To try to describe the plot of Shrapnel would be a thoroughly futile endeavor, because the point is that the story doesn't travel in any discernible path: rather, you come across fragments of story here and there, and what exactly is going on isn't apparent until the end, when a character appears and infodumps all over you. Even then, it may not be fully clear how everything fits together--there are still plenty of hows and whys left unresolved for those who care about such things. Moreover, there are quite a few memorable images and surprising moments, meaning that you might remember and be affected by certain bits of Shrapnel even if you never tried to put the various story pieces together.

Shrapnel might in fact be remembered more for its meta-IF elements than its actual story. For one thing, this is the first work of IF to actually ignore keystrokes--not disregard a command, but actually ignore that the player is typing something and show something else as the input. What's shown is 'restart,' no matter what the player types, at the restore/restart/quit prompt, though restart generally continues the story from where it left off rather than starting from scratch. Moreover, pauses are an essential part of the presentation of the text, again a meta-IF function that may catch the IF veteran off guard. Similarly innovative is "talk" as a conversation system: you direct your conversation toward whoever you're paying attention to, usually the person you last interacted with, and you're given a choice between accepting or rejecting a proposed rhetorical sally; if you refuse, your character says something else, something you have no way of predicting. The fragmentary aspect, the variety of apparently unrelated plotlines, is reflected in the text itself, which now and again spits out disjointed words and phrases that have already appeared elsewhere.

All these are intriguing, even subversive takes on IF as we've known it up to now, but--I know, I know, this is a hangup of mine--they also reduce the interactivity aspect down to just about zero. In something as short and disjointed as Shrapnel, the immersion factor is minimal anyway--by the time the player has figured out what's going on in the story, the story's over--and when the game commandeers the keyboard, the player is justified in thinking, well, why do you need me here, tapping on the keyboard? Why don't you just let everything scroll by me at once? Certainly, there's interaction of a sort here, even if it's forced: being powerless to stop the course of the story is an integral part of the experience, of course (though it's still possible to quit at prompts other than restart/restore/quit), but, again if you can't figure out what story is being told, it's hard to get all worked up about not being able to stop it. The limited control over the conversation system is similar: if the player's only control over what's said is a veto on one conversational option, the character may as well just start talking. (Admittedly, there are several people the player can talk to, but the choices aren't exclusive--were this rewritten as static fiction and the conversations simply written out, one character after another, the effect wouldn't be dramatically different. There are a few effects that couldn't be reproduced in static fiction: notably, you die repeatedly over the course of the story, and the place is littered with your own corpses by the end--but it's questionable how much impact that has on the story when the player's likely reaction to the deaths is something on the order of "huh?" It's not that there are no choices to be made in Shrapnel, but the choices there are affect the outcome so minimally that the result is closer to F than IF. Still, in its own way, this is pretty good F; the effect may be that of an early draft of a novel, with ideas, themes, and character development all fighting for space, but it looks like it would be a fascinating novel. Notably, the protagonist is split between two separate identities, and piecing together the way those identities is an intriguing challenge. (Of course, given the rampant confusion, the player isn't likely to make much headway in separating out those identities by the end of the story, but there's definite replay potential.) On the figurative level, the numerous violent deaths you experience are a precursor to the pain that your character inflicts, and you could even say that you're desensitized to the violence sufficiently that it doesn't have much effect on you, the player, after a while. (A similar process seems to have gone on with the character himself.) The Zork parody element--Shrapnel is set in and around a white house, and the living room has a rug with a trap door under it--brings out the ho-hum-more-violent-deaths aspect, since one hallmark of traditional fantasy IF is dying violently so many times that *You have died* has zero emotional impact. The core of the story, involving a dysfunctional family and abuse, is vividly and disturbingly rendered: the abuse is sufficiently distanced from you (you hear accounts of it rather than actually seeing it--that your sense of culpability is minimized, which is exactly the effect that the character himself has achieved. The way you seem to find horrific violence around every corner is a direct reflection of the nature of the story: the events that have already transpired have left unsightly secrets everywhere. The science-fiction aspect that appears at the end of the story, in an apparent attempt to make a bit of sense of the demented structure of the story, feels a bit tacked on, but it doesn't diminish the impact of what's come before.

In its own way, then, Shrapnel is quite a story, and that it's less interactive fiction than a forced march isn't a major drawback, in the end. It's certainly not easy to make sense of what goes on, nor is it particularly pleasant, but it's still an impres
precursor to the paindown to just about zerooff guardfragmentary aspectdemented structureseems to have gone onho-humrhetorical sallytacked onrampantbits of Shrapneldisregard a commandscratchdiscernible pathculpability*you have died*
[Hit any key to exit.]