Reviews by Emily Short

"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.

Entered in the ifLibrary's competition for 2003, this game bills itself as a work of Adult Interactive Fiction. I don't play many such games, but I thought that I would try this one since it was part of a mainstream competition.

Alas, it suffers from many of the things that put me off of other AIF games: not the presence of sexual content, but the absence of much else. Room descriptions are sparse to the point of non-existence, which is a pity; I've been told to investigate this man's home for evidence of certain shady dealings, but there doesn't seem to be much for me to pick through. Where objects are described, their descriptions are likewise brief: one frequently has exchanges of the type,

On the table is a glass.

>EXAMINE GLASS
It is a very fine glass.

>EXAMINE TABLE.
The table is exceptionally well-made and luxurious.

Everything is given this same gloss of vague luxury, not specific enough for me to envision it. (Which seems odd to me: if this is a game aimed at providing/evoking a, well, sensuous experience, I would expect it to be more vividly descriptive of the sensual enjoyments at my PC's disposal, whether or not they are sexual. But no matter.)

What made me actually quit the game, though -- or rather, fail to restart -- was that I got to a point where I was doing something that I thought was going to get me closer to the revelation of the mystery, and it turned out to result in a total loss of the game. Moreover, it was an action that I thought was one of the main goals of this particular genre. So, as a player, I felt rather cheated; I didn't know what I was supposed to be trying to do if that wasn't it, and I gave up rather than try to guess what was in the author's mind.

My major problem with this game: too much seemed to be going on, and I didn't understand very much of it at all. There is a fantasy setting -- maybe -- except that some of the objects appear to be technological, rather than magical, so perhaps it is really an odd piece of SF, instead. There are peoples and individual persons with strange Fantasy Names, many of them at a time, whizzing past my head in conversations I only nominally exert any control over. There is conspiracy, disguise, revelation, a blatant pass from a serving wench, all crammed into a couple of moves, before I have had a chance to really get my bearings.

Then I wound up locked in a cell and drunk; the hints didn't give me enough information to figure out how to rescue myself from this problem; and after enough turns of swaying to and fro in drunken abandon, I gave up.

Again, the basic problem is that I know too little to be able to guess what my goal in the game is-- even in the short term, I know I want to get out of this cell and rescue my friend/girlfriend/potential lover/whatever, except that I have no clue how to go about this or why I was even locked up in the first place. Character involvement is also not deep enough, because I understand too little of what's going on with my PC to care a great deal about his dilemmas and desires. If I had a sufficient understanding of my goal, I might find it easier to keep playing; if I cared enough about my PC, I might keep going despite the difficulties. The combination of problems is what made me stop.

There might be something interesting going on here, but so far all I can really tell is that things are Weird. More time on the establishing material might have helped.

I wanted to like this one, really I did. It was clearly trying to do some neat things, using the HTML-TADS options, but they didn't work perfectly for me. For instance, there's an option to put a menu in the left as a kind of sidebar, but when I scrolled the menu would vanish from view. It only offered a handful of commands, anyway -- a LOOK command, which I presume is no different from typing LOOK myself, and a COMMANDS that would list all the verbs I could use. The latter might have been useful, since some of the game's commands seemed to be a bit esoteric, except that it happened all at once in a scary single-column infodump to my screen.

There were also some illustrations; I approve of this. On the other hand, some of them reminded me of things I did in Hypercard ca. 1986: dithered black-and-white images of simple objects. Eep.

Another interesting thing the game did was to use an oft-suggested but seldom-implemented approach to conversation. When you spoke to an NPC, certain words were highlighted as links, and clicking on them equated to >ASK NPC ABOUT HIGHLIGHTED TOPIC. This avoids any fishing around for things to talk about, I suppose, without going all the way to having a menu. I thought it was a valuable experiment, though I am not sure I'm totally crazy about the effect.

In atmosphere, the game reminded me a bit of Heroine's Mantle, which I liked despite various drawbacks. Unfortunately, it shared a few of Heroine's problems, as well. The puzzles weren't quite as unfair, but it was still entirely possible -- even easy -- to render the game unwinnable, as far as I could tell. In particular, a certain sequence involving a telescope seemed to give the player too little warning. I did my best with it, but it was this sequence that ultimately caused me to give up on the game without really getting past the prologue: I couldn't figure out how to get past a certain point, I kept ruining my options, and the actions recommended by the hints were not successful. Plotwise, the logic of this sequence also seemed a trifle obscure.

The game otherwise could have used a bit more polish. I noted several places where there were typos or misspellings, or where the author had put in a non-default response but the default response was subsequently printed as well. I would probably have played at least a while longer if I hadn't run into the puzzle difficulties, however.

Considering that the Help text tells you this is a practice game, the various problems with it should not come as a huge surprise. There are several overt programming errors, but a lot more of what's wrong is lack of beta-testing. Many synonyms aren't handled, and obvious actions aren't anticipated. There's a stethoscope you can't wear or listen to, for instance, and stinky items you're not allowed to smell, and containers which do have contents but which describe themselves as empty if you try to LOOK IN them. I liked the solution to the maze, but that's just about the only thing I really liked much -- the game is otherwise pretty uninspiring on the design side, I'm afraid. The game needs a clearer sense of purpose. No, not a goal for my player character -- I think I've figured out what that's supposed to be -- but a sense of what it's trying to do, as a game. Is it supposed to be puzzly and challenging? If so, the descriptions need to be sharper and more evocative. Is it supposed to be creepy? Then there ought to be more effort put into the atmosphere. Heck, maybe it's even supposed to be a parody of bad beginner IF through the ages, but if so, the humor also needs to be more honed. Whatever this is, it doesn't have a very strong sense of itself.

This appears to be largely a parody/expansion/fanfic/something based on The Legend of Zelda. As I never played the original, it didn't mean much to me. There were a number of rooms where there was nothing to do, and the initial several moves of plot were of the variety where X tells you to go somewhere and see Y, and then Y tells you to go and see Z, and Z tells you to visit X again. So I wasn't terribly enthralled, and quit. Someone with nostalgic feelings towards Zelda might have a different experience. Or not.

This is interesting. To the best of my knowledge, the author didn't announce this game on the newsgroups; I hadn't heard of it at all until a friend and I looking for something to play stumbled across it on Baf's.

As you might guess from the title, it's a game about the quest for your next bong hit. With a premise like that I expected a rather half-baked short comedy game, but in fact it's an old-school puzzle-fest with a spacious map. We ran into some weird moments in the coding, but it showed a reasonable amount of work.

The puzzles themselves are very old-fashioned in character: a lot of them (at least in the portion I saw) seemed to entail finding the right object to give to the NPC to get another object to use to get a key... [etc], often through fairly long and convoluted chains. There is what appeared to be a genuine maze, though we didn't persist long enough to get it fully mapped. There are improbable leaps of logic and NPCs who seem able to teleport across the map just in order to prevent you from doing things. It's that sort of game, and you either get into the mood and enjoy it, or you don't.

I mostly did, actually, and we might have finished it, or at least gone further, if it weren't for the bewildering openness of the game. Many many locations and puzzles are simultaneously accessible from the outset, so we wandered around for a long time before deciding that we were either stuck or insufficiently directed. And the game has both hunger and sleep timers turned on, as well as the occasional message about how long it's been since you last had any marijuana. It's very easy to die before you've really gotten your bearings or figured out how to get your food source. When this happened to us, we became discouraged and gave up. I could easily see someone enjoying this piece if they were on an old-school nostalgia kick (and not too hung up about the drug-use messages). The writing is good-spirited. There are monkeys.