IF Comp 2019: Jon Doe – Wildcard Nucleus

Jon Doe – Wildcard Nucleus (Olaf Nowacki, Inform) is a James Bond pastiche; a computer scientist is mysteriously dead, his daughter is dating the head of a sinister corporation, and M15 sends you to investigate.

James Bond parodies, as a comedy medium, have Been Done. Boy have they been done. They’ve been done by people who held the actual rights, like the first Casino Royale; they’ve produced significant series in their own right, like Austin Powers and Archer. While this doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to do it again, it does kind of mean that if you want to do that, you need to nail down your own take on it.

The approach that Jon Doe seems to be taking, however, is a rather stiff retreading of certain of the basic tropes.

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Some nude women dance in the dark as the credits are projected across different parts of their bodies.

It’s honestly hard to tell whether that’s a joke or if it’s just very ill-considered retreading. This is a moment that was designed for a very visual medium, and doesn’t obviously translate well to text; but the text hasn’t really tried to adapt. That sets the tone for Jon Doe: sometimes it tries to recapitulate the plot beats from a Bond movie, but does so in a very bland and unstylish way; and sometimes it reverts to safer parser territory and has you explore a boring house and figure out a guy’s password by feeding his cat.

On the whole, Jon Doe is not super interested in the glamourous-international-playboy side of Bond stuff. There is little in the way of penthouses and casinos: you have offices, a middle-class home, a power plant. There is a fancy car, but you only use it to commute between different game locations, because the entire plot takes place in the UK. It feels weirdly low-budget, like a 70s TV show that by god was going to try and make the most of its location shoot in exotic Lyme Regis.

At at least one point, this lack of glamour is done as a genre-subversion joke: Doe tries the ‘we should kiss so the guard doesn’t suspect us’ move, and the response is pretty much ‘what? Absolutely not. How is that remotely necessary.’ Which I appreciated! And that’s about as close as the game really gets to a love interest.

The thing is, I’m entirely cool with taking these elements out of Bond. I’m receptive to a pitch that went “look, glamourous locations and Bond girls and car-chases aren’t really the point of Bond, for me; the thing I love is…” But it doesn’t really have an answer for that. OK, there’s an action scene or two, and a single Cool Gadget, and one Weird Henchman. But those aren’t elements that come out to shine – they’re at a fairly low-key level, for a Bond piece. The conclusion reads more like ‘look, if you get rid of all that juvenile power-fantasy stuff, there isn’t much left to Bond.’

Even if this committed to a James-Bond-as-tedious-bureaucrat bit, I could see that being workable as comedy! But I don’t think that’s the idea either: you’d need to push that angle a lot harder. I think this is just the result of trying to adapt a James Bond story to a parser format, and running up against the fact that the two aren’t really a natural fit. (People have done action-thriller plots in parser IF before, of course, but it’s not easy to pull off; and Jon Doe doesn’t seem to have any idea about how to tackle the problem.)

(Sidebar: there’s a conspicuous anachronism going on here: the dead scientist guy uses a TRS-80, which made its debut in 1977; but the plot explicitly concludes with the Windscale fire, which took place twenty years previously. This is kind of an old saw in James Bond – the longest-running franchise in movies, which constantly has to figure out what to do with a character firmly rooted in the late 50s and early 60s. Archer makes the joke near-constantly. So it’s not an unprecedented thing, or a problem, or even really a joke; it’s just a ‘hunh’ moment.)

I used the walkthrough intermittently from fairly early on, because a lot of elements that really should be fluid and forwards-moving are unnecessarily awkward. The moment that really did it for me was when you aren’t allowed to push the button yourself to open the garage door: it’s just such a boring point at which to impede the player! The game does move forwards more smoothly than this, at many points – the scientist’s-house sequence was fine, for instance – but I didn’t really have much confidence that it wouldn’t come crashing to a halt.

All in all: not very exciting in concept, a lot of issues with the execution. 3.