Review #6: HOPE'S PEAK
The Premise: Read about a mysterious Old West town.
The Gimmick: Do it one random paragraph at a time.
Hope's Peak is a jam project, created for the Mystic Western Game Jam (theme: "constellation"), and it's less a game than a short little narrative concept.
There is a land of dry dust and strong wind and in that land is a town named Hope's Peak, which has all the expected features of an Old West cowboy town. It has a sheriff and a mayor and a saloon. There's a blacksmith and a tanner and a mine on the outskirts. Its residents mainly raise cattle. But there's something not quite normal about Hope's Peak, something tasting of the supernatural, and it's not just that our cowboy narrator was raised from the dead and is now immortal. I mean that's obviously your first clue, but there's more than that.
This is all revealed to the player through short vignettes and half-scenes which are offered to you in random order.
Hope's Peak describes itself as "a mystery told five paragraphs at a time" but really it's a mystery told one paragraph at a time, it's just that after five you get an arbitrary "End" and then you can play again to get another random sampling. Again, this is a game jam project and so is more an exploration of an idea than a full work stuffed with complexity and content.
At each screen you're offered 3 random prompts out of a pool of, I would estimate, 150 -- I've played enough to have seen nearly everything, as far as I can tell. You click a prompt to display the corresponding paragraph, then you do that four more times, and that's that. A sample run might yield the following:
The prompts offered appear to be entirely random (you might even be offered the same prompt more than once) so the paragraphs you get in a particular playthrough aren't connected by topic, theme or causation. So it's not as if you end up with a five-paragraph narrative at the end, which would be neat; instead you just get five unrelated paragraphs. And eventually, if you play enough times, you will have seen them all. I bring this up not to offer a criticism of
Hope's Peak as it is presented, but to point toward the potential that could be realized by a work of this format. There's not a lot to this game, but it's got its finger on something.
Okay, so what about the content we do get? Like I said, I played enough times that I think I've seen everything.
Hope's Peak is not a story, more a series of glimpses
into a story; it is a mystery in the sense that it is mysterious, but not in the sense that there is anything to be solved or resolution to be had. It's a mood piece, really. You get brief peeks into this small slice of Weird West worldbuilding, and for that, it's pretty good. As you read, you start to notice recurring details about the frontier town of Hope's Peak and the world it occupies. A mysterious fever is mentioned a couple times. There are unsolved disappearances. The town is in a seemingly endless war against a seemingly inexhaustible supply of outlaws. Despite the dangers of the outside, the town has no defenses except its uniformly-armed citizens; they'd like to build a stockade but they lack wood to do so. Between this and the general barrenness of the climate, it is not clear how or why this village came into existence in the first place. Also, there are two suns and on the other side of the plateau is, per our narrator, "fields and fields of nothingness".
There's no resolution to any of these uncanny details. We never learn what The Constellation is or why it made our narrator immortal, the meaning of the "AMC" tag used by the outlaw gang, or even which planet Hope's Peak is on. The game's not trying to provide answers. It just wants to give you a taste.
Was this a hidden gem? No, but like I said there is potential in this format if it could be expanded, perhaps with a thematic link between the paragraphs you're offered so that it feels like story generation, or a way for the player to navigate this story-space instead of hitting the randomize button a bunch of times.
Her Story is what comes to mind when I think about this: like
Hope's Peak, it consists of a library of short narrative bits, but
Her Story provides the player with agency to search, explore, and analyze these bits to progress and to reach conclusions.