After Pain Talks

The patron pick for this month's Closer Look subject is another unexpected surprise. I had heard neither of After Pain Talks nor its author Scott Miller. With a funny looking title screen and the genres of "cinema" and "rpg", I expected something unusual and that's certainly what I got. APT as the title screen makes sure to call the twice, is a first release (maybe second Squink! shares its release date) that constantly deceives the player, making it impossible to predict what will happen. If you're expecting a traditional ZZT RPG of the era, you're going to be let down. But if you embrace the chaos the game provides, you'll get a memorable adventure with its share of unintentional comedy and very intentional writing.

It's a blend you don't often see. When it comes to writing, ZZT's situation is often dire to revisit. For a game to have that be the best component is rare enough, but when it is, usually you're in for something really well made in general. With After Pain Talks, you get some mediocre at best everything else, creating an unusual blend. Considering when this game was released, along with it being such an early work for the author, writing would easily be the last thing you'd expect the game to succeed at.

And yet, it's hard to really say that it does. The story of the game is a mess that fits right in with everything else about it. Fun, weird, and surprising. What author Scott Miller manages to do to make it still work is how just how well he portrays the life of the game's child protagonist. The game's mundane aspects are the most compelling, bringing back memories of middle school in a way most games with young heroes on epic quests to save the world are unable to capture. It's a remarkably normal life for this kid, until it suddenly stops.

The first impression isn't the best. The assorted logos of the title and the author's company being named after themselves suggests that it's going to be a bumpy ride. If you're lucky, it'll be a fun one too.

If the game's name appearing four times doesn't communicate it enough don't worry a scrolling marquee will soon show it a sixth time.

Though not before it pops up a message window to show it one more time. Don't forget. This is APT. This is After Pain Talks. This puts "The part where he kills you" to shame.

Mr. Miller has some real ideas. I've never been offered a bribe to engage with a game's tutorial like this before. This is just the first of many surprises that await players.

The first thing to learn is how combat works. The touch to attack system is certainly nothing new. What is different is that rather than try to attack and then get out of the way before the enemy can strike back, you're locked in to taking whatever the enemy plans to dish out in return.

In the tutorial, the troll doesn't get to fight back, letting the player just beat them down until defeated before getting gems which represent your experience points. Said points are then taken away by the tutorial because you didn't really "earn" them.

Next is ranged combat. Entirely un-notable other than the character giving the tutorial asking you to shoot them to show understanding.

Yet nothing compares to the chest opening tutorial. After Pain Talks is a weird game for a number of reasons, but none of the others come close to the absurdity of this.

"Just open the chest! Touch it!" I hear you say. No. That would be too easy. What if instead...

You still touched the chest! Except then you had to open the cheat prompt and type a command to really open it. And then you have touch the chest a second time! If somebody did this in an Oktrollberfest entry, everyone would agree that the joke wasn't funny.

That's it for the tutorial! You touch trolls until one of you dies. You shoot arrows to defeat enemies. You perform an unholy ritual to loot treasure chests. We're ready for whatever fantasy RPG Miller has in store for us!

Well... let me just show you the next board.

95% of the tutorial is irrelevant to the actual game! The game isn't a fantasy whatsoever, if anything it's a horror game with a tiny hint of sci-fi. You'll never collect "arrows". You'll never find a treasure chest, let alone have to use the cheat prompt to collect its contents.

This is the first time the game the game will circumvent the expectations it builds up. It will not be the last.

Instead, the game begins with some powerful art of "crazed Edna". The idea this might be a serious game is tossed aside and replaced with wacky characters and manic art. Characters players know nothing about in conversation that are a vehicle to say anything and move the game wherever Miller wants it to go.

I can see some similarities to Sue from NextGame 33, though nothing concrete enough to declare it a reference. MadGuy did not invent "Crazy lady" after all.

Miller's take how to to portray a human in ZZT is really something else as well. Her centipede eyes gaze out at you. Her tiger teeth create an incredibly muted yet toothy smile. But the outline of smiley faces make the art distinctly Miller's. These are unusual choices, and yet they work. The label on her sweater comes off as superfluous, who else could this be if not "Crazed Edna"?

The usual carefree attitude for the protagonist means that the player has no qualms with her offer of five bucks to jump off a bridge. While the portraits are crude in a very endearing way, the cinema sequences of APT are a lot less inspiring. Large boards like this one do little with all the space they have. Objects meant to be hidden until necessary have their hiding places given away due to the background fake walls.

The timing is clearly off here as well. Your character makes the jump, and immediately the hidden object swoops in from the side to catch them mid-fall. They show up so early though, that rather than be caught, you just kind of begin moving horizontally as if in flight yourself, and then both you and the mystery savior disappear before reaching the screen's edge.

Edna suspects it was Jesus, and the payment is never received. She's as jovial as before, excited to come up with new names for you that she'll forget immediately afterwards. Still, I think there's some animosity that your jump was non-fatal with those extended middle fingers waving around. I can't imagine they're not supposed to be that, though the previous drawing of Edna did have one hand with the same design pointing to the side, so maybe that's just what her hands look like.

And then you wake up.

Miller seems to love playing with players' expectations. Two fake-outs so suddenly, and even then, you still can't be completely sure yet that the game won't pivot back to the tutorial and end up being a by-the-numbers RPG after all.

Our protagonist whose name has yet to be revealed (it's not Medom), wakes in a cold sweat and wonders what the heck that dream was all about and who Edna was supposed to be, only to realize they're late for school!

Checkable boxes for the ZZT home include the need to put on clothes before you can leave and a usable toilet. The only real surprise is that the need for clothes applies to the front door and not your bedroom. I guess you're used to mornings alone.

It's an unusual house in how sparse it is. There's almost no furniture, the bathroom consists of nothing except a toilet, and your mother's bedroom in inaccessible. It's got a nice shape however, with a more appealing design in its blueprints than groups of perfect rectangles you so often see.

There's no toast in your mouth, so the run to school is just you running in the middle of an empty road for a screen to make the trek to school not so convenient that it it's next door.

The school being elementary hints that the protagonist is very young. I'm used to ZZT games making you a teenager because either the author is a teenager themselves or because they're not yet teens, considering them to be are cool and aspirational. The game never gives us an age or grade for our hero. They certainly act older than their school would lead us to believe. But who knows, there was no dedicated middle school where I grew up, so the elementary schools taught kids through sixth grade.

Miller tries to obfuscate the entrance a bit, having a row of invisible objects that send a message to an object in the corner to turn into a player. This object is surrounded by passages serving as a much quieter warp than using the Koopo method with endlessly running duplicators until the warp is needed. It does mean players need to press an extra key once the warp is active, though this is mitigated by Miller placing the row of objects a few tiles above the building making it likely for players (like me) to be holding down and warp before even realizing that they've bumped into anything.

The classrooms are another instance of Miller not sweating the details. It's a school. There are classrooms. Nobody wants to be on this board for a second more than necessary.

Some helpful talking to oneself lets players know they should be in math class, in the room that has the empty seat. If you're the kind of player that likes to explore their surroundings before advancing the game, you'll be disappointed. Not a single student has any code. Not even the one that stands out with a cyan background. We'll never know their deal.

And if you're the type that wants to advance the game, you'll probably do what I did and skip a small conversation by mistake. The game actually wants you to talk to the teacher before taking your seat. This conversation goes as you'd expect. The teacher is upset, the student offers their excuse, the teacher sighs and just tells "Mr. Miller" to sit down already.

We finally get to learn our name. Scott Miller. It's the author! This knowledge makes a few of the game's scenes more amusing (Scott is in fact _quite_ popular as we'll see). For readability's sake, I'll be sticking with "Scott" when discussing the game's protagonist and using "Miller" to refer to its author.

Scott's bad is day is only getting worse with his amusing sudden outburst. When he cusses in class Miller added a cute detail where you can see his teacher visibly wince. This is one of those moments where Miller's portrayal of the life of a child feels very accurate with a kid's reaction to their blunder being even more of an error than the original issue. I hope, for Miller's sake, that this scene isn't based on actual events.

The bell rings and class is dismissed with the teacher not caring to write Scott up or make his day worse than it already is. Being entirely devoid of code, his classmates continue to hang around after class. Maybe the game isn't the most realistic after all...

Afterwards there's no second bit of text from Scott telling you where to go next. The other teacher, should you try to go to the other class, suffers from a programming error, looking for a label that doesn't exist so now there is no second class. This bug doesn't impact progression, it only means missing out on immediately falling asleep in class before waking up in time for recess.

In fact, there's nothing stopping the player from skipping both classes. While the game tracks if you've been to math or not, there's nothing preventing you from proceeding to the playground for recess.

Right away you can tell that there's way more to interact with here. A lot more care has been put into making this screen than the last. But before you can investigate everything, you're immediately beset upon by a bully named Bill and his goons who are looking for a fight.

Finally, some action! Kind of.

One of the few things the tutorial didn't lie to players about is the back and forth combat. When you throw a fist at Bill, he punches back automatically.

What he doesn't do, is move. In the tutorial, the troll standing still as you wailed on him seemed like it was just for simplicity's sake, but no, basic combat in this game has no concept of positioning or dodging. You punch and get punched. It's all a matter of having more health than your opponent.

And to be clear, there's no randomization here. The entire fight is a canned sequence with every success and failure having been determined in advance. This kind of scripted fight hiding in gameplay lets Miller avoid stopping everything for a cutscene, and makes the attacks feel like your own actions as you'd have no way to know it's all pretend without looking at code or replaying the game.

It's easy to dismiss child on child violence in these ZZT games where you're likely to be one of those children and probably going to save the planet in the next hour. Here it comes off as very brutal, going for some more graphic descriptions of the violence rather than little drum sounds for smacking one another and alternating between and repeatedly in a daze.

Like, dwell on it a bit. Bill is in rough shape and he knows it, trying to get some quick revenge by ordering the rest of his group to kick Scott's ass with sheer numbers.

But Scott's ass is un-kickable. The other kids tremble at the thought of that they might cough up blood too! The fight stops, with Scott being free to explore the playground, while his "bullies" cower in place.

The peaceful kids of the playground all serve a singular purpose, that being a little trade quest confined to just this board. Having one of these sequences on a single board would normally be a recipe for tedium were it not for Miller coming up with some fun items to trade. What do these kids want? Sticks...

...jars of bugs

...broken watches.

They're really got their own little economy.

Only one student isn't interested in trades or fights. Meet Tori, she saw Scott cause a kid to cough up blood and immediately developed a crush.

She's also remarkably good at this.

Players don't get any insight as to what Scott thinks of Tori, and Tori doesn't really reveal much in the way of personality either, so getting together like this boils down to it sounding more likely to be the correct choice than anything else.

She reacts as any child would to get into a relationship with the great and powerful Scott, though talking to her afterwards, she's already bored.

After Pain Talks is a complex enough game that players aren't directly railroaded into agreeing to going out with Tori. You can reject her, either here or when she asks if you'd protect her, and the game continues. Not long afterwards Miller will tire of having to handle non-Tori daters and finds a way to end the game.

So you better get to work trading those bugs because the final item in the sequence in a locket, which Scott can give to his beloved to really lock in her affection. In elementary school I think it's equally likely that the jar of bugs or broken watch would have worked the same.