dialogue snapshots, intercut with spare authorship text, building to the roar of the graphical title page. Delightful. The graphical design of that title page itself is pitch perfect in setting the mood.
Then the complete break to… anyone? Spaghetti Western, yes of course. The western scene that itself was a fakeout to introduce our star. Terrific use of pace and misdirection to keep the audience on its toes, looking for purchase. I am hard pressed to think of a film that so sure-handedly established its protagonist, mood and expectations.
What do we think of the train station scene? Less focused, no? It starts to get away from the director here. I’m sure you all spotted some technical issues, anyone? Yes, our protagonist seemed to search too long for the right wordplay. The director insisted on overprecise blocking, but declined to leave instructions for the actors. The effect was a floundering performance, where if the actress did not say or do the EXACT phrase, the ensemble left her hanging. The ‘hail a cab’ sequence was particularly befuddling where sometimes it was on screen, and sometimes not without clear explanation. The director helpfully provided a script, but it was woefully incomplete. In the later bridge scene it was actually deceptive, but lets stay in the train station a bit longer.
After an interminable march of repeated dream sequence deaths or static head turning, I hope you all consulted the provided shooting guides. The “Walkthrough” in the parlance of this director. You will note that what the director was looking for was (Spoiler - click to show)a dropped scarf. You cannot fault the actress for not reading her director’s mind. Only after this arbitrary and unforeshadowed detail is finally serviced do we proceed, nearly a half of our runtime expired! You will note some jarring editing choices there, too. Previous characters appearing from nowhere, non sequitor dialogue and inexplicable footage of the director themself intercut with a tense chase scene.
What do we think of the production values on display here? The Venice setting is lovingly rendered in the large, but closeups suffer. Granted, this can be an afterthought to some giallo, but the masters perversely paid INSANE attention to it. For Argento it sometimes was the POINT of a scene. There are flashes in Barcarolle, but all too often the camera panned too far one way or the other and the set was exposed on screen. Even for simple things, like views through windows. The film makes the curious choice to chide the lead actress for these shortcomings. At first playful it starts to feel vindictive after a while.
There is a short scene of voyeurism and aggressive sexual tension that does some work to restoring the atmosphere of the piece, though even there, the director character inexplicably repeats their dialogue.
The subsequent bridge scene repeats a lot of the sins of the train terminal. Our protagonist is asked to perform to a script that turns out to not be what the director wanted. One sequence, where the script called for (Spoiler - click to show)snapping a photo of the bridge, then the antagonist, until the protagonist did them in reverse order the scene was allowed to drag. Similarly, her scene partner was supposed to be a provocatively dressed woman, when (Spoiler - click to show)the bit player was instead an elderly man. The main actress can be forgiven thinking she was off mark for long stretches of time there.
It ends with a tense fall from the bridge, to a dream death after reasonable attempts to swim to safety are rebuffed.
Well, that was as far as we were assigned today! So how do we assess this effort so far class? It seems hard to believe the director is allowing the lead actress to flounder (with contradictory instructions!) without some underlying purpose or artistic statement in mind. But if intentional, the first two hours show no hint of it. Even if true, I think the impact on the audience is the same - without access to the “walkthrough” the audience has no practical hope of understanding the work. Certainly, modern multi-media artworks utilize this kind of cross-media trick, but for a retro-Giallo it seems misplaced. The directorial choices, and perhaps sloppy shortcomings are deeply Intrusive to the viewer’s experience. And yet, do not lose sight of that powerful beginning, and many wonderful details throughout the work. There are Sparks to this work without question.
I see our time is nearly up. For tomorrow, let’s look at the cross influences of Hitchock and Giallo. We will return to this work after the semester is complete, for those interested in extra credit.
Played: 10/6/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Intrusively Buggy, almost Unplayable without walkthrough. Sparks of Joy in subject matter and opening sequences
Would Play After Comp?: Probably. I am too enamored of the source inspiration not to.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Missed the mark with loads of potential, December 16, 2023 Barcarolle in Yellow is a meta parser, working as an interactive movie script for a pulpy giallo, blurring the lines between reality and movie scenes. You play as B-list probably-washed-out actress Eva Chantry as she gets the call to star in the eponymous movie. With a twist-on-twist-on-twist, the game includes multiple endings (found A, I know of at least 6), in-game hints, and a walkthrough for one ending (A).
This game got me a bit conflicted.
The premise is enticing, the poster is so eye-catching, and the starting scene? an incredible way of hooking players. So darn unique! With the formatting the game introduction and credits, the game seem to play heavily on movie codes. With its whole fake-cult movie vibe, it reminded me a bit of the Goncharov meme. I was really intrigued with what the game had to offer, what meta commentary it might be making about the genre, or how to approach the scene/real-life aspect.
Then I started the game… and the problems followed. During the first proper playable scene, a Spaghetti Western filmed in Spain, events ended up repeating itself when I took off my costume after the shoot ended, with the director screaming CUT again, belittling Eva for screwing with filming.
The following scene is timed, with any wrong move, any missing action, leading you to your early death. I died and restarted the game so many times because of that ONE scene needed a very specific sequence of actions to ward off your stalker. The timing is so tight it barely takes into account failing or asking for hints.
The rest of the game feels pretty railroady, with us/Eva getting few opportunities to have agency. This makes sense, considering she is an actress playing the role given to her, following the directions told. You have some options of choices here and there, which influences the story, but not much more. There is only one path you can take, or you’d lose the game, essentially.
But the game is not always clear about which actions are the wanted ones. It does provide hints, which are formatted like snippets of a movie script, telling the player a general idea of what they should do next (this was so smart!). Sometimes, the necessary (and unusual) action is not included in the hint… making things complicated.
This maybe the most obvious in that first times scene. I had to look the walkthrough up to avoid (finally) dying right at the start. It really takes you out of the immersion the game so craft-fully created in the prior moments. It happens again when shooting the scene on the bridge. The undercluing really messes with playing.
After trying and failing to get through the game… I just opened the walkthrough and followed it to the letter… or tried to. Your hotel in Venice changes name with every playthrough (that was neat), but only one is included there (so I died… again and again, until I realised what was wrong). I would have been nice if the walkthrough included all possible paths instead of just that one ending…
I’m sure someone will end up publishing a comprehensive walkthrough at some point…
The writing goes all-in in the giallo genre, with the depiction of Eva as this seductress woman in her hotel room - the character being overtly sexualised, but also wink-wink hihihi - as well as being the subject of quite a large amount of violence… and not being able to do much about it on or off screen. It’s not really pleasant to go through, honestly, and I am not sure what the point of the game was concerning this.
Was it discussing how movies with shitty budgets have bad production periods where accidents happen but everyone have to deal with it? Is this a commentary on standards in the entertainment industry for actresses, especially in terms of being replaceable when their attractiveness fade? Or about the psychology being having no agency through the frame of an “adventure” game? Is there even a message in all this? Do you need to find all the endings to get the overall picture? (I hope not…)
This game had ticked all the checkboxes for being incredible, but its potential just fell flat with the muddled and sometimes buggy implementation. It has a good solid back bone, and some neat things (the script formatting and custom messages), but it still needs quite a bit of tweaking to make it the cult movie/game it is hoping to be.
Final note: spam Z at the end of the game for bonus features.
- dgtziea, December 13, 2023
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3 people found the following review helpful:
Theatrical Reality (or vice versa?), December 11, 2023(This review is based on the IFComp version of the game.)
I already liked the sound of this title before I knew what it meant. It has an inviting ring to it. Then I looked up “barcarolle” and found it’s a Venetian gondoliers’ folk song. That got me interested even more. A bit more searching learned that the “yellow” refers to an Italian murder/horror/mystery film and literature genre, named after the distinctive yellow (“giallo”) covers of the pulp novels that started the style.
An actress travels to Venice to star in a Giallo film. On her first night, she barely escapes a murder attempt. During filming the next day, a similar attack happens.
Barcarolle in Yellow is set up as an interactive movie script, blurring the lines between what is the scripted movie world and what is the in-game real world. Failed commands are met with an angry director’s voice telling you to focus on the part, descriptions of the player character’s actions make reference to an unseen audience, people around you are viewed as through a camera lens,…
Eva, the PC, is filming in Venice, so we also follow her during her acting work, and have to enter the commands according to the prewritten script she has to follow, adding another layer of confusion as to which world we’re engaging with.
As I noticed in the author’s work 1958: Dancing with Fear, IF is a genre that lends itself very well to a cinematic scripted style, allowing the player to direct the main character and decide on the action. Here, in Barcarolle in Yellow it seems that a perfect opportunity presents itself for a suspenseful murder mystery. The story is divided in scenes and acts, each with its own pace, atmosphere and tension. We can almost see the camera cut from one location to the other in the transition between scenes.
The writing is good, with a nice balance between attention to the surroundings (or the set…), and the events happening to our main character Eva Chantry. I like the use of space, with part of Venice condensed down to a handful of locations without feeling cramped.
I love the idea of the game.
But, however much I want to, I do not like this game as it is entered in the Comp. Perhaps aiming for next year’s Spring Thing would have offered the author more time to make it as good as it can be.
A game that’s modeled after a suspenseful film should move. Half the time I spent with Barcarolle has been struggling with the parser and unclear directions.
A game that depends on smoothly following the course of action, dragging the player along with the action and putting her on the corner of her seat with tension needs a generous, forgiving parser.
Synonyms for all the nouns should be abundant, every action should have half a dozen alternate commands, the player should be able to trust that her intuitive commands will be recognised and have immediate consequences that hasten the story forward.
Instead, half my commands were met with that angry director’s voice yelling at me “No, no, focus on this scene, don’t start dissociating again!”. And that’s a great story-appropriate customisation of the default rejection response! But not when the game recognises so few of the player’s commands that it comes up again and again.
I really liked Dancing with Fear. I have good memories of its main character Salomé. I’m starting to like Eva too, this game’s main character. It would be a pity to keep playing while frustrated at the implementation, and missing a great story with a great character unfold.
I’d love to play Barcarolle in Yellow again once it’s gone through at least one more thorough round of testing and editing. The way it is now, it doesn’t do its protagonist honour.
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Lights, camera..., December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
My wife and I visited Venice a few years ago, on a trip that had a lot of conventional highlights – the Arsenale! The Bridge of Sighs! That quadriga they stole from Constantinople! – and one that was quite unconventional. We went in late October, as the tourist season was starting to ebb, and though the city was still flooded with people during the day, many of them were cruise people who went back to their ships in the evenings, so once the sun was down it was surprisingly thinly populated. In fact one night as we walked back after dinner, the campo in front of our hotel was completely deserted, and as we marveled at the romantic ambiance, we suddenly spied a flickering light off at the other side of the square, in a heretofore-unnoticed breezeway leading around the side of a decaying building. We crept closer and saw that, oddly, small candles had been placed at intervals at the sides of the passage, leading us down and down the arcade into a night that suddenly felt quite black and cold, though still just as absent of human life. As we considered whether to keep going, I felt near-certain that either a ghost was going to appear, or we were going to be murdered, but either way it was going to be stylish.
From its movie-aping cover image to its multilingual-pun title (“yellow” is “giallo” in Italian, of course), Barcarolle in Yellow is similarly enticing, promising lurid thrills in a memorable setting. As an actress specializing in Italian B-movies, you’re summoned to Venice with the promise of work, but soon find yourself teetering at the edge of madness as plot points from the film – like a mask-clad stalker and a depraved cult – become all too real. Have you just been popping too many pills, or are the brutish director and sinister psychoanalyst in on the plot? And are you just the victim, or something else entirely?
This is a lovely lovely premise, but sadly for me the game didn’t quite live up to it, for two main reasons. First, the setting is surprisingly underutilized, and in fact Barcarolle in Yellow overall doesn’t provide much in the way of striking imagery. There’s something charming about entire districts of Venice being rendered as single locations, but the effect is to make an already-small city even more cramped. The general absence of implemented scenery – or even mentioned scenery – also drains the setting of some charm. Like, here’s the description for Piazza San Marco, omitting only the listing of exits:
"The best-known square of Venice, perhaps of Italy, featuring the church of San Marco, the iconic Campanile and the Doge’s Palace, as well as a grand view of the lagoon to the south and the island-monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore on the other side of the water."
This is a singularly underwhelming rendering of one of the most beautiful places on earth, and what’s worse, trying to examine any of the landmarks gets a terse reminder that you’re here “to work, not to see the sights.” Where a screenwriter might be able to get away with simply writing “EXT – LIDO – NIGHT” on faith that the director will add the details and ambiance, this works less well in IF form; again, I could fill in the blanks a bit from my own experience, but I still found myself wishing that the prose provided a more evocative jumping-off point for my imagination – all the more so since this is nominally a giallo, which thrive on atmosphere. Sure, things do get more evocative and intense in the interstitial cut-scene sequences, and there is the occasional exception, like a psychiatrist’s office that’s described with well-chosen details, but this can’t really substitute for the relative thinness of the interactive sections.
And speaking of interaction, that’s the other place where I thought the game fell a bit short. You’ve definitely got some interesting things to do, from escaping a violent mob to trying to catch the killer on film, but I never felt like an equal partner in proceedings; instead, like an actor working for a domineering director, I felt henpecked, pushed to do whatever specific thing the game had in mind with no tolerance, much less reward, for trying to explore off the beaten path. As mentioned above, the authorial voice even hurries the player past examining things it doesn’t want you to look at, but beyond that, the puzzle design is actively discouraging of experimentation – your introduction to Venice is a chase sequence with not even a single turn to spare, the movie-filming sequences adhere to a rigid set of requirements (you’re not even allowed to scream when someone gets gunned down in the Western you’re filming in the prologue), and in general I just felt like I was somewhat surplus to requirements. This reached a nadir in the ending, where the final text seemed to assume I’d accomplished something I’d spent many turns unsuccessfully wrestling with the parser to attempt (Spoiler - click to show)(shooting either my double or myself – the game kept insisting the gun was unloaded, even though I’d opened it and seen the bullet in the chamber). There are some decision points that seem to determine which of several endings you receive, but these are similarly curated, coming as yes/no decisions that break into the normal flow of parser gameplay, so I found they didn’t add much in the way of engagement.
Admittedly, the game’s thin implementation and occasional bugginess also meant that in the back half of the game I hewed closer to the critical path. When I took an action necessary to solve the first puzzle, for example, the opening sequence where the director of the Western yelled cut and a boy ran up with a telegram inviting me to Venice suddenly replayed, despite already being in the Venice train station. And an action sequence involving falling off the Ponte Rialto was somewhat undermined by the ability to enter a souvenir shop mid-descent, and pick up a passing motorboat along the way.
For all that, once I just gave up and went with the game’s direction, I did have a reasonably fun time. While this isn’t a story for the ages, it hits some fun beats, and gets many points for novelty (is there a second parser giallo?) And it’s occasionally quite skillful in how it mixes artifice with reality, with the protagonist’s real life sometimes seeming to be a movie, and vice versa. Still, I wish I hadn’t had to work so hard to meet the game halfway; this one needed a little more time in pre-production and a director who’s a little less of a control freak, though I could still see it gaining a cult following.
- Johnnywz00 (St. Louis, Missouri), November 26, 2023
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2 people found the following review helpful:
Italian slasher film where you're the star, November 22, 2023This game is a game with multiple layers of storytelling. In it, you are an actress speaking with the police, telling a story about a film that is set within a film, all played by you, the player, as a game…but is all of that true? Layers shift and change.
This is a giallo story, but due to my inexperience with much of Italian cinema I took it to be a ‘slasher film’. As a meta slasher film, it shares a lot in common with movies like Scream or Wes Craven’s new nightmare, or to games like the recent IFComp game Blood Island. The only real difference between this genre and those is that this game has a lot more reference to nudity and sexuality, but that’s a common difference between American and European cinema. While I tend to avoid erotic games, the nudity and sexuality in this game never felt erotic; if anything, it was just a way to incite more fear and helplessness.
You play as an actress who leaves one movie set to go to another. Along the way, a mysterious figure stalks and harasses you, and can kill you. But is that just part of the film, too?
I received ending 1, which seemed like an apt ending for the game. Overall, just like another game that I mentioned to its author, this game reminds me quite a bit of opera. Its symbolism reminds me of things like Don Giovanni, with the statue dragging him to hell, or Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, where all actions are symbolic.
The game does have several implementation issues though, which I share a large part in, as I tested it. I’ll send specifics to the author, but there are a lot of places where things fire out of order or synonyms are missed. I certainly could have aided with that better!
But I suppose it’s a bit of a missed opportunity; due to the occasionally sketchy implementation, I had to religiously follow the walkthrough. This could have been presented as a ‘script’ feelie (similar to and mirroring the in-game script), adding another layer to the game. But I suppose a new release of the game could also bring the errors in line, which would raise the game to a 9 or 10 in my mind.
- Tabitha / alyshkalia, November 16, 2023
- jaclynhyde, November 8, 2023
- Edo, November 6, 2023
- Zape, October 14, 2023
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