Ratings and Reviews by J. J. Guest
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Epic's 'Adventure', July 19, 2019Epic Adventures, a small company operating out of a terrace house in Kibworth Beauchamp, Leicestershire, were nevertheless one of the biggest and best known producers of text adventure games for the Acorn Electron. The Kingdom of Klein was their third release.
Perhaps surprisingly, The Kingdom of Klein shows a stronger influence of Crowther and Woods' 'Adventure' than either of the author's previous two games. It's a cave crawl, the aim being to restore the Klein Bottle to its rightful place on a pedestal in the King's palace. Along the way you'll also have to find the five Platonic solids. It's a big game, boasting 230 locations, and this, along with a superior parser, was a big selling point for Epic's catalogue. In reality, it's one of the game's biggest flaws, and all of Melvyn Wright's games suffer from the same problem. Most of those 230 rooms are there simply to represent distance and scale. To give an example, at one point in the game you find yourself on an open plain. To cross it, you must go west 11 times! Later in the game you find yourself in a ravine which requires you to go east 18 times before you arrive at where you need to be. A mountain takes 10 moves to climb up and down, and so on. This might be acceptable once, but the game requires you to constantly retrace your steps and traverse the same terrain. Needless to say, most of these intermediary locations are empty and have nearly identical descriptions.
The puzzles are very much in the spirit of 'Adventure', but completely original. Wands and magic spells feature heavily and some of the solutions are rather under-clued, though the hint sheet provided makes up for this. For the purposes of this review I played with the help of Dorothy Millard's CASA walkthrough, but when I reached the point where I had given up in the 1980s, I was actually surprised at how close my teenage self had got to the end. There's a fairly generous inventory limit, but it can still be a problem given the size of the map. For a cassette-based game written in 1984, the parser is remarkably robust, and I had no problems making the game understand what I wanted to do. The parser in Epic's later The Lost Crystal is even more impressive.
Returning to The Kingdom of Klein after 35 years, the game, though bug-free and solidly programmed, is definitely showing its age. I'd be hard pressed to recommend it to a modern IF player, but for those interested in IF history it's an interesting artefact, clearly influenced by 'Adventure' but not in any way derivative of it. Three stars.
A Walk Through S, May 2, 2019I liked this. Structurally, as well as thematically, I was reminded of the 1978 film "A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist" by Peter Greenaway. Stylistically I was reminded by the work of the so-called Spectric School of poetry. It took me a long time to play through it, because I was always tempted to wander. The more I wandered, the more interesting the game became, and the reason for this is given in the afterword, which itself makes for interesting reading. The randomly generated text was well done, benefiting from a diverse vocabulary, but it might have been improved by more variety in terms of sentence structure. All in all, a very interesting literary experiment.
Great for playing with kids, April 29, 2019I played this engagingly silly game with my 7 year old nephew, and he absolutely loved it. The terse text and clever button interface were an ideal introduction to the medium of IF, and though we went on to play a couple of traditional parser games, he liked this one the best.
We played on a mobile phone, and I hope Robin goes on to release more games for mobiles. I hope, also, that he releases an authoring tool for Versificator so that other authors can use it!
Draculaland riffs on a host of classic monster movie tropes and features (mostly) logical puzzles. We resorted to the hints once or twice. The only really disappointing thing was that (Spoiler - click to show)in spite of the title, you don't get to see a lot of the eponymous vampire. It might have been fun if he'd turned up earlier in the story.
Bob-a-job Week, December 12, 2018This is a retro text adventure written using the Adventuron system, a web-based IF language for creating games resembling those of the 8-bit era. Scout's Honour was written by a veteran of Delbert the Hamster and Zenobi, two prolific software houses which specialised in text adventures for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad computers in the 1990s. This game is very much of that ilk. It has a lively comic voice, daft puzzles and a suburban, Middle England setting reminiscent of the Adrian Mole books. Your task is to complete five 'bob-a-jobs' (simple tasks for a small payment) for a Boy Scout badge, in order to attend a disco and ask out the girl of your dreams. The Adventuron interface, despite its retro styling is a surprisingly slick, and whilst the parser is a long way from the standards of Inform or TADS, I experienced very little guess-the-verb or other problems associated with vintage games. Scout's Honour isn't trying to be modern IF. Adventuron is designed to capture the look and feel of the old Spectrum games, and it does this perfectly. I haven't completed Scout's Honour yet, but it amused me enough make me to want to try.
Period Charm, November 23, 2018It seems an odd thing to say about a computer game, especially one released this year, but Birmingham IV has "period charm". I started playing the game before I knew that it had originally been written in The Quill in 1988, but it immediately reminded me of BBC Micro games of that era.
Birmingham IV shares many tropes with the games of Geoff H. Larsen. It has a rural English setting with standing stones, long barrows and village inns with colourful names. It is peopled with trolls and other folkloric figures.
Unfortunately it also shares many of the faults of games of that period, such as an inventory limit. Room descriptions tend to omit the direction from which the player first approached the location, perhaps assuming that the player had made a map. It is also very easy to make the game unwinnable without realising it.
Nevertheless the Birmingham IV does have charm, and enough that its flaws didn't stop me from wanting to play it. I'm excited that David Welbourn has now produced a walkthrough, and I do hope that there's a post-comp release that's a little less "old school".
Short, Clever and Great Fun, November 23, 2018In this short, puzzle-centric game, we play as a young woman with a newly acquired superpower - the ability to stop time. Our job is to save a group of superheroes (and villains) from a nuclear explosion which we have put into a state of stasis.
As with all of Mathbrush's games, The Origin of Madame Time is clever, well implemented and fun to play. The action-packed superhero genre is a tough one to pull off in IF, but Mathbrush achieves it here by presenting the action just as it appears in a comic book - as a series of static vignettes. The puzzle mechanic is also clever; we must utilise the powers of the different characters in order to get them to safety.
Where it is less successful is in its sense of priorities. The exploding airship, which ought to have been front and centre, is not seen until some way into the game. In some of the descriptions, important details and bits of biographical trivia are given equal weight, which robs the setting of some of its drama.
The Origin of Madame Time was written as a sequel to The Owl Consults, but it is not necessary to have played the earlier game in order to enjoy this one. Both games are great fun, and highly recommended.
An Impressive, Atmospheric Tale of Horror, November 23, 2018I first had the pleasure of playing Bogeyman in an IF Meetup group, and of meeting the author, Elizabeth Smyth. Before the playthrough, she felt the need to give us a trigger warning. The game does indeed include scenes of cruelty towards children.
What impressed me right away about the game was its presentation. A choice-based game, Bogeyman’s links are presented at the bottom of each scene in a grid formation, separated by white lines, which is very effective. A glow effect around the text of each link on mouseover was a nice touch. The choice of a fixed width font for the Bogeyman’s dialogue was less successful, however. There are also a few illustrations, of which I would like to have seen more, and some suitably eerie music.
One thing that parser-based games tend to be better at than choice-based games is creating a sense of place, but Bogeyman, a choice-based game, left me with a very clear mental picture of the Bogeyman’s mountainside hovel and its surroundings. The child-kidnapping title character on the other hand is more of a cypher - we are given only glimpses, and this also works very effectively. One gets the feeling that description is absent because none of the children can bring themselves to look at him.
Also well evoked was the sense of a daily routine, which serves as a reminder of how quickly we tend to normalise a terrible situation.
Bogeyman is a long game, and I only had time to play through it once during the competition, but I’ll certainly be returning to it now that the comp is over.
All at Sea, July 10, 2017Footnotes in Ashes is a short story about a man lost at sea with his dead wife's ashes. Presented in six short chapters, it is not in any real sense interactive, and there are no alternative endings or different paths to take through the story. The reader advances the story by clicking on super-scripted references which reveal footnotes at the bottom of each page. The footnotes reveal more information, and sometimes a link to the next chapter. It's all a bit unengaging. The unnamed man and his wife remain ciphers, barely sketched in, and without any real agency the story becomes a game of hunt-the-link-to-the-next-chapter. I can't be sure, but I suspect there are one or two bugs in the implementation. It's hard to know whether they are bugs or deliberate text effects; at one point, for instance, footnotes from a previous chapter reappear, seemingly out of context. Towards the end, a genuine error message appears:
Error: <<audio>>: track "thunder" does not exist
With a bit more polish some might find this an interesting short story, but it's not really interactive fiction.
A Dadaist shish kabob that somehow tastes… delicious., April 13, 2017How Gorxungula’s Curse came seventh out nine entries in Abbie Park's Odd Competition, I'll never understand. Eight years have passed, and apart from the one I wrote, it's the only entry I remember. It remains one of my favourite Duncan Bowsman games. I suppose we gravitate to people we admire, and not long after the Odd Competition I got in touch with Mr Bowsman and mooted the idea of collaborating on a game - sadly that association has yet to bear fruit, but I live in hope.
Duncan is a prose stylist who varies his style according to the needs of each project. Here, he writes in the herky-jerky fashion of a carnival ghost train. Abruptly changing direction and crashing through our expectations like bang doors, his writing leaves the reader with the same weightless feeling in the stomach as a thrill-ride. You never know what's coming up next, but it's always the last thing you expected. Bowsman possesses the admirable talent of being able to take elements that have no business being together and forge them into a seamless whole. It looks effortless, but I suspect that this is an illusion, and like the proverbial swan Bowsman’s legs are going like the clappers beneath the surface of the pond.
Gorxungula’s Curse might look at first glance like something thrown together in five minutes, but then you look at the detail, and it’s like a Fabergé Egg, albeit one made from odds and ends from a wizard’s attic. He’s a consummate wordsmith, raiding the second-hand stores of literary history for forgotten treasures and stringing them together like a Dadaist shish kabob that somehow tastes… delicious. He is not afraid of inventing a new word when nothing in the dictionary will suffice, or of resurrecting some archaic term to do his bidding like an Atlantian mummy in a Clark Ashton Smith story. It’s this love of words, and the sheer joy of jamming them together that give his work such energy and colour.
Don’t get me wrong. Bowsman is quite capable of writing a straight story with beginning, middle and end all present and correct and in the right order. Irvine Quik, though quirky, is a great example of this. But it’s these bold experiments of his that I enjoy the most. They’re the text adventure equivalents of Captain Beefheart songs, and in a medium increasingly full of audience-pleasing pabulum, that’s sometimes exactly what we need.
An well written short fantasy, marred by strange 'rules'., January 27, 2017This is an interesting, short Twine game in a fantasy setting, in which one plays a thief hired to steal a gem.
I found the beginning of the game frustrating. Every 'optional' choice I made took me straight back to the 'Rules' page and I had to start all over again. In terms of immersion it threw me out of the game, quite literally, and slammed the door in my face. I wondered what I had done wrong. I can't help feeling that this could have been handled better, perhaps by having a separate page for the rules and for the first paragraph of the game.
The 'rules' themselves had a peculiar effect on the way I played the game. Choices fall into three categories; rogue, dissident and diplomat. We are advised "choose carefully" because "If you choose inconsistently between two category choices, you can often lose points that you've earned from a prior choice. To pass speech checks and earn the best endings, it is ideal to have 0s in the categories that you aren't choosing".
This injunction transformed my experience of the game, and not in a good way. Suddenly, I found I was no longer exploring the story world and making choices at will, instead I was skimming the body text and carefully scrutinising the choices in order to ensure that the ones I chose were consistent. Instead of being a game of "can you steal the Gem of Vorus?" it became a game of "can you tell the difference between a dissident choice and a rogue choice?" Judging by the number of times I got this wrong, the answer is a clear 'no'. I was frustrated by my inability to stay on the straight and narrow, knowing that it would result in my not seeing 'best' endings.
All of which is not to say that this isn't an enjoyable game. It was nicely balanced between action scenes and world building, and contains some very nice writing and characterisation. I'll definitely look out for whatever the author comes up with next. The author clearly knows how to tell a story, but for me the game was marred by the 'rules' which made the game more about second-guessing the author's intent than about taking part in the narrative.
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