The PC in Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony is a self-described middle-aged hippie in Wisconsin. He's a mystic, musician and computer programmer about to release the incredible ANTS software that will allow the alteration and merging of different strands of reality, to what I would euphemistically describe as great positive effect. The author says that the resulting trippiness is an attempt to convey the experience of a summer manic episode in which he believed himself to be a character in an interactive fiction game.
I think Harmonic itself is an amazing game. The crucial thing is that its manic astral mysticism and free-associating subject matter are the province of its prose, world and characters, but not of the underlying structure. The game design is well-considered and has many addictive mechanics recognisable from both old and recent gaming. Harmonic's core gameplay carrots reminded me of a bizarrely disparate group of life simulation games, from Animal Crossing on the Nintendo GameCube to Shenmue on the Sega Dreamcast.
In Harmonic, your PC's base is his house, and the game tracks time through each day and night. You can wander out and around the town, meeting and making friends, warping their realities and yours for the better, setting up projects for later and dealing with social engagements. Some characters will email you. Some events will occur spontaneously (eg a birthday party to attend) and others are unlocked, after a fashion, once you've brought the correct circumstances into alignment. Events are also gated by time, travel restrictions (you can summon your pushbike to your side at will by typing LUNAR, but you have to get your cycling skill up to be able to ride to further parts of town) and major social and puzzle progress through the game.
Why are you doing all these things? Primarily because you're living in the now and having a great time. You're also gradually advancing the cause of new positivity that you began by unleashing your reality-altering software. You can enjoy the experience of this world in its own right, but there's also a simultaneously generous and rigorous score system with a maximum score of 999 which tracks how much of the game content you've experienced. You can get points for doing all kinds of things both grand and elementary, from playing the piano or finding a new place in the city to major stuff like binding whole reality concepts together with your BIND power. There are also optional ending points at which the game tells you how awesome you've been for achieving a certain degree of completion, and then says something like, 'You can keep on playing, or just type WIN now if you'd like.' I was too engrossed in Harmonic to stop playing by the time I reached the first of these points, and carried on until I had more than 700 out of 999.
This IF take on life simulation is catchy in its own right, but it is the freewheeling prose and dialogue, bursting with musings on the mystical, the philosophical and mental health, that makes Harmonic a game that could exist in no other form than interactive fiction. In the same way that the sturdiness of the game's structure does not mirror the unfiltered flood of information you might associate with the recreational drug-taking writ large in the game's events, the writing itself is basically precise even as the ideas contained within it fly around and attach to each other easily. And crazily. Lots of them are cute moon pie, fireworks, astral explosions and love irradiation, but lots of them are interesting or novel in a more cerebral way. The two types are often wrapped around each other, and as long as the game was, I never got tired of reading new conversations, or of clocking the next philosophy of some coffee shop owner or Loonie co-op member.
An early coffee shop encounter with one of the female baristas the PC admires sees her politely listening to his musical-moon-unity theories even as she needs to shut him down just so that she can get her work done. The PC is a bit disappointed but soon puts things into perspective. I thought this was a good observation about kindness, practicality and acknowledging realities generated in others' minds. Later in the game, after the influence of ANTS has advanced considerably, what's in the PC's head becomes the freewheeling fabric and nature of the city itself, and the restrictions of the practical are lifted. There is lots of drug-taking (frequent enough that, paradoxically, I barely noticed) some care-free sex, parties, journeys on the wheel of time, teleportation, time travel, astral crystals, a pizza shop and an arcade with a Tempest machine. This is a game where the response to the WAIT command is, 'You feel yourself traveling through spacetime at the speed of light.'
Harmonic offers all kinds of helps for negotiating its large inventory of content. Actually, so many are offered at the start of the game that I was a bit overwhelmed. You can THINK about things to do, get general HINTS, get people or object-specific HINTs, EXPLORE at random, and you can also customise the progress of time and scheduled events, a concept you are unlikely to appreciate until you've been playing for awhile. There are also multiple meta commands which give you background information from the author, and in the reality-exploding style of the game, it's made clear that it's fine to read these before or alongside the game itself. Reality will eventually have exploded to the extent that I don't know if anyone could solve the last puzzles without hints, but this outcome seems to suit the nature of the whole piece, which is about drawing all realities into one plane. Life, the game, the author, the hints and all information in general. (Also, an anticipatory review the author wrote of the game as if someone else!) The game's cover painting conveys this collapse of dimensions nicely.
There's also a soundtrack of mp3s to be played at particular piano moments in the game, but I found this to be the only element that didn't really work. The first issue is that the songs are dispensed by copy-paste links within the game. Stopping typing, going outside the game, downloading the files one at a time and listening to one before continuing, if you intend to experience it at the directed moment, is too cumbersome to the overall flow, and something most players would consider technically cumbersome per se. The other issue is that the simple, average-fi room recordings of these piano songs are in no way able live up to the bath of figurative crystal light that the game's prose frequently emits.
Harmonic is a big, fun game that is generous about ways in which you might experience it. It offers a main story track, lots of optional content, lots of helps to access both of the above, interesting meta content and scores of ideas about existence, both wacky and thoughtful. Also, I didn't know anyone could make a game I'd really like that also had this much recreational drug-taking and Grateful Deadism in it, two things I would normally have to endure through gritted teeth. Philosophically, I understand that one of the (many) reasons I respond so positively to Harmonic is because the game is organised and disciplined art, even though it's about a lot of things and people that aren't necessarily organised or disciplined. I do feel the primary author shared or simulated (or both) a difficult-to-share personal experience successfully, too. This is my pick of the Main Festival Spring Thing games that I have played.
* Tech note – I was at first a little surprised the author managed to keep the whole game in the smaller Z8 Inform format, rather than having to go up Glulx. Then I learned the game was written in Inform 6, which provides more economical/sparse initial programming conditions than does Inform 7.
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