Ratings and Reviews by Jim Kaplan

Play it if: you enjoy the creeping feeling that you're making the day of whichever guy with too much time on his hands wrote this waste of server space to irritate people.

Don't play it if: you have a smidgen more self-respect than I do.

In all honesty, I don't have the energy to give the author here the benefit of the doubt. The game is brimming with jaw-dropping errors in spelling ("easilly", "proffesor"), punctuation ("the kitchen is to the south" and "there is a bedroom door north" lacking periods), capitalization ("HOUSE"), and grammar ("you find yourself in a house, you don't know where you came from..."). It has horrifying coding problems: refusing to print a room's location when you first enter it, allowing you to pick up things like wardrobes and fridges, specifically mentioning details like blenders and cabinets without implementing them. It has outstanding problems in its logic, such as why you would voluntarily lock yourself out of your bedroom and lock the key to the bedroom in another locked area.

My first thought playing this thing was that the game was written by a ten-year-old. I then revised this to thinking it was written by someone younger, since ten-year-olds generally have a better grasp of language. Then I read the glowing five-star, one-paragraph review the author wrote of his own game, and I realized that someone who literally has nothing better to do was having cheap fun at the expense of anyone curious enough to bite.

Don't do it. Don't make the mistakes I did. Shun Charlie. Shun the game of Charlie. Shun everything, and then shun shunning.

Play it if: you love the mindscrew genre, because this more than qualifies, or you prefer largely puzzle-less, narrative-heavy IF.

Don't play it if: you want to see the gameplay tie in with or match the bizarre narrative satisfactorily; if you prefer not to get involved in stories which tread the line between depth and obscurantism.

It's a shame that I couldn't give All Roads a higher score, because there are a lot of ideas here to like. Unfortunately, they're not organized particularly well, leaving me feeling rather frustrated at the end of the game.

Part of the problem is in implementing the main theme as expressed in the title. As with the old saying, Jon Ingold seems to want all choices and actions to converge on one inescapable ending. Which is fine if properly done. But here, the game is not capable of subtly prodding the player into committing the necessary deeds or providing the logic for this convergence. It has to actively force you, the player, to play out its desires, either through making the protagonist do things for unclear reasons (Spoiler - click to show)such as having to sign the guestbook or take the ring from the desk or making the protagonist carry out certain actions without duly reporting them to the player (Spoiler - click to show)(such as signing the guestbook incorrectly). The most irritating sequence in this regard comes (Spoiler - click to show)during the second visit to the Denizen, where the game loses all interactivity instead of finding some way of convincing the player to repeat his or her actions.

The story as a whole is a little too confusing for my tastes. The withholding of certain details, such as any real response to the "x me" command, felt like the game was trying to force mystery where it shouldn't have existed. In Adam Cadre's 9:05, this worked because the game conditioned the player from turn one not to expect...the thing that they weren't supposed to expect. Here, though, the game is explicitly a mystery, and a really good mystery works not by withholding information, but by withholding the key to how that information fits together.

Basically, it feels like the game needs to blatantly cheat its player to get its story across; and I'll take the cruelty of old Infocom over that feeling any day.

Again, it's a real shame I can't really recommend this game much, because it has a lot of positives: the tight prose, the reasonably well-rendered setting, and some core ideas that could have gone a long way if marshaled correctly. (Spoiler - click to show)I guess I'm just still holding out for a game that can enforce the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle without brute force. Ah well. Better luck next time in the genre.

Play it if: you're in the mood for bite-sized IF with a bit of innovation and Emily Short's trademark narrative voice.

Don't play it if: you're in the mood for something more ambitious, or if you're easily put off by gameplay that constrains player actions.

This is a curiosity: a non-linear game that feels linear. Emily Short's Glass tells a modified version of the Cinderella story from the point of view of the parrot. The objective is to use your limited speech skills at opportune moments to influence the story.

The one or two twists on the classic tale are interesting enough to make the game worthwhile by themselves, but perhaps the biggest draw (at least in concept) is the ability I influence the flow of things from a bird's-eye-view.

Unfortunately, I played Glass very soon after another conversation-based game, Whom The Telling Changed by Aaron Reed, and it blows Glass out of the water when it comes to the main gameplay mechanic. Choosing what to say and when to say it in that game required paying close attention to the story and constantly trying to interpret it subtextually. In contrast, getting to any of the endings in Glass feels more like an exercise in trial and error, and as such the gameplay is not as satisfying as it could have been.

Nevertheless, Glass is a good five-minute distraction with good writing and some engaging concepts. Now that the game's source code has been made public, it can also serve as an educational exercise by giving aspiring IF writers some insight into the inner workings of conversation- and scene-heavy games.

Play it if: you wish to explore profound metaphysical ideas as interpreted through the fascinating medium of bovine coloration.

Don't play it if: you do not wish to achieve NIRVANA.

What an incredible and psychologically complex game!

The player starts in the first floor of a place called the Grand Tower. The objective is to reach the top of the tower. This is clearly symbolic of the cycles of reincarnation (samsara) as espoused by mainstream Hinduism - as the immortal soul (the player, who can restart the game endlessly and never find an actual solution to the game). The Hindu connection can be conclusively established by the presence of cows in the starting room (though the fact that one of the doors is called Exit might suggest an alternative interpretation along the lines of Jean-Paul Sartre's work).

There are all sorts of details to be interpretively explored here. Why the particular colors of Pink, Green, and Purple? Why is it that examining the Pink and Purple Cows yields the tautology "X Cow is an x cow", while examining the Green Cow produces the statement "You see nothing special about Green Cow"? Or why is the description of Orange Door "The Orange Door is an orange door", while the description of the Exit is "You might be able to exit this way, if, that isn't, the exit wasn't locked". Why the phrase "that isn't"? Surely a game of this caliber couldn't have meant it as a glaring typo easily fixable by even the most basic proofreading process or input of creative effort, but must have some deeper meaning.

But then, who am I to interpret such things?

Perhaps the fact that nothing but three cows and two locked doors are implemented is a sign from the Author, a sign that we must not be troubled with the things of material existence, but must rather look to a higher purpose that exists behind the veneer of a simple interactive fiction game.

Namely, that the whole thing is a brutal waste of your time, the author is likely trolling, and your only path to spiritual liberation - moksha - is to free yourself of the need to play this game at all.

Play it if: you wish for a game that explores puzzles of dialogue and discourse, or if you want to hear a powerful, emotionally resonant variation on the tale of Gilgamesh.

Don't play it if: you have trouble with puzzles that depend on intuition rather than pure logic, for it is as often as not by intuition that you progress through the story.

There are two reasons I love this story.

The first is intuition. The "puzzle" of the game, if it can be truly called a puzzle, is one of persuasion: to win the people of your tribe over to your way of thinking by directing the flow of a story. The player does this primarily by interacting with emphasized terms in the telling. Where intuition comes in is that you have no control over precisely what to do with each term; it is on the basis of each word's context in the story that you must decide how to interact.

This means that, to perhaps the greatest degree possible in IF, this is a game about language, a game which emphasizes reading comprehension over puzzle-solving. Not only is this fairly unusual for the genre, it is excellently done - the player can deduce important lessons even from minor details in the telling.

The second is the story itself. The storyteller narrates the first half of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written epic in recorded history and a myth which still resonates with and influences modern literature. The choice of story is perfectly suited to this work, for the Epic is primarily about fear - in particular, fear of death, and fear of the unknown - and the search for immortality, whether through glory or through the love and friendship of others. These are powerful themes that the framing narrative explores, taking place on the eve of tribal war.

Whom the Telling Changed is itself an allegory of the Gilgamesh story, and in adding another fundamental theme - the power of legend and narrative - Aaron A. Reed succeeds in crafting a myth of his own. This is fantasy from an older and darker time, from a world where life was brief and difficult. For many people in those times, the only spiritual and moral comfort to be offered came from the telling and understanding of old stories - as Reed understood when he tapped into that primordial image of a troubled tribe gathered in darkness around a warm campfire.

There are but a few other notes I have on this work. There are one or two glitches to be ironed out - I only ran into one of them, though, which given the game's NPC interactions is a pleasant surprise. Also, while in general I'm no fan of sequels, there is another chapter to the Gilgamesh myth...perhaps there is another story be told.

Play it if: you're new to IF, or if you're in the mood for some light amusement and fairly easy puzzles.

Avoid it if: you prefer a bit more bite in your IF, or you've a hair trigger for cruelty or unfairness, for while not particularly challenging, this game has a soupçon of both.

While more of a showpiece to display some of Inform's capabilities than a true game, Balances is nevertheless an enjoyable enough experience in its own right to recommend it to the novice player.

The game, drawing upon the Enchanter trilogy's magic system, offers several good puzzles - many of which revolve around the player's ability to reverse spell effects. This creates some fun possibilities (Spoiler - click to show)(including the need to die at least once to win). There was an alternative solution to the lottery puzzle, however, which I would have loved to see implemented(Spoiler - click to show) - specifically, reversing the "caskly" spell to turn the first-prize ticket into the last-prize ticket, though that would have required re-tooling of the elephant puzzle.

There are, unfortunately, a couple of puzzles which would qualify as cruel or unfair (Spoiler - click to show)(specifically, the lottery puzzle). Nevertheless, I only had to resort to a walkthrough only once - and given my flair for puzzle-solving, if that isn't a sign of low difficulty, I don't what is.

Ultimately, Balances is a light and loose distraction. It's probably most suited to newcomers to interactive fiction given its small scope and relatively straightforward gameplay. The magic system and its implementation may also give aspiring IF writers some pointers on basic puzzle construction.