The Lindenbaum Prize, a competition for short gamebooks, goes into its fourth year. This year’s contest has no less than seventeen entries from a variety of genres, with a wide range of creative approaches. It’s a great opportunity for experiments, and it’s always exciting to see what the authors come up with. If you’re interested in interactive storytelling, you should check it out!

Chirality is the fourth competition entry I’m covering. For an overview of what I’m especially looking for in gamebooks, please refer to my coverage of the first entry, The House on Happy Hill.

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Mark Rosewater, head designer of the card game Magic: The Gathering, regularly replies to questions of aspiring game designers that doing something just because you can rarely leads to good game design. It may be an excellent way to demonstrate your cleverness, but if the end result isn’t fun for the player, then you have simply missed the goal.

The foundation of Chirality is a very clever trick which gives the book an excellent score on the innovation scale, but then Johnson somehow didn’t build an adventure around it. I don’t know if lack of time was the issue here; the flawless execution indicates the opposite. And yes, there is a story, but –

You know what, you should take a look for yourself. It won’t take long, because of the 100 sections, more than half consist of empty rooms with all options being to leave towards other rooms. Then, there are a few more dozen rooms in which you can at least pick up a keyword, then you leave towards another room. The remaining rooms, roughly a dozen, hold the storyline development. And even this story is hidden behind veils of cleverness; it wants to be re-read, interpreted, understood, and probably admired. Nevertheless, it’s fun to take a look at this for the trick alone.

It’s hard to compare Chirality to anything. You might imagine Matrix, only it’s 100 minutes of Neo repeatedly choosing between a red pill and a blue pill, with Morpheus sometimes babbling about destiny and the real world in between. Yes, if you look really deep, there might be something in there to puzzle out, but I’d say the vast majority of people would prefer the movie as it is. That includes myself, and I’m usually a fan of deep and bizarre puzzles. But right now, I find myself unable to solve the puzzle why literally every single option in the entire book is a variant of “proceed to another room.”

Jeremy: if you read this, I would be genuinely interested in the thought process behind setting up Chirality this way. You obviously put a lot of thought into it, so I would imagine there is an idea of purpose behind the emptiness.

Conclusion

• Writing: Very good, just not all that much.
• Plot: Also very good, just not all that much either.
• System: The main trick is very clever, there is no system otherwise.
• Structure: Like the minotaur’s maze, with hints of Ariadne’s thread.
• Execution: What is there is flawless, but that’s of cause significantly easier if you only build a foundation instead of an entire house.
• Overall: An excellent technical idea in desperate search for an adventure. I respect the innovation, but this is safely outside my top 3 unless the remaining entries fail very badly.