Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

Mercer Mayer's illustrations were part of my youth. They really brought the Great Brain series alive--which itself could make some good text adventures, with Tom D.'s scheming and puzzle solving. So when I confirmed he was the author of this text adventure nobody'd written a solution for, I figured it'd be fun to try.

Angelsoft parsers, though, tended to be not quite up to Infocom's--undoing doesn't work, and the randomized responses for nonworking verbs are just baffling. And they didn't have those neat InvisiClues. Which were almost necessary for Forbidden Castle. Mayer imagined a very cute world: a gnome with a weird belt, an ogre, a fairy, and other things that'd been done before, but the real charm of this game is how you can ride a dragon or pegasus to places you need to get. The whole map is connected at the end, but you don't see how at first--and there are plenty of weird deaths in the isolated areas if you do things wrong.

And you need to learn what magic items do--you're not told. Some help you around some magical beasts but hurt you around other. Wearing a sword gets you killed. Insta-deaths zap you a lot here, and it's not clear why. You can also assume it's a good idea to (Spoiler - click to show)pick up the bag on the first move, but if you don't, you're totally lost. The game gets in trouble a lot here.

The technical annoyances and Player Bill of Rights violationscan't quite obscure the imagination, though, so a walkthrough is recommended. But there is too much verb guessing and cheap death for an honest play-through. Most people won't have the patience for that.

I bet there are plenty of reviews that say of a game, "it's good at what it does, but it's limited, and the author knows that." And I sort of have little more to say than that, here, about this game. There are lots of ways to riff on 140 bytes of source code (not counting white space) but playing this game always makes me try to be that much more succinct, and it helps me when I know I'm flailing in wordiness. The names of all objects are shift-characters. The solution (Spoiler - click to show)isn't hard if you don't overthink, and I in fact enjoyed saying, ok, this has to be simple, but even better was what this game opened to me.

Because I never knew about the whole TWIFcomp. It was a great idea and I was surprised at how many people submitted entries and tried silly and even dirty tricks. If you missed the comp, as I did, the results and source are at this link. I hope they stay a long time. And as someone once derided for not liking code-golf even though I should, I found something worth code-golfing and learned about all sorts of computeristic poetry and bizarre programming tricks from this. I bet there is something there for you.

I think one thing it's hard for traditional parser games to do is encourage experimentation--Inform's default rejections are necessarily neutral yet tough to change. "You can't go that way." "You don't see any such thing."

That's not mind control, and more colorful options would annoy people anyway, but it's discouraging--shouldn't you have known beforehand not to X, or not to fiddle with Y?

Living Will's goal is unstated--maximize your money or, perhaps, your happiness, as one of four people close (or who can claim to be close) to ER Millhouse, a magnate who's made in the Congo with his company Droxol Vox. Each choice you make adjusts lawyer and medical fees, bequests (e.g. how much wealth you get,) DV's stock price, and even which of the four people you can be.

The first few times you'll undoubtedly stumble, but there are enough different ways to play the game, from too nasty to too generous, that you can--by the time you've run through a couple characters--predict how the third and fourth will do. I didn't dig in as deeply as I could have, but the parallel stories don't seem to change the basic facts of the past. You can change people's motives or how they feel now, but understanding the core story appears to be key in getting the result you want.

I'm a bit disappointed this game didn't do better in IFComp 2012, though I will waffle here and say I can't pick a game I'd boot from the top half, which this missed. I gave it a Miss Congeniality vote, though I also really enjoyed the games I tested. Perhaps the period-specific writing turned people off, but it seems necessary, to euphemize the dying man's actions.

Because of this and other things, LW feels a bit esoteric to start, and though it's clearly completeable in two hours, you need to have your thinking cap on to enjoy it, and you should try several radically different paths through before giving up on it. It's a good use of Undum's strengths, with the scoreboard that each move changes and a cool map of Zaire, too.

And any game where (Spoiler - click to show)unless you're very clever, the lawyers get most of the loot, even/especially when they help you rip off other inheritors, gets bonus points for me.