Filbert and the Broccoli Escape

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Filbert and the Broccoli Escape is an illustrated children's story adapted to a game; the lazy protagonist uses magic to try and get out of eating his vegetables, and finds himself on a (brief) miniature-kingdom adventure.

I dislike it as a game for straightforward structural reasons, and as a piece of kid-lit for more aesthetic, personal reasons. Let's start with the former.

Broccoli Escape uses Quest's hybrid parser/menus/hyperlink interface. I'm sceptical about this interface in general; but Broccoli Escape doesn't make confident use of it. Early on it flirts with a Quest-ish approach with option menus based on objects, but it quickly switches to something much more like a straight-up choice-based system. It doesn't use either smoothly; where it wants to offer straight-up CYOA choices, it awkwardly forces them through verb-noun commands that make no sense and confuse the transcript. Nouns and choices are capitalised in an ungrammatical manner.

Even imagining the work as a vanilla CYOA, it's pretty clear that Broccoli Escape was made by a static-fiction author with little or no game-writing experience. This is a pretty common species in CYOA generally, and the game falls into a familiar pattern: a single linear story wherein all the apparent choices are blocked off, except the one that leads to the One True Path. Worse, a lot of these blocked responses fall into that bad old IF pattern: offer an interesting option, then deny it as stupid or obviously unfeasible. (This specific thing is less justifiable in CYOA than it is in parser IF; it's ruder to refuse an explicitly offered option than an inferred one.)

It bears repeating: there is no point in adapting a work to a new medium unless the work grows in the process. Perhaps the idea was that in an online, gamified format it might reach more people; but gamification for its own sake is worse than useless, and an ebook might have been a more suitable (not to mention more widely-used) format.

Now, on to considering it as a book. (Important caveat: I'm speaking here as an adult who enjoys well-crafted children's books, not as a child or a parent.)

I have a number of nitpicky annoyances. I'm not a fan of the art style: it's all scratchy shading and blobby newspaper-funnies eyes, without the overflowing exuberance and fun-to-explore detail that I like best in children's illustration. And I always rather liked broccoli as a child, and deplore the unsubstantiated libel of its good name. (Aubergine is another matter.)

But running through these complaints, there's a general feeling of blandness. Broccoli Escape wants to be quirky and imaginative, I think, but more than that it wants to be safe. Filbert is a white kid from a middle-class two-parent family; the offending meal is gravy, mashed potatoes and America's Supreme Court-approved Designated Vegetable Which Is Unpleasant Yet Healthy. Filbert's problems are minor, his conflicts mild by the standards of kid-lit: he dislikes doing chores that every child dislikes, but never seriously clashes with his parents over this. There are touches of the comfortably-old-fashioned. (The author's parents probably read a printed newspaper. Parents of Filbert's generation overwhelmingly don't.) The central fantasy, of becoming very small, is a very standard one and isn't elaborated in any unexpected directions; and the whole fantasy plot is just one chase scene. Magic works (or doesn't work) as rhyming couplets. There's no problem with any of these as individual elements: together, they add up to something rather dull.

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