Ratings and Reviews by ccpost

I don't know that there's much I can add to the numerous reviews, but I played this for the first time recently and I wanted to register the incredibly moving experience that this game delivered for me. I'm still fairly new to IF, though I've had thought-provoking experiences with several works that have quickly demonstrated the artistic potential of the form to me. Photopia, though, is the first IF work that I've encountered that has moved me at a deep, soul-searching level. From start to finish, Photopia is a fine crafted, emotionally-wrenching experience.

I went into the game with only the barest information about it -- that it has been considered incredibly influential and that it experiments with the interactive fiction form. As much as probably any IF work, this one really benefits from going in with as few (or none!) spoilers as possible. I won't delve into any of the specifics, but I will discuss one especially affecting scene behind the spoiler tags below.

(Spoiler - click to show)The scene that especially got me was early-ish in the work, when you play as a father whose task is to go outside and retrieve his daughter (who we learn is Alley, the focus of the work overall) for bedtime. You can choose a number of options, either telling her to come inside right off the bat, or prolonging the conversation, discussing some of the finer details of astrophysics. As a father of a young daughter myself, this scene absolutely devastated me. By this point, the astute player can start to see that something ominous is heading for Alley, and so this time is all the more precious for the father. I wanted to keep the conversation going indefinitely, though the astute player also can see that there's really only one outcome for this scene -- bedtime will have to come at some point. By the end of this scene, I was not only in tears, but knew that I was in the midst of a truly special work of IF.

If you haven't played this game, stop reading these reviews and play it! Like a tightly written short story, you can engage with Photopia in a brief span of time, though it will stick with you long, long after.

I desperately want to love this game, but sadly I can only sort of like it. I'm obsessed with words, odd phrases, and idioms, so I went into this game with quite high hopes. Broken up into a series of 'interactive short stories,' a few of the stories are fantastically fun and pull off the wordplay game mechanic marvelously. A few of the stories are confusing and confounding to the point of being unplayable.

The stories that really shine -- "Shake a Tree," "Buy the Farm," "Shopping Bizarre" being the main highlights -- integrate wordplay like spoonerisms and taking idioms literally in truly inventive ways. As your playing with words often alters the game world, there are many opportunities for surreal, odd, and plain funny happenstances (Spoiler - click to show)like when some locks on a door become smoked salmon lox...that need to be 'unloxed' . O'Neill's writing in these sections is superb, conveying the strangeness of some surreal transformation caused by you invoking a bit of word play.

If this had been sustained for a full game (a la Counterfeit Monkey), I would easily give this game a 5 star review. However, the short stories that fall flat fall very, very flat. At least two of the stories almost certainly necessitate using the (fortunately built-in) hints, as the 'puzzles' involve guessing at some joke or bit of cleverness that you have only some vague idea of. This is essentially the same driving mechanic in the stories that work well -- except you are able to arrive at the right conclusions by playing around with the words in the text. For stories like "Manor of Speaking" and "Act the Part," there is very little actual wordplay involved, and few other clues in the text as to how to make progress.

Although I absolutely love the parts of the game that work, the fact that I was forced to heavily rely on hints and walkthroughs for nearly half the game seriously soured my overall experience.

I played this game several months ago, curious to try out Choice of Games for the first time. I fear this may have ruined other Choice of Games for me, though, because this one may be difficult to top. As I became familiar with the mechanics of the Choice of Game format (a story driven every few paragraphs by a set of multiple choices that impact the trajectory of the narrative and also affect various stats), I could see how masterfully Powell-Smith utilizes these features. Every choice feels meaningful, and the stats help you to see how you're making progress (or not) to a wide range of goals. I found myself truly strategizing as I made choices, checking my stats and considering how one choice over another may help lead me to a desired outcome.

In the game, you play as a character starting at a prestigious finishing school where your main goals include finding a suitable marriage and/or securing a social station that will help to clear your families troubled image. Though the genre of the game is not in my typical wheelhouse, I immediately became hooked.

What really makes the choices, stats, and achievements/goals feel meaningful is the enormous size and scope of the game. With 10 NPCs that you can develop relationships (both romantic and platonic) or rivalries with, along many other in-game achievements that can shape the plot in large or small ways, there really are an astounding number of ways to chart a course through the game. At over 440,000 words of game text, I only scratched the surface in my one playthrough. I believe I will feel compelled to play through again in the not-too-distant future.

More than just the scope of the game, though, is the craft behind the writing. Every scene is well written and richly descriptive. The NPCs have distinct personalities, lending real weight to the choice to develop relationships with one versus another. The setting is also rendered to great effect throughout the game -- by the end of the game, I felt like I knew Gallatin (the finishing school) even though you don't navigate through the world a la a text adventure.

The game is certainly an achievement, a wonderfully executed work in its own right, but also a testament to the possibilities of Choice of Games and the like. While CYOA-style works can be interesting, they typically feel like you're taking one of a handful of alternate paths through a set narrative. In Creme de la Creme, I really felt like I was moving through a fully realized game world and making impactful choices along the way. On top of that, the writing is sharp and the plot is full of intrigue. I understand that Powell-Smith is currently developing another Choice of Game set in the same world as Creme de la Creme, and I'll be playing that as soon as it comes out.

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).