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1-6 of 6 People-watching and self-reflection on public transport, September 5, 2023Just looking at a map of the London Underground leaves me a bit dizzy. All those colors, all those loops, all those stations! Chicago is a lot more linear, but then again, part of that is due to just not having as much public transport. I remember a family trip to London where I diligently tried to memorize all the stations and hoped maybe we could visit them all. Of course, I wanted to visit all the tourist sites too. I vowed to be back one day, but of course, Life Happened. I don't think I've even gotten to all the Chicago L stations. Some are not in great areas, and I drove by them on the freeway, and that's enough.
Moquette, a Quest game with JavaScript effects (the best by far to me is how the text whooshes off to the left like a train starting off away from a terminal) helped fill in part of my desire to visit the London Underground without having to buy a plane ticket, as it's a faithful replication of, well, the central area. It starts you off at Balham station in the southwestern area. Balham is part of the Northern Line, which made it confusing when I was trying to get my bearings to start! Perhaps I should not have. The game describes your general path to your job: ten stops to Bank, change to the Central line, one stop to Liverpool Street.
And so you take the Northern Line to work. There's a constant intimation you, Zoran, might want to do something else than go to your vague tech job today. Eventually the game pushes you out at London Bridge, one stop short of Bank. It's actually possible to get to Liverpool Street, where there's no way to get to leave the Underground and go to your job. But all the same, you can't go further. You want freedom, but you don't want to end up in the middle of nowhere. (One wonders what people on the north side think of Balham. Perhaps it isn't the middle of nowhere, but on the other hand, it's impossible to visit the Highbury or Upton Park stations in Moquette.)
This isn't just arbitrary by the game. Part of what makes the London Underground so interesting to me is all the loops and runarounds and interchanges, and if the station names far out seem interesting, it does get linear. So it seeks to maximize the confusion and looping. Without a map I was baffled to see myself winding up at that same place I hit about eight moves ago.
There's not much, strictly speaking, to DO in Moquette. You look at people, think about their histories and what they want to do, and ponder changing. You leave the train if you feel it may wind up in the middle of nowhere. Some people may quit before this, and it's a satisfactory experience. Eventually you stumble on a girl named Heather, whom you sort of liked. This all is a bit awkward, but there's more of a point than just emo stuff. You fail to converse adequately with her, or you think you do, even if you remember stuff she liked.
Fortunately, an unrequited crush is not the main thrust of Moquette. It goes a bit further than that, and if I didn't particularly like the end, which felt too swervy and too on-the-nose at once, I do recommend the journey. First through without the map, then trying to hit specific places. The people-watching bit is well done.
My own experience with public transport is spoiler-tagged, as it rambles a bit, much like Moquette does, but I've rather enjoyed myself more than Zoran, just reading a book and occasionally people-watching. (Spoiler - click to show)It has revolved largely around getting near tricky-to-find places. There are city and suburban buses to go with the Chicago L. I remember one library in the northwest suburbs that had the only copy of a book I wanted to read, and I took three buses there. I enjoyed planning the bus trips. Then one day I realized it wasn't hard to transfer my city card to work in suburban cards, and if they weren't too far away, I could place holds. I sort of missed the adventure, but I'd done things once. And that library? It's gobbled up into the consortium which means a Chicago resident can just sneak north to Evanston, place a hold, and not have to go through some mazy public transport. I sort of miss the adventure. And sometimes even on Chicago's grid, you realize you've been going west and then south to somewhere, and you've never gone south and then west. It's weird seeing a place you remember, thinking you took a route you never saw.
That's enough adventure for me. It feels like there should be more, and you can't get it just by public transport, but it's often a good start to make you want more. Moquette did that for me, even if I felt its ending didn't stick the landing.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
An accurate ride through the London Underground that should've had more, May 21, 2023Moquette 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.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
A fascinating journey through the London underground and memory, August 1, 2017This 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.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Good parts but a vague whole in existential tale of traingoing., November 18, 2015(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.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Choices, December 3, 2013I 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.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
At times frustrating, November 21, 2013I 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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