Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

A goofy, frenetic lampoon of slasher-horror. Take the genre-consciousness of Scream, turn up the wackiness to 11, and put it in the hands of someone whose basic attitude to the genre is one of amused contempt, and you basically have Samhain.

Samhain's comedy is a scattered, hyperactive mess of one-shot gags, fourth-wall breaking, and 90s pop culture references, sprinkled with the occasional hot-take social satire. The author's voice is very prominent, to the point where it feels like a particularly self-indulgent stand-up set. Occasionally a joke works, but on the other hand, occasionally a Hot Take breaks through the light-hearted goofiness and just feels gross.

The basic premise is that you're a pumpkin-headed scarecrow brought to life, and now you're running around a high school killing cheerleaders. The game's structure is very linear, and it does a decent job of cluing in the next thing you're meant to do.

An old-school cave-crawl; part of an unfortunate trend, predominantly in the UK, of games which offered a prize to the first player to complete them, as documented by Jimmy Maher:

To make a puzzle that will be attempted by thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people and not have it solved within hours — a development that would be commercially disastrous — requires making that puzzle outrageously hard. And outrageously hard puzzles just aren’t much fun for most people. It’s this simple truth that makes the idea of a mass treasure hunt much more alluring than the reality. The differences between the demands of the contest and the demands of good puzzle design are almost irreconcilable.

'Outrageously hard' is a qualitatively different from 'very hard', here. The approach all but mandated games which weren't just difficult, but cruelly unfair. In order to win Ket, you must use a password which only appears, randomly, for no diegetic reason, in a particular room of the early game; that room has become inaccessible by the time you need to use the word, rendering the game unwinnable without the player ever knowing why. There are a number of tightly timed sequences which will kill you if you do anything wrong, and a lot of random combat which will usually kill you even if you make optimal choices. The mid-game features a brutal inventory-management puzzle. Even with a walkthrough this is a painfully difficult game to play.

Ket has modest narrative ambitions: it's a minimally-written D&D-style melange with a nondescript hero who has no very strong motivation other than getting from point A to point B. A small distinctive feature is that the narrator is meant to be a companion of the player-character - so 'we' gets used a lot, and occasionally the companion passes comment - but this is rendered in an unclear and often confusing way, and it's never really built into anything more than a gimmick.

Mildly interesting as a piece of archaeology; not recommended otherwise.

A school-project-feeling piece about an important topic; incomplete. At least in the early game, the writing has a tone of terse, bored diligence about it:

You step off the bus and are greeted with a sign: “Central Utah War Relocation Center.” There’s barbed wire everywhere, and a bunch of barracks. This is it. You’re now a prisoner in an internment camp.

However, once you get past the relatively weighty decisions during the war itself, the experience shifts somewhat; you develop a host of connections to family and friends that were never mentioned before, and the writing takes on a more descriptive (sometimes over-wordy) quality.

It occupies that uncomfortable space in between first-hand personal account and impersonal factual account. I found myself uncertain about lots of details of accuracy; I think it would have been stronger with inline quotes from primary sources, or at least a bibliography. The author suggests that they’re aiming to expand the work with (among other things) a parser-based section of the camps themselves, which may go some way to explaining why this section is so minimal.

A familiar tack of Twine advocacy pieces: take some problematic social issue, particularly as expressed through games, and make it grotesque and unsettling. In this case, it’s a satire/re-appropriation of beauty-oriented games targeted at young girls: beauty products are presented as uncanny magic, and have actually-transformational results with strange consequences. There is a judgy magic mirror.

Mechanically, it’s a Sorting Hat kind of game: your choices of beauty product determine which of several branches you find yourself going down, most of which are pure-choiceless. Although the results are weird and are at least informed by Twine’s strong taste for body-horror, they don’t get so visceral as to make the piece unsuitable for its ostensive audience; and the story progresses away from its beauty-myth opening into fantasy adventure that’s only tangentially related. The on-the-nose theme and long linear sections could easily have rendered the piece tedious, but it’s buoyed up by a pleasant Diana Wynne Jones-ish ordinariness-of-the-fantastic charm.

This does (almost) precisely what it says on the tin: it is a linkified version of a sex and gender-related subset of Johnson's dictionary, plus some marginalia-like notations representing the thoughts of a reader, which suggest other cross-references.

Poking around in dictionary-like things can be fun; Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland could probably be considered as a CYOA (if so, it’d be one of the better ones). There, however, a lot of the enjoyment is of the discovery kind. This is more of a twinebound (adj. used of any work of choice-based interactive fiction in which the player’s experience of constrained or denied agency is a central rhetorical point) piece, the dictionary looping back heavily on itself in circular definitions and elision, relying on cultural assumptions which it avoids explaining.

I enjoy digging through old books dealing with sexuality – one of my most prized books is W.J. Truitt’s Nature’s Secrets Revealed: Scientific Knowledge of the Laws of Sex Life and Heredity, a Christian eugenics health-manual published in Ohio in 1916. The fun, in that kind of thing, lies in discovery: you know in general the variety of awfulness that it’s going to express, but the pleasure lies in finding strange extended metaphors, over-the-top illustrations, turns of phrase, weird theoretical deviations from the expected script. The much more constrained forms of dictionary entries means that DWitD doesn’t really provide any of that. So, a neat idea, but not as interesting as that idea promised to be.

A heroic fantasy romp, and probably the best such in IF. Good for many hours of fun. One of those situations where I'd like to be able to give four-and-a-half stars.

Treasures is conspicuously non-literary: it does not try to do anything except amuse, but it has high standards for this. It is written in an overblown cod-medieval heroic jargon. Like a Fighting Fantasy book, a Gygax dungeon or Zork, its worldbuilding is a melange of convenience, with SF and fantasy tropes thrown together in a big nonsensical pile. Its dominant tone, though, is one of old-school swords-and-sorcery, all villainous port-cities, cunning young courtesans and ripped barbarians. The protagonist is a straightforward rip-off of Conan.

None of this is taken remotely seriously. Fond, over-the-top lampoons of a schlocky genre, attempts to replicate the so-awful-it's-accidentally-brilliant, can very easily become lazy and tiresome; but ToaSK is saved by quality of writing, by balanced economy of design, and by meticulous implementation -- none of which you'd expect from a heroic-fantasy thing that presents itself as a retrogame.

The game avoids guess-the-verb by limiting the verb set very tightly: USE, for instance, covers essentially all fiddling with objects. Most of the action, then, is about guess-the-object (difficulty: easy to moderate), or fighting monsters of a low enough level for you to defeat. At the lowest difficulty setting, I encountered only one or two monsters who couldn't be defeated when first encountered; at the highest, a bit more care is required but progress is by no means grueling. The pace and difficulty is very well-measured indeed; I played this in a group on a car journey, and while things were never a cakewalk, we never got stuck for long enough for our enthusiasm to flag. It is (I think) possible to make the game unwinnable in a place or two (edit: I'm given to understand that this has been fixed in the most recent version), or to shut off certain important optional content, though mostly it's pretty generous.

Also, although the game sets itself up as a treasure hunt, this is really not the central interest; almost everything that you gank will end up being used for something else, the non-functional treasures will mostly be used to buy time with Vessa the Delicate Doxy, and having an overfull inventory makes you less effective in combat. Most objects are single-use and disappear when used; so your inventory is a to-do list, rather than an inert pile of points scored.

While the prose is very much a lampoon, it displays a strong sense for (not just a snickering love of) the godawful language of pulp fantasy RPGs and their relatives. There's a freakin' reference to Tarkus, for fuck's sake, a strong contender in the Top 10 Most Embarrassing LPs My Dad Owns. And with its profusion of all-caps phrases, there's a definite aroma of DWJ's sardonic Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Ross has a very fine ear for just how far to push this; the thees and thys, for instance, are used only when they genuinely make a sentence funnier, rather than being slathered all over everything in the hope that comedy will result. This is not always infallible: the pirates and the end boss are kind of cringeworthy. But there's a lot more substance here than mere nostalgia disguised with a thin coat of irony.

Much fun is had at the expense of the barbarian's machismo and stupidity, but this is, crucially, of a good-natured sort that includes the player, rather than blaming them for things that aren't within their control; the player's job is to steer the PC through things he doesn't really understand. (The approach of Lost Pig is very similar.) And, indeed, the whole world feels pretty good-natured, which makes the general tone feel somewhat lighter than the material it's drawing on. While in theory the game-world is ruled over by an oppressive tyrant, in practice you can mostly wander about as freely as you please. All the villainous low-lifes of the port-city turn out to be good-hearted and on your side. Your enemies are mostly independent monsters, rather than agents of the Slaver King. So while there are theoretically tortures and slavery going on, the general feel is never very bleak.

The good-natured non-seriousness is also the thing that lets the game get away with lots of women who have plainly walked off the cover of a 70s pulp novel, by way of an adolescent fantasy. There are lots of heaving oiled chests and sex-for-fetch-quests, but these are not really twinned with the animus towards women or blithe sketchiness that makes so much classic fantasy creepy as hell. Like many heroic protagonists, the barbarian isn't all that interested in women, sex aside; but this is portrayed as part of his risible stupidity, rather than a sensible manly attitude that the reader is assumed to share.

There's something about the whole thing of very early Discworld, back when Pratchett wasn't doing much except sniggering at fantasy tropes. Of course, Pratchett fairly quickly moved on to using the setting to reflect real-world things and explore more complex characters; ToaSK never pretends to be remotely interested in that. But there's a moment at the very end, after the kingdom is saved (in an apocalyptic orgy of violence that leaves most of your allies dead), where the writing steps aside a little from the lampoon and the mood finally takes the barbarian seriously. The ending itself is precisely what the genre demands, but the tone is handled to perfection.

Treasures will not change your life, deeply stir your emotions, or grant you insights into the human condition. Its design does not purport to light a way forward to anything. It will probably be befuddling to anyone who didn't, at some stage of their life, enjoy crap heroic fantasy. Accept all that, and it's a highly entertaining game and an impressive piece of craft, which is precisely what it sets out to be.

Light My Way Home is a simple, evocative little game. The unfolding of exactly what is going on is, I think, important to its emotional arc, so I'll avoid spoilers.

Knowing how to make use of empty space is a big deal in most artistic disciplines. Home is deft in how it employs the gaps often present in games: the dark loneliness of night-time in interstitial urban space, the gaps in recognition and memory, the unbridgeable distance between PC and NPC. It shows rather than tells, and doesn't overshow. It's able to do this without being frustratingly opaque, because the underlying story is quite simple; it is more of a tone piece than a plot or character piece. There is a small knack to interaction, and a little thought is required about how to progress, so the pacing is neither puzzly-slow nor trivially-rapid.

To some extent, it felt akin to a small, moody point-and-click 2D Flash adventure: the single mode of interaction, the genderless NPC who follows your actions rather than being explicitly directed, the atmospheric music and emphasis on lighting.

In order for parody to work, it has to be salient criticism: it needs to articulate and illuminate a problem with its subject.

I haven't ever played Guitar Hero - I'm not a console gamer, timed pattern-matching isn't a mechanic that appeals to me very strongly, guitar-driven rock music isn't high among my musical preferences - so I don't have much invested here, but I know that it's a timed pattern-matching game about music. Champion of Guitars demonstrates that if you remove the timing and the music from this formula by making it a turn-based text game, and make no attempt to replace those features with any of the strengths of that medium, it becomes trivial and boring. This is kind of like saying that Adventure is boring if you take out the puzzles, navigation and room descriptions. It's a feeble argument.

Of course, Champion of Guitars is kind of a tedious game - that's the point. But if you're going to waste anybody's time with a crappy game, your point had better be a good one. Parody works best when it wants to understand its subject, when its mockery gets to the heart of something important. When it demonstrates a wilful ignorance, a refusal to try and understand what's going on, it becomes nothing more than a loud, sneering expression of dislike.

Choice of the Deathless has the most richly-developed, distinctive, ambitiously-written world of any Choice of Games work I've played to date. Its setting has previously been explored in two static novels by the same author, and it shows: the world feels concrete and confident, able to veer well outside standard genre templates without getting bogged down in exposition. It's a world in which souls are standard currency and soul contracts are the principal focus of law; law, here, being a largely magical discipline that serves as mankind's best defence against alien demons and not a few gods, beings with massive (but circumscribed) power. This aside, law firms function more or less like their real-world versions, only with more entrails. The player is an entry-level lawyer in one such firm, saddled with student debt and eager for advancement in a cutthroat field.

The world is skilfully evoked, and I'm a sucker for world-twist fantasy driven by venal sins and human frailty. Like Emily, I found that it perhaps evoked an intensely high-pressure career a little too well; I broke up my play into multiple sessions, because playing this in a single sitting would have been a bit much.

Structurally, it closely follows the standard CoG pattern: you follow the promising career of a talented PC of user-determined gender and sexuality, leaping months or years to keep the narrative focus on Critical Life Decisions. Choices that you make shape character stats, and in general it's a good idea to play to your character's strengths. Romance or rivalry may be established with various NPCs.

Deathless reminded me to some extent of the board game Arkham Horror. Arkham is designed to give the player a constant impression of being really, really screwed - but in fact, with some light strategy and planning it's not all that hard to succeed. Rhetorically, Deathless implied that my character would have to make major sacrifices, but by the end it seemed as though I was doing pretty well on all fronts: my character had resounding career success, was well-liked by every tracked character and maintaining amicable romance with one, had heroically saved the day several times, hadn't suffered any great loss or had to compromise any principles close to his heart. The student-debt mechanic seems to be mostly a rhetorical flourish, intended to make the player feel as though they're making bad decisions regardless of what they do.

Deathless attempts a bit of narrative framing, with shades of triangle-of-identities shenanigans. To me, this felt like a lot of setup for something that, ultimately, ended up falling a little flat. (Spoiler - click to show)At the climactic moment, fighting in the demon realm, the antagonist shatters the PC's very being into pieces; the entire story up to this point is a process of putting the pieces back together, of reconstructing an identity. This was meant to feel, I think, like a moment of existentialist triumph of the will, of transformative power derived from defining and asserting one's identity. It's not intended to be just about overcoming this one attack: at the climax of a story that's about being a beleaguered cog in a vast and threatening system, the idea is meant to be that the protagonist has developed and retained a strong sense of self that surpasses their functionary role, an identity that is in itself power. The hero creates their own rescue by understanding who they are and what truly matters to them.

So it's clear that the author has been thinking about the thematic implications of the game structure, of the way that the CoG template is all about character-defining choices. But in the event I think that the climax fell a little flat, because it doesn't make sense unless the character is able to come across as a strongly-defined individual - something that's very hard to accomplish in a game that leaves character definition largely in the player's hands. Because, as RPG players know, there's vastly more to character definition than can be encapsulated in a form: the form is a starting point that you need to elaborate on. The player, here, is filling out a character sheet; they cannot improvise. It falls to the game to construct something on that foundation - and this is a really hard thing for a game to do to any meaningful degree. This is material that deserves a meatier protagonist.

So like most CoG stories, this does a good job of revealing a world and a trade within that world, but ends up being unsatisfactory at depicting character. This is more of a problem for Deathless because its world is not a fun genre exercise, so its hero can't really be a cheerful adventurer; and unlike (say) Fallen London, it's not an open world but a bounded story with narrative velocity, so it's less feasible for the hero to work as a Virgil, a backgrounded guide to a strange world.

My dim recollection is that The Shamutanti Hills was one of the first CYOAs I ever played, and the first game I encountered that really featured the lethal combination of heroic fantasy and dice-rolling. Around the age of eleven, I ate this stuff up. I'm pretty sure that it was Shamutanti that prompted me to lay out pages and pages of horribly-designed, painfully-derivative fantasy CYOA, all written in pencil and in a hand far too small for anyone else to ever read. It was some gateway-drug shit, let me tell ya.

While the prose is solid, as literature Sorcery! doesn't have high aspirations. It's a post-Tolkienian hero's journey, heavily shaped by the school of RPG design that's all about individual, discrete encounters. There is an overarching story, but it boils down to "retrieve the immensely powerful artefact, save the world: to do this you will need to traverse most of the map." The hero is a blank, and the moral range is the familiar RPG dichotomy of "help people, or be a heartless mercenary." But within this overworked genre, it occupies a pretty specific style, with a grimy swords-and-sorcery feel.

The art from the original book has a huge influence on this: it's from a school of 1980s British fantasy art, all hippies-gone-heavy-metal, macabre and hideous, wherein everyone looks monstrous and threatening. Given how much of the contemporary reworkings of medieval fantasy sanitise and soften the era, this is kind of refreshing: it's a world of disease, deformity and desperation, where you're much more likely to catch the plague than to own a suit of shiny plate-mail. Unlike some of Jackson's gamebooks, The Shamutanti Hills is actually not a totally hostile world - allies and neutrals are by no means uncommon, if rarely straightforward - but the art style constantly hints at something nastier and more alien. (The more recent elements of the art, while capable and well-integrated, are a good deal less flavourful.) Much of the original art is finely-detailed enough that it's not really shown to best effect on a phone-sized device.

But about that hostility level: the design of the original is very much derived from a style of tabletop RPGs in which the GM is primarily an antagonist, not a guide, play is meant to be challenging. Like many of Steve Jackson's gamebooks, it actively works to instill paranoia in the player, but sometimes punishes paranoia. Enemies can be allies in disguise, or vice versa. Cues about the better decision are not to be trusted.

The combat is a big improvement from the gamebook version, which (in my faulty memory) mostly consisted of repeatedly rolling dice until someone was dead. The new mechanic is intuitive, not trivially easy, and involves some real tactical decisions. The gloss and guesswork of the magic system is far less worthwhile. Sometimes the adaptation isn't entirely smooth - you can play a male or female character, but there are certain romance-edged scenes that were clearly written with the assumption that the protagonist is male. But in other places the additions are just right, often in ways that make play less brutal - the rewind mechanic allows you to UNDO to any point along your journey, which is super-convenient.

Overall, Sorcery! is a strong and professional-feeling adaptation, and the things that prevent me from being a wholehearted fan of it are largely to do with the goals of the source material: it's a genre that I'm kind of burnt out on, and it's modeled after a style of role-playing of which I am unfond.

Set in a mildly steampunky high-fantasy world, First Snows establishes a strong opening tone: a grim, dark winter, a town whose inhabitants are curt or suspicious, a sinister mystery, a certain emotional numbness.

As so often, the promise of the initial mood is the best part; the emotional numbness and suspicious inhabitants turn out to be the product of scanty characterisation, and as the mystery unfurls, the prose proves inadequate to render shock and horror. The story does nothing to build on your initial motivation, and the worldbuilding doesn't become any deeper after the early game, so by the endgame - it's about medium comp-sized - you're still wondering why you should care.

There's a shade of overwriting early on - The clipped, abbreviated sentences were his normal manner of talking, and you responded in kind with a brief “No” - which suggests a more character-oriented plot. This fades rather quickly as you get into the game proper. That's fine; if dialogue's not your strength, avoiding it is a legit approach.

Mechanically, it's pretty old-school: you will get stuck quite early on unless you vigorously search for crucial items, NPCs are stand-offish, there is timed death. There's a nod to the Enchanter scroll-based magic system, but the game isn't long enough for this to become a regular feature, or for it to really qualify as the Thorny Old-School Puzzler that it's drawing on. But it's still difficult enough that you can expect to be stuck quite a lot, and for me it didn't generate anywhere near enough motivation to stay with it long when the going got tough. (I finished with a walkthrough -- hat-tip David Welbourn.)

So to me this felt as though it had at least one foot in the era when people would and did persevere with games even if they were sort of dull, just because they were games. Perhaps that's overly harsh; in the mid-90s, say, this might have earned some quiet praise and a place somewhere near Wearing the Claw. And I'm a long way from being the ideal audience for this. But still, it feels like a piece with the soul missing, lacking an essential Cool Thing to make you stick with it.

Eric Eve's games tend to be solidly built and to follow well-established, orthodox design patterns; The Elysium Enigma, a sci-fi mystery, is no exception.

Enigma is structured around simple, traditional puzzles in a fairly non-linear arrangement. There are three major NPCs, all responsive conversationalists. In terms of design, tech and careful diligence, it's an impressive piece of work: its threads never seem to trip over one another, the plot inobtrusively avoids ballooning without making play feel confined, and conversation updates smoothly with knowledge and plot advancement. Interaction is very much of the traditional variety: discover hidden items, find keys and passwords, fiddle with electronic devices, find a vehicle to overcome a barrier, and so forth. (While there are more involved puzzles for a higher score, getting a winning ending is quite easy). Although you're exploring a village and environs, it's a largely deserted environment, major characters aside, and the player's adventurer-style trespass, vandalism and theft goes largely unremarked.

The weak points of The Elysium Enigma lie in the writing. I don't want to paint too strong a picture here, since for the most part the prose does the job that's required of it. The standard IF fare - descriptions of rooms, objects and actions that straightforwardly negotiate these - is mostly good solid work. (There are occasional quirks of overspecification where more natural speech would have worked better, but nothing egregious.) Where it falls short is character writing.

Characters are used effectively to deliver key information and direct action, but this often comes across as highly artificial. (This is partly because of the brave decision to keep the three central NPCs on-stage and highly responsive for the entire course of the game.) Even allowing for this difficulty, they're all rather two-dimensional.

Take the protagonist, Andrew: tall, athletic and good-looking, a bit contemptuous of Elysium's locals. His reactions to events generally go undescribed, which is a standard approach: show what the player character sees, imply their inner state, avoid directly reporting it. But when we do get hints of the protagonist's state of mind - his final words at the game's conclusion, for instance - they can seem massively off-key.

And this is a problem, because the NPCs aren't incidental to the story. Indeed, it deals with perhaps the most difficult of NPC dynamics, romance. The game's problems in this department are, I think, perfectly summed up in a single moment. It takes a little buildup and is spoilery as hell, though, so bear with me.

(Spoiler - click to show)Early in the game you encounter Leela - young, attractive, apparently an outcast from the village. She's a wide-eyed, curious ingenue; she asks you for food and clothes, bathes naked and then continues to follow you around in that state. Once you've provided her with food and clothing, she expresses romantic interest in you. If you ask about a relationship, she strongly suggests that she'll have sex with you a little later. A little later, you're exploring an underground bunker; she throws herself down on a mattress. You're discussing the implications of the exciting mystery you've uncovered. At this point, she's dressed in a sheet held together with a couple of safety-pins. And...

...and nothing. Not so much as a fade to black. There's no way to initiate sex directly, and more circumspect methods (more kissing, lying on the mattress) seem, in context, awkwardly chaste.

I'm definitely not arguing that there has to be a sex scene here - you could fade to black, have her reject the PC, articulate some motivations for the PC to keep it in his pants, or rewrite the scene so that it didn't lean so obviously in that direction. But as it stands, this makes the whole scene seem like an awkward lapse in characterisation.

More generally: Leela's character is a recognisable Type from SF of a certain awful era: a wide-eyed ingenue, in need of rescue, childish, curious, sexually liberated yet virginal, spirited yet biddable, given to following the hero around. Now, arguably the story's point is that this character is a fiction; perhaps the intention was that Leela's character was meant to look like an implausible male fantasy. But this is rather undermined because Leela's true identity, Anita, is the other side of the same coin, the Cold, Calculating Bitch. Now, this is a boring stereotype, to be sure, but it also kind of torpedoes the emotional impact of the game's final Big Choice. Andrew has to choose whether to bring Anita in or let her go; for this choice to have weight, it requires the player to be invested in Leela/Anita. The problem is that Anita, the real one, is less complicated than Leela: all we see of her is the heartless schemer of the official report, and the spitting ball of hate when she's captured. For me, the choice of whether to let her go read less like a moment of anguished indecision and more like relishing a moment of power over a bad woman.

The game initially suggests that it's going to be social science fiction. You have to deal with a strongly technophobic culture, and the implication is that you're balancing the need to respect that culture with other concerns: the need to protect individual rights, political and military objectives, and so on. In the event, though, this isn't explored as much as the initial setup might suggest; you only really deal with one Elysian, there's no story incentive not to violate their cultural norms, and the real plot is about espionage. The Elysian culture is rendered at a Star Trek planet-of-the-week level of detail: one big cultural hook drives all the conflicts, and everything else is a bit generic. (Of course, a detailed Le Guin-ish culture-building piece really isn't what the author is interested in, even if I'd like him to be: the real focus is geopolitics and espionage. (Spoiler - click to show)But Leela's deception relies on you misreading the genre, thinking that you're in a Culture vs. Individual story rather than a Great Game one; so perhaps the mystery could have been preserved for longer by continuing to develop a culture-oriented plot.)

Finally, the central premise of the plot feels a bit off.(Spoiler - click to show) We're meant to understand that Anita plans to seduce Andrew in order to extract tactical information from him. Her mission is covert observation; the risks of exposing herself are very high, so the information should be a) very valuable, and b) unobtainable by safer means. In the event, she doesn't get all that much information from Andrew, and most of it seems like things that could have been learned covertly (if perhaps not so quickly). So the upshot is that Anita seems like an incompetent spy.

So while I could respect Enigma as a piece of design and implementation, I found it very hard to enjoy as a story.

This is a game that is centrally about trolley-cases: ethical scenarios with binary options, designed to get at the heart of a problem of ethics. Rather than circling around a single issue, it aims to give a survey of an entire landscape; as philosophy IF goes, this is an approach closer to The Chinese Room than De Baron. The difference is that where The Chinese Room presents its material as a goofy wonderland, The Test makes some effort to present each scenario with a degree of serious realism. I've written elsewhere about Test's shortcomings as a philosophical piece, so I won't harp any further on that subject.

As a work of participatory narrative, however, it's also a bit disappointing. The premise makes it very clear that every scene will boil down to a single binary choice; as in CYOA, this can easily lead to disengagement from the rest of the material, particularly when the material is intellectually or emotionally challenging (which trolley-cases damn well should be). The fact that the scenes are obviously unrelated one-off scenarios also makes engagement more difficult: it's easier to take a decision seriously when you expect to have to live with the consequences for a while. The game aims to create realist, flesh-and-blood characters, thus lending more weight to its scenarios; but it's hard to develop a sense of attachment to a character when you're aware that they exist for a single purpose and will be discarded once that purpose is complete.

Finally, the ending, in which it transpires that (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist is an artificial intelligence being evaluated for ethical attitudes, is too brief to be satisfying, and feels like a cheap narrative justification for a hodge-podge structure. To be really interesting, it'd have to explore things considerably further - what sort of world has a need for robots with a varied range of ethics? what sorts of things would result from following the ethical compass you've defined? how do these values conflict or cohere?

Given its design premises, Test is competently executed; but those premises make it prohibitively difficult to accomplish its goals.

It's not hard to discern the game that this wants to be: a setting-focused, slow-recovery-from-amnesia, evil-science-secrets-uncovered, atmospheric-horror piece akin to Babel, drawing on a potent setting: the ruins of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and its sequels have explored very similar territory, albeit with more guns.

Pripyat has some bells and whistles - music, a scattering of graphics - but the game itself reads like the rough outline of a parser IF game, rather than a complete implementation of a choice-based one. The protagonist's actions are all adventure-game standards: examining scenery, reading diary pages, collecting inventory items and using them on things.

It's very short: every possible action is a key plot-coupon action, except for one that instantly kills you. Horror, and especially this kind of setting-reliant piecing-together-the-fragments horror, needs a slow build to be effective. The impatient pace means that setting and atmospherics -- which would seem like strengths of the premise -- get neglected. And the speed of plot delivery means that a perfectly serviceable plot ends up feeling facile.

So there are some sound instincts here, but a great deal more work needs to be done.

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.)

Witch's Girl a browser CYOA framed as a children's story, and combines gently snarky humour, simple but charming illustration and a turn-to-page-N conceit to suggest a picture-book. Two small girls, Oblivia and her best friend Esme, encounter a witch who directs them on a time-travel adventure to save their (slightly hazily-defined) fantasy world.

The emphasis here is rather more on the adventure part than the saving-the-world part; in a few important respects the story resembles a game of make-believe more than a work of authored fiction. The long-arc plot is conspicuously an excuse to run around and have adventures, and is often temporarily forgotten in favour of more immediate distractions. There's a pleasantly childlike focus on the cool stuff that's happening now; but there's also a certain snarkiness about the whole enterprise that gives it a more disaffected grown-up feel at times.

Structurally, a degree of puzzle difficulty is added by a time-travel mechanic; in order to find items to solve gateway puzzles and advance to the next stage of the central plot, you need to use the witch's cauldron to travel back to earlier points of the plot and choose alternate paths. This means that you have to consume most of the game's content in order to win. Towards the end this devolves into lawnmowering through all the options, but it's less annoying than it could be; finding the last few items took about the right amount of time, as far as I was concerned.

My feeling was that it could have benefited from a little more use of state; it's a game about collecting items that doesn't have an inventory, which can make it a little hard to keep track of things. And it'd have been nice if there had been slightly more illustrations, more evenly distributed through the text. But overall, a pleasant experience.

A shortish CYOA piece that combines the Teenage Dirtbag tone (familiar from a million My Crappy Apartment games) with the game-as-zine approach of recent Twine offerings. The difference from normal My Apartment is that instead of being a cynical asshole middle-class American kid, you're a cynical asshole Pakistani kid from a class that's privileged enough to share a lot of middle-class Western tastes.

In line with its Teenage Dirtbag tone, its perspective is the sort of South Park nihilism where the only function of ethics is to allow you to be scornfully aware that everyone's morally bankrupt, and to enable sick humour to function. The protagonist cares more about cute girls, Facebook and the next Game of Thrones episode than actual political issues or religion - and, in this counterfactual universe where he is motivated to vote for no very clear reason, there's not much to suggest that changing his mind would be worth it.

The game is largely linear, with significant variations depending on whether you go to vote with your metalhead buddy, a cute girl from your college, or your inept, shotgun-toting security guard. Invariably your polling registration is messed up and you have to venture into the violent slums of Murdabad to cast your vote, leading to slapstick culture-clash scenes. The main fear of your wealthy contemporaries is Taliban attacks on the polls, but the real obstacles to voting are more to do with massive income disparity, apathy, corruption, everyday violence and a society deeply inured to all of this.

If you do manage to vote, there's no political effect; in fact, there's no political outcome even mentioned, confirming the general sense that it's taken for granted that nothing will change. Rather, voting (and telling people how you voted) is more of a social gambit, allowing you to get the girl or party with your security guard. In at least one ending, your hipster buddy votes for the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party for ironic purposes. Similarly, the game frequently claims to give you points - positive for looking good, negative for being a terrible person or just looking lame -, which are not actually recorded and have no impact on the story.

It's a somewhat rough effort; spelling and punctuation occasionally wobble, and the integration of graphics is spotty. It seems at least partially addressed to an outside audience, explaining some of its dialect and references, but by no means all (and sometimes the explanation is no more enlightening than the original). In at least one ending the game seemed to give me the wrong companion. Very little information is given about the candidates you're voting for; this obviously reflects the low-information, low-engagement stance of the protagonist, but it does make it harder for an outside reader to grasp things. (The semiotics of having the One Pound Fish guy represent the PML-N totally elude me. Possibly it's a sick burn if you're up on Pakistani politics; possibly it's a throwaway YouTube joke.)

I don't feel qualified to rate this, but it's definitely the most interesting Quest game I've played to date.

18 Cadence is a story about an American house built at the beginning and destroyed at the end of the twentieth century, and the families that live in it.

It's interactive fiction in the weak sense: interactivity here provides different ways to view the same events, rather than giving you any power to affect them. In this kind of IF, presentation is hugely important, because the player's involvement is all about manipulating presentation. Without presentation, they're mere hypertext novels, a bunch of static text that you might encounter in a somewhat different order. Cadence does a rather lovely job in this respect: the visual metaphor is of a cutting-board on which you arrange scraps of paper, each describing someone's perspective of an event or some aspect thereof. It's a very tactile, hands-on kind of process; what control you're granted is very immediate, and much more fine-grained than is usual in weakly interactive formats.

A few specific kinds of scraps can be combined into one another. Scenery objects can be combined into single-paragraph descriptions akin to a generated IF room description. Specific information - the date, age of the character in focus, the location - can be added to individual fragments. You can also click on scraps to change the way they're structured, or compress them into a summary. All this is useful, but doesn't do a great deal to change or recontextualise scraps: the important thing is positioning different scraps relative to one another.

The player's involvement isn't a process like being an actor or a co-author, a director, a stage manager: you're an editor. Someone else has already shot all the footage, and it's your job to choose which material to use, and where. The cutting-board is far, far too small to hold everyone's story at once: if you use it to keep track of key events as you go through the full century, it'll quickly overflow. You have to decide whose stories, which elements of those stories, to focus on. Montage is a powerful storytelling tool when put in the hands of the audience, as with vidding, or the endgame mechanic of the RPG Fiasco. But remixing requires familiarity with the stuff you're working with, so Cadence play is sort of divided into two stages: lawnmowering through all the material, which is rather like reading a fragmentary novel, and then selecting and arranging content.

The story has its own foci, though, apart from any manipulations you exercise on it. It's in large part a conversation about what families are and aren't; while being very clear about the importance of family in general, it shows actual families as being based on the best you can do with what you have available, rather than reflections of some platonic ideal; both happy and unhappy families are all different. Even where traditional family households exist and function well, society doesn't flinch from sacrificing them to economic or military ends.

As far as its genre touchstones go, 18 Cadence is a sort of historical dynastic tale, a tale of changing eras, in the same category as Woolf's Orlando, Forrest Gump, even Little, Big; the usual pattern there is to follow a family, or an individual, through decades of change. (It seems to take care to avoid trying to cleave too closely to a high-school-history kind of summary: we're not Forrest Gump, coincidentally central to every event of canonical modern history.) It's not unusual for a home to play a big role in this sort of story, but in 18 Cadence, a little unusually, it's not a home that remains in the same family for generations, but one that gets resold or repurposed many times over the course of the century. So whereas in dynastic, tale-of-our-times stories the house tends to emphasize continuity, in 18 Cadence it foregrounds discontinuity much more. People break apart more than they hold together. Houses are not things that remain in the family by default, but rather to be rented, mortgaged and remortgaged, repossessed. A family home is not a source of constant stability, but a tenuous moment, striven for and then lost, not to be recaptured. Thus also romance, parenthood, family. The rapid, gap-filled pace of the story, a handful of fragments for an entire year, makes for a world where entropy is king, where old age and death come too quickly.

So the mood of Cadence is strongly downbeat. You are forever losing people, and people are forever losing homes. The fragmentary nature of the narrative paints a picture of a world full of gaps: gaps between people and their loved ones, between hopes and realities, between the glimpses you're afforded of people and the full story of their lives.

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.)

Ex Nihilo sits on the cusp between IF and e-poetry: a very short, very abstract, highly atmospheric CYOA in which you make choices about a deity. It will take perhaps five minutes to play, but you'll want to play a few times.

The core plot is always the same: a divine being creates the universe, abides alone for eons, encounters a race of lesser beings, and finally meets a being that is something like an equal. The value of interaction is primarily about the attitude and tone of the piece: depending on your mood and tone choices, the lesser beings and your relationship to them will turn out rather differently. God's mood is the shaping force of the universe. Events are described in terse, cool tones, at a high level of abstraction; and when you meet your counterpart, at the end, things are left massively wide open.

The game's colour choices and the decisive nature of the final encounter, which determines the fate of the world, suggest a kind of Manichean universe*, in which the nature of the two sides is always different. The suggestion of these strange dualisms is the main thing I took away from the piece; it has the weirdly fruitful nature of procedural generation about it, and in this context the awkward juxtapositions that this kind of thing often throws up seem more like the product of minds alien to one another trying to communicate.

To be more specific: the final choice of the game is a text entry, the first thing you say to the Other Being. From what I can make out, the game stores the entries of everyone playing the game, then feeds them back out as the Other Being's responses. Like letting players choose their character's name, this is the sort of thing that you'd expect to be tone-breaking, and often it is; when you encounter a divine being who greets you with "Eat at Joe's", you're kind of catapulted into a Douglas Adams cosmos. But at best, the disconnect that this creates, the feeling of talking at deep, unbridgeable cross-purposes, makes for a pretty good suggestion of cosmic conflict: Heaven and Hell fundamentally don't understand one another.

All this is rendered in a smooth, simple, effective graphic style with appropriately vast-and-lonely-sounding music.

* that is, a world shaped by the struggle between two roughly equal gods or cosmic forces: in classic Manichaeism, these are the forces of good and evil.

An academic-mystery adventure about European art history. It's large, attractively illustrated and amusingly written, but (as with many games that have a lot of action territory to cover) doesn't work awfully well on the interaction front.

Gilbert Fontenelle, a crabby professor of Pre-Renaissance Italian art, is brought in to investigate a Mysterious Clue on a painting in the Vatican archives. This will end up taking him on a grand journey across Europe, on which he will discover ancient plots, rampage through a great many art museums, meet attractive, intelligent younger women and be grouchy to the latter. (They will find this endearing and gently needle him.) There are strong shades of Indiana Jones here, if Indy was frailer, grouchier, Frencher and much, much more interested in the actual content of his academic field. ("Sorry, beautiful," Fontenelle subvocalises to a Polish hostess, "Gilbert Fontenelle already has a vice: the study of Pre-Renaissance frescoes.")

The characters are thoroughly hammed-up, the action slapstick. Most conversation happens in (large) press-any-key-to-continue cutscenes, a lot of which are very funny: the comedy generally derives from Gilbert being a horrible grouch who hates everything, but who (despite protestations) is willing to engage in a great deal of impish mischief. There are a lot of fourth-wall-bending jokes; on several occasions Fontenelle grumbles about all the adventure cliches, suggests some more that would be even more ridiculous to encounter, and promptly encounters them. The conspiracy-and-mystery plot is not taken enormously seriously; (Spoiler - click to show)there does turn out to be an ancient and cloaked cabal, but they're mostly in it for the annual dinners. But the sense of a grand adventure through cool places is strong regardless. Also, though saying this feels kind of like a disservice to the author, everything is funnier in French.

My French is good enough to read IF (if I read aloud, and go to Google Translate for idiom, and the French version of Zarf's Play IF card for standard commands) but not really sufficient to judge the quality of prose, and the parts of my brain that scan IF for puzzle content don't link up well with the parts that read French. So, while I felt that a lot of necessary actions were heavily underclued, I'm not sure that this impression is fair. Less ambiguously, this is a full-sized story about fast-paced intrigue and action, with fairly traditional IF puzzles worked in. That combination tends to lead to punishing timed sequences and wobbly implementation, which is certainly true here. In other places (the Bond-ish card game, the final puzzle) the gameplay aspects make the pacing sag. It's admittedly difficult to twin certain kinds of plot to IF that plays smoothly, and Ekphrasis' failings here are hardly extraordinary. The game managed to be compelling despite this, largely because I liked the characters so much; but expect to grind your teeth at a few points.

It's not wholly bug-free, either; there's at least one-point where dropping an object makes it impossible to pick up again, rendering the game unwinnable. (The walkthrough at the Archive is not entirely to be relied upon, either, which can cause big problems in certain timed sequences.) It's not entirely clear whether the extant version was intended as a final release. Regular saving advised.

This is a game that's deeply interested in art history, and there's an appropriately extensive use of graphics The choice of images is generally excellent, particularly when it comes to setting. Their combination is less so, and often feels a bit clip-arty. (At the time, this was about as much as you could squeeze out of Glulx; I live in anticipation of what will ensue once the Euro IF crowd get to grips with I7 Vorple and native-language I7. If this entire game could be rendered in the style of the chapter-break postcards... that would be pretty spectacular). There are also sound effects, which are more squarely in the just-a-clip department.

This is a slice-of-life game, heavily influenced by lad-lit novelist Nick Hornby, that deals directly with a romantic relationship and its breakup. That's a pretty rare thing in IF, and Mix Tape gives some hints as to why.

The author's focus is definitely more on the writer side. Essentially all of the significant actions come pre-scripted; only one scene involves much interaction, and even there your actions are about preparing dinner, rather than directly engaging with the relationship. Much of the significant plot is doled out in walls-o'-text. The prose wanders, a good deal of the time, into overwritten or overwrought territory; it avoids being bland, it maintains voice, but it's in need of a ruthless edit and some repurposing to fit its medium better. Significant action is pretty limited throughout; veering from the script will either get you stuck entirely, or dragged back on course.

The central relationship concerns Peter and Valentine, twentysomethings from nowhere in particular. Although you play as Valentine, the protagonist of this story is definitely Peter; Peter is the one whose interests dominate the narrative. Val isn't given much that makes her stick in the mind as an individual. In the frame-story, wherein Peter gets Val to burn her scrapbook of their relationship, it felt to me very much as if Peter was using Val as a prop in his own internal drama while justifying it as a necessary step for us.

A lot of the problems with characterisation are ultimately interaction problems: Peter isn't deeply-implemented, so he comes off as distant and inattentive. Peter's role is to direct the plot, so he comes off as controlling. The combination makes him feel self-absorbed and emotionally manipulative. (True, this is meant to be about a failed romance, not a healthy one. But it's meant to resolve into a failed romance but a reaffirmed friendship, and doesn't really succeed at it.) But it's also a problem with the writing: Valentine mostly thinks about Peter, Peter mostly thinks about music. It's hard to form much of a picture of Valentine other than as Peter's cute girlfriend.

In this particular corner of cultural history, we tend to have some fairly strong feelings about parity in romantic relationships. But the basic formula of interactive media involves a highly asymmetric relationship. This means that IF stories about romance are a very fine balancing act; small errors can have far-reaching, unintentional overtones about manipulation, coercion, emotional blackmail. Moments intended to be touching often become creepy even in more traditional media; IF is even more vulnerable to this. (Violet, a more mature piece than Mix Tape, still ends up falling into this trap.)

The game's structural conceit is a retrospective of a romantic relationship in the form of a selection of songs. This is kind of self-indulgent on the face of it, and suffers badly because the songs aren't (and can't be) included in the game. This was perhaps more of an issue in 2005 than it is now, when more or less any song can be listened to on YouTube; but it still has a translation problem if you're unfamiliar with the songs, dislike them, or simply have no emotional resonance with them. (For me, most of it falls into the category of Earnest Indie-Pop Rock with a side of Boring Indie That Nerds 5-10 Years My Senior Like.)

(I liked this considerably more when it first came out, but on re-examination its flaws feel far more acute. The score here splits the difference.)

Zero Summer is a browser-based game using the StoryNexus platform (best known for Echo Bazaar/Fallen London, and a bit like a social network game without the social network nonsense). It's set in a strange postapocalyptic Texas: you show up in Amarillo with amnesia and are obliged to find your way in the world as The Man With No Name.

The StoryNexus platform has a good deal more friction than is usual in a CYOA. Your choices are never single-click: you have to draw cards, mouseover them to see what they mean, click to bring up the card's options, assess those options, decide between them. In some games (this one included) you have to travel between regions to get the options you need, which is not in itself a content-offering process. Grinding -- repeatedly doing the same thing in order to raise your stats -- remains a significant game element. Even on a decent internet connection, none of this loads instantaneously; every click is a little slower than might be desired. And the system itself limits how much you can play by giving you a set number of turns that refresh slowly over time.

All of this, importantly, is dumb friction: it doesn't add challenge or engagement to the experience, it just slows the rate of content-delivery down. This places really high demands on the content itself; and, indeed, the Failbetter house style has generally been to set very high standards for the writing side, with strong and distinctive worldbuilding that's evoked with dense, punchy, elegant prose, richly evocative but (at its best) understated.

Zero Summer's take on the house style is a little different, but only a little. It veers somewhat away from the generic characterisation of Fallen London, towards more specific, continuous characters. Its snippets of text are more on the lengthy side. But these are very small departures, and most of the core elements are much the same: a strange, dangerous world full of sinister wonders and gradually unfolding mysteries, explored by a enterprising (but vague) jack-of-all-trades and delivered as a series of anecdotes in juicy prose. The rhythms of the text, the way the story is paced, the detail-oriented aesthetic feel for the subject-matter are fundamentally familiar.

As with Fallen London, the world of Zero Summer has been transformed by a fantastic and sinister apocalyptic event. In Zero Summer, however, it's less a matter of mysterious fiendish machinations and more a force of the harsh, inhuman desert. Demons won't be offering you scones and employment, here. On the other hand, the protagonist feels like less of a hedonistic sociopath; this is a story concerned with hospitality, with getting to know people because you'd like to know them better, rather than for the sake of money, sex, information, patronage. Notably, while three of your base stats correspond to Fallen London ones, there's nothing that matches the thievish Shadowy. (The particular combination here, of people who are immediately hospitable but also very private, thorny and hard to get to know, feels just right for a frontier US context.) It's concerned about staying human in a tough world.

Insofar as Zero Summer has failings, they're generally to do with problems inherent in StoryNexus. The art is stock. The world is, at present, perhaps a little sparse; you can travel to areas before there are any actions unlocked there, and you often find yourself drawing the same five cards over and over again (which undermines the purpose of having a card-based opportunity system instead of a static set of options). There is a shade too much grind required, and the turn-limit system remains an unhappy compromise. But within its established idiom, Zero Summer is a capable and engaging piece of work.

maybe make some change is a rare thing: a political game that's powerful without being preachy, a heavily-multimedia piece that doesn't feel gimmicky, a limited-action/brutalised-protagonist piece that feels justified. Dealing with the Maywand District murders, it puts you in the shoes of Adam Winfield, one of the US soldiers convicted of the premeditated killing of unarmed Afghan civilians.

PAX East 2011. At the IF Demo Fair, Aaron Reed is showcasing an early version of maybe make some change, then titled what if im the bad guy. To me, the experience of play feels like an attempt to represent post-traumatic stress disorder. The game is played with headphones: the soundtrack is a garble of radio static, yells and gunfire, through which emerge fragments of speech clips about the Afghan conflict and the War on Terror. In the screen's background, behind the text, clips play from first-person shooters set somewhere in the Middle East. The central text is terse and repetitive, the verb-set narrow; interactivity feels distant, a struggle through a haze of stressful stimuli. As a piece of multimedia IF, it's astounding, leagues in advance of anything comparable; otherwise, it feels more like a theatre-of-cruelty experiential piece than a playable story. A woman stops playing, refusing to enter the commands that she feels the game's demanding of her: Aaron gives her a hug. "That's a totally legitimate response."

maybe make some change is a more meditative creature than what if im the bad guy, less easy to read as designed primarily to shock and brutalise the audience. The voices are chosen more for calm tones, the crackle of radio and gunfire is less jarring (the predominant sound is of an eerie air-raid siren), the video more blurry and ghostlike. The game doesn't try to overwhelm you with multiple stimuli anywhere near as much. The narrators use less racist language. The overall effect is less of a hammer-blow to the face: still disturbing, but allowing more focus on the underlying content.

The game's basic conceit is a cycling Rashomon story: the same vignette is told over and over again by different narrators, military and civilian, before and after the event: sergeants, a pro-war relative, a liberal blogger, an army trainer, your prosecutor. Each retelling takes only a single action before switching to the next; the initial feeling is that this is a one-turn game like Aisle. The same sentences are used in each retelling, but as well as tenses, many of the words shift between narrators -- most significantly, the word used for the Afghan man killed by the platoon, which varies from 'civvie' to 'insurgent' to 'fuckhead'.

The game focuses on the strained and difficult positions that the protagonist faces, about situations and interpretations framed by other people. Most actions are invalid, either denied by the narrators or self-censored by the protagonist. The central thread to the piece is obviously about the conflicting pressures and limited freedom of the protagonist. But there's more to the piece than the weary The Game Is Oppressive, The Player Is A Victim dynamic.

(Spoiler - click to show)The central point of gameplay is to unlock the full suite of available verbs, then apply them to the correct narrators in ways that might conceivably have helped. For me, this successfully threaded the needle between ironic nihilism and demanding perfect-world outcomes.
There's a definite element of disassociation or derealisation about gameplay, a post-desperation feeling of 'okay, I'm fucked anyway, let's try anything'. But it avoids becoming navel-gazing; the game does an excellent job of contrasting the various American-centric fantasy wars with the man in front of you, the ghost of Mullah Adahdad who you must confront again and again from different angles (contrast De Baron). Similarly, for a piece that's about different perspectives, it does a fine job of avoiding pure-subjectivity soup.

The multimedia features are largely lost in the non-browser version; not recommended.

The design of this short piece is not unlike Clarke's debut Leadlight: you are a cute, athletic young woman exploring a macabre setting, getting attacked by wacktastic monsters, and dying a lot. This version, however, is a straight-up treasure hunt. In tone it's more of a light-hearted Halloweeny romp, though there are still a few genuinely macabre images.

You are pursued around the house by two monsters, the clockwork girl and the terror statue; remaining in a room with them results in your death. You can avoid them by moving away (though they may come after you), or by shooting them with your limited supply of bullets. Also limited is a central room, which kills you the third time you enter it. Although the treasures you're looking for (terrible, but highly valuable poetry) are hidden, they're only nominally so; the trick is about finding enough breathing space to look for them, and finding genuine treasures rather than useless scraps.

For a game produced within the time constraints (Ectocomp's slightly weird setup: three hours of coding, as much preparatory writing as you like), it's impressively tight design, and everything pretty much works as it ought to. Poking at the scenery too hard is not to be advised, but in general you won't have much time to do so. There are some sound principles at work here, but for me it wasn't quite entertaining enough to stick at; that sodding clockwork girl was far too persistent, and working out which things hid the genuine poems was too trial-and-error, given that I usually had to burn up a bullet to get one. Too much of my gameplay was spent running in circles, trying to make a swipe at that damn armadillo shell and getting headed off by monsters every time.

This seems to be designed as an intentional challenge, but my frustration level for replay is fairly low. If I'm not encountering new content or discovering new strategies, I don't really want to keep hammering away at the same puzzle time after time. That hurdle is what stops this game from being a generally strong piece, as opposed to just a strong piece given its time constraints.

[Review originally posted on intfiction.org]

Simon Christiansen's work has been characterised by brilliant concepts that are ultimately let down in the execution. The execution has improved considerably (and so have the concepts, really); the overall experience, though, is still a little rough.

The big concept of PataNoir is that similes occupy their own adjacent reality that you can manipulate: change the simile, change the real world. One frequently-employed subset of this involves altering the personalities of people. Elements of one simile can be used to tinker with another, and in some sequences similes are gates that allow you to plunge into entirely separate worlds. There are, then, a number of distinct kinds of manipulation that can be performed with similes, and they're thrown at you pretty much all at once, together with rules about how the system works (similes can be used to modify real-world things, but can't act directly on them: a simile key will not unlock a real door.) When I first played it I had a little trouble taking on everything at once, and stalled out perhaps halfway in.

The simile hook provides a good deal of rather lovely imagery (kicking in good and early), with elements of fantastic journey about it; to film this you'd want Terry Gilliam (or Švankmajer, though it's not quite that dark). There is a hauntingly dark atmosphere to much of it. Not every section is quite as spectacular as it could be: the climactic scene in particular could be richer and darker. But there are many images I took away from this: (Spoiler - click to show)the angel fountain encircled by snake-paths, the sleeping giant, the eyes you swim into like subterranean lakes, the plunge from bottles on a table in a messy apartment into a minaret-studded city. There's much here of the raw stuff of imagination, the pure delight of strange transformations.

Structurally, the game has areas you can travel between, and you will fairly often need to travel back and forth. The game's natural pace is a sort of Anchorhead-like, leisurely poking around at things; but I ended up speeding things up with the walkthrough a good deal, for a couple of reasons. Dream or hallucination is a flow state: it's not something where you get hung up on a fair-but-difficult conundrum for a while and have to work through it logically. The play experience matches up much better with the experience-as-written when you cheat. Simile-logic isn't really consistent enough for a Savoir-Faire simulationist approach, and there's often a whiff of read-author's-mind about the solutions. In the impossible-to-make Platonic ideal of this game, more or less everything you tried would advance the plot somehow. That said, going to the walkthrough really doesn't ruin the experience: it's still hauntingly strange.

Christiansen's biggest limiting factor remains narrative voice. This is exacerbated because of PataNoir's reliance on a genre that makes very strong demands on narrative voice, even when done as a pastiche. Noir needs a tone of slangy self-assurance, murky motives, a grimy, uncomfortable world full of implied sex, violence and desperation. PataNoir feels a bit more in Thin Man territory: there's a noir template, but it's being used in service to something else, it's as much a comedy on noir tropes as anything, and thus it's rendered nonthreatening. The characters are a little too straightforward: the obligatory femme fatale has the mandatory dangerous curves, but these are only significant as a simile: but the PC doesn't feel as though he regards her with either lust or trepidation.

And then there's the ending. (Spoiler - click to show)The protagonist, it turns out, has a rare mental-health condition ("Lytton-Chandler syndrome") and, off his meds, has likely fantasised the entire thing. A lot of people felt this was a cop-out; I'm not convinced of this, but I don't think it really matches up with the story as written. The tough, non-flowing puzzle structure isn't suggestive of hallucination, but of solid, graspable, permanent worlds; the contrast between the rich simile-worlds and the flat detective-noir story suggests that they genuinely do occupy separate worlds, rather than being elements of the same hallucination.

So ultimately I came out of this hoping that Christiansen would team up with a more confident wordsmith, or perhaps find something that allows him to develop his own voice rather than trying to replicate an established style.

Flight of the Hummingbird is a sort of attempt to blend platformer-style puzzles in an IF format. All of its puzzles are to do with difficult or unusual ways of getting around. Most involve alternative ways of handling space than the standard IF rooms-and-compass method. While some of these experiments seem potentially interesting, none are developed much beyond the point at which the player can grasp their use.

The fictional content is pretty standard fare: you play a third-string superhero with a kind of feeble theme and an unimpressive power (you can fly, but have to chug sugary sports drinks every few turns). You're tasked with dealing with a third-string supervillain with a campy villainous plan of some kind that requires a space rocket; everybody expects you to screw up. This is a pretty well-established comedy premise, so it needs to be really funny to work: ideally, it would have played on the careenings of the navigation puzzles to produce something wildly slapstick. Flight's writing, however, is more workmanlike than anything, and the comedy falls flat. What remains is a My Pathetic Life narrative, which turns out to be no more appealing with superheroes than in My Apartment.

So the ultimate effect of Flight is of something that was designed as a succession of themed puzzles with a narrative skin, rather than something that marries puzzle and narrative together. It may appeal as a quick puzzlebox, if that's your bag: it's not really mine.

Guilded Youth is a short, aggressively compact coming-of-age story, with well-considered, strongly-executed, attractive presentation that contributes a great deal to the content without overwhelming it. You play Tony, an 80s teenager whose world is viewed through the lens of a fantasy-RPG BBS; recruiting various allies from his online world, he leads a series of quixotic real-world raids to plunder treasures from a derelict house. The interest lies not so much in trespass and theft, however, as it does in learning things about the NPCs (though this mostly feels like glances at the surface). Munroe is a capable writer. There's well-chosen music. On the surface, this feels like a polished product; indeed, it's really the product of four different specialists rather than one overworked generalist.

Once you get to grips with it, though, it's not quite there. Gameplay is restricted to a narrow set of verbs and interactions. This makes play easier, but has the side-effect of making Tony's engagement with his world and peers seem very impoverished: going on a great adventure doesn't change the fact that he's an awkward kid. Some games parlay limited verb sets into rich and engaging gameplay: Guilded Youth very much doesn't. Interaction rolls along smoothly enough, but it always feels constrained.

The narrative, too, is clipped, narrow, to-the-point; we see nothing at all about Tony's mundane life, or very much of what matters about alternative world of the BBS. The story offers subplots, suggestions of character arcs, then prunes them away after barely a plot beat. The story has been much-compared to 80s children's adventure movies, particularly The Goonies, but to me it felt more like YA novels of the same approximate era: willing to touch on big, thorny, uncomfortable issues, brave enough to avoid neatly resolving them. There's perhaps something to be said here about the experience of being a teenager, of being in a place where everything is done for a future that's taking its time in arriving; of feeling that everything important, everything fulfilling, has been indefinitely put off; but this explanation has the feeling of an excuse. Rather than a conscious design decision, it's probably the result of the game being written hurriedly as a tech demo for Vorple. Jim Munroe:

"I just kind of dropped it when I was done. Me and Matt considered it a lark, a nostalgic trifle, so much so that we didn’t anticipate people would care what happened to the quickly sketched characters."

(Post-comp, an epilogue was added, allowing the player to focus a little more on one of the characters. These sections add a small but important sliver of character development, player choice and much-needed narrative closure; they make the thing feel more like a complete piece, even if they don't entirely fix all its weaknesses.)

Nonetheless, it's a pretty damn good tech demo; the importance of launching a new IF tool with a first-class demo game can't really be understated.

A piece of ecological science fiction with obvious similarities to the James Cameron Avatar, Changes relies on a contrast between an idyllic setting and violence and destruction. Some fairly nasty behaviour is required to make much progress in the plot: (Spoiler - click to show)a space explorer crashed on an alien world, you must kill a succession of alien creatures in order to steal their bodies and abilities, enabling you to return to your ship.

The immediate attraction of Changes is environmental; it is set in a good-sized map full of attractively-described locations, pleasant to explore and absorb. (Given how well-suited IF is to environment-focused games, it's surprising that so few exist, so this was pretty refreshing in its own right.) The writing is strong enough to serve as an immediate draw. At the larger scale, it has a consistent, overarching set of puzzle goals that are readily grasped, are deeply tied into the world, themes and plot, and do a good job of directing short-term motivation.

It's at the intermediate scale that Changes stumbles: between the immediate experience of setting and prose and the grand arc of the puzzle sequence, a player has to figure out the shape of individual puzzles and get them to work. Here, the extensive map becomes a drawback: it's not always very clear which problems can be tackled at any given time, and even when you know what to do the execution can be fairly frustrating. A good deal of effort has been made to provide clues, but these often appear long before they can be usefully acted upon and don't show up again. Experimentation isn't always as well-rewarded as it might be.

In some ways, it's tempting to think of Changes as a belated artefact from around the tail-end of the Middle School period, something to be shelved alongside The Edifice and Babel, intended to be played over multiple sittings, likely to stump the player for considerable periods of time. (Tending to support this: the backstory is doled out through amnesia-recovery.) The game might have been served better by that model, perhaps; at any rate, the two-hour Comp doesn't seem to be its optimal environment.

As is made very clear by the title, this is a sports-sim game set in the Harry Potter universe, many years before the events of the novels. Very short, it relies heavily on fairly obscure knowledge of its oeuvre, and makes little effort to supply it to outsiders. While the player has more influence on the match than in most recent sports-based IF works, the game-like elements are not deep, and non-enthusiasts are unlikely to find very much here. (As someone with only glancing knowledge or interest, I can't speak to how it treats its subject matter.)

The game shows pretty strong evidence of being written by someone without a strong familiarity with IF. Almost no descriptions are written, so EXAMINE is near-useless. The verb-set is limited to a small number of mostly specialist verbs during a short intro sequence, then even further limited during the game itself. The events in the game itself are heavily random. As the Gryffindor Seeker, you're responsible for catching the Snitch and ending the game; but victory in the tournament requires that you wait until your team is ahead by 30 points first. A few commands allow you to disrupt the opposing team, with random success, or avoid being disrupted. Otherwise, it's a matter of waiting until the right moment as the match plays out, then using the SEARCH FOR SNITCH command and hoping it works. With a little application of UNDO, victory is not difficult.

Much of the action takes place independent of what you're doing, and is not always very clearly explained. (Someone familiar with IF conventions would probably have included the game's score in the status bar, and made SCORE work as well as X BOARD.) Quidditch involves a lot of aerial acrobatics, so the interaction necessarily takes place at a fairly abstract level; thus also the description of events, and I never got a very strong sense of the physical state of the game; and character-wise, it relies upon the reader having a good established sense of who most of these people are, or who they will become. So I suspect that the game may be fairly unsatisfying even for Potter fen; as Emily Short has written of Ron Weasley and the Quest for Hermione, and as I've experienced with some of the movie-based Harry Potter videogames, a lot of the appeal of this kind of thing is about immersion in a familiar fictional environment. This is the sort of thing that IF is really well-suited for; instead, Quidditch Final brushes past environment exploration and character interaction, and aims straight for something that IF is traditionally very weak at: a complicated action sequence. So, while the author has definitely done their homework -- the thing bristles with throwaway references -- I'm not sure that it's employed to best effect.

Given the narrow verb set, I had the strong sense that this would work better without a parser interface... except that most CYOA systems wouldn't offer enough control over complex random events. (Undum could do it with enough Javascript on top, but that would be really challenging for a casual coder; I7 + Vorple may turn out to be a better prospect.)

Dreams are difficult material for a writer; most often, literary dreams are just narrative laziness or cowardice, and resemble actual dreams very little. apple, however, attains a sort of Lynchian semi-coherence -- a faint shadow of the senseless power of actual dreams, but about as good as can be expected in a waking state.

The author was in his teens when he wrote this, and there's a definite adolescent feel to the whole thing: Tarantino-slickness, transgressive (though not porny) sex everywhere, the cool-meta vibe that Hollywood went frantic over in the late 90s and early aughts. It's very much a beast of that era, back when school shootings evoked controversy rather than resignation.

It's not much of a game; the interactivity is slight, more about engagement and focus-changing than about altering the course of events. There are one or two cool use-of-medium tricks in here -- as when the narrative turns into a TV script -- but they come across as throwaway and irrelevant. There are great big textdumps. At the time, to a sceptic, it would have looked like the logical extension of the malign influence of Photopia: short stories trivially dressed up as IF, cheap pressing of the audience's buttons. Formal purists, people who see the game/puzzle aspect of IF as essential, are basically going to hate this.

What's striking about apple is that it does a pretty decent job of representing a sense of the dreamlike: fractured hints of narrative, a looming feeling of inevitability, a lurching unease. It's not perfect at this, it's not even great; but it's good.

Yoon's talents lie strongly on the writer side, as an author of lyrical, strange, high-concept SF/F in traditional prose formats. She has a proclivity for improbable fanfic mashups. And thus, here we have a short, poetic, lachrymose and opaque piece -- a fragment, really -- about Swan Lake and Klein bottles.

As an Artshow piece, there is not a great deal to do in Swanglass except to try out commands and piece together fragments of story, until you find the thing that ends the game. The writing sometimes works and sometimes is too overwrought to take seriously (">X MOSS Soft and green and vulnerable. Like your heart, once.") If you're not vaguely familiar with the plot of Swan Lake, it'll make very little sense; even if you are, you'll get little more than glimpses.

One of the big problems with more serious IF is how to maintain tone when the player resists it by entering silly or out-of-character commands. This is more of a problem when tone-viable, useful actions aren't obvious. It's tempting, in this situation, to write in snarky dismissive responses, in the same general style as the rest of the game; this works very well for some narrative voices, and quite poorly for others. Swanglass, with its tone of highly-strung, lyrical grief, is not really appropriate for response-snark, but the snark's there regardless. The answers to >EAT SWANGLASS or >COUNT LEAVES are entertaining, but give up too much: you get the sense of the author lampooning her own style. A larger game might get away with this.

In most respects this is like a tiny, puzzleless Moonlit Tower. If you enjoyed that and want more, this will deliver a very small taste, but probably not one that will satisfy.

One of a small but important subgenre, the single-NPC conversation game. Games of this form inevitably have a romantic subtext: you are, after all, focusing intently on a single person for quite a while. ("I think I can fall in love with anyone," a friend once said, "if I spend enough time looking into their eyes. Hairdressers are a problem.") In Snowblind Aces, the subtext stops being subtext and dances around in the foreground.

During a war roughly analagous to WWI (but with more steampunk-fantasy elements), two fighter aces on opposite sides collide, crash in a snowbound waste, and must work together to survive; this is the climax of a long flirtation based on being honourable to one another in dogfights. The attraction is obvious: the question is what you do about it.

Pacian is consistently good at creating characters who are, if not particularly deep or complex, at least memorable and attractive. If IF fanfic were a thing, Pacian would be the genre's biggest ship-baiter. I've always felt that this character-design approach feels much more like a visual medium, and that of comics in particular: and the first impression that I got on examining Imelda was "man, this feels like a Phil Foglio character."

So the game succeeds at the first hurdle of romance-oriented plots: the audience should like the leads and want to see them get together. At the second requirement (there should be serious obstacles to the relationship) it's a little more shaky. As in Walker & Silhouette, the leads begin the conversation totally eager to jump into one anothers' pants, and largely remain thus throughout. This, combined with the highlighted-keyword conversation system, makes the flirtation feel like an effortless glide rather than a dogfight or a fraught landing. You have opportunities to disrupt it if you want, true, but doing so by mistake is unlikely. And because the game is so centrally focused on the romance, you're not really given any motives to do so, except to be perverse: I never felt as though Lucas' love of flying, or for his homeland, were evoked strongly enough to make for character conflict. You do not feel as though you're sacrificing a great deal by spending the rest of the war in prison. And of course, that frission is the obvious point of the game's premise -- so if it comes across weakly, that's a big problem.

Though generally strong and efficient, the writing is conspicuously less smooth than in Pacian's later works. There were a number of moments in the dialogue that broke the tone for me. The cutting banter is good at times, but less convincing at others; and the tone doesn't shift enough in response to key events in the conversation.

The game states that there are a good number of endings, but I didn't find myself wanting to seek out more than a couple. I can't help but compare the play experience to that of Galatea. There, conversation was much more of a struggle: finding enough topics to discuss in order to reach an ending can take a while. But because you have to search for them, there's a stronger feeling of things to find. After one playthrough of Snowblind Aces, however, there's a pretty strong sense that you've exhausted the great majority of topics.

But there's much to like about Snowblind Aces: a satisfying epilogue section, mostly fluid play, a distinctive and engaging premise. Like Pacian's output in general, it's overtly pulpy, but it's tasty pulp. (For me, this was one of those games that you save up for when you want to play something that you can be sure is going to be pretty good.)

TriadCity is an ambitious MUD with some unusual goals, set in a fantastic, genre-bending city.

Given the long-term nature of play, and the world's very-incomplete status, this review should be treated as more provisional than usual, and less likely to age well. Also, I am inexperienced in MUDs generally -- but, since TriadCity seems to be aiming at a fairly different audience, that shouldn't be a disqualification.

The game really, really wants you to acknowledge that it's postmodern and literary. (When you log out, it gives you Amazon referrals to all the books it's referenced.) I'll grant this, but with the caveat that these categories aren't really badges of honour; what's important is whether it's good literature.

And as a literary work, TriadCity leaves a good deal to be desired. Compared to the average work of IF, or mainstream CRPGs, there is very little active narrative; at least at lower levels, it's more of a sandbox than a quest-driven system, and more about exploration than either. Apart from a number of chatbots that seem disconnected from the world proper, NPCs are minimally reactive. There seems to be the idea that player-driven roleplay would fill a lot of the space, but at present the users are too sparse for this to be viable; and it seems likely that there is more to do at moderate-to-high levels, but leveling is quite slow.

To repeat: sloooow. At low levels, much of your time will be spent managing sleep. There are hunger and thirst counters too, but these are less obnoxious. While fatigue is a MUD convention, it adds very little to gameplay, detracts a great deal from the enjoyment of exploration, and is most annoying at the worst possible time -- that is, the very early game. There are ways to make it less awful (make a high-CON character, invest in certain magic items) but these are largely just compensation for a terrible idea.

The game has some pretty laudable ideas about how it would like to work: less gameplay focus on combat and theft (they exist, they're just hard), with a polite and supportive player culture of intelligent adults. How much this is actually achieved is another matter; the people who are on are friendly and very helpful, but too few to really constitute a culture. And there doesn't seem to be much to replace combat and theft.

The prose tends towards the genially brief; it's competent, in general, but not strong enough to constitute an attraction in its own right. NPCs receive very light characterisation and, as already mentioned, are largely non-interactive. Some of these characters are drawn from literature and folklore and oddly juxtaposed into the world -- but this is a common practice of games of this ilk, and I don't think it's inherently better literature just because they come from books rather than pop-culture.

The main immediate attraction of the game, as it stands, is exploration of the City. Most low-level experience is gained by walking around and looking at stuff. Roughly, the city is divided into three sections: the anarcho-socialist, hippy-agrarian Northwest, the morally ambiguous high-tech, artsy, technocrat-capitalist South, and the dystopian, authoritarian-capitalist Northeast. If you have detected a slight element of political bias in the above, you don't know the half of it. While TriadCity purports to be interested in subjectivity and morally complex issues, it pretty much establishes who the good guys and the bad guys are from the outset; and further, because most of its elements are versions of real-world things, it often comes across as sorting things into neat little Good/Bad/Ambiguous boxes. (Good: vegetarianism, liberation theology, wine, kaballah. Evil: guns, goths, slavery, smoking, cannibalism.) As satire, it's not enormously sophisticated. Now, I'm pretty damn close to this thing's political demographic. I enjoy a socialist-utopia fantasy as much as the next pinko. But even so, jeez, this needs to be rendered a whole lot more problematic. Possibly it gets more nuanced later on -- but there's little sign of it thus far, and I doubt too many people would be willing to stick around and find out.

The other thing about exploration is that the map is quite large and often very empty. The game touts its thousands of rooms; people from an IF background, where four high-detail rooms are usually considered superior to any number of low-detail ones, will generally react to this as a reason to run away screaming, possibly undergoing flashbacks to Time Zone. The huge map multiplies the fatigue problem, and makes it necessary to map; plenty of user-made maps exist, but they're poorly indexed. Because the world is very much under construction, it's possible that more richly-detailed rooms are intended; but it seems as if the idiom is inclined towards much, much more of the same.

Which brings me to the next point: at present, it seems as though a lot of the draw of TriadCity lies in the opportunity to contribute to the world. Characters can earn in-game roles and rewards by contributing code and worldbuilding to the game itself, or art, maps, and various categories of writing to the website that supplements it. With this in mind, I started to design a small area for the game -- but then I balked, because I felt as though I was creating something dead. The game doesn't need more areas; it needs more active narrative, more detail, more things to do in the world that already exists. And after several days of pretty intensive play, I just haven't seen any examples of how the game might do that kind of thing.

The Forgotten Girls is about child sex slavery in the developing world. This is difficult material, and the author seems to be a novice at both writing and IF design. You play a child prostitute who attempts to rescue another and escape slavery.

Narratives about atrocity have a particularly strong relationship to authenticity. First-hand accounts by victims or witnesses are highly potent, even if the narrator is unskilled; second-hand accounts, by people who have spoken with actual witnesses, still have the impact of immediacy, but require somewhat more technical skill. Third-hand accounts, fictionalised, seriously reduce the impact, and a great deal of skill is required to impart the appropriate feeling to the audience. And interactive narratives are generally harder to get right. So I can't really blame the author for too much, here, other than underestimating the difficulty of the task.

Verisimilitude is the biggest weakness of The Forgotten Girls. It's set in a specific culture (India, with Hindu and Sikh surnames) with which the author does not seem to be particularly familiar. That said, the NPCs are not convincing as humans of any culture; their dialogue is stilted and unnatural, and they're conspicuously pawns of a puzzle structure. This makes it difficult to take them seriously as monstrous abusers. While the intention here seems good -- showing abuse victims working actively to empower themselves, rather than passively awaiting rescue -- the effect kind of diminishes the seriousness of the issue. If you can easily manipulate your abusers with adventure-game tricks, the power dynamic is all wrong. (I'm reminded, again, of the slapstick ghetto scene in The Great Dictator, in which Jews outwit beer-gutted, oafish Nazi police with skillets and flower-pots.) Depicting abused women as active agents in their own rescue has its virtues, but depicting victims as more resourceful than abusers makes the entire scenario nonsensical.

The problem's compounded because this world-illogic-for-the-sake-of-puzzles isn't just about NPC behaviour; the physical world works like this as well. A wooden cupboard can be set alight with matches. An ordinary car can smash through a brick wall from a dead start. A girl is able to walk (let alone flee) immediately after a vicious and prolonged beating with an iron rod. This could have been glossed over if the characters were less mechanical, and fixing it wouldn't compensate for the mechanical characters; but it does make the problem worse. Along similar lines, room descriptions are often laid out as ungainly inventory listings, and synonyms and close-but-wrong attempts are rarely implemented; you're never allowed to forget the artifice of your environment. (And from a gameplay perspective, read-author's-mind is a huge problem. There is, at least, a pretty good hints menu.)

It's worth comparing this to another game about real-world atrocity, Gigantomania. While suffering from similar problems (counternarrative gameplay elements; a general feeling of sophomore inauthenticity), Gigantomania made a creditable attempt to represent life under Stalin through modes of interaction, to explain experience through doing, to bring home a point by exploring how a system works. The Forgotten Girls doesn't really do anything like this; it's really just the statement "sex slavery in the developing world exists." That's not a pointless statement, for all that it makes for a less interesting work. But I think there's little point in fictionalising that statement if the fiction has less force than the bare facts.

Heavily reliant on cult JPRG Suidoken II, this is a minigame about head-to-head cooking contests. The only possible interaction is cooking, which is a two-step process; you pick a base food from a list, then modify it with seasonings from a second list. The modification is more conceptual than literal; mayonnaise turns into cream if you combine it with a quiche, or transforms fried chicken into french fries. Add salt to a sandwich, and it becomes peanut butter and jelly. There's no way of getting any more information about these ingredients -- such as the ones with Japanese names -- or predicting what effect a seasoning will have, short of experience. Other than this, play consists largely of pressing any key over and over to see what happens.

The NPCs -- your cook-off opponent, and the judging panel -- are drawn from Suidoken II, which you are assumed to be familiar with; each is described with only a brief phrase that makes little sense out-of-context. Sometimes there's a hint about the sort of food they prefer, but not enough to formulate anything like a strategy with. Still, random selections will usually be enough for victory. Winning contests unlocks more base recipes, but other than this there appears to be no progress; win or lose, you still go around and play another contest.

The writing has a sort of manic anime feel about it, but is generally not really enough for the job. It doesn't provide either enough information or enough interest. It does not seem designed with a prose format in mind; rather, it's a little as if someone stripped out the text from a medium more reliant on visuals. The effect is a bit like a radio broadcast of a gymnastics contest; sure, you get the general idea of what's going on, but it's clear that you're missing out on the most crucial element.

As a coding exercise, it might be considered a small success; the presentation is smooth enough. As game design, it leaves something to be desired.

A game that feels very much like an exercise in learning the multimedia features of Glulx, and using them in puzzle-critical ways. The basic conceit is that, eyes dilated and without your glasses, you must rely on your next-generation smartphone to deal with the world.

Your ultimate objective is to reach your wedding rehearsal, and the tone is generally light-hearted and wacky; but the TMBG song on which the game is based is about trying to screw up the courage to end a loveless relationship, and there are enough hints of correspondence between the two early on in the game to give a suspicion that all is not necessarily well.

The core of the game is a punishing puzzle highly similar to (Spoiler - click to show)the classic boardgame RoboRally, in which players control robots racing through a factory full of laser beams, pits and conveyor belts. Most of the entertainment value comes about because commands are pre-programmed in blocks of five, which has unpredictable and messy results when robots interfere with one another. Narrow Your Eyes' version is in some respects simpler; there is a single robot, control of which alternates between you and an evil scientist. Instead of relying on drawing the right cards, you can enter any commands you like. (To work this out, you absolutely need to go straight to the hints.)

On the other hand, the commands are entered by entering two-digit numbers, and you have to figure them by trial and error; firing the robot's laser is not automatic; and the board is unusually complex for a RoboRally map, being entirely covered in conveyor belts.

There are two big appeals of RoboRally: the spatial-logic challenge of setting up a good turn sequence, and the entertaining chaos when sequences get broken. Narrow Your Eyes places the emphasis heavily on the former -- which may appeal to people who prefer more pure logic puzzles, but which I find less interesting.

What's lethal, though, is the combination of less-than-ideal graphics and the trial-and-error commands. Each turn, the robot alternately moves under its own power and is moved by the conveyors; sounds are included to help distinguish between them, but the timing of these is Not Right somehow, and I found the effect confusing. The images are not animated, but simply disappear and reappear in their new location -- which is considerably more difficult to follow than visuals of a robot actually twisting and jiving. And in order to figure out commands, you'll need to take notes, and while taking notes you take your eyes off the screen and lose track of the sequence. Also, the robot kills you quite a lot, so heavy UNDO is required.

It's possible that this represents intentional design, and the game is aimed at people who really enjoy tracking and processing many pieces of hard-to-track, logically tidy information in quick sequence.


So this struck me as a successful coding exercise but an intensely frustrating user experience, and I cannot report on the ending.

Citing Ray Bradbury as a primary influence, this feels very much like a SF short story from the 50s or 60s, the sort of SF you could make a movie about without any need for a special effects budget. The protagonist, a child, lives with his parents on an island across the bay from Astro City. Earth is at war with Mars, and the protagonist plays make-believe games based on this distant conflict. But then a rocket-man washes up on the shore, and reality and fantasy intermingle. (There is a general feeling of WW2 fiction here.)

Though capable overall, both the writing and the overall design have some rough patches. The prose feels a little first-draftish in places. Most of the gameplay is quite narrowly focused -- probably too much so, in the make-believe sequence -- but there are a couple of points where the solution is a little counterintuitive. The denouement is rather heavily foreshadowed, the protagonist is perhaps a little bit too much of a Disney innocent. But there are many gleaming moments here, little bursts of rich, world-grounded imagery that make this feel less like a fantastic piece and more like a childhood memoir.

As science fiction IF goes, it's uncommonly good in that it has its feet planted on the ground, it grasps and is concerned about the flight-of-fancy aspect of the genre.

A feckless loser, likeable but kind of awful, has his life even further ruined by the intrusion of an SF/F trope. He joins up with a group of yet-more-awful guys and an cute girl or two; together they navigate a grody, nocturnal Americana fever-dream, overcome obstacles through randomised combat, and squabble interminably; a extensive range of graphics and atmospheric music rounds the experience out. Scatology, sass and geekery abound. If you've enjoyed previous Robb Sherwin games, then, this is a safe bet.

In Cryptozookeeper the subject is aliens and cryptids; the result is something that feels like The X-Files cross-bred with Pokemon, with an all-slacker cast. A lot of things don't make sense, and the general feeling is of a partial hallucination; wisecracking is juxtaposed with graphic horror, the plot develops tangled corners that you don't need to keep track of, and gameplay alternates between drifting easily along while expostulation happens, and being stuck in a frustrating corner with a skewy puzzle just beyond your grasp. And it's always night. And characters point out, repeatedly, the many aspects of the story that make no sense. It's a very particular kind of surreal.

At Cryptozookeeper's heart is a mini-game in which you create cryptids by combining DNA that you've collected, then battle them in an underground animal-fighting ring, in order to level them up to face a final challenge. The design is such that collecting all the DNA and discovering all the cryptids is optional. Combat is old-schoolish and random, but handled automatically and quickly; your main decisions are about gaining stats. On the other hand, you'll do a very great deal of it, it involves few strategic decisions, and it's not very clear how much is enough; players who dislike grinding may grit their teeth.

Thorough implementation is often talked about as a sine qua non of IF authorship, but it comes at a high cost. Sherwin puts as much effort, care and love into his games as anybody making IF, and does extensive testing; but robust implementation comes fairly low on his list. (Save often.) Among his higher priorities, it seems, is long-arc story. Cryptozookeeper is sometimes buggy or cumbersome, and often sparse and linear -- but it's also large and brim-full of content.

For much of the game you have three or four NPCs in tow, but you can talk to them rarely and on very limited topics. Despite this, they feel more developed than many NPCs with ten times their conversation topics -- Robb writes very well, the images help, and you have time to get to know them. (Too, you're constantly sniping at one another; the silences feel, appropriately, like irate sulking.)

Like most Sherwin games, this is basically about how the world is dark and horrible but even the most abject can be redeemed; it manages the difficult task of making both the darkness and the light seem genuine.

The protagonist is an underdog in a murderous struggle for succession. The action takes place in a sealed castle, with four towers around a central hub area and a throne-room to the north. Dying many times is to be expected before winning, and (Spoiler - click to show)nasty things lurk in the basement. Unlike Varicella, however, the antagonists of Magocracy are autonomous and unpredictable, and must be overcome through random RPG combat. Rather than the elaborate choreography of Varicella, then, you'd expect more strategic decisions, made up of cost-benefit judgments rather than the gradual uncovering of the One True Path. Sadly, Magocracy retains much of what's annoying about the gradual-uncovering approach, abandons most of what's fun about narrative IF, and brings in a host of new problems with its RPG elements.

The main problem with Magocracy is that, in terms of the immediate experience it delivers, it's really boring. The fantasy world is transparently made up of cheap knock-offs of Earth cultures and lifeless genre tropes. The writing is pedestrian, the setting bland; the PC has no personality to speak of. There's no sense of drama: moments that should be big dramatic reveals mostly leave you scratching your head. This is particularly bad because the general pattern of play is to try things out, get killed trying them, and hopefully learn a little bit with each death. It's a style of design that desperately needs to offer the player some sustenance to keep them going: and very little effort is spent on this.

The game's central conceit -- that you're the hopeless underdog who somehow has to find a way to triumph over the world's most powerful mages -- is used to justify some odd behaviour, like enemies who totally ignore you (they don't see you as a threat, or don't want to kill a helpless bystander). But among these high-powered mages there are also characters who will flee in terror the moment you attack them with a flimsy conjured staff. The general feeling is that Magocracy isn't really interested in narrative, even a narrative that's mostly about combat.

The hopeless-newbie conceit also reflects the player's learning curve. In Kerkerkruip, a great deal of effort was spent on making sure that the player had some idea of the general structure within which your strategic choices would operate. By the time you've died once in Kerkerkruip you should have a pretty good grasp of the general pattern of play. Magocracy does spend some time on explaining its mechanics, but getting a sense of strategy is much more slow and tedious. In this respect it fails because it's designed too much like conventional IF; you have to spend a lot of time on mapping and searching for hidden things before you can even really start to strategise. The author seems aware that this is a problem, and has included a number of items to compensate; but all of these are, likewise, rather hard to find.

IF that makes heavy use of randomisation, such as RPG-like combat, struggles with whether to allow UNDO. There are various approaches to dealing with this -- preserve a random seed, allow UNDO contextually -- but Rheaume's approach is to say that UNDO isn't cheating, then design the game to be so filled with death, randomness and near-unwinnable states that UNDO is essential to survive. But cheating isn't the most worrisome cost of UNDO; heavy use of it is, I think, inherently disruptive to the play experience.

Magocracy is not a slight work, and some of my dislike for it is because my priorities are so very unlike the author's. It might appeal to the type of gamer who requires no motivation whatsoever to solve a tough puzzle, other than the fact that it's tough. But even as a pure-RPG-combat exercise, it doesn't instill a huge amount of confidence. The hints file suggests 'find a better weapon straight away by looking under the kitchen table'; but this replaces a weapon with 1d4+1 damage with a 1d6 one, which gives you precisely the same mean damage. There are minor bugs like the arrival of creatures in darkness being reported as if it were light, and monsters being awarded points for kills (presumably they're not eligible for the crown). Only one tester is credited -- which would be too few even if the game was less experimental. Given that the overall design of the game has some questionable choices, small but glaring errors do not dispose one to trust the author. And for a game in which success is slow in coming, the author badly needs that trust.

There's not much feeling of unity or distinctive vision, either in mechanics or content; the magic system, for instance, is a grab-bag that doesn't operate, or even follow names, in any consistent manner. >CONJURE is different from >SUMMON for no particular reason; the light spell is a Crazy Magic Word but everything else is normal verbs. The maze monsters are cameos from other works, not members of the world. (A standard approach in roguelikes, Eamon and some MUDs, but it needs a little more work to be effective in narrative IF.)

CRPG-like IF continues to be a popular aspiration, particularly among new authors, and I certainly don't want to suggest that it's a doomed exercise. It's not difficult to imagine the basic premise of Magocracy rendered as a much more enjoyable game. But mixing IF with other game styles is a tough task, and highly risky to undertake as one's first IF game. (Even veteran authors can end up producing something pretty underwhelming.) A good feeling for the design strengths of both forms is crucial; the ability to smooth over the join with strong writing is a huge asset. Without either, dedication and diligence are unlikely to count for very much.