Ratings and Reviews by Emily Short

A silly and rather far-fetched scenario about how you get rolling again when your car breaks down in Portugal. I give it three stars only because it is quite a small game, with only a couple of puzzles: this one is good-natured and charming, with some sly humor. It is roughly the size of a speed-IF, but more coherent and better polished.

The game is also written accessibly enough that non-native speakers of French will probably not find themselves too baffled by slang or idioms. For those who can follow along but get stuck figuring out what to type, standard IF commands in French can be found in PDF form here: http://ifiction.free.fr/fichiers/Introduction-IF-fr.pdf [look for the page with the puppet on it]. Many standard English abbreviations also do continue to work in the game alongside their French equivalents. Since the game also includes contextual hints and a complete solution on demand, it is unlikely to leave the non-native speaker stranded.

I had high hopes for this, since I enjoyed both the book and the board game from which it takes its inspiration. In practice, though, I find it completely bewildering. During the first part of the game, there's not much to do other than sleep and attend holy services; there's some interesting coding at work here so that whenever bells ring for Matins, Lauds, etc., the player will automatically zombie-walk to the church to attend, but that makes the game somewhat uninteractive at the beginning.

After a couple of services, one of the monks turns out to be missing, and I'm directed to look for him. I assume (given the premise) that he's supposed to turn out to be dead -- but I can't seem to find a corpse, nor do any of the other monks seem especially concerned about looking. So the game continues for quite some time with my aimless exploration of the abbey, interrupted by service after service. (Time passes quickly here, with the result that one is called back to the church extremely frequently. While this mechanic makes some sense in the original board game, it's frustrating in IF form.) At this point I've used up nearly a whole day without having found any clues or having any better idea what I'm supposed to be doing than I had at the outset.

On the one hand: a reasonable amount of work seems to have gone into animating the characters and programming the player to return to the church on schedule, and there are a number of touches where the author seems to have done period research in order to flesh out the settings with appropriate furniture and room descriptions. I'm all in favor of historical IF, so this is nice to see. And from the evidence of the other review, there is obviously *sometimes* more to see than I got a chance to experience.

On the other hand, the gameplay is either buggy or very badly-directed. The story side doesn't do much better, either. The game encourages the player to go around asking the characters about one another, but quite often they have almost nothing to say; responses such as "I don't know him well" are common, which is strange given that this is a very small community of monks who live and work together, and who would be likely at this point to be all too intimately aware of each other's personality quirks. Furthermore, characters show no discomfort discussing third parties who happen to be in the room.

In short: this is an interesting concept that deserves a better execution. "An Act of Murder" shows that the randomly-selected-murderer scenario can work in IF; "The Abbey" doesn't appear to have pulled it off, though.

Ecdysis is a compact bit of horror. Summarizing the plot too much would only ruin it, but it's worth knowing that this is one of several games based on snippets from H. P. Lovecraft's "Commonplace Book", and that the premise is a weird and disturbing one.

Ecdysis is fairly linear up until the late stages of the game. I found that the first release of the game had some awkward moments, but the later release is smoother and easier to play. Puzzles are mostly a matter of figuring out the one next thing you can do, and are not too hard -- but all the same this does make some good use of its interactivity. Worth a look.

This is a short-short horror game, surreal and suggestive without quite coming out to say what is truly going on. The plot might appeal to people who also liked, for instance, All Alone, or the entries in the Commonplace Book Project. It also shows a certain amount of effort and care, especially for a first-time outing: it comes complete with hint and help menus and cover art.

The main problem is that it hasn't been tested as much as it should: missing synonyms, some sensible actions not accounted for, and so on. The room descriptions also sometimes feel rather minimal. Better pacing of exposition and exploration would make the game more suspenseful and deliver the story better.

A future version of the game could improve on many of these things, leaving a substantially stronger effort.

"Pascal's Wager" is a philosophical thought-experiment in which Pascal's wager is extended to include betting on which of several deities controls the universe, and therefore which one you should worship.

At first blush, it might appear that this is an invitation to explore or express one's own personal morality through the player character, by choosing and acting out an alignment. In practice, PW doesn't work this way. A specific god is selected as the true god on any given play-through; this is really a re-playable puzzle game where the desirable goals, and the correct solutions to puzzles, depend on which god currently rules the universe. Even if you pray to the right deity, he won't accept you as a true worshipper unless you've also lived by his precepts -- i.e., accomplished the correct goals in each scene, and performed them in the correct way. Viewed as a puzzle game, it's lightly amusing; the puzzles themselves are not usually very difficult in concept, but require rigorous exploration and occasionally feats of successful guessing, because the game does not always point the player at the relevant elements of a given scene. (I particularly had to rely on hints during the third of the game's three scenarios, because there are several items that are under-implemented and don't give the player enough feedback about what's there and how it can be used.) There are also some cosmetic flaws, such as erratic spacing, missing punctuation, and typing errors, which are occasionally distracting. The implementation in general is of a spare, old-school variety, with a few items per room, and the expectation that the player will explore a lot before expecting to resolve any puzzles.

Even so, I found Pascal's Wager moderately entertaining as a puzzle game, and increasingly so as I replayed the scenario a number of times and became familiar enough with the environment to guess what I should be doing.

I had a bit more trouble with it as a philosophical experiment. Pascal's wager is firmly grounded in the Christian idea that one will be judged in the afterlife on the basis of one's faith and behavior. Other religions and philosophical systems have very different ideas about the soul's journey; early Greek thought, for instance, tended to assume that only very major sinners were actively punished in the afterlife, and that one didn't dishonor the gods by worshipping the wrong ones, but by leaving some out. Greco-Roman religion was syncretistic and inclusive; it tended to accept foreign gods as versions of members of its own pantheon, and to blend and combine cults extensively.

The game also reveals its strong ties to Judeo-Christian tradition when it insists on assigning every religion a sacred text, and assumes that private prayer is a chief measure of devotion. Neither is especially true of classical paganism, at least: there was no sacred text about the Greco-Roman pantheon; priests did not have the job of interpreting and expounding dogma or giving worshippers instructions about how to live; and religion was a highly public affair, involving participation in the public sacrifices and festivals. (Spoiler - click to show)And arguably Mammon and Cthulhu work in quite different ways as well.

Finally, there's a lot more to the specific deities than these caricatures suggest. I don't know enough about Tenjin or Hanuman to have opinions about the way they were treated in the game, but it shortchanges Bacchus quite a lot to depict him as a god who simply wants to see humans drunk/stoned as much as possible (though I admit that this made for some mildly subversive gameplay). (Spoiler - click to show)Among other things, Bacchus is a god of escape; I felt that by rights I should have been able to pray to him in the prison section and have the doors of my prison fly open. I realize this goes against the idea that god never tips his hand to humans, implicit in the original Pascal's wager -- but on the other hand, I have this handy ivory die that is apparently a foolproof method of aleatory divination. So...

This may all be needless nit-picking, depending on what you are looking for in "Pascal's Wager". It is not an effective exploration of what it would mean to live by the religions it depicts (and, indeed, for all I've been complaining about the Christian assumptions applied to non-Christian cultures, even its version of Christianity is caricatured -- what happened to all the forgiveness and redemption business if you can only get into heaven by having lived a sinless life?).

It is also not a highly polished piece of interactive fiction. People who get bothered when some of the furniture can't be sat on will be unhappy with this game; it could have stood some more beta-testing, I think, especially in the last section.

It is entertaining as a re-playable puzzle game, and one which occasionally leaves the player with the pleasant sense that he's allowed to do whatever he wants, in accord with whatever morality he chooses.

That sense wears off again once you've explored enough of the game to understand how the mechanisms work -- but for a while it's good fun.

The content of this story won't be a surprise to anyone, and it's pretty light on puzzles, too: this is Jack and the Beanstalk told backwards. At each turn, you have to guess the move that Jack took to get to the present situation.

The resulting game is necessarily pretty linear, though not quite as straitjacketed as you might expect -- it's possible to wander around looking at things and taking other non-world-changing actions, as long as your next significant act is the correct one. The actual puzzle of figuring out what to do next is usually not that hard, given (a) the knowledge of the game state it produced and (b) familiarity with the original story, which means that the story goes by quickly and doesn't wear out its welcome. The peculiar reverse-causality remains entertaining throughout.

The implementation is pretty smooth overall -- I ran into only one or two moments where I had trouble with unrecognized commands that I thought ought to make sense. (Spoiler - click to show)In particular, I tried a bunch of variations of >ENTER OVEN, GET IN OVEN, OPEN OVEN, and the like, before realizing that I needed IN to hide there.

On the whole, this game doesn't have much to offer beyond its gimmick, but that's enough to amuse for the fifteen minutes or so it takes to play. And it's definitely an interesting take on treatment of time in IF.

Reverberations combines a silly (but functioning) plot with some fairly old-style gameplay. Room descriptions are sparse, objects are few, NPCs are terse, and the puzzle solutions tend to be very much of the "because the author said so" variety. Fortunately, there are some hints, as well as an available walkthrough, so it's possible to get through without too much frustration -- and a couple of the puzzles do feel pleasingly natural.

As for the story, well, it's not fabulous, and there are times when the game pokes fun at its own implausibility: the main character is a surfer/pizza delivery boy who just sort of stumbles into solving a high-profile mafia case, and has a bit of a romance with the district attorney as well. The events that contribute to this plot are all very thinly developed, too: searching for clues is usually a matter of wandering into the relevant room and noticing the one object there that is remotely interesting. And the DA is much too sketchily drawn to come across as much of a personality.

Reverberations is entertaining if you're looking for a way to kill forty-five minutes or so (more if you don't look at the hints), but it's not likely to stick with you long, either for the story or for the puzzles.

This is a converted game book or "solo adventure", turned into Z-code, so I wasn't expecting exactly the same things I might have expected from a different piece of IF. I was looking for something I could compare to other choose-your-own-adventure style offerings in the IF world, such as One Week, Desert Heat, and When Help Collides, The Geisha Section.

The game has an RPG element, which is to say that you're allowed to adjust some basic skills up or down for your character. Later, these affect the success or failure of your attempts; the calculations are done automatically by the game and you are told whether you succeeded or failed and what the outcome was. (I presume that in the paper version of these game books, the reader/player would have had to perform some dice-rolling at these points.)

What this left was a handful of decision points with a lot of intervening text (in which there would occasionally be a bold-faced You attempted a Communication roll, and failed. [I paraphrase.]) This was, frankly, more reading than I really wanted to do. Then, the writing was nothing terribly stand-out, and most of it consisted of pointed plot exposition, rather than action. Many of the decision points consisted of the choice:

(a) Do [interesting action]
(b) Otherwise

On the whole, a lot of binary choices like this, especially when one of them is "do nothing," doesn't seem to present even the basic level of challenge and interest I expect out of a choose-your-own-adventure scenario. I gave up before the actual mystery really got off the ground.