Ratings and Reviews by katz

You arrive in town only to find it abandoned. Where are the villagers? What happened to them? This familiar setup quickly moves into a tense, action-packed story that continually kept me on my toes.

The unusual third-person perspective gives the Salt Keep a novel-like feel, which is one of its strengths. There must have been temptation to make Doyle an AFGNCAAP, but making him his own distinct character was the stronger choice. And how many fantasy stories have you read that star a traveling salesman?

The thing I found really interesting in The Salt Keep was the blend of CYOA mechanics and RPG stats. While some of the scenarios have the familiar "Find the item to use in the place" mechanic of CYOAs and parser games, you also have stat blocks and can make checks with a chance of success or failure. This kept me on my toes and forced me to think more strategically than the usual one-lock-one-key puzzle-solving of adventure games. Instead of simple failure, failing a check usually allowed you to complete the action but suffer an injury, resulting in consequences that cascade as the game proceeds. It also increases replay value--maybe this will be the playthrough when I just beat the guard in hand-to-hand combat! (Note: It was not.)

A high fantasy with a classic feel and lots of action, I enjoyed The Salt Keep a lot. Now to deal with my sliced hand...

Is why we can't have nice things.

First off: The premise of Calm is brilliant. Earth has been decimated by a fungus that causes stress to kill you. Like any proper post-apocalyptic game (a woefully underrepresented genre in IF), you have to act carefully to survive, but the survival process is based on avoiding stressful situations and finding ways to destress.

The descriptions are atmospheric and evocative; coupled with the smooth implementation, it's a rewarding world to just wander through.

There are, however, some issues that keep this good game from being a great game.

First, the player's mood is a two-axis scale described by a single adjective. While I must applaud the author's vocabulary, it left me constantly guessing. I would have preferred two quantitative values to one qualitative one, although I suspect other players may disagree.

Second, while multiple solutions and implicit actions are both good mechanics, I don't think they work that well in conjunction. The game allows various items to be used for various acts and automatically picks one of them if you don't specify. Since items are everywhere and there's no carrying capacity, most actions succeed without you really having to think about them. Again, some people may like this; I found it too Nemean-Lion-ish. Occasionally the games choices didn't make sense, either (smashing a lock with a bottle).

Third, the starting quests feel pointless to me. For instance, one requires you to gather food, but you never need the food, and you aren't penalized nor does the quest revert to incomplete if you eat all the food or drop it.

Still, it's a well-realized game and I found myself returning to it. My concerns may not bother other players at all. Calm is worth checking out.

Even accounting for the elusive last point, this is still an extremely short, simple game. I kept encountering situations where I expected the game to be more complex and was surprised when it wasn't: the locked gate, for instance.

This is doubly odd because the details of this world are so intriguing. In contrast to the standard animal's-view focus on describing normal human things from an animal's perspective, Veeder has developed a creative rat world that hints at underlying complexity--and yet, these details are never really needed within the game. I'd like to see more rat world and get a chance to put some of this information to work.

I'd also like to see some technical improvement: the clever responses in this game are still outweighed by stock answers, more items could be implemented, and there are a few spelling and grammar errors. Overall though, particularly given its length, it's a fun game.

Surrealist interactive fiction is largely an untapped resource, and this well-written and well-crafted little game shows what the genre is capable of. It's atmospheric, creepy, and suffused with a sense of inexorability that builds as the player finds him- or herself moving things along towards a foreboding conclusion.

The ambiguous ending frustrates a lot of players, but I appreciated it. It seems clear enough to me--the game isn't excessively complex--Plotkin just never states it overtly. Surely there's room in the canon for a few intentionally unresolved endings, and if they belong anywhere, it's in a surrealist game.

The impeccable implementation did not compensate for the fact that I didn't like either Violet or the player character. Violet's voice is perfectly believable, but it's also nagging, wheedling, and irritatingly superior; the player character's inability to focus was enough to make me declare him/her a lost cause. I appreciate the ambiance, but however detailed, the story didn't place me in a world where I wanted to spend any amount of time.

Rimworld feels like an archetypal 80s RPG: You find yourself, surprise surprise, on abandoned planet amidst the abandoned relics of civilization, your goals vague and your timeframe not very urgent. And yet there's nothing wrong with the archetype. Abandoned civilizations make interesting settings. The atmosphere is strong, if not exceptionally striking; the prose is serviceable; the puzzles are interesting, if not exceptionally original.

Rimworld makes for a reasonably entertaining afternoon (or morning, or evening, as your preferences may be); you won't feel that your time has been wasted. But there are so many other things.

The linear nature might turn off some players, but that also makes it a more truly story-like experience. Easily flowing narration (marred by the constant word definitions, which get tedious after a while) carry the whole thing along in a dreamlike manner.