William Dooling. 28th place, IFComp 2022.
Seth Godin has a book called The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick). It posits that the path to most goals includes a tough learning phase (the dip) where you do a lot of hard work with little reward, and suggests before entering the dip for a given endeavor we should commit-or-quit, to minimize investment in things that aren’t really worth it.
The advice wasn’t written with games in mind. Indeed many games - especially commercial games - do backflips to keep the player from experiencing a dip. I just started playing Marvel SNAP and it is a preternaturally smooth experience. I played at least twenty-five rounds without losing, and there’s a conveyor belt of shiny rewards you return to every five minutes. This sort of “don’t lose the player” design has become so common that it’s practically required to launch a mobile game; to lesser degrees I see it as a hallmark of “modern” game design, and even when something like comp game According to Cain guides me through relevant commands and nudges me in the right direction, I feel it’s in the same school.
But some games have a tremendous “dip” in the form of a very steep learning curve, including ones that stand out as unique and remarkable achievements within games because they’re built on rich worlds that take a great deal of skill to navigate and appreciate: Much of the Rogue family (including my personal favorite, the slightly-more-accessible Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup,) Dwarf Fortress, King of Dragon Pass, even Elden Ring. The first few hours with any of these games can be terribly frustrating. Tutorials for them are often confusing and/or feel inadequate. And beyond those first ten painful hours, they each hide an experience difficult to find anywhere else in games.
Fortunately I didn’t sit down and review Dwarf Fortress after the first two hours; if they had, I’d probably have declared it an unplayable mess and moved on.
I admire Lost Coastlines. I did not enjoy my first two hours with it.
The game has the air of a deep roguelike. The “walkthrough” linked from the IFComp listing is in fact a 19-page manual explaining the premise, character classes, stats and scores, commands and mechanics, and examples of play. The credits say it represents four years of work. There’s a “potentially slow” world-generation step when it starts up a-la Dwarf Fortress and the world is expansive, seeming to consist of multiple large procedural-generated maps, dense with incident.
The setting and premise are an absolute delight, sidestepping a lot of cliches for the genre. We are in “the dream” living out one of our fantasies - is our dream-self a pirate, a magnate, a mystic? - to accumulate Pleasance (as in “pleasant dreams”) while minimizing the poetically-named Worry, Fury, Madness and Sadness. We accumulate Pleasance by sharing stories, recording secrets, answering questions, and renouncing possessions. All while sailing a great procedural sea and fishing, fighting, floundering our way across the world. It brings to mind Fallen London both in its use of abstract concepts as key mechanics, and in raw originality.
I saw the note about fonts and mapping and so went ahead and downloaded the game and ADRIFT so I could play it. I found the manual in the download, and skimmed it but didn’t read in detail - I figured the game would get me started, and it does have a tutorial after character creation. I did read the first paragraph, which says:
You can play in this world for as long as you like: for hours upon hours, or for fifteen minutes before going to bed. The rules aren’t complicated, and there’s no way to lose.
Oh, game. Nothing is foolproof; you just hadn’t met the right fool until I came along. Here’s my end result after my first 90 minutes:
================ YOUR FINAL SCORE ================ PLEASANCE: 27 [-] SADNESS: 20 MADNESS: 58 FURY: 62 WORRY: 106 [=] -219 *** You have won ***
Somehow that You have won did not do much for my confidence.
On this first adventure I started with the tutorial, which started very easy to follow with a little adventure, and then led me into a bar with three characters that dropped a shocking amount of information on me at once. Because everything is couched in abstract terms (which I love, don’t get me wrong) I had a tough time separating critical gameplay instruction from advice from backstory. Right here I should have gone to get a notebook and started making tables and checklists, and I’m sorry I didn’t. Then the tutorial closes by threatening me with a nightmare right away! An easy one, sure - pay the man three coins. Only at this point I didn’t think I had any “coins” and went on my merry way hunting for them. It was several turns and some negative consequences before I realized I was supposed to pay out of my initial stock of Pleasance. It’s kind of a harsh choice for the tutorial to start the player at a disadvantage vs jumping straight into the game!
So I start wandering around a bit, and mostly hitting encounters that seem too tough for me. There’s a resource-management aspect to the game and my first instinct was to patrol the starting area for important guidance and to build up some stats before venturing further afield. But the game has an “instability” mechanic to discourage staying in one part of the map too long. It’s strictly one action per island and sail on, even if those actions seem reasonable for one visit like provisioning at the market and checking for rumors at the tavern. Some islands have three or four paths to explore, so return trips are encouraged, just… later. This does contribute to a dream-like wandering. In practice I found myself venturing far afield and mostly trusting to luck regarding resources.
My ship was absolutely wrecked by some storms. I’d picked “pirate” as my class and had a little luck plundering, until I met a ship with red sails that destroyed my ship, took my crew and all my cargo, gave me loads of unpleasantness and marooned me. I didn’t technically “die” in the narrative here: I was subsequently picked up and returned to a starting island. But mechanically it might as well have been death. I was practically starting over but in a much worse state due to all the sadness, madness, fury and worry I’d accumulated. The only sensible thing to do was end my game and try again.
I tried again. About 25 minutes in I plundered a sea lane and ended up in a fight with a white-sailed ship that, I kid you not, took 25 turns to resolve with lots of repeated text. I’m not sure why this was any different from the 1 or 2 turn encounters I’d seen in the past. It drained my resources. Shortly thereafter I got stuck in another encounter and was marooned again. I ended the dream with -76 points. (Progress! I think.)
I never recorded any secrets or told any stories or anything of the like. There’s some text suggesting this is a critical core mechanic to the game. I was scared away from it a bit by the loud warnings that this mechanic could be used ONLY ONCE per game, and I knew from the intro that a game could go on for hours and hours. I also didn’t find any of these key items for a while, and then found myself stuck in a “fatal” series of encounters on my way back to a key location to use them. I’m guessing this explains my miserable scores.
So I get the feeling that the two-hour-mark is not the sweet spot for Lost Coastlines. There’s definitely the impression of a much wider, deeper world here. I tipped over the edges of the world in a couple of directions to new maps, and quickly retreated since I was having a hard enough time with the first one. I encountered at least one overland journey which seemed to have its own mechanics. I never executed any successful arbitrage, if that actually is a mechanic in this game. I never saw more than half of the possible cargoes. With practice I’d probably learn what to take note of and return to, how to interpret the riskiness of encounters, etc. Two hours wasn’t enough to get there. If I had to guess, I’d expect the game’s best form to start taking shape somewhere north of six hours for me.
Which all makes me wonder how IFComp itself affects this game. Not in a “does this deserve to be here” sense - not at all! It definitely deserves to be here. But this is a game with a “dip” and here I am at the commit-or-quit point with thirty more comp games staring me in the face. Will I come back to Lost Coastlines after the comp and invest the additional hours to make it my rewarding lunchtime distraction? Probably not, if I’m being honest - I don’t have a lot of room in my life for these deep games anymore. But it sure seems like some people will, and their extended experience with the game will be a lot more telling of its success than my false start. I’ll be watching their reactions, and one of them might draw me back in. I kind of hope it does.