Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

A just-so story: an author has some small children. Every night, at bedtime, he sits down with them and invents another installment of an ongoing story. The children chip in with suggestions. The story they tell has a lot of problems -- exactly the sorts of problems you get with stories told off the cuff. It's mostly a series of fragmentary set-pieces, it's heavily derivative, it lacks cohesion, there are a lot of loose ends that never get tied up; the stories are mostly unified by a broad setting and recurring characters. The children don't care about any of this, because they're sharing a story by their dad. Later, the author assembles some of these stories into an IF game, designed to be accessible to children. Whether this actually represents how Alabaz was written is irrelevant: it's very much how it feels.

The plot: you are an Everyman child hero, tasked by the fatherly but inert King of Alabazopolis to reunite an archipelago-kingdom sundered by mists. To do this, you must take your child-crewed ship, explore the islands and recover magic pearls; there's more than a touch of anime about the scenario. Its strength is in its set-pieces, which include plenty of strange and striking imagery. (Some work much better than others.) The novice-friendly design is a more questionable virtue; the influence of casual gaming is obvious, with heavy-handed pointers and showers of achievements, and a character whose main function is to follow you around dispensing tutorials.

Despite this, Alabaz is consciously old-schoolish; it's a substantial size, and there's a lot of Zork and Myst here. As a game for children, its worst structural flaw is that it's a big-map game that's designed in ways that make travel very tedious, even when you've solved all the relevant puzzles. Apart from this, the puzzles are solidly designed and appropriately easy; but I think that this was intended as a game to be played over many evenings, which is hard to do with easy puzzles. The tedious navigation fills that gap.

In terms of content, there's a sort of uneasy dissonance that a child might or might not pick up on: it's a world where adults behave like sulky children and children behave like responsible adults, and it's also a world that promises heroism but fails to deliver, because heroism requires real monsters, and in Alabaz all apparent monsters quickly turn out to be paper tigers. The game seems designed for very small children -- too small to cope with very much conflict in their fiction. I can't say how well it'd work for its target age, but there's a great deal that makes this translate poorly for adults.

I suspect that children’s literature is best written not by a doting parent -- someone who primarily wants a safe, clean, improving world for their children -- but a crazy uncle, someone who wants to entertain, inform, subvert.

A children's game that sets out to teach the importance of hard work, promise-keeping and the total inflexibility of social obligations. It's painfully earnest, cheerful but oddly joyless, and it ends up badly botching the moral (in a way that leaves a lot of players drop-jawed).
Wil, nine-going-on-ten, lives in a rural village under a curse of perpetual winter. Most of the game is about doing chores for the local artisans, and at first it seems as if this will entail some rich economy-worldbuilding; but this never gets very far, and ends up feeling incomplete and inconsistent. The villagers are uniformly cheerful and pleasant, but the world feels grim and cold; the chores are mostly fetch-quests, and the game runs somewhat slowly, so navigating the large map can feel very much like trudging through ankle-deep snow doing a job that somebody else cares about.
There is potential here; there were plenty of things that caught my interest that were never fully developed, and the game's basic structure and implementation is competent (if not hugely exciting). It's appropriately easy, and (with some minor exceptions) bug-free. Its failings are mostly quite high-level intangibles: the delicate matters of pacing, engaging gameplay, tone and theme. Still, I would not recommend this to a child -- not just because of its stark and bungled ethics, but because it never really gets to the fun part of a proper child's story, the part where the child breaks the rules and gets to have an adventure. (Spoiler - click to show)At one point Wil stumbles into a supernatural realm, the Valley of Perpetual Summer, and meets a fairy girl. Almost immediately, he leaves -- he has to get on with his chores.

A work of spectacularly ill-advised genius, packed with horrible, horrible design decisions but still pulling off some excellent ideas.

It's really four games, rather tenuously linked. This is not a terrible idea per se: if it had been called When Help Collides And Other Stories, no problem. The trick is that the first, When Help Collides, dispenses the codes required to unlock the other three when you win it. When Help Collides is a clever idea, but the implementation is disastrous: a smorgasbord of unintuitive new verbs combined with very low levels of feedback and a lot of death. But the codes are available from an accompanying file, which meant that it seemed pointless anyway -- except that getting the codes the hard way is necessary to make the games cohere. So. Yes. Horrible decisions piled on top of each other.

Of the remaining three games, Level 50 is a game about heroic-fantasy RPGs, and more or less forgettable; Parched Mesa is a too-brief horror Western; and A Bleach of Etiquette, the notable one. It's an organise-your-training-calendar game about a (somewhat alternate-world) geisha; in a week you have to brush up your skills enough to pass your Geisha Exams, or use patronage to cheat. The writing's strong if terse, and the game's strategic core makes for an engaging, deep puzzle; worth putting on the shelf beside Textfire Golf. It's still heavily flawed: the interface is awkward, it doesn't have enough hand-crafted content, and it's somewhat offensive.

More than any other IF work I've played, The Baron's reputation precedes it. I knew that it was going to be pretty dark. (Spoiler - click to show)I knew that the protagonist was going to be loathsome. I knew that sexual child abuse was going to be involved. The game itself does a thorough job of warning you about it. So I wasn't shocked by any of it -- but it's still a very powerful piece.

The Baron could have been rendered, without losing very much by way of interactivity, as a CYOA. Virtually all of the significant interaction comes in the form of menu choices, and the elements that are not menu choices could have been trivially rendered as such. It's almost stateless. By a formal definition of IF, it isn't much of a game. But the expectation of inhabiting the world, IF-style, is a very powerful tool for identifying with the protagonist. The danger of a ream of menu choices, particularly if they're tough or uncomfortable ones, is that the player will detach and be pushed out of the world: which defeats the entire point of rendering serious material in an interactive form.

The Baron is not particularly striking in the questions it poses: it's striking in how it builds up to those questions. A lot of this is independent of the IF/CYOA distinction: it's the Socratic method of framing questions in different ways in a particular order. But a list of checkboxes is easier to blank out than a world that, it's implied, you are going to have to live in. An IF world is one in which you have to engage -- there's a genre expectation that close reading is going to be required to negotiate the world.

It's not perfect; the detaching effect of multiple-choice isn't entirely eliminated, and the pace is quite rapid -- which makes the developing plot less predictable, but also means that you never have to live long with any of your choices.

Heliopause looks, on the surface, like far-future SF. It's a veneer. A very good, lovingly crafted veneer, rich with knowledge of astronomy and the knowing evocation of tasty SF tropes; but the heart of the game is fantasy, and this is understood, and it's very adeptly handled.

The framing of the story makes it clear that we're dealing with a tall tale, a reliable signal not just of narrative unreliability, but of entry into realms of Story where versimilitude is beside the point. The threefold repetition, the fisherman's-wife motif of a fourth greedy wish cancelling the previous three, the three gifts whose use emerges only at the moment of crisis -- these are solid motifs of the fantastic, and deftly employed. The protagonist gives lip-service to the idea that he's collecting stuff for its unique scientific properties, but really what's being sought isn't something with a technical application so much as Herodotean wonders.

SF treats space as a rational quantity to be managed in some way or another: an ocean to chart, a frontier to advance, an empire to administrate. In Heliopause, space is the Great Forest of Arthurian knight-errant and Grimm fairytale, or the ocean of the Odyssey: anything might be encountered there, but you won't be able to plot it on a map. The principal controls, which you're given enough time to figure out intuitively but not enough to really master, feed into this feeling, as does the low-level approach to scenery; the standard IF game encourages a rather Aristotelean, sift-through-lists approach to one's surroundings, but this feels more like fable than fieldwork. The problem with this in a game context is that things end up feeling quite linear; the sense of vast possibility in the early stages gets closed down towards the end.

The essential problem of any piece of art is getting the audience on board with what you're trying to accomplish. The worst thing that can happen to an author is if, by accident, your piece strongly suggests an interpretation completely incompatible with your aims.

Repetition can be dark, claustrophobic, ominous, spirit-crushing. It can also be ridiculous. These functions aren't mutually exclusive -- just within IF, the repeated self-sabotage of Violet is both funny and heart-rendingly tragic -- but the emergence of one when you were meaning to just do the other is lethal. (Spoiler - click to show)Grief's portrayal of a paranoid, overprotective parent, becoming increasingly desperate to protect their child over multiple iterations, is meant to reflect agonising guilt; instead, as the parent's protective measures get stronger they seem more ridiculous, and as the child finds ever more arcane ways to die things drift into the realm of Edward Gorey or South Park. Serious tragedy is hard, and the structural idea is not inherently awful; perhaps with stronger prose and less generic characterisation it might have worked.

The other problem is that the subject matter, and to some extent the structure, draw inevitable comparisons with Photopia; intentional or not, that's a tough act to follow.

There's been a few games where a significant part of my experience was tied up in community play; something fairly long and puzzle-oriented gets released outside the comp, and there's a few weeks during which a good portion of IF people are playing simultaeneously. There's a tone of mild competition, you can get tailored hints fairly easily, and if you want to discuss something about it then it's fresh in everyone's mind. It doesn't happen too often; the game needs to be fairly long, somewhat difficult and reasonably well made. First Things First and Savoir Faire are good examples of games that really benefited from this kind of play, but I think of Heroine's Mantle is the primary example -- largely because I wouldn't have played it very far without that context.

The style is superhero cheese plus a good deal of campy spy thriller. I'm fairly sceptical about how suited superhero fiction is to IF; it's a genre all about action and visuals, it doesn't exactly play to IF's strengths. HM deals with the action problem by making your powers functional but quite limited, like the superhero version of an Enchanter spell; this is a tenable approach, but the puzzle structure is really too linear to make the powers feel very powerful. There is a good use of the training-sequence in which you learn to use your powers -- common in mainstream videogames, not much-used in IF. (A game needs to be pretty long for it to be of much use; games like The Erudition Chamber or The Recruit, which are entirely training-sequence, always strike me as kind of unsatisfying.) The puzzles are generally pretty hard, there are a lot of them, they're mostly very traditional in style, and they're sometimes a little awkward.

The writing's indifferent, and the plot's about at the standard of Hollywood superhero movies, with similar problems of tone -- too earnest, and inclined to leering. Your mileage may vary. Length is a big advantage; most IF is so short that there's little space for character arc or really explore a game mechanic. So the storytelling here isn't very dense, but it can still accomplish a fair bit.

If you like old-school puzzlers and superheroes, and aren't very sensitive to representation of women in fiction, you're likely to get a lot out of this. Otherwise, unless circumstances align, it's likely to be a struggle.

Jacaranda Jim was the first IF I ever played. It was, to put it mildly, not a brilliant game; the tone is wacky-morose-snark in that Douglas Adams style that's unbearable when done by anybody other than Douglas Adams. It was clearly aware of this. The world doesn't make a vast amount of sense now, and it made even less sense to an eight-year-old. It kills you a lot. It traps you permanently in certain rooms. It has a sidekick character, Alan the Gribbley, who is both revolting and useless. When I wrote off for the map and my one hint, the former turned out to be larger by several orders of magnitude than the area I had actually managed to explore.

There were, however, a number of puzzles that I managed to solve. They didn't really resemble anything that might be considered a plot, but I gained a good deal of satisfaction from them anyway. And I played and played and played it, despite everything, because I understood that this was a medium vastly more appealing than anything else available at the time, if only the content wasn't so horrendous. So I owe it a fairly substantial debt, despite all.

Moreover, it introduced me to a number of words, including 'bootleg' (there is an evil Software Pirate) and 'plinth'.