Reviews by neroden
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Enjoyed far more than I was expecting, March 25, 2021You go around "finding untruths" while trying to "find the truth".
Slightly underimplemented (but bug-free!) and very short, but somehow extremely fun.
I "won" in a couple of turns, but then had to go back and explore the world to get the "real" ending, and the process was just... enjoyable. It's basically an "examine everything" game, and the humor is broad strokes, but I liked it.
A comment on reading conventions, March 24, 2021This is a one-trick game which makes an insightful comment on the conventions which the player uses to interact with the game.
The twist got me, and made me laugh. It's more or less fair, though, as I saw on the second playthrough.
It reminds me of an Orson Scott Card essay on how to read science fiction: the experienced science-fiction reader is looking for the world-building clues in the story as they read, and constructing the world rules, how it works, in their head from the clues dropped in the text. A reader not used to science fiction can get lost, as did some of the students in his course.
The same approach happens when we play an interactive fiction game. There is a process of exploration to figure out the world model. There are also certain conventions, or shorthands -- as there are in science fiction -- where the writer can import a lot of assumptions at once, from previous gameplay (like previous SF), without spelling it all out.
(Spoiler - click to show)9:05 plays a trick with those assumptions.
This also engages with the discussions by many IF luminaries about the coercive nature of game design, where the player is given the illusion of choice but the author is actually restricting the player's options to the preselected ones. This is particularly apparent in second-person media like most IF. In fact, to avoid player frustration, it is standard design advice now to use the text to hint the player in the "correct" direction, and the player usually follows it. Of course, the author can also mislead the player. (Spoiler - click to show)And very elegantly, 9:05 does.
Fails at its stated goal due to poor execution, March 24, 2021The puzzle is not, in fact, logical.
(Spoiler - click to show)The description if you type "examine me" is "You're the adventurer in Zork who was too polite to open someone else's mailbox."
This is a logical pointer to outside knowledge. But the adventurer in Zork is quite carefully *very* undescribed. For all we know, the adventurer in Zork is wearing a hat, a dress, and boots. This makes it impossible to come up with the official solution of removing your shirt. "Remove sari" doesn't work. "Remove hat" doesn't work. "Remove dress" doesn't work.
(And "x clothes" says "There's nothing unusual about your clothes", so dress and boots it should be.)
In fact, the solution is not only completely illogical, but was clearly written by men who've never worn a dress. It's asking for author mind-reading and/or cultural assumptions, which isn't logical. At all.
The pity is that I could probably make a game which actually made the intended point better. Even implementing "remove clothes" might have arguably made it logical.
In fact, I think Colossal Cave's final "puzzle", where you have to figure out that the vaguely-described rod is dynamite and come up with the verb "blast" which has never been used or mentioned in the entire game, makes the same point, and better, if unintentionally. Within the Colossal Cave world model, the rod being dynamite is perhaps more logical than anything else; it is hinted at, and there is every indication you should figure out what the rod is good for, but you haven't used it in the rest of the game. And if you have somehow typed "blast" because you were swearing mildly, you have a hint. But otherwise, it's "read the source and find the list of verbs". Logical but unsolveable without luck, hints, or reading the source.
Unlike this game. Moral: even if you're devising something perverse to make a point, technical competence and thoroughness of execution matters.
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