Ratings and Reviews by ccpost

I'm a newcomer to IF, and so I've been working my way through some of the classics to get acclimated and learn a bit about the history of the form along the way. As a game consciously designed for and marketed to 'adult novices,' I thought this would be an ideal game to play early on in my IF career.

Wishbringer definitely fits the bill as a good game for beginners. The story is charming, the atmosphere is engaging, the puzzles are interesting but not difficult, and the game overall is quite forgiving. I appreciate how the narrator prompts the player to save at key times when an irreversible action is about to be taken, for instance.

The fairy tale tone and the at times whimsical to surreal atmosphere of the town was done to good effect. I also found the map to be perfectly sized, as I quickly internalized the town layout of Festeron. This works well since meat of the game is a non-linear treasure hunt/puzzle solving deal that involves exploring the mostly open map. Despite the relatively small map, there are really two Festeron's that you get to explore since the world goes topsy-turvy after the introductory section of the game. I may play through again just to explore some of daytime Festeron.

While I liked all of those aspects of the game, there's a major flaw (to my mind) in the game design that keeps this a merely good not great game. The game centers around a magic stone, the Wishbringer, that can grant 7 different wishes. However, Moriarty &co decided to make using the Wishbringer optional, a way to make puzzles easier to solve for newcomers and build in more challenging (and more rewarding) ways to solve puzzlers for advanced players. I was looking forward to the magic/wishing aspect of the game, though I never actually used the stone. Even as a newcomer, I was able to solve the game without using the stone. If the wishes had been actually integrated into the puzzles and story, rather than leaving them as an optional feature, I would have loved rather than just liked this game.

I had a blast playing this game. I'm not much for genre fiction of any kind (mysteries, romance, pirates, what have you), but Briggs uses genre fic tropes as tools to great effect without this being a straight up "romance" story. This is done in large and subtle ways -- from the Caribbean setting to details like using "aft" and "starboard" as commands to move around the ship. PH perfectly nails the atmosphere while creating an original story. Though not a simple game by any means, it is, simply, fun.

Several aspects of the game work really well to draw in players of all experience levels. I'm relatively new to IF and text adventures but was able to make good progress without making extensive use of walkthroughs hints. More than the relatively straightforward (I'd say 'fair' rather than 'easy')puzzles, though, the structure of the game is quite effective. Extensive descriptive and dialogue-driven scenes intersperse the sections of exploration and puzzle solving. This was done in a balanced way so that I never felt I was just slogging through treasure hunts to solve puzzles nor did I feel bogged down in scrolling through text.

In addition to the effective structure, the writing itself is outstanding. I was often struck by rich, evocative descriptive passages that just floored me. These are the types of lines I would put a star by in a paperback book...except I was playing this on a computer! Things like: "Rats’ scratchings counterpoint the lullaby of bilge water sloshing in the bulkheads, punctuated by footsteps slapping the deck overhead."

Others have made this point, but it's worth reiterating that this game perhaps most fully achieves Infocom's promise of interactive literature. Though made 30+ years ago, there are still lessons to be drawn from this one.

As a recent convert to interactive fiction, I have been looking for good games to get started with. Although this is perhaps not a typical work, I was intrigued by the sci-fi dystopian premise and encouraged by the wealth of critical praise heaped upon AMFV. Rather than detailing specific aspects of the gameplay or plot that I found especially effective, I want to focus this review on the merits of AMFV as an introduction to IF.

In short: I found AMFV quite stunning in its own right and also an effective introduction to IF more broadly. The work opened my eyes to the artistic potential of IF as a form and delivered a playing experience that was easy and engaging for someone with only minimal prior exposure to IF.

A few more detailed points:

I appreciated the relative lack of puzzles. Though I'm not averse to puzzle-heavy IF, I wanted a work without punishing puzzles or cruel game design (e.g. unwinnable states, lots of learning by dying). I loved that the main mission of the game is to explore the simulated versions of Rockvil, which still requires some careful attention to the description of places and objects without the demands of a typical puzzle (e.g. finding just the right use of an object to get past an obstacle). AMFV helped to ease me into the playing mechanics of IF without suffering the pain of banging my head (literally or metaphorically) against some puzzle to make progress.

I also thought that AMFV did a great job of introducing the a novice player to the poetics of IF, that is, the joys (and challenges) of navigating a simulated world via a text interface. Cleverly, the simulated versions of Rockvil can be seen as sorts of IF worlds within the broader IF work -- Perry Simm is in the same role as the player. This effect was achieved quite well and not in an eye-winking kind of way.

Finally, this work is clearly significant in the broader history of IF, which is obvious even to a newcomer like myself. Playing it definitely helped me to better understand the historical foundation of where more recent IF works have come from, but the experience was not that of an 'eat your vegetables' history lesson. The work is still fresh and enjoyable on its own terms, and indeed the satirical thrust of the work is still very relevant (even if the political satire could be heavy-handed at times -- probably my only real complaint about AMFV).