Reviews by JonathanCR

I don’t like giving negative reviews to things or being critical for the sake of it. But I thought it worth tackling this one fairly with the more constructive aim of giving some indications to the author about how to improve things.

If anyone else reading this is like me, they were captivated by Zork in their youth and made fumbling attempts to create their own games in imitation of it, but lacked the imagination or technical ability to produce anything remotely uncringeworthy. This game is those games, but in Inform rather than C64 BASIC. If you’re expecting a jolly, in-joke-filled nostalgia-fest, in the style of “Enlightenment” or “Janitor”, you can forget it. If you’re after a more serious retro-style cave crawl, in the style of “The adventurer’s museum”, you can forget that too. This one tries to recreate the world of Zork but without, it seems, either the imagination which made the early cave crawls such experiences or the wit to parody them amusingly. In fact it’s not merely completely humourless but lacks pretty much any kind of atmosphere or character whatsoever. And that is the first point I want to make: if you’re going to make a game, you need to have some kind of vaguely worthwhile story, or world, or experience to convey to the player.

We don’t get that here. The room descriptions are spartan to the point of meanness:

medium room
You are in a medium-sized room. Exits lead south and west.

A panel is on the wall.

Or:

big room
You are in a huge room. Souoth is a smaller room and hallways lead east and
west.

(That’s just one of the many spelling errors, which it would be tedious to list.)

The implementation is poor:

blue room
You are in a blue room. Exits lead east and south, and there's a glass wall to
the north.

A gray door blocks your way south.

A dial is on the wall.

>x glass wall
You can't see any such thing.

Or:

platform
You are on a small platform over spikes. The platform feels weak beneath you. A
bar leads out over the pit to the south and northwestt lies the maze.

A door leading southeast is here.

A rocky shelf is sticking from the wall.

The platform is collapsing!

>climb onto bar
You can't see any such thing.

>s
You realise that there's a hole blocking your way south.

The platform is collapsing!
You fall onto spikes!
You have died! You wake up in a random room!

It was that last one that finally exhausted my patience. (Spoiler - click to show)I did have a look at the walkthrough at this point, which revealed that what I should have typed was GET ON LEDGE (“climb onto ledge” or “up” or any other alternative wouldn’t have worked). Incidentally, that last room doesn’t really have a door leading southeast – that is actually the door leading northwest, but it seems to have the same description in both of the rooms it’s in. (You can’t go back through it though, for no apparent reason.) There are many other examples of this sort of sloppy implementation. As for the design of the game itself, I could also mention the maze (the rooms of which don’t have any descriptions at all, and which has no original features apart from its thankful shortness); the Room Of Pointless Death (my name), where pressing any button other than the right one will kill you; or the locked door puzzle where you must simply turn the dial next to the door until you hit the right number. There is one part where the game appears to be completely broken (Spoiler - click to show) where you are told that there’s an exit east, but you can’t go east.

The game gets some points for being competent and coherent marginally more often than not, but not many. In short, it feels like a practice game, written as a programming exercise. Its biggest flaw, though, is just a complete lack of imagination.

To the author: as I said at the start, I don’t want to be negative for the sake of it. The criticisms I’ve made are meant to point to questions about why one makes a game and puts it online for others to play. The game has to make sense and be reasonably playable by other people, and that means making sure that objects are properly implemented, that things mentioned in the descriptions can be appropriately manipulated, and that there aren’t points where only one particular form of words is accepted despite the existence of many other equally plausible ones for the same action. That’s just fundamental. Equally important, though, is having something worthwhile for people to play. The Zork games were great games because they took the player to an interesting world that was well described. If you use the Zork name, that’s what people expect. Even if you don’t, people will expect something that’s worth their time. A “big room” and a “medium room” with nothing of interest going on in them isn’t. If you try writing something more original or simply more imaginative in general, and testing it properly, you might well produce something worth playing, but I’m afraid this isn’t it.

Broken legs is a gloriously written game, one that revels in the sheer vileness not only of its protagonist but of the world in which she dwells. This is a character who makes Varicella look like Francis of Assisi, and the basic idea of the game is much like Varicella: the loathsome PC must eliminate a series of equally loathsome rivals within a time limit. Rather than a struggle for political power between courtiers, however, this is something much more vicious: a group of teenage wannabe starlets competing for the last place at a prestigious stage school. Lottie, the protagonist, has screwed up her audition, so the only thing to do is to ensure that all her rivals do the same thing even more disastrously. And so the mayhem begins.

I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with a more over-the-top hateable main character: it both adds to the game (as an interesting experience) and detracts from it (you really don’t want Lottie to succeed, given that she’s the nastiest one of the lot). The game’s light touch and superb writing do much to make the nastiness fun, however. The author captures and parodies the ghastly valley speak, not to mention the two-faced bitchiness, of these would-be clean-cut starlets in such an exaggerated way that its basically humorous nature is never obscured. (Spoiler - click to show)The effect is enhanced still further by the glorious twist at the end, complete with the option to play through the game again with additional comments in the light of what we now know is really going on. It turns out that the wickedness of Lottie as revealed throughout the game is entirely fictional – but only because there is even greater duplicity at work. The world of this game is revealed to be even more fathomlessly nasty than we thought.

I found the game staggeringly difficult. Some of the methods needed to eliminate the rivals are decidedly hard to work out. That is, of course, as it should be, but some are harder than they need to be because of the fairly basic interaction system. Much of what you need to do involves getting other characters to do things for you, but the limitations of the ASK/TELL conversation system make it hard to do this. (Spoiler - click to show)I worked out, for example, that I needed to get Rosanna to lie to Kassie about the audition, but I couldn’t find any way to even suggest it to her. It turned out that I needed only to give her the memo. But it wasn’t obvious to me that it was merely a lack of the memo that was preventing her from telling the lie. One or two also seemed insufficiently clued to me. (Spoiler - click to show)When talking to Alexandra, the topic of her shoes and music never came up. In fact even after I knew, from reading the hints, that these were the key to defeating her, I never found a way to get her to talk about her music. And these items weren’t visible in the room. So without the explicit clues, I would never even have thought of focusing on them. However, the in-game hint system is a lot of fun and gives helpful hints. It still wasn’t enough for me, though, since I ended up using the walkthrough to see enough of the game to try to judge it fairly. And in this case, I’m glad I did, as I would never have solved most of these puzzles left to my own devices.

For me, the difficulty and rather random nature of many of the puzzles is a negative point against this game, although they may not be for others. Apart from that, though, the game’s gloriously nasty premise and excellent writing make it a very strong and enjoyable offering.

I loved this. The main gimmick of the game is its dual setting: you are telling a story to your small son. A nice touch is that the prompt is "The prince then " - inviting you to finish the sentence (in either the past tense, to match the prompt, as if you are really speaking your move to your son, or the present tense, in standard text game format).

Now at first I thought that this was a cute gimmick but nothing more. But in fact the story-telling setting is neatly woven into the whole game. After typing a move, for example, the game may describe what happens in the standard way (in "your" voice - this is what you're saying to your son), and then add the boy's comments. Often the boy decides what happens next, even overriding "your" description of the action. There are points where he takes control of the story quite drastically. The effect of this is that very unpredictable things happen in the story, but while this highlights the unrealistic nature of the story *that you're telling* (about the prince), it actually helps to make the story *that you're in* (about the father and son) much more immersive and believable. When you play this game, you don't believe in the prince and his adventures, but you do believe in the father and son making up the story about the prince. And you care about the prince, despite his obvious unreality, because the father and son care about him, and the telling of his story is an important part of their bonding.

In short, then, what might be a cutesy gimmick is actually a clever and charming technique that draws you into a story in a way that often eludes games that make far more effort for "believability". It is funny, but the humour is not just about jokes, but serves the deeper purpose of fleshing out the characters of the father and son (and the mother) and their relationships. The game as it stands has basically a single, not-too-hard puzzle before its disappointingly premature ending. I give it only a 3 because it is only an introduction, but it is a spectacular introduction and I would absolutely love to play a full-length version of this. I can easily see how more serious aspects of the family relationships hinted at in the introduction could emerge in a longer story, making this potentially quite a thoughtful and moving piece as well as a very entertaining one.

This is one of the stranger ideas I've ever seen for a game, but it's a lot of fun. A nice twist here is that most of the pleasure of this game comes from *not* completing it. Winning is dead easy, but it's more interesting to have a look around first. The NPC is enjoyably unpleasant and both the PC and the absent artist are given a lot of character - or at least, a lot is hinted at.

A couple of striking points about this game, which I'll hide not because they're really spoilers but because working these things out is part of the enjoyment: (Spoiler - click to show)The game appears to be set in the distant future, at least given that Britney seems to have been visiting the moon and the PC is apparently purple. I thought this interesting given that there is nothing overtly SF about the setting at all - apart from the talking fish, of course, which I initially assumed was a sort of whimsical fantasy element rather than a SF one. Perhaps it is and the SF elements have got absolutely nothing to do with it. (Spoiler - click to show)I think this is the first game I've played where the PC is gay and this makes no difference to the plot. That's also very refreshing.

I can't really add much to what has been said about this game already, except to say that I simply found it virtually perfect. The writing is absolutely beautiful, consistently funny, and often surprisingly moving. That is partly because Grunk, as a character, has such integrity and believability. Although presented as incredibly dense, the way he describes locations and objects, often incorporating quite shrewd observations along the way, suggests that he's not all that stupid at all. That gives him depth and emotional resonance. It must be said also that by having Grunk narrate the game in its entirety offers a neat approach to the problem of who the parser is supposed to be, and whether the narrator of the game is a different person from the PC. This game solves that problem by identifying the PC with the narrator, although at the cost of distancing the player from the PC (if Grunk is telling me what's going on, I'm clearly not Grunk, just in case I'd had any uncertainty on that score). There's no emotional distancing though, because Grunk is so engaging a personality.

The puzzles are nicely logical and the gnome NPC has a dry, educated wit that meshes perfectly with Grunk's rather more straightforward approach to life. There are a truly vast number of things you can ASK GNOME ABOUT, most of which have no bearing on the game itself, although some of course contain vital clues. It's a lot of fun to explore these topics, although this can result in the gnome seeming a bit like one of those information-dispenser sort of NPCs who are inexplicably willing to be grilled at length by over-curious PCs. But the gnome's sardonic wit and the fact that he's busily doing other things whilst satisfying Grunk's curiosity make him much more than a talking pedia.

The pig also has a lot of character, making this whole thing rather like one of those children's books that adults can also enjoy. I liked the author's attention to detail, which often brought out extra little elements of the characters (e.g. try taking your trousers off in front of the pig). I must admit that having apparently completed the game I was puzzled by how to gain the elusive last point and looked it up fully in the hints. I rather wished I hadn't, not only as it would have been more fun to work out by myself, but also because the behaviour required to get the last point is the sort of behaviour that I instinctively engage in when playing this sort of game anyway, but generally don't bother, because it seems not to matter. The fact that it mattered in this game says a great deal about it. This is a game with heart.

I don't normally like puzzle games, partly because I like to be immersed in a believable world and puzzles are intrinsically unrealistic, but mainly because I'm not very good at them. This one, however, is one of the most beautiful and satisfying puzzles I've encountered, simply because it is so logical. Everything in it flows neatly, and once you've understood how the set-up works and the sort of thing that you need to do, it is simply a matter of making it so. Each time I played, I managed to overcome the latest obstacle, only to find a new one; each time, again, the solution to the new obstacle was generally not too hard to work out once I'd got used to the way that this world worked. (Spoiler - click to show)I must add that I especially loved the problem of the battery, which I solved almost instantly and was delighted to find that my solution worked perfectly - this made me feel clever, which is not something that often happens when I play puzzle games. The constant replaying in light of new information sounds tedious but in fact replaying each time, carefully taking into account the new problem that had to be overcome while still doing what had to be done to account for the ones encountered before, was enormously satisfying. It is like putting together a series of simple, overlapping themes, one by one, and ending up with a complex symphony.

I thought that the small world of the game is believably structured and described, and that everything is implemented extremely well. The basic conceit of the game - (Spoiler - click to show)having to move around and perform actions at the same time as your earlier self, also moving around and doing things, while avoiding meeting her - must have been a nightmare to code, but everything seemed exactly as it should be to me. I also liked the fact that there are somewhat different paths to victory. (Spoiler - click to show)The walkthrough had the player setting the bomb and then using the time machine for a second time to go back a bit and leave, avoiding the explosion. I, however, did it differently, setting the bomb immediately before using the time machine the *first* time, and doing all the stuff I needed to do and escaping just before it went off. So I only travelled in time once.

There are some flaws with the game. I think the greatest is simply its believability - not because of the SF elements, but because of the implausibility of what your character knows. Paul O'Brian mentions this in his review. There are various items in the complex that the PC needs to take in order to win. In order to take those items, the PC must engage in rather complex and carefully timed behaviour (to put it mildly). The way she acts (on the winning scenario), she absolutely must know precisely what she's doing and be acting with considerable foresight. (Spoiler - click to show)For example, pressing the button for the upstairs door, knowing that her future self will be standing there to walk through it. But of course if she knew all that in advance she might as well just bring some of these things with her and not have to jump through hoops to find them in the complex. I must admit, however, that I don't really find that a serious problem with this game. The game is, above all, a puzzle. Its purpose is not to immerse you in a completely believable world (although of course it must meet minimal believability criteria if the world is to function logically enough to work as a puzzle, and it passes this test with flying colours). When I actually played the game, I didn't care in the slightest that the PC couldn't know this or should be doing that. All I cared about was *me* solving the puzzle that was presented to *me* in the game, and I enjoyed doing that enormously.

Also a word about puzzle-solving here. I saw some reviews that complained about having to write down lots of information in order to complete the game - like mapping Zork, but mapping the timing of events rather than the locations of rooms. I didn't do any of this. As I worked out the solution to the puzzle there were one or two key times that I needed to remember, but I didn't find any need to write them down. Admittedly I used brute force for one part of the puzzle. (Spoiler - click to show)The problem of how to break the glass without making my earlier self hear the alarm had me stumped for a bit, until I realised that I could just wait until my earlier self used the time machine, and then break the glass with impunity. To do this elegantly I should have replayed, noting down the time when I used the machine. In fact I just waited a few turns, tried breaking the glass, undid when I lost as a result, waited a few turns, and so on until breaking the glass did not result in a lost game. Again: unrealistic, of course, but it didn't matter (in my opinion) because I'd worked out how to solve the puzzle, and that's the main thing. So I would say that those who fear mapping or who don't fancy having to write lots of stuff down to complete a game needn't fear this one. You very much have to keep your wits about you and be able to visualise what's going on, and detailed logging might help, but it's hardly essential.

After seeing the previous review I had to give this a go myself, since I'm a theologian too (not a New Testament scholar, but I know enough about that to appreciate the jokes). Perhaps the audience for theological text games is larger than one might think?

The game does a hilarious job of satirising trends in academic theology (well, I thought it was hilarious anyway). The basic joke is that the spiritual world has to adapt to match theological trends, so when our protagonist dies of boredom during a lecture on Mark's Gospel, he finds that hell is being closed down to conform to "demythologisation". Admittedly the satire is rather blunted by the datedness of the target (Bultmann's famous essay on demythologisation was written in the 1940s, and this sort of thing hasn't been top of the theological agenda for some decades) but I think we can live with that.

Despite the humorous style (I especially liked (Spoiler - click to show)the theology exam from hell - this actually gave me uncomfortable flashbacks to my own finals) there are some sections with more serious and even moving overtones. The recurring theme of the Empty Tomb makes that inevitable. (Spoiler - click to show) I found this especially so with the Golgotha scene, where you must inscribe words onto the cross of Christ. I'm not certain if this mixing of moods is confusing or adds depth; it is probably down to individual taste.

How does the game play? It is extremely episodic. For the most part, you move from area to area without going back, and often without carrying objects over. This can feel quite disjointed, and there seems to be little logic in what scene follows what. That, is perhaps, deliberate. (Spoiler - click to show)It is, after all, a stumble through the landscape of someone's mind. It also makes the game quite a fun series of discrete puzzles; you don't have to worry about what's already happened, or worry that you should have brought some object that you missed. But it can also feel quite illogical. (Spoiler - click to show)It is odd to re-enact the resurrection and then shortly afterwards come to the scene of the crucifixion!

The puzzles are variable in difficulty, of course, but I found some of them hard without using the hints. There are a number of guess-the-verb issues. (Spoiler - click to show)You are told that you cannot MOVE the statue's hair, but you are still expected to PULL it. That's annoying. Also, COMMANDing the stone to move doesn't work, but TELLing it to do so does. I have to say that some are rather badly clued as well. (Spoiler - click to show)In the empty tomb, you are told that this is *Mark's* version of the story - so you can't appeal to an angel to move the stone, since that doesn't happen in Mark. I thought that this must mean that the young man in a white garment, who appears in Mark, was relevant, and spent some time trying to work out how to acquire such a garment. It turned out that I was supposed simply to tell the stone to move. But that doesn't happen in Mark either!

The sheer fun of the game, not to mention the audacity of a game that revolves around theological jokes, overcome these issues enough to make this a 4 for me. The writing is very good throughout, and the world is extremely well implemented (being able to examine not only the characters in pictures, but the objects they are holding, is pretty impressive). The hints are also excellently done, revealing the solution suitably gradually.

One of the most interesting things about playing text games, in my view, is the way in which problems that are relatively small or unimportant in the grand scheme of things become far more significant when *you* are the one faced with them. Often, a problem that, were it to feature in a conventional story, might not interest us, can become all-consuming in a text game, where if the writing is strong enough and the puzzle well-paced enough, we can feel something of the protagonist's fear or frustration.

Oddly, I found this more true in this game than in any other I've yet played. The game falls into three main sections. The first is a time-based challenge: you must get fed before you collapse from hunger. The second is less constrained, and allows you to roam about in search of more satisfying food. And the third is another time-based challenge, this one more serious than the first.

The game gets progressively harder as it goes on, and it starts off pretty hard. As other reviewers have commented, some of the puzzles are not fiendish so much as virtually unguessable (although I was pleased to figure out by myself what was, in retrospect, probably the most outlandish of them - (Spoiler - click to show)tying the cat food tin to the balloon, taking it onto the roof, and dropping it in the direction of the boy). This can be especially frustrating in the second part of the game, where you must solve a variety of puzzles in order to get to the coveted soft food, but it is not always clear what your goal in each puzzle is, or why solving it matters, or indeed what's going on at all.

There is also an uneasy tension between your limitations and goals as a cat and the uncatlike intelligence you must show in overcoming the limitations and attaining the goals. The game itself shows awareness of this; show an object to the Provider, and he looks puzzled at the fact you're carrying it around, as well he should if you're just an ordinary cat. This comes to the fore in the final part of the game, where you must do things that clearly no cat would ever do, and rely upon knowledge that not only would no cat know, but this cat apparently doesn't know either ((Spoiler - click to show)the cat does not know that the liquid dripping from the car is petrol - it doesn't even know that it's a car - but you must still soak the shirt in it in order to make a fire). But even in the same sequence, the cat is sometimes characterised as a typically amoral, food-obsessed feline ((Spoiler - click to show)in one grim possible ending, you simply eat your stricken Provider, the game commenting dryly that he remained a Provider right to the end).

It must be said that the game also suffers from a fair few technical problems and unrecognised words. Trying to fill a container at the stream, for example, is greeted with the response that there is no water here. At one point I attempted to do something with my claws, to be told that I needed to be holding them first. It is also odd that a game with an unusual protagonist doesn't allow you to examine yourself, although some self-description is included in the inventory. It doesn't seem to recognise "it". Finally, there are one or two spelling mistakes (including one in a location description, which is annoying).

So why four stars, given these flaws? It's partly because of how well written the game is. There is understated humour in the descriptions and narrative, which presents everything precisely as a cat *would* think of it. The kitchen is simply the "food room", where the only object of any interest is the cat's bowl. A chair becomes a "lumpy mountain", the main interesting feature being its impressive collection of scratch marks. Cars are shiny beasts and cat food tins are eggs. But the game doesn't go overboard with this; the balloon, for example, is described as simply that. Moreover, the prose is admirably restrained, and despite the humour, never comes across as overtly funny. There is a starkness and seriousness to the game which matches the feline protagonist perfectly, and which is reflected in the snowy landscape surrounding the house, which is largely hostile to the cat. The only character who seems happy, the boy behind the fence, remains largely unseen. The cat begins the game starving, there is a brutal Rival roaming about, and the Provider is not well at all.

That leads into the other reason for a high score. The end game is, in some respects, annoying and frustrating. As I have commented, it forces the player to behave in distinctly uncatlike ways, and the difficulty of the puzzles does not let up. But it captures the attention like nothing else I have played. The time constraint now seems far more serious than that used in the first part of the game, with failure a much scarier prospect. There are various ways to fail the end game, all rather grim and depressing, despite the relative lack of care that the cat displays in them (which, as previously mentioned, clashes somewhat with the attitude that the cat must display when under the player's control). Finally, even the victory text is understated, rather sad, and poignant, despite the upbeat end. Despite the thinness of the characterisation of the Provider (as is only right, given that the cat cares only that he provides), I cared very much about what happened to him and the cat. That is why, for me at least, this is not just a strangely powerful and memorable game, but also a successful piece of interactive fiction. It demonstrates the power of the genre to make us care about situations and characters by making us part of them, in a way that could never work in any other genre.

This is a fairly straightforward game, but one which is fun to play. The plot: in the aftermath of an alien occupation of earth, you - a mercenary type person - have stolen one of their ships to investigate a mysterious and possibly valuable object in the solar system. The object turns out to be a huge space station. You must explore it, discover its secret, and return to earth before the thing enters earth's atmosphere and is destroyed. Shades of Rendezvous with Rama here, with a few twists.

The game is well implemented, with good writing. There are a few welcome humorous twists, although the attempt to marry different tones and styles doesn't always work. The introduction, for example, with its cavalier account of the liquidation of much of earth's population, and the amusingly disgusting ship piloted by the PC, suggests a setting of black humour. However, the bulk of the game, and especially the revelation of the nature and origin of the space station, seems grimmer and less in keeping with the introduction.

The game is not very long, and follows quite a linear progression, so there isn't great freedom to do your own thing - but the story flows in a way that makes sense, so this isn't a great handicap. The puzzles are pretty simple and shouldn't keep you guessing for too long. In fact the only part I had difficulty with was the final sequence, which is also fairly straightforward but much harder to do right - much saving and restoring required here. I encountered an odd bug with restoring saved games, in which a great deal of extraneous text was displayed after each move, but the game was still playable and this may have been a problem associated with iPhone Frotz, which I played it on, rather than with the game itself.

All in all, there's nothing groundbreaking here, but it's a decent game that should prove a pleasant diversion for an hour or two. It doesn't do a great deal, but what it sets out to do, it does well.