| 5 star: | | (7) | | 4 star: | | (15) | | 3 star: | | (18) | | 2 star: | | (2) | | 1 star: | | (0) |
| Average Rating: 
Number of Reviews: 5
Write a review |
1-5 of 51 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
A game about Nothing, May 10, 2024Released in the early days of the Amateur Era, this work achieved some notoriety by taking a definitive if hesitant step away from puzzle-focused interactive fiction. As the author states in the >AMUSING response at the end: "This game was an attempt to see if a serious and interesting story could be merged with traditional IF 'puzzle' elements without one overshadowing the other."
The work consistently presents itself as a morality tale, and the majority of contemporary and subsequent reviews categorize it as such, which presumably reflects most players' experiences. However, the author denies this description of the work in the associated walkthrough (emphasis mine): "...TAPESTRY may seem to be centered on morality and 'proper' choices. This was not my intention. There is a grander scheme going on (which the opening quote alludes to, and which, I hope, the epilogue makes clear)..."
The opening quote of the piece is from a book by Neil Gaiman: "Those who believe they must atone inflict this place and its tortures upon themselves... Until they realize that THEY, and only they -- not gods or demons -- create their hell; and by this they are freed, and take their leave... This place is evil, Timothy, but perhaps a necessary evil." The obvious reading is that hell is solely in the mind of the beholder, a self-inflicted torture that is ultimately unnecessary, serving only as a waystation for those on the path to enlightenment (or at least some other destination).
The author's use of the term "the epilogue" is interesting, however. This is program-mediated text, and although the final words of the game exhibit a dry, detached tone that is in stark contrast with the melodrama of the rest of the text -- a tone which on first reading implies that this is the "real story" of the PC's life -- the final text does, in fact, change depending on the course taken by the PC. The single identity referenced by the noun "epilogue" is therefore all three versions of the text. In two versions, the objective facts are consistent but what changes is the subjective narrative weaving them together. In the third (the one in which the PC successfully changes his past), the objective facts themselves differ.
I think it is fair to take the author at his word that this is not a game about morality. The ostensible moral dilemmas presented are almost parody in their contrived framing, and the story is not very subtle in its feedback that doing the "right" thing by changing the past to accord with commonly-held standards is in fact wrong. The encouragement you get in this path is from an "angelic being" who is (as the work will confirm if prompted) not a good guy. It soon becomes clear that the PC's attempts to do the "right" thing are at root just attempts to escape guilty feelings. What is not clear is whether that the guilt is even genuine -- the more closely one inspects the PC's thoughts, feelings and actions, the more he comes off as immature, narcissistic, and even sociopathic.
The most "winning" path (as implied by the tone taken in the text) is the path of (Spoiler - click to show)Clotho. In this path, the facts of the PC's life don't change -- only his attitude about them does. Though the work describes the transformative change as the PC "facing" his pain and guilt, in practice the change comes about via the PC simply denying all agency in his decisions as well as their negative consequences. (Spoiler - click to show)Regarding his absence from his mother's deathbed: "...you tell the Wraith ... how you wished you could have been in two places at once... only to find out it was too late." It is made unambiguously clear during that vignette that the PC should have been doing this work much earlier, and that he chose to go to City Hall knowing that it would preclude making it to the hospital in time. Regarding his "mercy killing" of his wife: "You tell [the Wraith] of Sarah's sickness, of her suffering. You explain that you wished to free her from all of it, that she herself found living impossible. You tell the Spectre that your act was one of love." In the vignette, the player must decide to kill Sarah before finding her note, and, as another reviewer notes, there does not seem to have been any discussion between them about this drastic decision beforehand. Moreover, on the path in which the PC ensures that she is given a new experimental treatment, she is cured! No matter how the PC prefers to tell it, a jury privy to the same evidence we are would have grounds to convict. Regarding the fatal car crash that ends his life as well as an innocent bystander: The PC makes no attempt to put a spin on this matter, but driving around late at night for no reason in a sleep-deprived and emotionally-unstable state is in no way responsible behavior. One might also note that his sole concern seems to be that he killed a woman, since he exhibits no dissatisfaction if the outcome is revised such that his victim is male.
Additional support for the author's claim comes from the design of the player interaction. The player gets, in effect, only two choices: whether to attempt to change all three "crisis" points in the PC's life as a group and whether to contest the accusation that he has done wrong. The former requires active effort on the player's part to search out the combination of events that will result in a changed history, while the latter is forced upon even the passive player since the game will interpret inaction as a choice. Very strangely, this second choice can be imposed even before the player makes any move that looks or feels like an intentional selection. (Spoiler - click to show)It is possible to leave the first and second scenes without resolving either. After being railroaded through the third, the player will be taken to a fourth location, where the Wraith will accuse the PC with three simultaneous questions: "Will you face me? Have you hubris enough to commit the breaking of your Moira? Are you fool enough to face your crimes?" (Apparently, in the author's mind, all three of these questions should be served by the same answer.) Simply saying "no" at the first prompt (the essence of denial) results in a choice being recorded -- from that point onward the player is only allowed to follow the script. Crucially, when the Wraith accuses the PC of being "a fool and a coward," an attempt to agree is rejected by the game: "You are about to concede defeat, when you realize that you cannot. You MUST fight this creature ... to the bitter end." To the PC, admission of any responsibility for his actions is tantamount to defeat.
The best support for the author's claim that this is not a morality tale is the endgame. (Spoiler - click to show)No matter which path is taken, the final result is oblivion for the PC; the choice truly does not matter for him. In the end, it seems to be a game about Nothing.
[A final note: This observation didn't fit well in the above review, but one item of interest about this game from an historical perspective is the surprising similarity between the climax of the third panel's vignette and that of Adam Cadre's Photopia (i.e. (Spoiler - click to show)being the driver in a fatal car accident that the player is powerless to stop despite being forwarned). This work predates Photopia by two years. As Paul O'Brien observes about the efficacy of the device: "[T]he feeling of not being able to (Spoiler - click to show)control the car despite what you order the character to do is an extremely chilling one, and it is an effect that would not pack the same potency were it attempted in static fiction." Cadre and other authors would experiment with limiting player agency more directly in later years, even to the point of replacing entered keystrokes with others to enforce pre-set commands in some cases, but the notability of the device in this work suggests that it may be the first time any author tried to limit player agency in a story-relevant way.]
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Loose threads, May 25, 2019Tapestry was one of those games that was pretty revolutionary when it was released. Replaying parts of one's life wasn't a new concept by any means, but the storytelling device was ripe for the interactive-fiction treatment. As such it wooed me at the time, but replaying it all these years later I mostly just see the flaws.
The first problem I have with the game is that the story and all the player's goals are spelled out entirely in the prologue. It's a somewhat interactive text dump, but for the most part it successfully removes all wonder from the playing experience. You are shown key moments from your life you can replay, you are told how you can replay them and how you can reach the three distinct endings. What follows is essentially the video game equivalent of cutscenes: lots of exposition without much interaction. Yes, there are a couple of puzzles, but they're rudimentary and you have to more or less repeat the puzzles on each playthrough which is quite tedious.
The second problem I have with the game is the simplicity of the moral choices. The first one involves deciding whether or not to go to the hospital to watch your mother die or save a small family business from going under. Perhaps somewhere at sometime a real human has had to face such a decision, but it didn't move me; all I could think about was that my jerk of a coworker Mike couldn't cover for me while I went to the hospital. The second moral choice involves euthanizing your wife or trying to prolong it with a new drug treatment; the moral debate over euthanasia aside (and why are there only two options here?), all I could think about was how silly it was that the player and his wife seemed to never have once had a discussion about this before the player is forced to make the choice.
The overall theme of fate and guilt is a good one, and Ravipinto's writing and coding are solid. But the design of the game and the moral choices left me cold and I found it hard to care about the characters or their fates.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
An influential early game about moral choices, February 3, 2016Tapestry is a game that came up quite a bit in early IF discussions due to its unusual storytelling strategy. It remains fairly well-known.
Tapestry is a story about the afterlife, where a man is confronted with his 3 most despicable moments in life, and a chance to revisit each. You can deny each memory and fight against it, you can accept the memory and your shame, or you can accept the memory and deny your shame.
It is well-known for its moral choices, and for having several distinct paths, one of which is almost puzzle-free (the one where nothing changes), while one is puzzle-intensive (fighting your fate).
The first time I played it, months ago, I didn't really like it, and I stopped after the second panel. But this time, I used the walkthrough, and I read the story more, and I really liked it, and even found it emotionally satisfying.
The game gives an entire recap story at the end (about 2 pages), showing what life you really led.
An interesting, fascinating game. I recommend it (and don't feel bad about using a walkthrough, as many of the puzzles are just busywork). I do regret using the walkthrough at the very end in the 'accepting your fate' lines.
6 of
7 people found the following review helpful:
Good game, but flawed, April 25, 2012Tapestry. You've died, and now are confronted by the tapestry of your life, woven by Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos: the fates of Greek myth. The three of them, along with Lucifer, confront you for judgment, but also to give you another chance to revisit three key moments in your life. Will you make a change, or not? You are filled with regret and shame, but is it because of what you've done, or have you simply looked at things from the wrong perspective? Perhaps your life was good after all.
Fate, judgment and the meaning of life are the key themes in Daniel Ravpinto's first IF game, which won the Xyzzy award for Best Story in 1996 (and came in second place in the IF Competition that same year). The game begins in death and hackneyed writing: although it was nominated for Best Writing, I found it to be cheap and pulpy, especially the long, opening prologue.
"Fleeting glimpses of faces half-remembered in the gloom," the game begins. Then this seemingly endless fragment: "Screams, the sound of squealing tires, a sudden thump, a sickening crunch and a violent jolt followed by a sense of weightlessness and disassociation." Already the text of the game feels heavy handed. But it gets worse, when we appear in a room called Nothing: "Concepts like time and place have no meaning here. Your mind attempts to impose something, some order, some structure, upon the space in which you exist, and fails." Oh, come on. Is this a lecture? The opening prologue reads like pretentious pseudo-philosophy. I had a hard time pushing myself to read on.
Especially when you are teleported to a tower and an interview with Satan, who is here to judge you. I felt like I was in a Chick tract, to be honest. Maybe it's my religious upbringing, but I've seen this story before: you've done horrible things, you have to relive them and account for them or maybe change them. And the writing in the Prologue section was so incredibly stilted and overblown that I had a hard time taking the game seriously. Which is actually a shame, because once you get into the game proper, it's not that bad. Tapestry actually has some good ideas, marred only by a hokey premise.
In some games, I suppose you could let bad writing slide. But not in Tapestry, because there's a lot of it. You often are given large dumps of text to read. In fact, one reviewer mentioned that Tapestry might have been more effective as a short story, given how much you have to read at any given time anyway. But I think that such a story would still require a re-write. Of course, I should back off a little here with the recognition that some of this is taste. I'm sure plenty of people found the writing satisfying.
Once you get into the game itself, you get to relive some pretty horrible events. Even though I didn't care for the structuring premise of the gameplay, I thought that the way Ravpinto structured the progress of the game within each section was very nice. Basically, Ravpinto tried to create puzzles which were consistent with the gameworld and seemed like natural actions for the protagonist to take. In some ways, they aren't actually puzzles at all, but actions the player takes to advance the plot further. The emphasis isn't on "solving" the game, but progressing through it, making choices to determine the outcome. In this way, the game is very interesting, and does something very well. Abstract puzzles and off-kilter world logic are absent from this game, allowing players to "inhabit" the protagonist and try thinking like a real person.
I hope I find more games that try this sort of thing, because this is exactly what interactive fiction needs to be legitimate. Don't get me wrong, So Far is a very fun game, and I liked it much more than Tapestry, but Tapestry is moving in the right direction for those who are craving interactive stories rather than mere puzzles. As such, Tapestry seems like an important step in the development of IF, even though framing narrative is too heavy-handed and derivative for me. In spite of its blemishes, you should try it out. The game is very short, playable in an hour.
17 of
18 people found the following review helpful:
Holds up well over the years, May 3, 2009We played tapestry on ClubFloyd recently, and took the game through all the various possible threads, something I'd never done on my own, years ago, when I first played it. What I found, first off, is that the game holds up well over a dozen years after initial release, and that second, the path I originally took that I thought best was probably less than ideal. Worth revisiting if you've played before, but only once.
Daniel Ravipinto stated at the time that he wrote the game that his goals were to see if a serious and interesting story could be merged with traditional IF 'puzzle' elements without one overshadowing the other, and to explore mutually-exclusive paths, a pre-defined main character, moral dilemmas, 'puzzle-less' IF, and semi-realistic NPCs. He does a very good job of this. This is a piece of IF well worth downloading.
1-5 of 5 | Return to game's main page