Barry Pratt in: Nothing to Report is a comedy adventure game written and directed by Tom Wood. It took twenty-five years to get round to starting it, which Barry would consider brisk.
I fell in love with Sierra adventure games. Typing commands into a parser, guessing the one verb the game wanted, and dying in ways that were unfair, sudden and very funny. The death messages were the best writing in the room. You died so you could read them.
Then LucasArts came along, and the games stopped killing you and started making you laugh instead. Point and click. Verbs at the bottom of the screen. Jokes in every corner, if you bothered to look at everything. I always bothered to look at everything.
Barry is my attempt to have both: a Sierra-style world where things go badly wrong, with the LucasArts habit of rewarding you for poking around.
I've wanted to make one of these for about twenty-five years. I had the ideas. I did not have the skill, and I never had the time.
What I did have was a copy of Adventure Game Studio. In March 2011 I finally had a go, and got as far as one room. One screen, with nobody in it. Then life, work and twenty-odd other priorities got in the way, and the room sat there, empty and unbothered, for fifteen years. Somewhere along the way the files went missing too. Barry would have been proud: it was the most thorough job of doing nothing I've ever managed.
What changed was the tools. I still can't code, and I still can't draw. But I can write, and I can direct, and it turns out that is now enough, if you are stubborn about it.
I wrote the story, the jokes and every line of dialogue, and decided how each room should look and play. The artwork was generated with ChatGPT, one scene and one sprite sheet at a time. The game itself was built with Claude, which turned my notes into a working engine, then fixed it, every time I played it and found something else wrong. There were a lot of somethings.
It's a fitting way to make a game about an AI that takes over an office. I like to think PIP would approve. Noted.
On the surface: a man who has done nothing for twenty years, promoted by a machine that mistakes his invisibility for brilliance. Underneath: what happens to the people who are quietly getting by when the systems start deciding who matters.
Barry doesn't save the day because he's clever. He saves it because he wants a cup of tea, and he finally decides that's worth standing up for.
The original game, as it survives today. Fifteen years in a folder, then quietly lost. Nothing to report.