Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

Written for the Ludum Dare game jam, Evolution: A Parallel Narrative is a game about the shaping of a god, most akin to Ex Nihilo. It is not really about evolution as a biological process, or even about analagous selection-and-mutation processes; but rather the more general word, applicable to Pokemon and presidents, that means 'development' or 'change'.

As might be expected of such a rapidly-created work, there are lots of flaws: the prose is awkward and full of errors, suggesting very quick writing and possibly a second-language author.

Initially a normal person, you discover a Rift Engine which sends you through a series of disconnected, hastily-described science-fiction sequences, each resolving in some binary choice; these, in turn, grants you some kind of massively powerful ability. By the end you have become a godlike being.

Some of these choices are conceptually clear - philosophers vs. warriors, for instance - but the choices between different scenes are hugely opaque, like the one between String Theory or Mars. Most of the choices involve choosing which side of a conflict to support, suggesting that you're becoming the patron of causes or peoples.

These abilities don't interact, or become relevant at all within the story; rather, the end just assumes that you have become intensely powerful, and determines the result from your Morality score. This is a shame, because the powers you get, and how they might function together, are the most intriguing thing about Evolution. (But of course it would have been a vastly more challenging effort.)

Ultimately, this boils down to that rather boring variety of story - the game with Good and Evil choices, at the end of which you are either irredeemably selfish and destructive, or a pure and righteous hero. This is a model that's both boring and arbitrary; and it doesn't always fit well with the actual choices you're given. (Choosing peaceful herbivores over violent carnivores is presented as moral: but this feels like a category error of sorts, a case of anthropic thinking.) Often you get far too little information to make choices that seem as though they'll have massive impact. The impression you come away with is that gods are monstrous, charging headlong through the universe and screwing around with it on whims, without ever really understanding any of it.

Finally, the effort expended on the early game - discovering the Rift Engine, and a trad-IF-like sequence about repairing it - seems wasted, ill-suited to a CYOA format and largely irrelevant to the real focus of the game. Of course, these failings - both of surface polish and core design - are hardly blameworthy in a game jam piece.

Figaro is a very small example game, introducing a single point of theory and not really aspiring to any larger artistic goal. It lightly depicts an imagined scene from The Marriage of Figaro, taking an approach very similar to the examples of the built-in I7 manual.

The standard role granted to IF player is to identify with and serve the interests of the protagonist. You might have some influence over what those interests are, but the purpose is much the same.

A different approach, far less-explored, is that of drama manager: the goal there is not to reflect the agency of the protagonist, but to make decisions about the story, some of them extending well beyond the agency of any character. This is territory well-explored in RPGs, where improvisation is much easier; in computer games, the examples I'm aware of are all, like this, very brief.

Figaro presents three choices of three different kinds. One is a flashback choice that has major implications for the protagonist's character, rather like the character-creation choices in certain CRPGs or many ChoiceScript games; such choices often ignore strict agency (such as choosing your gender), and may even imply some changes to the world, but their proper locus is still the character. Another is a traditional agency-of-protagonist choice. And in between there's a choice that bears no relation to protagonist agency at all - which character is your wife carrying on with? Figaro demonstrates, albeit minimally, that all three kinds of choice can co-exist in a narrative game, and that having several kinds of choice can be more interesting than being restricted to one.

Nonetheless, my main reaction to the piece was that there are vast numbers of narrative computer games determined by direct protagonist agency, and a decent number with a strong element of retrospective or character-creation agency; but there just aren't very many dramatic-agency games of any significant size. Within its limited range, Figaro is well-elaborated, allowing for a very broad range of outcomes - but it's far broader than would be practical in a larger work, and doesn't really address the problem of how to design drama-manager choices in a longer piece.

Like many concept games, I came away with a feeling of mild dissatisfaction, because explaining the concept is the easy part. This game is roughly the same thing as a conversation about theory in the pub; it introduces an idea, but doesn't grapple with the (much larger) problems of design and implementation. Which is fine, as far as it goes; but it makes you want a whole lot more.

Retro-Nemesis is a game that was originally written as a hidden feature on the Get Lamp documentary. It didn't work out that way, so Robb released the game in a more conventional manner.

So this is a story about Robb's IF friends, and as such it's very much an in-community kind of story; you play Robb, who is lured by the diabolical Jason Scott with promises of more screen-time in Get Lamp into a road-trip to set fire to Adam Thornton's second house in Canada. Madcap road-trip hijinks ensue in rapid succession and everything goes to hell, with the barest of nods to interactivity.

If you're a fan of Robb's writing in general, this is an entertaining few minutes: it's all over-the-top Achewood-esque capers, viewed through a thick haze of sex, booze, retrogaming and sketchy Americana. If that's not your thing, you're probably going to feel a bit like a Mormon at a baccanal, sitting quietly in the corner and waiting for all the stuff you don't grok to be done with.

Filbert and the Broccoli Escape is an illustrated children's story adapted to a game; the lazy protagonist uses magic to try and get out of eating his vegetables, and finds himself on a (brief) miniature-kingdom adventure.

I dislike it as a game for straightforward structural reasons, and as a piece of kid-lit for more aesthetic, personal reasons. Let's start with the former.

Broccoli Escape uses Quest's hybrid parser/menus/hyperlink interface. I'm sceptical about this interface in general; but Broccoli Escape doesn't make confident use of it. Early on it flirts with a Quest-ish approach with option menus based on objects, but it quickly switches to something much more like a straight-up choice-based system. It doesn't use either smoothly; where it wants to offer straight-up CYOA choices, it awkwardly forces them through verb-noun commands that make no sense and confuse the transcript. Nouns and choices are capitalised in an ungrammatical manner.

Even imagining the work as a vanilla CYOA, it's pretty clear that Broccoli Escape was made by a static-fiction author with little or no game-writing experience. This is a pretty common species in CYOA generally, and the game falls into a familiar pattern: a single linear story wherein all the apparent choices are blocked off, except the one that leads to the One True Path. Worse, a lot of these blocked responses fall into that bad old IF pattern: offer an interesting option, then deny it as stupid or obviously unfeasible. (This specific thing is less justifiable in CYOA than it is in parser IF; it's ruder to refuse an explicitly offered option than an inferred one.)

It bears repeating: there is no point in adapting a work to a new medium unless the work grows in the process. Perhaps the idea was that in an online, gamified format it might reach more people; but gamification for its own sake is worse than useless, and an ebook might have been a more suitable (not to mention more widely-used) format.

Now, on to considering it as a book. (Important caveat: I'm speaking here as an adult who enjoys well-crafted children's books, not as a child or a parent.)

I have a number of nitpicky annoyances. I'm not a fan of the art style: it's all scratchy shading and blobby newspaper-funnies eyes, without the overflowing exuberance and fun-to-explore detail that I like best in children's illustration. And I always rather liked broccoli as a child, and deplore the unsubstantiated libel of its good name. (Aubergine is another matter.)

But running through these complaints, there's a general feeling of blandness. Broccoli Escape wants to be quirky and imaginative, I think, but more than that it wants to be safe. Filbert is a white kid from a middle-class two-parent family; the offending meal is gravy, mashed potatoes and America's Supreme Court-approved Designated Vegetable Which Is Unpleasant Yet Healthy. Filbert's problems are minor, his conflicts mild by the standards of kid-lit: he dislikes doing chores that every child dislikes, but never seriously clashes with his parents over this. There are touches of the comfortably-old-fashioned. (The author's parents probably read a printed newspaper. Parents of Filbert's generation overwhelmingly don't.) The central fantasy, of becoming very small, is a very standard one and isn't elaborated in any unexpected directions; and the whole fantasy plot is just one chase scene. Magic works (or doesn't work) as rhyming couplets. There's no problem with any of these as individual elements: together, they add up to something rather dull.

A missing-person case draws a detective into a cultic mystery. The genre is Chaosium's familiar twinning of 1920s noir-flavoured detectives and the Cthulhu mythos; indeed, the author acknowledges that the game is based on a particular Chaosium scenario, The Secret of Castronegro. Rather than the standard Lovecraft New England, the action here takes place in small-town New Mexico.

Small-town New Mexico in the 1920s seems like a strikingly non-standard setting with a lot of potential, but Castronegro Blues is not very focused on descriptive writing, or character writing, or on prose in general. Some people have complained about the profanity in this series; while I generally don't give a fuck about that kind of thing, I kind of sympathise. It's not that there's a lot of swearing, really; it's that the rest of the writing is so utilitarian, so placeholderish, that the crassness really sticks out. Similarly, the protagonist is kind of an asshole: he's uninterested in and contemptuous of his surroundings in general and the people in particular (there are lots of NPCs, almost all of whom are one-line stereotypes). Now, asshole protagonists can absolutely work, if they're interestingly complex or have redeeming qualities or are just entertaining; but the nameless detective here is a blank, except for when he occasionally, suddenly comes up with something curt and mean-spirited - the entire description of a desk sergeant is "He looks like an idiot." So while I'm generally a big fan of asshole PCs, it was uncomfortable to spend time around this protagonist, and I didn't feel as if this discomfort was in service of anything.

(It's possible that he wasn't even intended as an asshole. Maybe he was intended as a gruff, laconic Marlowe type, and the author didn't manage to capture all the elements thereof. But what's left is pretty much just asshole.)

Player interaction is not a focus, either. The process of detective work is conspicuously just a framing device, and this is true of the game's approach to interaction generally. For much of the time, solutions spring into your hands in a great hurry; on the other hand, UNDO is forbidden, the game puts you in situations where death is hard to avoid, and there are no warnings about keeping saves.

What this game is focused on is story, the unfolding of a Lovecraftian horror mystery. But in its enthusiasm, it hurries: police and witnesses pour detailed accounts on you, helpful library books spring into your hand. Both mystery and horror are genres that are reliant on pacing, on the slow build, on taking care with the delivery of crucial information to the player, on the power of the unknown. It's more difficult to pull off when, as Castronegro does, it includes a lot of stock subgenre elements (creepy Indian tribes, old local families with human-breeding plans, secret cults); the result is that this game tips its hand way too early, before there's time to develop a sense of threat.

There's enthusiasm here, but that enthusiasm has yet to get translated into a labour of love. This section, from early on, tells you pretty much what you need to know:

There is a knock at the door but the knocker doesn't wait for an answer. The door opens and a beautiful woman walks in. "Thank you for seeing me, detective." You invite her to sit and she does.

That's skipping over a lot of annoying little steps - opening the door, greeting the woman, offering her a chair - that the author thinks are boring. And a lot of them are boring! But the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater: the character herself motivates the protagonist and thus the whole story, so she very much needs to not be boring. What we get really amounts to just a statement of her narrative role - 'you know how this kind of story goes, fill in the details yourself.' That's really boring.

(On the plus side, the titles are getting a lot better. The Surprising Case of Brian Timmons is pretty feeble as titles go. Castronegro Blues could be a Tom Waits song. Ill Wind is just great.)