Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

Kallisti is the game I most love to hate. There are few pleasures in IF more deliciously guilty than introducing Kallisti to someone and watching their jaw drop. Most bad IF is just boring; it's rare to find one where every piece of text makes you flinch.

Synopsis: sophisticated-yet-rugged Gustav seduces sophisticated-yet-virginal Katie in a stilted and stalkerish conversation. In the second scene, they have pretentious, mildly kinky sex. The third scene, the strongest, shortest and least interactive, descends into the surreal.

It wants to be darkly significance-laden, cosmopolitan and erotic, something in a European arthouse idiom. To put things mildly, it doesn't work. In part this is because it's trying to do a lot of things that are quite difficult: nobody has succeeded, for instance, at making IF that works as both literature and porn (and most are too sensible to try). But it can't really be credited even as a heroic failure.

It tries to be dark and smouldering, and comes across as creepy and pathetic. It tries to be elegant, stylish and sophisticated, but feels flowery and sophomoric. When it tries to be deep it's laughable and when it tries to be funny it's flat. It routinely presents weary cliches as dazzling insights. The writing transcends the merely awful: there is something painfully wrong with almost every sentence. Here and there, as is usually the case when someone overwrites at length, there's a phrase that would be quite good in another context. But it's far more fruitful as a source for entertainingly awful quotations. ("I am called Katie, I work here, as you know.")

It's unlikely to function as pornography, either, even to people unbesquicked by the predator-and-virgin premise; the overwriting and the pseudo-intellectualism get in the way. Elements that could be handwaved in conventional AIF, like the unnatural-feeling seduction, look a lot worse when you're invited to consider them as literature. It's possible that it might appeal to someone who liked intellectualism as an aesthetic fantasy element but was utterly indifferent to its substance. But I'd guess that "pondering socio-sexuality as he grazed his teeth over her pert mounds" is a bonerkill for most people. And it lingers too long over physical details and uses too many AIF conventions to make it plausible that it's not meant to be porny.

It's technically competent and player-friendly, for the most part, although the pacing is far too ponderous in the first scene. (Long, awkward pauses make sense in conversation games like Galatea or Shadows on the Mirror; in a scene that's meant to be spontaneously witty and intense, they're a much bigger problem.) I've never made it past the first scene without exploiting one of the rare bugs. (You can repeatedly pat Katie on the ass, presumably raising her Seducedness score every time, until after a few dozen iterations she stops slapping you and falls into your arms.) The broader implied setting is evoked fairly well, even if the actual prose used to describe it is cringe-inducing. It does some sensible things to distinguish story text from parser responses, but manages to make this come across as a lazy affectation.

It frames itself as a Discordian work, but takes itself much too seriously to be credible as one. It's worth contrasting against Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis, another sex-driven Discordian piece which tries to do rather less and accomplishes a great deal more.

Painfully earnest and rhetorically self-defeating, Jarod's Journey is the canonical example of How Not To Do It when it comes to IF that aims to make a point about ethics, politics or religion.

Jarod is a Christian pilgrim (or possibly evangelist; it's not very clear) in the late first-century Holy Land. The game's themes have little to do with the concerns of first-century Christians, though, and thinking of it as a historical piece would be a mistake; rather, it's consciously modeled on parables. In each section, Jarod visits a city and observes the ways different people express their faith; he then has to decide which of them is doing it right, or rather which message God wants him to derive from his observations. In each case there is only one right answer.

There are several problems with this. One is that the scenes Jarod observes don't always translate readily into parables; another is that the parables don't translate straightforwardly into morals. Yet another is that choosing between the morals is often arbitrary and unsupported; a lot of the morals don't seem to be in conflict with each other, and in places the texts quoted to explain why a choice was wrong could quite reasonably be taken to mean that it was right. In other words, unless you are already familiar with the author's very specific theological concerns and idiom of interpretation, Jarod's Journey is not just unfair as a game but incoherent as an argument.

The game violates a few of its own expressed maxims; one of the obviously-wrong choices is a Pharisee who prays in a conspicuous, repetitive, hollow, bombastic style that closely resembles the game's own approach to biblical quotes. Its text argues for the primacy of simple faith and prayer, but its mechanics seem to say that it's more important to give the correct answers to questions of doctrine.

It doesn't help that the tone is one of clean-cut, sanctimonious enthusiasm. Although the story makes it clear that he has been raised as a Christian, Jarod seems ingenuously surprised at basic tenets of the faith. The Holy Land seems to have been rather cleaned-up since the life of Christ; there are lots of hard-working tradespeople and a distinct absence of lepers, prostitutes, tax-collectors and lunatics. (The most disreputable people are a bunch of nasty-looking street toughs who turn out to be exactly what they look like.)

Games about ethics and religion are very difficult to do well, particularly if they advocate a very specific position. But the most basic design principle for them is that it's never a good idea to give the player a set of choices, then tell them that A is good and B and C are bad; it's boring gameplay and it's unpersuasive rhetoric. Jarod's Journey is worth playing because it demonstrates very clearly why this is.