Sean Barrett's Heroes is a nicely done implementation of an clever and long-awaited idea--multiple PCs within the same game, between which the player can switch at will. As proof of concept, it works just fine; as a game, it works slightly less well, as the game makes some unfortunate choices that obscure its most interesting features.

The game bills itself "a most traditional CRPG experience," ironic on several levels. For one thing, the game has no RPG features besides the multiple player roles; it’s true that the setting and general plot appear to be very RPG and stock fantasy--a dragon's gem, a nasty warlord-type fellow, a quasi-medieval milieu, large dollops of magic, and other such familiar elements--but the multiple-PC angle adds a good deal. For example, progress for some of the character depends on knowledge that the other characters have--sometimes in minor ways, as in it’s hard to know where you’re going when you’re one of the characters unless you already know the landscape, and sometimes in more major ways. Some characters have an obvious motivation to go to a certain place; others have no such motivation, but the player’s knowledge that useful objects (for that character) are there replaces that motivation. That’s interesting in itself, though I’m not sure I call it a triumph of game design, as the game does tell you (in the walkthrough) that you can play the parts in any order. (It mentions that some roles may help you understand the others, yes, but that’s not much help.)

The plot involves a certain object that you want to steal, except that there are no less than five of you--four of you appear to be erstwhile members of a band whose exact purpose (besides general heroism) is fuzzy but which apparently was the bete noire of the warlord presently in power. As such, my first assumption was that the five PCs are working together, which, it turns out, is not the case--they’re all working toward the same goal, but they’re not trying to help each other. In fact, only one of them can be considered to exist, in the game’s timeline--it’s not as if you can come across an object as character 1, using your special skills, and surreptitiously pass it to character 2, who has the power to use it. (If that aspect were realized, it really would be CRPG-esque, or at least closer.) Perhaps no one expected this but me, but I spent quite a while wondering when my various compatriots would show up. At any rate, you see essentially the same scenery five times, through five different pairs of eyes, each of which sees what matters most to it and characterizes the setting in ways that might be expected of that particular character.

The plot sounds, and in many respects is, pure conventional fantasy; three of the characters are an adventurer, an enchanter, and a thief, who do pretty much what you’d expect. The only elements saving the main story from utter conventionality are the "royalty" character, who accomplishes his or her goal by ordering underlings around, and the "dragon" character, who achieves the desired result much more directly than its human counterparts. (Suffice it to say that "smash" and "burn" are key verbs.) The royal character is followed around by a mob of hangers-on who produce dialogue like this (apparently created by a random patter generator akin to that of Jacks or better...): "Baronet Pom says to Knight Thannishessolf, 'Did you hear? Lady Lalla was with Lady Reloppimmib behind the throne in the palace, and they were having a disagreement with Baronet Jurzad!'" This sort of thing palls after a while, but it did keep me amused--and the notion of accomplishing an adventurer’s objective by stomping around with a huge entourage is pretty funny in itself. The dragon is even funnier--it speaks in first person plural, past tense, which makes it sound oddly grandiloquent, and whenever a human shows up, you get something like this: "We heard shrieks from a man-thing, ‘Wuthe-elistha-migodisa-drakin. Dran-dran-dran.’" The dragon has an entertainingly contemptuous view of human affairs--it remarks about a garden, for instance, that "we perceived fresh plants in a location inappropriate to their origins, with insufficient bare earth." The writing, here and elsewhere, sustains the game and retains the interest of a player who might not necessarily care to keep plowing through a stock fantasy game.

What’s odd, then, is that Heroes isn’t really conventional fantasy at all--at least, there’s a twist that pulls it out of the realm of the archetypal fantasy quest--and yet the game hides its creativity under a bushel basket, so to speak. Not only is it not apparent until the end that something more might be going on, it’s far from clear even then; the clues are so evanescent that the player could easily dismiss them as just an attempt to be vaguely enigmatic. (For my own part, I’m not sure I would have been able to put it all together without some helpful ifMUD input.) This layeredness is not, of course, a bad thing, and it worked in another Comp01 entry, Jon Ingold’s All Roads--but there the meta-puzzle of the game was right on the surface, and the player couldn’t very well ignore if he or she wanted to gain even the most superficial understanding of the game. Here, superficial understandings are in ample supply, and the prodding to probe deeper is a touch too gentle. (If nothing else, however, it became apparent why the collaboration I was expecting didn’t happen, as there are nudges in the direction of the larger plot at the end of each chapter.) The deeper problem, obviously, is that apparent stock fantasy is a turnoff for many players, and even the multiple-PCs hook isn’t necessarily enough to overcome that; if the tugs at your consciousness, so to speak, hinting that you may be missing something were a little more pronounced, the fantasy-haters among us might be given pause.

The other problem is that the puzzles themselves, quite apart from the framing puzzle, are pretty difficult and require some obscure connections (or connections that are only supplied to the other characters, multiplying by five the usual poke-around-and-pick-up-clues problem). Not only is it occasionally not apparent why you want to do something, it’s not apparent how to do it either--and while puzzles are usually bearable if you have either the why or the how, having neither makes things rough. Adding to the difficulty is an ample supply of red herrings--some are irrelevant to everything, and most simply aren’t relevant to any particular character, but with so many apparently useful objects to choose from, getting inside the author’s head is often a challenge.

Technically and artistically, Heroes succeeds admirably; the few bugs in the competition release appear to have been cleaned up, and the POV-shift is nicely done. The game does commit some design sins, but I appreciated the artistry of the multiple perspectives and the layered plot sufficiently that I gave it an 8 in this year’s competition.