Reviews by Emily Short

This is a piece I sketched up one evening apropos of a rec.arts.int-fiction discussion on simulation and puzzles. As a game, it doesn't have much to recommend it, unless you really enjoy coming up with diverse ways to destroy various materials.

This is a pretty entertaining send-up of the later portions of Spider and Web. It is spoilery and incomprehensible if you haven't played the original game; worth the five minutes of amusement if you have.

Not all of the puzzles in Kaged feel fair or well-clued, and this is a pity, because the game is otherwise very effective. You play a minor bureaucrat in the justice system of a vast and overbearing state, trying to understand a series of recent disturbing events. The architecture of the setting, the behavior of the other characters, and the unfolding of the plot all work together to create a sense of oppression and fear, which only grows stronger as the game plays out.

Kaged is illustrated with a handful of surreal images, which do more to strengthen the mood than to explain anything.

An entry into a competition for games based on dreams, The Retreat feels just a bit off-kilter from our reality. Many elements of the backstory go unexplained for the whole game -- which is not very long.

Despite the relative slightness of the piece, though, it has evocative moments, and there was one action in particular that I felt guilty about when the game was over.

This is a combat game about fighting fish.

The opening of the game is probably its weakest point: there’s not much information to ground the absurd set-up, and it’s also possible at first not to realize that you can do anything but PUNCH, SLAP, KICK, and BACKHAND the various fish. I went through a few rounds of that and found myself wondering whether there was more to the game than randomized combat. (It’s not really randomized, either, but I didn’t recognize that at the very outset.) So I came close to quitting, before I realized that there were both puzzles and a (slight) story in there; I just hadn’t really gotten to them yet.

Things pick up in the midgame, as new props become available to fight with, we learn a little more about the premise, and the fish start to fight back. The final fight ends with a fanfare and flourish that make the earlier fights seem more significant.

It’s still not what you would call a great game -- the game-play is too repetitive, and there is not enough feedback on puzzle solutions -- but it has a certain quirky charm.

This had a bunch of rough edges, implementation-wise — some problems typical of ADRIFT parsers, and some others. It also has a somewhat railroady presentation: though it's a mystery, the player's opportunities to explore and solve are tightly constrained and directed at all times. There was also one puzzle involving finding an object that I don't think I would ever have gotten without a walkthrough.

All the same, I found this strangely enjoyable. The robot protagonists develop personality and humanity as the game proceeds, and there were some unexpectedly touching moments.

The premise is that you are trapped in a hot-air balloon, drifting perilously towards a volcano, accompanied by an uncooperative NPC who is carrying entirely too many heavy objects. Your task: get rid of everything that is weighing down the balloon so that you and your companion do not become one with the lava.

This is a very entertaining one-room puzzle game with a Weird Victoriana theme. It avoids some of the claustrophobia of other one-room games because the balloon is constantly in motion and the view outside changes as you go; the chief NPC is grumpy and untalkative, but in a convincing way; the puzzles are well paced.

The original version had some annoying parsing errors, but these may have been rectified in later releases.

This game concerns a male character called in to assist some beautiful girls who have unusual abilities and ought to be much more powerful than himself, but who somehow can't get anything done without masculine direction.

The male-wish-fulfillment aspect may come from the dating sims PK Girl partly emulates. All the same, I found the premise fundamentally unappealing and did not want to play to the end.

Fate is an exploration of player choice and moral dilemma in interactive fiction, and as pioneering work, it's worth a play.

I’m not sure how much “Fate”’s moral dilemmas worked for me, though. The central question always comes down to balancing suffering — are you willing to hurt X in order to save Y? — and while there are many permutations and many outcomes possible in the game, the choice often felt essentially arbitrary. Gijsbers does attempt to sketch in story, to provide weight and characterization to some of the characters, but I felt there was not enough meat here to make the major decision points really powerful.

So I enjoyed the game, and I thought it was an interesting essay in designing IF. I also thought it did not quite accomplish what it could have if it had framed its dilemmas a little differently (pitting different principles against one another) or else developed its characters more deeply (to make more interesting the choice of who has to suffer).

ACG is a moderate-sized piece, well-tested, with a wide variety of responses to unusual conditions. It's unabashedly a puzzle game -- the premise is a bit thin and the story is minimal -- but what it does, it does very well. The puzzles are generally fair, and many are quite ingenious: the objects you've been given at the beginning of the game can be used in a satisfying variety of ways. Very few of the puzzles felt at all shopworn or perfunctory.

The attention to detail is also excellent. There are a number of easter eggs and special endings -- while there's only one way to really win, the alternate semi-loss conclusions are great fun to read.

One thing that many players are likely to find surprising is the absence of response to EXAMINE: Thorsby eschews object descriptions entirely. Everything you need to know about a thing will be evident from its room description and inventory listing. (On the other hand, this makes for some very long inventory lists...)