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Echo Bazaar is just about the most fun you can have with a web browser these days.

If you're even remotely interested in games, social narrative etc, and what you can achieve with a vintage game format and some neat new twists, you should give EB a whirl. Possibly you're not remotely interested in these things, in which case you should definitely take look inside. At once, if possible.

You need a Twitter account (don't worry, it won't spam you or your followers) to play, and that's all. Now "adventure game" is the only way to describe EB, and as a consequence I hear a lot of people shifting uncomfortably and looking around for something completely different to do, but stick with me a while. You won't be disappointed.

To be clear, in no sense is Echo Bazaar from the superfuture. It has no augmented reality features, no automated chatbots, no location-based elements and so on. It doesn't need them.

Instead, Echo Bazaar is just an an absurdly great game: gently wonky, vaguely sinister, tremendously well-written. It's still in beta and already writhing with invention, comic detail, possible evolutionary directions. It fits nicely into your day too, by making only modest demands on your time, being entirely pick-uppable and put-downable.

And of course, you get to meet people and kill them too. What more do you want?

Now Read On

The game is set in a fog-bound, parallel Victorian London. It's powered by serial 'storylets,' riffs from the c19 London myth-kitty, bent into pleasingly familiar comic-horror shapes. While we're here noticing things, I have to say it's a pretty neat trick to relocate the whole city of London to a lightless "Fallen" underground, strictly from a genre/ narrative-production standpoint. 

At a stroke, we're now technically (this from the perspective of someone who neither knows/cares what 'steampunk' is meant to be, that is) in the 18-19th intercentury: among the catacombs, tunnels, cellars, infernal caves and intestinal castle corridors of Gothic fiction. Where there were carrier pigeons, now there are messenger bats. Inhabitants of both eras are made available for narrative cross-breeding, hence music-hall horror, encounters with undead pugilists, troglodyte melodramas unfolding serial-fashion. By the way, if you're allergic to elves and trolls - or what the late Peter Cook once referred to en passant as "all manner of goblinry" - then Fallen London will not distress. 

There's no serious attempt to map fictional spaces onto real ones here (Bugsby's Way/Reach/Marsh does make an appearance in the game, but happily we're not in the immoderately portentous Sinclair/Ackroydian psychogeographic London) which is, to be clear, another major plus. 'Pervasive' and/or 'locative' game designers take note: reality is your fourth wall, your bubble-burster. No danger of that here: at least, not yet.

On Keeping it Fluffy

Lightness of touch makes all the difference.  

Mainline English comic writing often dips into a distinctively elasticated, jaunty self-deprecation: as if the mere act of speaking or writing were vaguely painful or distressing. This appears especially in the context of smart people teasing the genre they're notionally writing in. Beyond antiquarian jollies and/or well-turned pastiche (good things nonetheless, especially when not done in a half-arsed manner) a gentle reluctance to play with total seriousness is good news again. Echo Bazaar's charm-attack is allied to old-fashioned indie resistance to normal business, where normal business is increasingly a grim-faced gigantism, over-imagineered, self-regarding and wanton surrealism.

The Bazaar is pretty cheering strictly because of what it isn't, in other words. 

The same restraint that helps it walk smartly past Taking It All Too Damn Seriously turns us similarly away from the path of gloomy thrills, avoiding repulsively prurient Jack the Ripper horrorism or worse, CSI: Greenwich 1894 - an inevitable franchise expansion there I'd guess, one we might call 'Vixploitation' - and instead keeping the tone intimate, playful: even when you're killing someone for stealing your Counterfeit Head of John the Baptist, that is. 

It's the hugely unlikely, hovering spirit of PG Wodehouse (flicking peas at HP Lovecraft, say) that makes Echo Bazaar into more than just another wee trot through the imaginarium.

Dual Purpose

EB succeeds however you take it. It's structurally engaging enough to keep you happily grinding, clicking away like a happy lab-rat for the next enabling item, for the next narrative turn, but at the same time (if you're the kind of person for whom this matters) it's extremely well-furnished in there. Beyond universally legible starting points like Dickens or Conan Doyle, my operatives detect TS Eliot and GK Chesterton and - for all I know - an unnatural commingling of Kellow Chesney and Flann O'Brien, not to mention untold volumes of primary source material. There's some chewy and ambitious world-making going on, for sure, and the setting is wholly expandable: Victorian-Gothic Londonism is almost a free-standing genre in itself, capacious enough for all kinds of referential fun, apocryphal play. And if this stuff is not readily apparent, it doesn't matter a bit.

Inside Information

I've been told that the creators of The Bazaar eat only hazelnuts, and that they live together in a ratproof shed on a dredger's platform, moored on the shores of The Unterzee. They all inhabit the same crumpled, crackling and filthy bed, squabbling over bundles of sigil-blackened vellum, cotton bags of shells, greasy volumes of recondite poetry. By night they sing ancient river-shanties. They do not sleep.

Emerge

You'd need to have suffered a career in academia to call some of the sweeter narrative touches 'emergent' so let's just say EB's all a-pop with pleasing consistency: there is no light in Fallen London, hence no flowers, so women wear little decorative mushrooms in their hats. Of course. That's just the kind of professional-level whimsy that we're here for.

But player behaviours are certainly emerging: in the last few weeks we've seen little factions emerging, clans budding, fighting strategies being exchanged on Twitter, and most importantly perhaps, user-content fading in, which points forward to some interesting social-technical ambitions.

Without getting into this topic too deeply, the social action elements are considerably better engineered (eg tactful and adult, implicit understandings of likely use-cases being what counts here) than the very many graspy, pesterful - and inordinately successful - Facebook games (you know, for kids) whose naked intent is to own the names of everyone you know in short order.

I'm looking forward to seeing if they can maintain currently high standards of etiquette while growing the player-base.

In-game rules are evolving quickly and in some fairly odd directions too: now that I've stumbled across the vaguely disgusting power to eat rats-on-a-string (and lately, a mysterious blue sea-crystal called glim) I've become considerably stronger, better at all sorts of things. But whereof we cannot speak...

B...bb...b...bb.... beta!

EB is still in beta, meaning there are obviously some loose slates, minor infelicities. But the fact that the game is being created as it's played, along with the knowledge that you're helping to make it better by playing it or giving feedback adds to the fun considerably. Being part of something that perhaps doesn't quite know where it's going yet just feels very much in key, somehow.

Society/ All aboard/ Let it be known

Lastly, as it's a Twitter thing, you get a better class of player aboard, including some otherwise fairly respectable people.

It used to be said that Doom was golf for geeks, a social event for teams as much as anything. EB is shaping up to be... I don't quite know what. But shapes are forming in the ether... Having said that, if you are one of the people who has 'killed' me, whether in earnest or in sport, then, ladies and gentlemen, rest assured: I'm coming for you.

Unless you'd prefer some vigorous sparring by the Observatory, that is. 

Go and play Echo Bazaar