Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

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.

I first played this in IF Comp 2002, and didn't get very far; I was running on an unsupported Mac interpreter. It placed sixth of thirty-eight -- which, looking back, seems to be roughly the line between the games of some enduring quality and the those that were unremarkable or deeply flawed. And it remains one of the more popular ADRIFT games, so I thought it might be worth revisiting.

The basic premise is that a shadowy agency is trying to kidnap or control a number of psychokinetic girls; more or less at random, they ask the PC for help and proceed to become entirely reliant on him. The main aim is to pick a girl, then develop your relationship score to a high enough level to get a special ending.

As everybody else has stated, it's conspicuously sexist, in a genre-derived, uninteresting way. Further, it's in denial about it: the hero is portrayed as chastely chivalrous and pointedly contrasted against "real" sexists and perverts, while rhapsodising over the sweet submissive innocence of childlike girls. This worldview is not an unfortunate flaw: it's foundational. Inhabiting a particular representation of gender is the central purpose of the game, and considerably less attention is paid to the evil-institutional-conspiracy / paranormal-powers plot.

Romance is portrayed in a decidedly unromantic way, as a matter of dispensing gifts, assistance and compliments while not hitting on other girls (if it might be noticed). It's romance stripped of the complicated social intangibles; though never turning into porn, it's definitely running on porn-logic. If it actually acknowledged that it was D/s lifestyle fetish, it'd be rather less unnerving.

The writing is going for a sort of charmingly-awkward effect, the sort of not-quite-fluent style you often get with second-language writers or patchy translations. It doesn't always sustain this, frequently dropping into Generic IF Bland. Other anime-derived stuff -- overuse of ellipsis in dialogue, busy upbeat music, template characters and settings -- is likely to annoy anybody not already enamoured with the form.

Gameplay wobbles between linearity and go-everywhere-to-see-if-anything's-changed, although this is largely a conscious design decision; the plot's streamlining is sacrificed at various points to allow for lots of optional content. On the other hand, the map tends to be designed with an eye to its effect on pacing the first time you run through, to the detriment of re-exploration, and there's a narrow inventory limit. Conversation is rather stunted; when it breaks into multiple-choice menus, it's often a matter of one Good Choice and several bad ones that end the conversation.

If you can get past all this, it has a number of things to offer: it's quite long and has considerable replay value. It may appeal if you like games which involve hunting out optional content, of which there is a great deal. Its use of multimedia is genre-appropriate and executed with skill, and for a game of its size, particularly in ADRIFT, it has a more than respectable level of polish. But this is like saying that GTA has really immersive world design, if you can just get past the violence and reckless driving. Slow pacing and lots of optional content is fine if you enjoy the basic texture of the world; if the world makes your skin crawl, it becomes a liability.

Conventional wisdom holds that educational games suck. Conventional wisdom is unlikely to be shaken to its foundations by Run for the Oregon Legislature!

It's apparently targeted at an audience wholly unfamiliar with IF; indeed, there seems to be no good reason why it's using a parser-based system at all, since it lists all the possible commands at every stage. And IF is not the easiest platform for novices -- particularly so when it's minimal, buggy and not designed to take advantage of any of the medium's strengths. Choicescript, Undum or Flash would have been more natural choices.

Even if you transferred the existing structure into something more appropriate, it would probably still not be a good game. Most of it involves textdumps about how the election process works, after which you sometimes can make a choice, more often just walk north to continue. (Yes, this is sort of awkward.) It bills itself as simulation, and it seems probable that some simulation is going on; but it doesn't do so in a very transparent way, and the few things that do happen as the result of your actions give little feedback about why. There's an implication, for instance, that you're spending resources -- money and time -- but you are given no idea about how much of these you have. There's a general lack of polish; where you'd expect the game to end, you're instead moved to a darkened room. Possibly it's an Oregonian tradition to feed unpopular political candidates to the grues.

A great deal's missing from the simulation: any idea of the general political climate, any idea about your opponent, anything much about your policy positions or the concerns of your constituents. The impression it gives -- probably not the intended one -- is that electoral success is almost entirely about running an efficient campaign. A side-effect is that the subject matter is rendered pretty boring and lifeless.

The thing that this most closely resembles is a particular kind of interactive museum exhibit -- the one where, rather than reading some text on a board, you press a button to illuminate a box that contains some text on a board. This isn't as pointless as it looks -- crap interactivity is actually quite good at engaging interest. But if you're going to do this, at least make sure the button doesn't stick, or throw off alarming sparks.

AAS was an extended April Fool's joke, a quickly-developed IF platform intended to be deeply horrible for both authors and players to use, full of every bad design decision conceivable. It provided a lot of entertainment to those involved, but is not one of the more enduring IF jokes. AAS Masters is the final installment in the prank, one of the longest games written in AAS and certainly the most playable; it is, nonetheless, a snarky injoke authored in an intentionally awful system, and will probably be of little interest to anyone who wasn't involved.

Structurally, the game forefronts the platform's crude and ill-balanced combat system; you explore a big sparse map, defeating members of the (fictitious) AAS community in order to reveal their identities. Granade manages the not insignificant task of crafting a fair, playable AAS game, and the result is something likely to take no more than fifteen minutes.

The best SpeedIFs are usually examples of mad genius; solid, appropriate, non-boring design is rare. The Twelve Heads of John the Baptist, by contrast, is a straightforward process-of-elimination puzzle, like 69,105 Keys writ small. It's notable, however, for meshing a sensible puzzle mechanic with entertaining content in a way that doesn't feel forced; and it has a good feel for one of the key pleasures of IF: the joy of a rich inventory listing, packed full of interesting and picturesque objects.

So, nothing extraordinary here, but a good eye for combining strong, established design elements; and enjoyable to play, however briefly.

Zarf has a keen instinct for taking things -- code, puzzles, narrative structure -- to pieces, then seeing if they'll fit together in a different way. Here he's tinkering with CYOA. Written for a SpeedIF challenge that required authors to use unfamiliar IF languages, The Matter of the Monster is a highly experimental minor work, both deeply impressive and faintly disappointing.

The story itself is, consciously, nothing very special; three siblings set out on a quest to slay a giant monster. It's heavily framed as a bedtime story; there's a well-observed tension between the serious, insistent child and the mother, who thinks that heroic fantasy is a bit silly. The story is told mostly back-to-front, starting with the final success of the youngest sib and working backwards by hops and jumps; depending on the chronologically earlier events, the later sections change somewhat. This doesn't affect the final outcome; what's at stake is the shape of the story, and secondarily the nature of the hero's family. Although the writing has some fun details, it's very clear that content is secondary to form; the hacking of narrative is more important than the narrative.

Undum was, to put it mildly, not really designed for this, but it's made to work; the story jumps up and down the page, so there's a strong sense of thumbing back and forth in a text that should be static, even though it's shifting before your eyes. (Vorple may have been an inspiration here, but Undum has its own transcript-editing habits.) With the reading habits of conventional IF, however, it's easy to miss the changes, even though the total amount of text is quite small; what really matters is that it's intuitively clear which section of the text you've jumped to.

It's probably best to think of this as a hugely-expanded approach to The Girl and the Wolf, rather than as a hugely stripped-down version of a scarily flexible work of IF. It's hard to imagine a larger work built on TMotM's techniques. As an approach to short, dense pieces, though, it's intriguing.

An excellent game, many aspects of which will be deal-breakers for many players. Let's start there.

First, it involves a lot of sex, much of it grotesque. With both genders, a variety of inanimate objects, corpses. There is a great deal of scatology. There are mohel jokes. Yahweh figures as a poor cousin to the Hellenic pantheon. (Spoiler - click to show)You will catch the clap and have it cured with a hash-pipe and a leather mallet. You will be raped and mostly enjoy it. If you are fond of taking offence at things, you will find ample opportunity here.

Second, although its sex operates under porn-logic, it is not really pornographic in motive; there are numerous sex scenes, yes, some of them with attractive people, but they're mostly played for laughs or squick or glossed over in jaded tones: "Of all the times you've ever boned a slatternly servant on a reeking mattress, this is certainly one of them." It's unlikely to function as wankfodder.

Thirdly, considerable background is required. You definitely want at least a passing familiarity with Graham Nelson's Curses (on which it is largely a commentary), Classics in general, and classical satire and comedy in particular. (Apart from anything else, there is at least one point at which insufficient knowledge of mythology can put the game in an unwinnable state.) It also helps to be acquainted with T.S. Eliot, Discordianism, the earlier Stiffy games, AIF conventions, Adventure and a broad swathe of assorted literary and geek lore. The overwhelming majority of players will feel they're missing things; some will feel they're being sneered at. You also have to cheerfully accept that none of this is going to be treated with anything slightly resembling reverence. (Fondness, yes. Reverence, oh my no.)

Fourth, it's quite old-school in structure and style. Scenery is sparse, wacky anachronisms abound, NPCs are very simple, and you're on a MacGuffin quest. It's cruel, too; a good deal of content can easily be missed, and there are several ways to put the game in an unwinnable state without realising it. On the other hand, the puzzles are mostly not very difficult, there are numerous modern conveniences, and the underlying design is well-crafted enough that play is generally smooth; but you will, nonetheless, want to save often.

The good news: if none of these forms a major objection you will probably enjoy Mentula very much indeed. Mentula is not a game that anybody has mild opinions about; it didn't earn a single 5 or 6 score in Spring Thing, and earned more 10s and more 1s than any other entrant. So, the good stuff: it's funny, clever, hugely good-natured, it's an overflowing cornucopia. Okay, it's an overflowing cornucopia in which some of the fruits turn out to be penises, but it's very clearly a game that was an immense amount of fun to write, and it conveys that sense of fun very well.

RenFaire medieval with an anime flavour; textdumps abound, there's rather flat humour and a great deal of bishounen faerie mages kissing. The world is full of sparkles and flowers and pretty details. Even if this isn't really your thing, it's an unusual style for IF; the world feels oversaturated as a Technicolor musical. What starts out looking like a standard-issue D&D quest turns into a grand struggle between high-powered mages... or, well, that's the idea.

Gilded is mainly of interest because of its horribly overpowered magic system. The player can shapechange at will, but this is the easiest aspect of its design: you can also magically create and summon objects. This would suggest a creative, simulationist approach to puzzles, but... well, imagine Scribblenauts with a plot, an antagonist and an expansive setting, but without clear, limited objectives. Now imagine it as implemented by a single author of moderate ability. You can create or summon virtually any object, but the game almost never understands the implications of this. Your antagonist is digging a hole; you summon his spade, and he keeps right on digging. You can summon the pants off NPCs and they carry on regardless. And sometimes the system just fails entirely. You're faced with an impossibly vast array of options, almost none of which do anything significant.

This is compounded by writing that doesn't always successfuly convey what's going on with the plot. The result is something that relies on read-the-author's-mind, that's near-unplayable without a walkthrough and difficult even then. Gilded isn't exactly a work of mad genius; its core mechanics are all old ideas, just hugely overextended. But it has a strange charm, and its design is a useful cautionary tale.

An impressive piece of work: although its core appeal is probably limited to nostalgia-addicted baseball nerds (a category which, as far as I can tell, makes up about 99.95% of baseball's fanbase) it succeeds in emotionally engaging people who don't know or care about baseball and are never going to.

The game recounts a famous 1908 screw-up that defined the career of Fred Merkle. From the outset, in no uncertain terms, you're informed that the disaster is coming and that it will scar your life. Yet you still keep working towards it, through a difficult commute and an indecipherable morass of baseball terminology. The game is broken up by flashbacks that imply the main story is just a flashback. There are obvious debts to Photopia and 1893: A World's Fair Mystery; one could choose worse models. It seems diligently researched.

Bonehead has a number of conflicting, emergent morals, some of which the author certainly didn't intend. The point could be that Merkle was a clueless blunderer, only barely holding on moment to moment, and some horrible mishap was inevitable; this comes out of gameplay, and contradicts statements that Merkle was actually pretty savvy. Another is that Merkle is a sort of sticktoitive hero, unable to give less than his all even when it leads to his destruction; this feeling hangs around the story even though it makes no chronological sense. Another, probably closer to the intent, is that even solidly competent people fuck up all the time; whether a fuck-up goes unremarked or haunts you your entire life is largely a matter of luck.

Bonehead's main flaw is a tendency to cheesiness that it can't quite sustain; there's that historical-fiction thing where you always meet significant historial figures who are just now thinking about something that will ring down the ages, and there's a Hollywoodish moment of Touching Redemption. Overall, though, a really strong debut.

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.