Ratings and Reviews by Emily Short

The Shadow in the Cathedral doesn't feel surprising or blatantly experimental. It's mostly using well-known techniques effectively, rather than charting new territory. Nonetheless, it succeeds where lots and lots of IF has failed: it's a big plotty work with lots of events and lots of action, full of energy and adventure. There are twists you guess might be coming, and other twists you don't. There are chase scenes that don't suck.

It goes out of its way to be fair, but without becoming dull. There are many potentially frightening moments in the game, but as far as I can tell no ways to get to a no-win situation. And despite the intended audience of middle-schoolers, I also didn't feel that the game condescended to me. It was, perhaps, a little less violent than the same plot might be if pitched for adults, and sexuality doesn't come into the story much at all, but the language, the puzzles, and the characters are all sufficiently sophisticated to hold an adult's attention.

Shadow takes place in a steampunk world, but one more individual and deeply thought-out than the average steampunk. This affects everything from the protagonist's attitudes towards mess (clockwork precision is the ideal) to the setting details (the glow of gaslight, the huge clock faces) to the puzzles. These are of easy to moderate difficulty, and most of them involve machinery in some way -- and often not "figure out which button to push" machinery puzzles, but "crack open the front panel and tweak the machine itself" puzzles, or "apply basic principles about levers and counterweights." They're mostly things I haven't seen before, they're a great fit for the setting, and I really liked them.

One small gripe: there are more non-reciprocal pathways than I'd like, where you go north one way but you have to go east to return. I had to make a map. That's rare, for me. But it's totally worth it.

The design is smooth. The story is fairly linear and there isn't a lot of scope to change the outcome of anything, but I played for seven or eight hours and was rarely at a loss for long. With a small handful of exceptions, interaction is well-clued without being too horribly blatant. It's one of the best-paced long IF works I've played.

The ending is a cliff-hanger, looking forward to sequels. In spite of this, there's enough of a shape to the story that I was content for the time being (mostly; I would have liked a little more wrapping up).

Bottom line: this is extremely accessible and very satisfying. I ran into a couple of cosmetic bugs (now reported and, I believe, already ironed out by Textfyre), but overall it feels solid. There are fun things to play with, surprising and memorable images, and neat turns of phrase. I keep going back over the good bits in my head. I'd especially recommend it to people who enjoyed the plottiness and period-specific puzzles of The King of Shreds and Patches.

Obligatory disclosure: I played a free review copy of this work; and, because I run MacOS X, it was necessarily the Glulx version. I haven't worked with the Standard UI for Windows. I can say that the Glulx game file played smoothly, without the delays that some people reported in Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter. It did take a long time to come back after saving the file, but that was the only significant slowdown I noticed.

Set in Cambodia from a westerner's eyes, this ghost story is creepy long before anything supernatural turns up: the environment feels hostile a lot of the time, and your fellow westerners haven't always come to Cambodia for very admirable reasons. There are some hints of why the protagonist was drawn here, and suggestions of what may be gained by reaching across the cultural divide to understand one's fellow humans; but that kind of connection is shown as pretty hard to achieve in practice, and the predominant sensation is of powerful alienation from one's surroundings and the other people.

To some extent that comes out as an function of the protagonist's personality: he seems to be easily bullied by the other characters, not always to know very well what he wants, and to have trouble meeting the girls who interest him on their own terms.

The first several scenes are all conversations with other characters, setting up the story's main problem. It often feels as though the author is more interested in exposition than he is in the plot: for instance, you can spend a dozen or so turns having the protagonist monologue to another character about Cambodian history and economic problems. I was very interested in the environmental details, which are clearly observed at first hand. And, exposition aside, the plot machinery generally does move forward when you've completed the necessary tasks (usually asking questions, though there is one task in the mid-game that approximates a simple puzzle).

By the time the ghostly events turn up, one is really kind of rooting for the ghost, which is an interesting experience.

So in favor of this game are a protagonist struggling past the features of his own personality; a novel setting; and good integration of the horror elements with the real world.

That said: this game needs a LOT more polish. Conversation sometimes suggests options that don't actually work, or loops around on itself implausibly. It's easy to get into a state where you're struggling with the parser in attempts to say something and simultaneously being berated by your interlocutor for your silence. There's also a point where the game seems to offer you a choice ((Spoiler - click to show)which of two girls to date) but your selection doesn't actually determine any outcomes. Many objects are mentioned but unimplemented, which is a pity because the experience of exploring would be especially compelling in this novel environment. Eventually it peters out so that many of the room descriptions themselves are very curt, not even mentioning specific items, and there are assorted typos and missing punctuation marks. Overall it just feels like a game that isn't at all done yet.

This problem becomes more evident as the game goes on, until I found myself in a scene I couldn't figure out how to end, which was largely unresponsive to anything I tried to do. So I never saw the actual ending.

I really wanted to like this game because the setting promised so much. The game does live up to part of its promise, but is let down by its implementation. I hope the author will consider reworking this piece substantially: to flesh out the end-game and hint certain scenes better, to make the setting more explorable, and to tighten up some of the pacing in the early game. If extended this way, I think it would still be an uncomfortable piece to play, but uncomfortable in the ways the author intended.

Despite the presence of some modern(ish) equipment, Infidel is set in the world of fantasy archaeology, like Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider, in which ancient monuments are storehouses of fantastic treasure waiting to be picked up, and the archaeologist's task is simply to dodge all the antique mechanical traps that lie in the way.

Infidel can be rough going for a player used to gameplay refinements introduced even a few years later. It doesn't understand many common abbreviations -- most painfully, it misses X for examine. The opening phase of the game features both hunger and thirst timers. Guess-the-verb problems make at least two of the puzzles significantly harder. (Spoiler - click to show)(If you're having trouble breaking the lock on the chest in the prologue, or throwing the rope down the north staircase in the pyramid, you're probably on the right track but using the wrong wording.) The knapsack you need to carry around your possessions is especially irritating, since you'll have to wear it and take it off again dozens of times over the course of play. There is also some justice in Andrew Plotkin's spoof Inhumane: Infidel will kill you a lot, and not all of the deaths are well-signaled in advance. You'll need to keep a lot of save files, and examine everything carefully before you interact with it.

To balance this, though, there's quite a lot right with the game as well, especially once you're past the prologue. The meat of most of the puzzles involves deciphering the meaning of hieroglyphics, which instruct the player in how to get past traps. There's a lexicon in the feelies for a few of these symbols, but the rest you'll have to work out as you go along, by comparing the labels on objects or making guesses based on their pictorial quality. (The hieroglyphics are in ASCII; make sure you've set your interpreter to a fixed-spacing font in order to read them properly, because Infidel unlike many later games is not able to set the font automatically.) These puzzles give the game a feeling of thematic coherence lacking from the Zork trilogy; while the effect is not exactly realistic, Infidel at least seems to take place in a self-consistent universe.

Space was at a premium in these very early games, and that shows in Infidel in both good ways and bad. Descriptions are often terse and not every possible object is described. On the other hand, what descriptions exist are sometimes rather evocative, and the constraints make for a fairly compact game with multiple uses for some of the objects.

Infidel is famous for not following gamers' expectations for a game narrative, and opened up some new possibilities in interactive storytelling. (Spoiler - click to show)The game ends in the protagonist's death, a punishment for having been selfish and cruel to his colleagues and workers, and having driven away everyone who could potentially have saved him. This follows naturally from the premise: the feelies and the prologue of the game clearly establish what kind of person the protagonist is. In my opinion the ending works a little less well with the puzzle-solving midgame of Infidel, however; in particular, the player experiences so many meaningless deaths before the game's end as to make it hard to regard the final "winning" death as narratively significant. Later work has gone much, much further in this direction, but it's worth looking back at early efforts.

Note: it is impossible to get past the game's prologue without information from the feelies. (Spoiler - click to show)(Specifically, the dig coordinates for the pyramid.)

The opening sections of this game I found extremely evocative. The player is in a dreamlike environment full of unnerving scenery that can't be real. That's been done plenty of times already, but Parish's surreal vision is more menacing than most -- not for the bloodstained room in which the game starts, but for the way even seemingly harmless and everyday objects take on personality and voice.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of direction about what you're supposed to be doing in this nightmarescape, and after a little wandering around and feeling creeped out, I had to admit to myself that I was just stuck. So I went to the walkthroughs for a clue, and the things they suggested were so surprising and (as far as I could tell) arbitrary that instead of trying to play further I just followed the walkthroughs word for word.

There does appear to be a kind of logic behind some of the surreal features, and I gather that some players have finished the game (by giving it a lot of playtime and working as a group to figure out its stranger bits). So perhaps I was wrong to give up so quickly on solving it on my own. The problem is that the game doesn't do a lot to foster the player's trust in its own fairness. On the contrary, important entities appear and disappear apparently capriciously; descriptions don't always lead the eye to the most important items in the room; rigorous searching and examination is required throughout.

I still don't think I understand the story, though I've been through all the recommended steps. I have the vague outline of an idea of what it might be all about, but it's pretty messy. (Spoiler - click to show)Like, I might be a human, but all of humanity's been caused/invented by some huge alien experiment gone wrong. Or some other lifeform entirely, and the people experimenting are human. Or I might be an awakened AI and the machine of which the researchers speak is some kind of computer model or internet. I'm pretty sure it's one of those, unless it isn't.

At the end I came away with the feeling that Parish's starting premise was to make a lot of creepy stuff happen and then come up with an explanation for it later. That's the same starting premise I think they had for Lost and The X-Files, so he's in good company. (Or, well, he's in some company.) But I'm bewildered enough that I don't even have the conviction to say the game doesn't make sense. Maybe it does, and I just didn't get it, or I played it wrong.

I do think that the game would've been a lot stronger with a clear goal for the player at the outset and stronger hints about where to direct one's attention and efforts. That doesn't have to mean spoon-feeding, exactly; just more to keep the player from being wholly lost.

King of Shreds and Patches appears in a genre, Lovecraftian horror, that already contains some of the best IF out there -- perhaps because IF is such a good medium for telling a story of exploration, hidden rooms, and dark secrets. What sets this particular game apart is its setting, Elizabethan London in 1603, which is vividly researched.

As a game, King has some real strengths and some annoying weaknesses. Positives include the THINK command, which allows the player to review what quests he might work on next -- a valuable feature in a game with such a large map and so many characters to interrogate; the game map, which provides an overview of what London looks like, and expands with new locations whenever the player receives a commission to go to a new place, which conveys well the experience of moving around a city the protagonist already knows; and a number of puzzle solutions that build on previous solutions, giving the impression that the protagonist is gaining certain skills and habits as the story goes on.

Several of the puzzles, however, turn on precise, fiddly manipulation of what I assume are realistically implemented Elizabethan objects. On the one hand, this makes the player engage more completely with the period, which is not a bad thing; on the other, the experience could be frustrating, especially when the proper use was under-clued or a timed scene was in progress. (Spoiler - click to show)In one case, the object I was struggling to learn to use was the printing press the protagonist used for his livelihood -- surely something he would be able to manipulate with confidence.

Another issue is that the game relies heavily on knowledge flags to determine what the player is allowed to do, and sometimes these triggers are more finicky than I would like. On several occasions I found myself looking for a building I knew should be present in a location, but because the game didn't think I'd "learned" about its presence yet, the parser stubbornly disclaimed all knowledge.

As story, King of Shreds and Patches is again somewhat mixed.

There are some very memorable scenes, and (as often in horror IF) the first hints of the truth are genuinely creepy. It also uses very effectively the idea that the player constantly risks madness by too great a contact with the cult he's investigating. IF provides a great context for that, too -- every time the game hinted that I was on the verge of knowing Too Much, I'd go ahead and do the fatal action, and then UNDO: both succumbing to my own temptation and allowing the protagonist to remain innocent.

I was less satisfied with the ending, where unspeakable horrors become speakable and in the process turn out more banal than their earlier manifestations.

This said, King offers a rare depth of experience, with a long and eventful plot, detailed historical setting, and a large cast of characters. Conversation sometimes becomes a bit longwinded (characters have a lot of backstory to disclose, and you really need to ask about every topic that is listed as an option), but the extensive character interaction provides a feeling all too rare in IF, that of being in a heavily-populated area. Like Anchorhead, King also implements days and nights, giving the player a better sense of passing time than most IF offers. King of Shreds and Patches is a substantial work and well worth playing.

This is the second noir IF game to come along in the last couple of months, but "Sam Fortune" is deeply unlike Make It Good. Some of the same conventions show up -- the obligatory bottle of whiskey, the double-crosses, the general shabbiness of the protagonist's environment, the women virtuous and conspiring -- but instead of deep and sometimes frustrating freedom of Make It Good, we have a highly directed, scene-based game that spoofs radio drama.

Each scene offers just a puzzle or two of sneaking around, and though the game bills itself as "nasty", this is not really a reflection of how hard those puzzles are. It's possible to lock yourself out of victory by not taking everything that you should take at a certain point, which is awkward and could (I think) easily have been designed around; but most of the solutions are not too difficult. The game provides built-in hints, as well.

There are some cosmetic flaws -- for some reason, Blanding doesn't always make things "scenery" when they ought to be. Or perhaps he just prefers the effect of having all the important objects listed on their own line even when they're also mentioned in the room description. In other respects the game often privileges function over immersion in the prose: there are exit listings in the status bar, the game periodically prompts you when it's a good idea to save, and conversation is handled with a standard menu system. Object descriptions are minimal unless the object is important to play.

Probably the most unusual aspect of the game is the way it's framed as a radio drama, complete with explicit commercial breaks and a sponsored product that shows up during play in Coke Is It! fashion. If you do something that loses the game, the story cuts away to a listening kid, whose mother comes in and abruptly turns off the radio. The narrative voice also swaps between first and second person, which may be a little disconcerting; but I took it to mean that the first person portions were voice-over narration from Sam's point of view.

The writing tries for hard-boiled wit and sometimes succeeds, but equally often comes off as corny -- a fact that is weakly lamp-shaded in one of the endings when the mother complains of the decreasing quality of radio drama these days.

So overall, it's hard to take very seriously -- but it isn't trying to be taken seriously.