Michael F Zozo’s Ambigo
The following article was one of several short-form pieces of writing requested by a now defunct publication following the death of game designer and architect Michael F Zozo. Each was intended to serve as an independent summation of one of his titles.
The opening cinematic of Ambigo reveal its unique and surreal premise. It depicts a dark skinned man in a white suit and hat walking the path in the middle of jungle. Waves can be heard crashing in the distance and the air is filled with the sound of exotic birds. Voice acting is noticeably absent from the game, but text displays the central premise.
“My name is Rhupti Galgola and I am the only detective on the island of Ambigo. Last night, at The Feast of The Seventh Candle, academic Distris Harlow was murdered in his manor by one of his eight guests.”
Rhupti emerges from the woods and stands before a colossal manor house on the edge of a picturesque cliff atop a bay. The first rays of pink begin to rise above the horizon.
“At noon tomorrow, the ship will arrive to the mainland and the guests will depart. That is how long I have to solve this murder.”
The large golden gates open and Rhupti enters the grounds, progressing confidently towards the front doors.
“To make this task even harder, I am physically incapable of lying.”
The doors are opened by an unseen hand revealing a deep cavernous darkness inside the house. Rhupti slows his approach and removes his hat to reveal a shock of salt and pepper hair. His final words appear on the screen after he has entered the manor. They are written in a different colour – the way that the player is able to differentiate the different characters' dialogue. This gives the final sentence of the introduction a sense of objective finality.
“On Ambigo, the punishment for murder is execution. This is the duty of the only detective on the island.”
And so begins an incredibly surreal point-and-click adventure in which the player is forced to confront the divide between truth and lies, reality and perception, the objective and the subjective. This is not at all the first time that Zozo explored these themes, both in his interactive fiction and in his architecture (his 1973 piece 'Memoire de Gistelle un tan papillion' is a forty foot tall structure of stone, bronze and concrete that blossoms out like a mishapen tree from a single base only an inch wide. Not only does this give the impression of an impossible act of balance, shifting lighting patterns coupled with a carefully crafted backdrop give the illusion that the entire edifice is rotating. These alterations of the truth are represented in the title, a nonsense series of words that resemble French closely enough for only those who speak no French to accept that it must make sense.)
The premise is both simple and imaginative, but with an elegance typical of Zozo's ingenuity.
By telling the player that they are inhabiting an avatar incapable of lying, it is not one fact that is established, but two. Firstly, and most obviously, the main character cannot say things that they believe to be untrue. As the player discovers evidence or learns facts, they become deeply ingrained in the dialogue choices that are available with different characters. Therefore, entire branches of conversation can be eliminated as the player progresses. Secondly, and far more cleverly, anything Rhupti does say, must be true (or at least perceived by the detective to be true). Not only do the facts dictate Rhupti’s line of questioning, but Rhupti’s line of questioning dictates the facts. There are a vast number of examples of this, but a very early example is found if the player attempts to question Lady Redbird. She will ask him if he suspects that she is the murderer and the player can answer yes or no, however, once that decision has been made it will distinctly effect the flow of the rest of the game. If you respond in the affirmative, Redbird becomes the focus of the investigation and Rhupti’s job (and thus, the job of the player) is to find evidence implicating her and confirm his suspicions. By saying she is the chief suspect, she becomes the chief suspect, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
Though Rhupti's inability to lie is never explained, it is occasionally explored. He can, for instance speak in metaphor, but not simile. He laments that metaphor is a descriptive portic device in which both parties acknowledge the inaccuracy of the claim being made, but that a suitably vague simile could be perceived as a factual statement whilst in fact being exaggeration, thus a lie).
Ultimately, Ambigo is a game about objective versus subjective truth. Rhupti’s inability to lie is the very tool that allows the player to shape the investigation and find the killer. Whilst his perception of events may be mistakenly constructed by misunderstanding the objective truth, he can in turn construct a facsimile of reality through speaking the truth as he sees it. The entirety of the game attempts to make this point.
Most players, initially suspect the Argentinian writer Alfredo Borgian (a not too subtle nod to Magical Realist, Jorge Luis Borges). He is one of the first characters that Rhupti meets and it is easy to establish his opportunity and motive. Whilst the game initially presents Borgian as a mild-mannered, intelligent academic, as Rhupti digs further, the Argentinian grows more passionate, more hot-blooded and more maniacal. If Rhupti is able to piece together an adequately air-tight case, solving puzzles as he goes, the noon deadline will approach. Rhupti will eventually confront an armed Alfredo at gunpoint above the bay and reveal his guilt before disarming and capturing the killer. Noon arrives and the player is given the final choice – 'Execute the guilty Alfredo Borgian' and 'do not execute the guilty Alfredo Borgian'. It is decided, regardless of the player's choice, that Borgian is guilty.
If the player chooses to enact Rhupti's duty, the detective draws his porcelain revolver (a state-issued weapon that is capable of firing only once before shattering, a mechanic intended to promote 100% assuredness in its wielders before they draw it) and shoots Borigan through the head. We see only the silhouettes of this placed against the midday sun as it reaches its apex above the bay. There is a burst of detritus from the side of Borgian's head, he slumps, the other characters' shadows stand perfectly still. The camera rises to show the cloudless blue sky. There is the sound of bells and a boat's horn in the distance as the transport from the island arrives. Gulls bark nearby. The words 'Ambigo' appear and the credits roll. If the player chooses not to execute Borgian, Rhupti does not draw his porcelain revolver. The two stare each other down as the other characters gather closer. Borgian regards the drop beside him to the ocean and seems to consider jumping. Before he makes a choice, the camera pans up and the final moments of the game are identical.
Once they have reached the end, regardless of which version of the narrative that they construct, most players congratulate themselves on having solved the mystery, on finding the tiny clues and implicating statements at the start of the game made by their killer of choice, and investigating to reveal them as they truly were. Even those who chose to play again naturally followed their previous actions, believing they had arrived at the only correct conclusion in their initial playthrough, and reached the same endings.
Except, those two endings are not the only endings. In an incredibly ambitious move for the time period, there are a total of seventeen endings. The progression of the game, in fact, the thematic feel of the game are all crafted by the player. Rhupti Galgola's attempt to drive the investigation and his inability to lie lead to a situation where any of the eight guests at the house can be pursued as the murderer. Each of the guests is warped by Rhupti's declarations as he constructs the reality in which they were the killer all along. Similar to Borgian's progression from calm academic to raving madman, Distris Harlowe's fiancée St Vivette begins as a distraught maiden mourning her lover's death and ends the game as a cold-blooded femme fatale. The Good Doctor is a proactive and helpful figure who desperately wants to assist the player's investigation, until he is suspected by Rhupti, in which case he is slowly moulded and redrafted into a genocidal eugenicist. Irinia, Harlowe's mother, can be an ageing chess genius in the depths of shock or a barely-functioning dementia-riddled fraud. Each character has their base personality and a twisted vision of themselves that becomes apparent only when the player follows leads that favour them as the killer. Yet, these personalities cannot coexist – if Irinia is the killer, she performs certain actions that are performed by another if they are the primary suspect. It is not possible for both Borgian and St Vivette to be the killer, and their motives for doing so are mutually exclusive. If Borgian is the killer, St Vivette is not a calculating nymphomaniac masquerading as a devastated virgin, she truly is the symbol of purity that she presents herself as. Likewise, if St Vivette is the murderer, the fiery tempered version of Borgian does not exist. Sixteen of the endings are created when Rhupti suspects a guest and must make the same choice, though in entirely different contexts, than with Borgian. Kill the guilty or spare the guilty. Whoever you pursue as the killer, they are who the killer becomes and has always been. The history is written in real time, but the past is rearranged. None of these endings are perceived as 'good' or 'bad'. There is no 'real' killer whose identification is preferable to the others. This is even presented as true if the player fails to solve the murder. In the seventeenth ending, Rhupti is unable to narrow the suspect list down to a single criminal. This is achieved when the player does not pursue the leads and opportunities presented to them and instead forms a broad pattern of investigation – no one thread is pushed far enough, no criminal can be determined, nobody reveals a hidden persona capable of murder. In this ending, the ship back to the mainland arrives and Rhupti stands alone at the dock, watching the guests leave, knowing that through his ineptitude, he has failed to apprehend the criminal and one of those departing has been able to escape justice.
More interesting perhaps than the way in which the plot is re-imagined depending on the actions of the player, is the way in which the very genre of Ambigo is realigned. Pursuing St Vivette creates a game which lovingly embraces the tropes of Agatha Christie's oeuvre. Meanwhile, pursuing The Good Doctor creates a game where the setting and concept are the same, but the tone is distinctly more mystical action in the vein of Indiana Jones. Through shaping the plot, Rhupti not only alters the other characters, but alters his own role according to genre. Pursuing one guest creates a seemingly straight forward neo-noir in which Rhupti takes on a persona similar to JJ Gittes of Chinatown. Pursuing another, creates an openly surreal nightmare in which Rhupti is merely dipping his toe into the abstract horror in line with Twin Peaks' Dale Cooper.
For most game designers, this would have been an extremely 'out there' project. It is hard to imagine being able to secure funding for a game that so wildly bucked the tropes and traditions of a still young genre. However, as is typical of Zozo, there was an additional layer of surrealism, an additional questioning of reality. Some have even referred to it as the eighteenth ending to the game – thought there is no physical ending, it does effect what the player leaves the game feeling and understanding of the story. Even within the extremely malleable bounds of what constitutes truth within Ambigo, all is not as it seems. For the player astute enough to even realise something strange is happening, to those who play multiple times and strive for different endings, or those who discover through conversing with others that their assumptions had not been the only possible path, the truth is yet again disguised.
In each ending, regardless of the path taken, in the depth of the final conversations when players are likely to be distracted by uncovering the truth and the climax of the story – Rhupti Galgola speaks a very small, very subtle lie. Thus, the entire concept of the game, the entire founding principle is revealed to be untrue. Rhupti can lie, the premise is faulty, the entire founding idea that the player has been using to guide their experience – one of the exceedingly few 'truths' set in stone, is a lie. This reveal, for those who recognise it, casts a shadow across every action within the game, for if the detective can lie and the detective is forging reality with their words, the reality they are creating is not only malleable, but fictional (even within the realms of the fictional game). As the avatar for the player, Rhupti reveals himself not only to be an unreliable narrator, but the player to be an unreliable consumer of the story, and an unreliable writer of the events.
With the very nature of the game called into question, the numerous oddities about it become questionable. Why do the characters have such bizarre names? Where is the island of Ambigo supposed to be and what 'state' is it that grants Rhupti his legal right to punish the guilty? Why do all of the characters in the game instantly believe Rhutpi's claims without question? Why is there only one detective on the entire island, and why do the characters instantly accept that he is incapable of lying? Why does the player?