Posted 12 November 2001 to rec.games.int-fiction

There Is No IF Review Conspiracy.

But if there were, and it wrote a review of Fallacy of Dawn, it would probably look a little like this.

Spoilers at the bottom, but they're clearly delimited.

Fallacy Of Dawn, Robb Sherwin, 2001

Can Pac-Man make you cry?

It's an honest question. Does that little yellow chomping fellow strike an emotional resonance within you? Can you get choked up about the meaning of a life spent gobbling food dots and power pellets, alternately avoiding and courting Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde?

No?

Ah well.

Let's try another approach:

Do you remember your Atari VCS? (That'd be "2600" for you newbies) Do you remember the visceral thrill of "Night Driver," the amazingly lifelike graphics of "Pitfall," the sheer beauty of "Demon Attack," the incessant, hypnotic pulse of "Space Invaders?" Are "Yorgle," "Grundle," and "Rhindle" still names that strike fear into your heart? And "Warren Robinett" one that inspires fierce and sudden joy?

No?

Let's move on, then.

Do you know whether the Pterodactyl is really "unbeatable?" Did you ever agonize over which "Outrun" soundtrack to play? Do you understand why it should be a capital offense to convert an "I, Robot" cabinet into "Arkanoid?" Can you still recite the order of the boards in Donkey Kong up through the second pie factory? Do you know who Eugene Jarvis is, and why you should care?

No?

Well, in that case, you shouldn't play Fallacy of Dawn. It's not for you. You can stop reading now too.

However, if you did feel some dim stirring, way down in your synapses, at some of that, if your nostalgic heart beat a little faster, if your stomach and bowels clenched at the thought of what Atari perpetrated on a nation of hapless 12-year olds with its travesties of "Pac-Man" and "E.T.," then run, don't walk, and download Fallacy Of Dawn.

A few words here: I love Sherwin's writing. Hell, I thought both Chicks Dig Jerks and A Crimson Spring, crash-prone bugfests that they were, were worth playing for Robb's dialogue. So I probably cut this game more slack than it really deserves. You've been warned.

So: the synopsis. You're Delarion Yar, ex-hacker, currently unable to correctly perceive the electromagnetic spectrum owing to having been badly messed up by some creditors a while back and apparently suffering some pretty insidious brain damage. You live in a crappy town called New Haz, which might be the Fort Collins of Sherwin's nightmares, but sure seemed to me to be a slightly Utopian New Haven, Connecticut. You have a horrible job tending classic video games--whose screens you can't even see--in a run-down arcade in a mall. You have hideous debts and a monkey on your back in the form of a ree--rephasia, a 10th-generation amphetamine derivative--addiction; it's not clear whether the memory lapses are due to ree or the damage inflicted by the goons (drugs or thugs, a theme throughout the game), but in any event, you're not in good shape.

After a couple of initial puzzles, you're presented with the real challenge of the game: come up with a lot of money, in a hurry, or your creditors will kill you. So you need to get a weapon to get past the CopBot into the Other Side Of Town, where you can start picking up odd jobs to make some money.

Yeah, really.

Doesn't sound too promising, does it? The funny thing is, it works. Yar quickly hooks up with his old buddy Yeoweh Porn (yes, you read that right), and a girl he's kind of sweet on, Clara (the completely optional and not-at-all-explicit sex scene with Clara also contains one of the worst puns ever, and is gentle and strangely touching, in a very weird way). The trio team up to get Yar some money to pay his debts and fix his head.

The midgame is--quite self-consciously--the midgame of a million mediocre RPGs: talk to someone, get a quest, do the quest, get some money. And then the game takes an unexpected but not completely unpredictable hard left turn into territory traversed before. [There's a spoiler section at the bottom, explaining this.]

But let's face it. You're not playing this game for the plot. You're playing it for the Sherwinnianess. And *that*, it has in spades. Where else do you meet Hitler in a bar (well, probably Demon's Forge)? Where else are killer robots called "Failed Romero", and it's not clear whether George or John is meant? And where else would you possibly find the loving deconstruction of quite so many video games of the 70s, 80s, and 90s? The game ripples with the weird B-movie 1980's-as-seen-through-a-haze-of-Cinemax-and-Robotussin vibe that characterized Chicks Dig Jerks, only under much better control this time.

The game itself is written in Hugo, and has an interface not entirely dissimilar to Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country. The main text window is at the bottom. Above it are a series of graphical windows depicting the current location, Yar or the character he's interacting with, and Yar's "health" and "ree"-meters. The crudely-drawn cartoons of A Crimson Spring have here been replaced with smeared, pixellated photos, which do a pretty effective job of rendering Delarion Yar's damaged view of the world. Interaction with the NPCs--of whom there are many, mostly illustrated from Robb Sherwin's stable of friends--is done with TALK TO NPC, and then selecting choices from a menu, using what appears to be a Hugo conversion of Inform's phtalkoo library.

Alas, there are a number of problems with the game. Most of them can be traced to a failure to keep enough track of character state. When conversing with characters, it is possible to get into grossly inappropriate conversations, when Yar recites lines based on events that haven't happened yet or that he hasn't witnessed. Occasionally characters do not appear in the room description, although they are there. Sometimes it's possible to repeat conversations. Pronoun selection seems pretty antic. And as far as I can tell, "OUT" is never implemented, leading to lots and lots of "GO DOOR"--very 1982, but not in a good way. None of these bugs are exactly fatal, but they do add up to make the experience more frustrating than it should be.

That said: this game is far less buggy than Sherwin's previous efforts. It is, for example, possible to finish this game without it imploding, and most of the puzzles are adequately cued (I did have to ask for help a few times, but in all but one case, the puzzle was something I should have solved on my own).

What, then does that leave us?

Well, if you're me, you're left with a bizarrely moving musing on the nature of the human condition, cloaked in HaXX0R-speak and a veneer of classic video games [see the spoiler section below for this too]. I don't know why this works, because there's no reason it should. Maybe it's that I also did a lot of my coming-of-age in the Golden Age Of Video Games, and that I have some sort of emotional connection to the world Sherwin describes.

But work it does. I found myself not just identifying with, but liking Delarion Yar, braindamaged speedfreak loser that he is, and genuinely caring about helping him out of his difficulties. Maybe it's that it's a game about losers, about the Pynchonian preterite. No one living in New Haz is there because he wants to be: everyone there has come up craps in one of life's dice throws. Yar, Porn, and Clara are simply making do as best they can, and, in a way, it's a story about kindness in the face of a world where you go to the Post Office to pick up bounties on people you've murdered at, where a random keg of beer is likely to contain severed limbs, and where "Custer's Revenge" can be found in the bargain bin at your local video store. Love isn't all you need, but an electric pistol, love, and a few pills of CGA-colored rephasia might just do the trick.

If Pac-Man can make you cry and if you demand that your snozzberries taste like fawking snozzberries, then give Fallacy Of Dawn a spin. Roll out.

Adam

SPOILERS BELOW
Next page...
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Spoiler section

[part one]
The game veers off on a course reminiscent of Delusions (C.E. Forman must be frothing at the mouth now. Of course, the odds are slim it's about this game rather than about any of the other myriad things that cause him to froth, but...) or Knight Orc (for what it's worth, Sherwin claims KO, not Delusions, as his inspiration).

[part two]
The life-as-seen-through-the-lens-of-classic-videogaming is another reason that C.E. Forman will be fuming--but at least, unlike Sylenius Mysterium, this game is playable all the way through.