Moquette

by Alex Warren

2013

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- Denk, September 5, 2023

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
An accurate ride through the London Underground that should've had more, May 21, 2023

Moquette is an interesting title that is best described as a sparse simulation with a rather confusingly written narrative slapped onto it.

Your protagonist has a hangover on a Tuesday morning and ostensibly you're supposed to go to work or check out a park, but the entire game is about the player guiding the protagonist through the labyrinth of the London Underground. Indeed, the entire game has lovingly created this network so well that one could play this with the Underground map on another page in the browser.

I've actually ridden this subway many times, so I've found myself figuring out which station to go next. It's fun to read descriptions of the passengers, the station history, and the "tips" for quicker and safer transits because I found it to be more or less accurate. And there's a few bits of trivia that I learned along the way. I imagine Londoners would've had more a kick out of this experience too.

But while I find this simulation aspect to be fun, it's definitely no Fire Tower or a city sim. What I mean is that the game lacks interactivity and simulation aspects. You're not interacting with the scenery except the passengers who would come in and out of the train. In parser games, you'd be typing "smell" or "listen". In Twine games, you'd click on hyperlinks that let you focus onto objects like the seats. This game forgoes this interactivity for a certain atmosphere to help aid the narrative (more on that later), but I find this to be detrimental. The dearth of sensuous experiences is simply jarring for a simulation that does go out its way in recreating the train networks. The game needs far more text to accomplish its simulation goals because, as it stands, the entire game is just about riding the train and switching lanes. None of that vicariously experiencing of the train through the text, only the chores of switching lines. You're aimlessly wandering through different station lines and it's pretty easy to feel like you're doing nothing without much stimuli.

Which is why there's a narrative added into the mix, I suppose. I'm not sure how to feel about it because it dabbles in some psychiatry cliches and has a muddled message about agency. While I've mentioned that the descriptions are clearly sparse in order to supplement the narrative, the narrative ironically doesn't feel connected to the simulated experience of riding the train. It may seek the chance encounters we may have on the train, but it is more interested in (briefly) exploring the psychology of the protagonist. And I found that to be weak too since it's so quick that the explanation feels ambiguous. This narrative is only tolerable with the help of some admittedly impressive text visual effects, but I wasn't too won over by them either. The story just loses itself in these effects. And while there is a line or two about being part of the London masses, that feels more like a reach than anything.

It also seems that the web app for Quest is very buggy on Firefox. I've had the game crash on me multiple times and was surprised that the game could time out if you leave it for too long. This was my first Quest game, so I'm not deducting points for that -- this is mostly a warning to anyone who wants to play the game.

Regardless, I find this game interesting, which is why I'm overrating it a bit. If I wasn't so interested in the London Underground, I'd imagine I'd not even finish the game. But I was pretty happy going around the Underground and wished there was more to the simulation. The narrative, I'm not too fond of and wish it was either more relevant or just gone; it's divorced enough that it doesn't affect the experience but is still jarring enough when it does emerge. Moquette is short enough to give it a whirl, but I definitely feel like I wanted more from this experience and players with sympathies like mine would probably agree.

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- IFforL2 (Chiayi, Taiwan), June 27, 2018

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A fascinating journey through the London underground and memory, August 1, 2017
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

This game reminds me for some reason of Michael Ende's Momo.

In any case, this is a quest hyperlink game that has you travelling on trains. You are on a subway line, you can wait or get off at each station, then travel on a new line in a new directions.

There are a dozen or more lines, with quite a few stations.

As you play, very good text effects begin to show up. A metastory appears.

There is unnecessary strong profanity; however, on Chrome, profanity filters filter it out.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Good parts but a vague whole in existential tale of traingoing., November 18, 2015
by Wade Clarke (Sydney, Australia)
Related reviews: IFComp 2013, Quest

(This is an edited version of a review I originally wrote for my 2013 IFComp blog.)

Moquette is a Quest hypertext game in which you play a hungover security guard who begins to feel the weariness of his lot too heavily during one morning commute on the London Underground, and who then begins to wander the network in some kind of attempt to do anything differently.

This was the first Quest game by the author of the Quest engine, Alex Warren, and I think it made sufficiently good on views expressed in his blog over time about trying out different things in IF. It's not going for radically different, but it has its own feel and structure, and text effects which are novel enough to make me say that the author walked some of his talk. I found the game fascinating at times, well written as often, though in a way which underutilises (or just doesn't utilise) experiences the protagonist has had earlier in the game. Another problem is that no specific background emerges for the character. And I found the ending to be very querulous; it seems really hard to end existential IFs in a way that is equally or more satisfying than the game content.

There is a fair bit of content in Moquette, and its attention to geographical and other details of the London Underground give it the smell of the real. But overall it's a mix of good elements amongst others which don't work so well.

The run of decisions you make during the game consists of looking at various strangers who get on and off the trains, deciding when to switch train lines, when to stay on a train and when to get off. There are a lot of strangers and a lot of lines to switch between, so eventually the player is likely to start wondering: Does this game have a trajectory or an end, and if it has an end, how deep into my travels will that end be? I wondered all of these things.

The protagonist's view of both himself and others as unthinking cogs in the machine of life is one of the classic concerns of modernity, a concern emphasised in this game by the fact that the whole thing occurs on trains, those classic symbols of the Industrial Revolution. With all this in mind, it seemed to me the game could have gone on forever, making a conceptual point of pointlessness while annoying a lot of players in the process. Thus I was glad of a random encounter on the trains with a character whose presence opened up the possibility of throwing a spanner into the cogs. Still, the protagonist's narration around this event didn't change to reflect the passage of the day, his wobbly health, things that had happened earlier or anything that might happen later. The lack of connectedness of the parts renders the game's finale probably more ambiguous than was intended.

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- verityvirtue (London), August 25, 2015

- Joshua Houk, October 18, 2014

- Sdn (UK), February 17, 2014

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Choices, December 3, 2013
by Simon Deimel (Germany)

I understand that opinions will differ on MOQUETTE.
The prose is exellent. I enjoyed reading it, despite some vulgar elements (I usually reject verbal abuse). As some critics already pointed out, I can just say the same: The beginning was a bit aimless, I did not understand what to do, and when the main encounter finally happened, I had the feeling that my choices actually had not made any difference. The author gets an extra praise for implementing each of the mentioned passengers in detail and rendering thoughts about them. The text effects were interesting.
All in all this is a well-crafted piece of interactive fiction, which put a focus on fiction rather than interactivity. Nevertheless I must say that the first part was somehow tedious and I wondered "when is something gonna happen?" too many times.
Note: I posted a similar review on the webpage of the game.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
At times frustrating, November 21, 2013
by streever (America)

I wasn't sure what I was doing or why. Ostensibly, I'm on my way to work, but my limited understanding of where I need to go and what train routes get me where left me feeling mostly frustrated.

Perhaps this game would work better with a map as a companion piece--perhaps not, because there doesn't seem to be any reason to go to any specific place. Essentially you wander the subway in a fashion similar to the classic Zork maze--there are areas and people to look at, but none of them advance you or get you anywhere.

I can't tell you why I switched lines, or why I swapped trains--as my protagonist said sometimes, "Or I could change to the Charing Cross branch. I could do that. There is nothing stopping me."

I found reading my protagonists stream-of-consciousness to be infectious. His sense of ennui and boredom made me wonder what I was doing and why I was bothering. I suspect this was the intention--but I found it frustrating. I prefer it when the emotions aren't told to me, but rather things I experience through good writing and plotting.

Finally, a twist occurs, but it is quite late in the narrative, and I had a hard time understanding what it was trying to tell me. It seems to be a meta-commentary, but I'm not sure on what--the nature of games, or a psychological statement? Ultimately, I was left wondering why my protagonist didn't just go into work, or get on a different train and go home to sleep off his hangover.

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- Egas, November 17, 2013

- E.K., November 17, 2013

- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 16, 2013

- Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle), November 16, 2013

- Edward Lacey (Oxford, England), November 16, 2013

- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 8, 2013

- ifwizz (Berlin, Germany), October 27, 2013

- N.C. Hunter Hayden, October 23, 2013


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