Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

Almost Goodbye is a series of drama set-pieces: two people, a setting, a last chance to make something meaningful of a flawed relationship that will have no next chapter. It's a deeply theatrical premise: you can almost see the big empty stage, a projection screen, two chairs in the middle of all that space.

This is all based around a science-fiction premise: the protagonist is a scientist about to depart on a one-way space-colony mission. There are genuine observations being made here about sciencey subjects: the unprecedented finality of long-distance space migrations, the way that the all-consuming drive required to be a top-ranked modern specialist is liable to screw up one's personal life. But this is very, very much secondary to the Interpersonal Conflict side of things.

The main problem that Almost Goodbye faces is in its writing. Not that it's bad, by any means: it's consistently well above average. But the nature of the piece, the rawness of its framing - two familiar people, one irreconcilable disagreement, no time - lay things bare. There aren't any flashy explosions, clever puzzles or gorgeous costumes to hide behind. There's no room to prevaricate. So the piece, by its nature, sets a very high bar for its prose. Reed is a good prosaist but not a great one; there are points where the writing hits the nail on the head, and a lot more points where it's... fine, but not quite delivering the staggering emotional gut-punch that the situation calls for. (I'm am an absolute sucker for the theme of leaving a beloved place forever. Dragged-out goodbyes fuck me up. I fully expected to be crying by the end of this. In the event, nothing quite did it; I am aware that this is a totally unfair standard.)

Structurally, it's a very simple scene-based CYOA with a scattering of contextual text substitutions (it was written to showcase what could be done within that scope; and the contextual stuff is well-orchestrated). Your choices are important, for all that they don't influence the broad outcome of the action in the slightest; these are choices about who you are and how you care about people, not what you do. (It treads a thin line in avoiding judgment about which choices are the Good Choices, and mostly gets away with it.)

The regular structure of the thing, the establishing of a scene according to a set of rules, the one-word assertions about the state of the protagonist, the pathos twist at the end, puts me strongly in mind of narrative RPGs. Possibly I am projecting here. But my feeling at the end of playing this was: this would be an amazing story told off-the-cuff. As a polished piece, it's almost there.

(This is a pornographic game. Expect discussion of porny things.)

I7 never really caught on in among AIF authors. Bob's Garage and its available source code, released in the ancient history of 3Z95 (that is, in 2006, the first year of I7's public beta), offers some clues as to why.

The case for I7 flopping as an AIF platform would have been pretty good on its own: I6 was never hugely popular with AIF authors, so I7 didn't have a pool to draw on. Too, AIF often relies on libraries for its sexytimes modeling, and has a smaller community to produce those libraries, which makes for a certain amount of inertia.

And to a great extent, Bob's Garage looks like a first draft of an I7 AIF library; the game itself doesn't ever make use of a lot of the terms it defines. But it also shows strong signs of being a learning exercise. The plot (hot women blow mechanic in a bathroom for some reason, later one of them coincidentally needs her car fixed urgently and only the mechanic can save her) is hackneyed even for AIF, and the interminable-busywork to actual-sex ratio is high. It also makes heavy use of scenes, which at the time were one of the most-touted aspects of I7's design: and the result feels heavily scripted, constrained and dominated by textdumps. The conclusion you'd draw from Bob's Garage, if it was your model for how I7 worked, would be that it was a lot of effort for a rather shabby return.

But perhaps most importantly, I7 is natural-language, which makes code statements feel more explicit as declarations about your world. It's hard to write "ass is part of every woman" or "assfucking a man is being inappropriate" without feeling a tiny bit skeevy about yourself (or else hearing it delivered as if by a preacher in a second-tier SNL sketch). Natural language code means that you read and hear the content of your world-model as you build it, and hearing the built-in assumptions of AIF is usually going to be ridiculous, creepy or both.

(More entertainingly, and an important chapter in the history of AIF penis-modeling: to avoid the player's penis showing up in inventory listings, before inventory is taken, said penis is teleported to a room called FakeStreet, then teleported back again afterwards. In itself this says very little about I7 -- even back then this could have been avoided by using part of --, but it's funnier in I7. The two stars are mostly due to the amount of time I've spent giggling about this particular hack.)

This is a game about exploration, about discovering strange and wondrous worlds. It'd be easy to consider it a companion-piece to Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home. In general, it's structured like a classic IF adventure: explore a cave network, collect objects, use each object to solve its one puzzle, thus opening up new areas and new objects. Monsters attack; keys must be found; there's something of the sense of an old-school Zorkian cave, all juxtapositions. The structural difference is that it's rendered in a CYOA format: each exploration reaches a dead-end and then returns you to the start, retaining any inventory. (The protagonist, in each playthrough, is both different and the same.) This is classic adventure gaming boiled down to its structural essence: get thing, go to place, use thing. And as such, it's skilfully executed: it's fair and easy, but not a cakewalk.

Invisible Cities ranks highly among my desert-island books. For me, this puts Bigger Than You Think in a precarious position; I'm comparing it to a book which, well, I would cheerfully throw every IF game written before 1995 into the fire to preserve one page of Invisible Cities. And my intuitive reaction is to see if Bigger measures up. (That general reaction, as well as not being hugely fair, is probably a sign that I'm not really cut out for fanfic.)

Where Invisible Cities is very much about personal experience (melancholy, nostalgia, romantic longing), Bigger Than You Think is less personal, more rational. There is a good deal of aesthetic and intellectual wonder, as well as action-horror adrenalin, but it has a generally cool affect. The protagonist(s) are academically-minded archaeologists; on making a new discovery, they are often described as dedicating the rest of their lives to its study. The strange worlds are ultimately not an unreliable reflection of personal experience: there is a central mystery to work towards, and in doing so you will reveal a unifying logic to the world. The direction provided by that mystery is perhaps a necessary change to make it work as a game. But compared to the rich emotional landscape of Calvino's original, it feels a little arid.

That said, it's a fun game with capable writing, well-established motivation, solid design and an attractive setting, which is not to be sniffed at.

(Also: at one point, the game adopts an Arabian Nights structure, with stories told by an NPC that lead the player into alternate worlds. This was a cool thing that I'd like to see used more extensively.)