Reviews by OtisTDog

An older game submitted to the 2003 Spring Thing, Inevitable -- which is not to be confused with a 2017 work sharing the same name -- is a bit off the beaten path for the modern player, but it is an interesting stop on a tour of IF history.

The game offers adjustable difficulty, and I played it on the "harder" mode. This mode doesn't offer particularly hard puzzles as science fiction puzzlers tend to go, so unless you prefer games with few or no puzzles, I would recommend it.

The writing of the game starts out feeling a bit ponderous, but the player soon gets used to the serious tone. The player character is a military officer and space fighter pilot, whose planet recently lost an interstellar war. He or she is tasked with escorting an ambassador of the conquerors on what seems to be nothing more than a sightseeing tour of a now-abandoned city.

The opening sequence sets an interesting mood, with the protagonist's ship being damaged and unable to take off while a heavy storm rages outside. However, the rain abruptly stops and the mood just as suddenly shifts, leaving the player with the familiar task of scouring the empty city for what's needed to repair his ship. A glance at the horizon shows another squall line on the way, but (Spoiler - click to show)this is false foreshadowing that never ends up affecting the story.

As the player goes about this task, various interesting technical touches will be noted, which provide niceties that are relatively rare for the era. (This was the era immediately preceding the introduction of Inform 7, and the coding skill needed to achieve these in Inform 6 were decidedly above average.) The game offers a >GO TO functionality that isn't well-advertised but is a welcome affordance. A particularly nice touch was the way that the PC will considerately put everything aside before following your instruction to wade into water -- and then take it all back after emerging.

The overall style leans toward hard science fiction in that it's grounded in a realism informed by the characters fictional universe. The protagonist takes the futuristic items in inventory for granted, and much of the characterization comes in the form of timeless complaints about authority and regret over a woman from the past. At certain points the realism is inconsistent in its attention to detail, however -- for example, in a scene where (Spoiler - click to show) the protagonist must free-dive to obtain a long metal bar from an underwater structure some of the difficulties which might be expected in that situation (weight, awkwardness) are ignored. Also, there doesn't seem to be any function for certain items outside of demonstrating the nicety mentioned above, though arguably this is not wasted or unfocused work so much as a touch of hyper-realism for effect of the type I pointed to in my review of Anchorhead.

Certain significant parts of the interaction are definitely buggy, and other parts seem as though they might be. Only one issue rises to the severity of threatening the successful conclusion of the game (Spoiler - click to show)(a metal bar can become irreversibly stuck in a wall), but this is unlikely to be encountered in practice. The others that I noted (Spoiler - click to show)(a power tool magically performing its function while turned off, an item being described as being simultaneously on something and wedged into something, disambiguation messages for a particularly tricky sequence involving a complex shape) only create unexpected disruptions to the immersion. Said immersion is artfully achieved through vivid descriptions of the alien city environment and its varied technological artifacts; many reviewers compare it to the atmosphere of Myst.

The puzzle-solving is the core of the gameplay side of this work, and it was quite enjoyable. (Spoiler - click to show)Who doesn't like slowly reactivating derelict alien machinery? The game fulfills the promise of its hook and really shines here as the player makes progress through various obstacles. Only one puzzle seemed like a real problem to me, (Spoiler - click to show)a very important one involving a stone dolmen, but on review the issue seems to largely stem from an uncharacteristic shortfall in the description of the physical scene. In a complex spatial situation like that, I personally appreciate an abundance of information to make sure that the relevant details are communicated, and that style is followed assiduously everywhere else in the game. The worst case scenario is that you'll have to consult the walkthrough to get past that puzzle, which is hardly a catastrophe.

The two-star rating that I'm giving is based on the game's weaker side, which is its story. The narrative elements are interesting enough as their own framework, but they feel essentially grafted onto the gameplay framework -- they don't naturally interact and reinforce each other to improve the experience of both, which is the holy grail of interactive fiction. In addition to some very surprising revelations that seem like they should not have been withheld at the start (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. that the protagonist is in fact very familiar with the city, having lived there for years), I was left with significant questions about the plot, including but not limited to: (Spoiler - click to show)Why did the alien ambassador want to go there in the first place? Why did Rajan wait until the last second to intervene in the past? Why did the PC fixate on the woman with the green eyes in the past? That's not to say that the story was uninteresting -- it most certainly was not, and the flashback-oriented exposition is well-paced on a structural basis -- it's just that it seems like the story could have been quite different without affecting much of the experience of play.

The pacing near the end is irksome, slowed by some final puzzles when the narrative is trying to advance quickly. I personally found all of the available endings to be unsatisfactory from a narrative standpoint, leaving the emphasis in my memory on the setting, atmosphere and puzzles, all of which are very well executed. I did have fun with this game, and I expect that most sci-fi fans will, too, and absent the not-quite-insignificant bugs I would probably give it three stars.

In the glory days of the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup, from time to time someone (or a group of someones) would make a game as a demonstration of a rhetorical point. A famous example of this is +=3, which was written to demonstrate that an author needs to make the player aware of the relevant details of the game universe in order to be fair. As I understand it, this piece was also inspired by a discussion -- this time about possible models for the paid development of interactive fiction in the aftermath of the collapse of the commercial era. Given the scale of the effort, an echo of the Textfire collection of the previous year, it also seems to be inspired by the pure joy of practical jokery.

This is less a parody of the individual games involved than it is of our society as a whole -- specifically commercialism's influence on culture. The work posits that the manufacturer of Coca-Cola, infamous for never passing up a chance to expand the mindshare of its brand by slapping its logo on something new, has decided by spreadsheet that there's a theoretical payoff to funding new IF in order to achieve a little more brand awareness. It shows us a taste of a "what if" world in which some of the best-known works of the time were produced under a product placement model of monetary "support" for the art, a world in which presumably IF is plentiful... and it just won't shut up about the sponsor's carbonated beverage.

I suppose that whether this world is a utopia or dystopia is a matter of personal preference, but personally I'm pleased that, 25 years on, the art form has continued to grow organically in the absence of major commercial interests.

The rhetorical value of this work is lessened somewhat by the over-the-top nature of the jingoism, and as a game it suffers from a reliance on player knowledge of the games being simulated. David Welbourn's walkthrough can get you through any points where you become stuck, but there's no particular payoff to reaching the programmed end. It's still worth a quarter of an hour to be amused by the various one-liners and to consider the questions that the game implicitly prompts.

Aisle is one that I finally broke down and played a few years ago. It did not impress me, and I didn't find the central innovation (i.e. one-move game) to be very interesting as a mechanic. A recent re-examination of the work and its reviews in greater detail changed my opinion of it -- for the worse.

The game's tagline calls itself: "an instant in the life of a man" [emphasis mine]. Likewise, many reviews mention "the story" [again, emphasis mine]. But there is no single story. This is made clear by the "frontispiece" displayed upon opening Aisle, which at its end states: "Be warned; there are many stories and not all of the stories are about the same man."

As many reviewers note, extended interaction bears this out. It's not possible for the PC to be just one man due to conflicting information presented in various "endings." (I put scare quotes around the term because it seems clear that no one outcome is intended to represent a complete experience, thus the interactor is almost certain to "replay" many times before deciding to stop.)

Obviously, on a purely structural basis, the interactor of this work is expected to try at least dozens of different moves in order to observe the various bits of past and/or future that each new "ending" produces. Theoretically, that structure does offer an interesting possibility, in that the motivated interactor can try to suss out particular details and build up a picture of the whole possibility space of the protagonist's future as well as the complex of factors in his past that shape his present. To my mind, the kind of meaningful question asked and answered by a work of this structure should be: How can one action now change the future of this person, and what are the limits of that change? (As Duncan Stevens puts it, the point would be "to explore the central character and take a look at the various possibilities available to him from one point in time.")

Unfortunately, since this work is not consistent in the details that a diligent player uncovers, any meaningful exploration of those questions is abandoned, and the whole concept reduces to an exercise in style. Sean Barrett's I'll does a good job of making the point in an exaggerated manner via rhetoric-in-action.

The central premise of the scenario is weak and seems particularly ill-suited to a weighty treatment of the possibilities opened up by the novel mechanic. (As the review by Ben at Trotting Krips notes: "It is difficult to turn your life around in the middle of a Winn-Dixie.") The inciting incident is that the protagonist has a moment over the fresh gnocchi at the end of an unpleasant day. Prior to this, he seems to be just have been going aisle by aisle through this, his regular grocery store, in a run-of-the-mill bit of shopping. Is this the first time the store has stocked fresh gnocchi? Has he never noticed this item before? Has he forgotten that it was there? Why does *this* time seem so significant? The work offers no answers -- does not seem to have anticipated the question.

... Or maybe it has. Perhaps the added significant context is the proximity of the brunette, whose appearance reminds the PC of a woman, Clare, who features so prominently in many responses.

The work is noted for its 100+ unique "endings," but the range of supported actions is not well-correlated to the situation, making it hard to predict the effect of many commands. For example, if >SLEEP is tried by the player, it is because he or she is in "lawnmowering" mode and that is a default verb, not because it makes any sense for the PC to actually go to sleep. At least some responses use unique verbs that are unlikely to be discovered without a walkthrough or decompilation. It's hard to know what to make of responses to commands such as >GIBBER or >DROOL, which are highly unlikely to be tried without external prompting.

Interactions with the woman tend to send the "story" on an unexpectedly dark trajectory. Stevens notes that the PC "often treats apparently normal conversational gambits as an excuse to act psychotic." While I immediately agreed with this sentiment, that description is, on balance, overstated. The author usually chooses an unpleasantly surprising spin on the interactor's choice of actions involving her, even those that seem innocuous, in a manner that strikes me as a deliberate exploitation of the coarse-grained interaction afforded by the ASK/TELL model, which collapses many potential variations of topics into one keyword or keyphrase response. Since the woman is by far the most interesting part of the environment the player is certain to stumble over one of these warning signs soon enough, perhaps in response to >ASK WOMAN ABOUT PASTA or >ASK HER ABOUT HER CART. Sure, asking someone about the contents of their cart at the grocery store is an unconventional conversation starter, but does Barlow think that the PC's subsequent actions truly represent the player's intent? Compare those two responses to >ASK HER ABOUT HERSELF or >ASK HER ABOUT GNOCCHI for similarly unpredictable results in what is presumably intended to be a positive direction.

Inevitably, the interactor reaches a point in exploration where, to quote Stevens again, "options for civilized behavior run out." If one stops before that point (and has by happenstance missed the yellow flags presented when interacting with the woman), then it is indeed possible to come away with a sense that this is a single story dominated by themes of "romantic isolation" and "melancholic longing" as labeled by Jimmy Maher's review, or even one that is "beautiful and tragic" as described by manonamora's. However, the work itself does not stop there, and a completionist will soon discover huge swathes of additional "story" that are very dark indeed, with possibilities ranging as far as assaulting the woman in the store or the revelation that the PC is a murderer. When one bears these darker outcomes in mind, it becomes more difficult to interpret the "positive" outcomes as good things, after all. (In fact, on closer inspection, even some of the presumably-positive outcomes involving the woman seem tinged with a sense of predatory manipulation.) As one progresses through less and less likely significant responses, the PC becomes steadily more repugnant.

Between the single-response constraint and the author's capricious imputation of the intent behind any given command, I'm hard pressed to say what it is the player is supposed to be actually doing after loading up Aisle. When interacting with this work the interactor is not actually exploring a character or a story -- between the limited and/or contradictory information about the context of the single choice point for the protagonist and the extremely low ability to predict the impact of that choice on the situation, this work is missing the heart of what I consider interactive fiction to be. There is nothing solid to discover through persistence, and although any one response often resonates to a greater or lesser degree with others, it is difficult for the player to even draw firm boundaries between the various major permutations of the "true" situation, as these seem to bleed into each other in places. In the end, we are only exploring the author's momentary whimsies until patience and/or interest runs out.

As noted in the review of Mike Root, there is an alternative lens for evaluation of Aisle, which is that the work's purpose is to "play the player." The best evidence for this interpretation is the way that certain clusters of responses do paint a semi-consistent portrait of a certain type of person with a certain type of past. However, these responses do not seem consistent enough to look like deliberate planning on the author's part. For example, if the player focuses on mundane goals, the commands >EXAMINE GNOCCHI, >EXAMINE PASTA, >TAKE PASTA, >TAKE GNOCCHI, >TAKE SAUCE, >ASK WOMAN FOR SAUCE, and >PUSH CART are all straightforward options, but they each define significant aspects of the PC and/or his backstory in a manner that the player can't possibly predict. For example, >PUSH CART imputes an active anger to the PC over being confronted with the suppressed memory of Rome and edges slightly malevolent toward the brunette, while >TAKE GNOCCHI suggests long-settled resignation about the outcome of the events of Rome and ignores the fellow shopper. >TAKE SAUCE yields a Clare-less response implying that Rome wasn't that significant, after all, and >ASK WOMAN FOR SAUCE indirectly suggests a painful episode from which the protagonist might be starting to recover (or perhaps, taking some responses into account, something less pleasant). Although the outcomes differ significantly, I don't see any consistent logic mapping those significant differences in outcome to significant differences in the player's choice.

In summary I would say that Aisle does best when engaged with on a very shallow basis -- one can argue whether or not that necessarily means that the work itself is shallow. I think I would have liked it better with fewer implemented responses, and especially if Barlow had chosen to trim out or simply not respond to various default verbs related to violence, as it does for some of the stock actions in Inform 6's Standard Library. In that form it might live up to the praise in Jimmy Maher's review, even as it was reduced in scale to a bite-sized 15-minute novelty. I would definitely have liked it better if all endings were consistent with one another such that discerning the protagonist's total past becomes a genuine exercise in discovery, which would let the diligent player reach the point of making an informed and more importantly intentionally significant choice of the single allowed action.

One of the reasons that I don't often play choice games is that it rarely feels like the choices available are about directly controlling the character that you're playing. The options often clearly have significance in terms of impact on the unwinding plot, but it can feel more like the old CYOA books than interactive fiction.

You're a Time Agent! neatly avoids that by having the choices matter on an almost second-to-second basis. As a "time agent" of unspecified provenance, you are tasked with infiltrating a facility of unspecified importance. Your obstacle is a door guard, and the puzzle is essentially one of social engineering aided by the supernatural ability to retain information from alternate futures.

Author Tabitha O'Connell overtly undermines the "hey, wow - time powers!" aspect of the game with an introduction which promises that gameplay will consist of "f*cking around" in time. Still, even though the scenario doesn't have much scale, it's surprisingly compelling. As the player-stand-in protagonist tries various gambits, minute bits of information will be pried loose from the stony-faced guard, and these begin to create new options to try.

As manonamora notes, the choice links are conveniently color-coded to indicate when they have been "played out." This is a wonderful nod to the player experience that heads off the most likely source of frustration for the format of the gameplay. Various branches of the timeline offer silly "achievements" that are tallied and listed once success has been achieved.

What's most fascinating to me about this work is the way that it manages to turn the scenario into a fairly mundane experience that feels like "just another day at the office" for the titular time agent. That's not criticism -- that's praise for the author's skill; it would be very easy to make this premise either too silly or too boring to recommend, but instead it's a bite-sized mini-adventure that engages without resorting to the most typical styles of glamor. As one repeatedly rewinds to try again, the guard, initially presented a stock villain, begins to soften and become a person as various peeks behind the professional mask are obtained. (Spoiler - click to show)In one branch he even gives you $50 for dry cleaning, motivated by sympathy for a stranger on the street. He, too, is having just another day at the office.

I've only gotten one ending (so far!), but I'd definitely recommend this "amuse-cerveau" as an enjoyable short experience.

Emily Short's masterpiece is widely considered to be the Greatest Work of IF of All Time. This is reflected in its very secure #1 spot in the IFDB Top 100 list and its continual appearance among the topmost slots of every quadrennial Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time since its release (having placed 3rd in the 2015 edition and 1st in the following 2019 and 2023 editions).

It is undeniably fun to play with the semiotic manipulation technology (one of those advanced technologies that are indistinguishable from magic), and the inventive exercise of the various combinations of changes in the puzzle design makes for a "just right" feel of challenge almost universally throughout the game. The task for the player is constrained enough that finding a solution is almost inevitable, but unique enough to make each solution feel like a surprising breakthrough intuition. I once saw someone describe the essence of good puzzle design as "making the player feel smart," and it's hard to imagine a better recipe for doing so using "reasonably easy but not boring" puzzles.

In addition to sporting very enjoyable puzzles, Counterfeit Monkey's narrative earns consideration as literature by exploring questions that seem even more relevant today than they were when it was released. Its indirect commentary on the nature of language and its interaction with reality, and especially how that interaction is relevant to politics, is the work's thought-provoking philosophical core.

Short's tremendous worldbuilding skills are put to the test by this work's scope, but, as Edward Lacey's early review points out, she does a remarkable job of inventing a plausible-feeling world in which this technology exists but which is somehow not too different from our own. The pacing of the complex exposition is slow enough that significant questions will linger in the player's mind for some time, but by the end of the game those questions will have been answered.

Viewed through the lens of conventional storytelling, the resolution of the narrative comes off as strangely incomplete; the three most significant characters (Spoiler - click to show)(Andra, Alex and Brock) all seem unexpectedly subdued about the radical rearrangement of their relationships with respect to each other -- my impression on completing the game was that they are in shock at the story's conclusion, not yet ready to acknowledge the scale of the inevitable changes to their respective status quos. The outcome of the greater political situation also seems a bit too pat, in that (Spoiler - click to show)the new Atlantida seems too insubstantial to hang any hope upon; surely there were other people involved in the government with a vested interest in the way things were and who will look to "reset" the embodied spirit of the country in their own image posthaste. Still, the dramatic questions of the ostensible plot have been resolved (Spoiler - click to show)(if in a manner that looks like failure to the player), so perhaps the remaining questions are springboards for their own stories. (... and note that, for anyone brave enough to try, the game was published under a CC-BY-SA license, so the way is open.)

Short did consciously make the moral climax of the player character's story into a "no-win situation," citing it as "an illustration of one of the core problems of democratic society," and (per the same source) was clearly aware that she was leaving the items outlined in the previous paragraph unresolved. As such, we can be fairly certain that Counterfeit Monkey is telling exactly the story that she wanted to tell, in exactly the way that she wanted to tell it.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about why this work left me a little disappointed. At first I thought that it was just the familiar result of exploring a work that is surrounded by hype and finding that it didn't live up to my expectations, but I later realized that that's not the case here. It actually exceeded my expectations as a game -- it is such a high level of craft that it pegs the needle of my ability to discern things to appreciate; doubtless there is much genius embedded in this work's coding and storytelling technique that escapes my notice entirely by virtue of being off the scale. What I can see is that this work perfects many of the signature elements of Short's style (e.g. conversations, creating a "living" setting, thematic puzzle design) and is truly a masterwork in terms of game design.

What disappoints me is the story side, and the reason is that I was convinced for structural reasons that a different story was being told.

(Spoiler - click to show)
The story that is actually being told is about the intersecting character arcs of Andra and Alex. The situation is such that each perceives a zero-sum game, but in actuality there is a wider range of possible outcomes including negative-sum (as is actually observed in the ending) and possibly positive-sum (as is hinted but not realizable). Each character acts in accordance with his or her own values and priorities, and certain choices -- including the functional climax choice of whom to release from storage -- are between mutually exclusive options that can satisfy only one of the two.

The structure of the work makes me believe that Short was trying to create a genuine tragedy, i.e. a story in which the "right" choices from the perspectives of the characters in the story results in a "wrong" outcome from the perspective of the audience. The key evidence here is that the player must make the climax choice without being able to anticipate the resulting consequences. I scratched my head for a long time about this design element, because as a player of even the most interactive of fiction I feel more like a member of the audience than a genuine actor in the story -- an almost inescapable side-effect of the fact the available actions are always constrained by the finite nature of the embodying program. The design around the story climax did not seem consistent with Short's normal style, but it makes sense as a deliberate choice if the intent was to simulate being the character in a tragedy, i.e. not knowing what the audience knows.

In fact, the "audience" does know the most important and impactful fact affecting the personal drama between Andra and Alex, which is that there is a time limit of unknown length after which their temporary fusion will become permanent. It is clear that neither Andra nor Alex want this outcome, but the game makes it easy to forget this and to ignore that ticking clock in favor of having fun in the moment. (Who doesn't delight in discovering the untalented naval polecat?) Upon reaching the ending, I, too, was in shock alongside the main characters. Like many, I tried different ways to reach the winning state that I assumed must exist, only to later discover that it simply is not provided.

This story doesn't feel like a tragedy to me, it feels only like a bummer ending to an otherwise extremely fun game. (Tellingly, most of Counterfeit Monkey's effusive reviews tend to ignore the endings entirely.) I credit an excellent essay by Drew Cook for elucidating various aspects of tragedies that are essential but which are not provided here. The key quote from the essay sums it up: "Through tragedy, capricious disaster becomes comprehensible and–rather optimistically–a step on a path toward social harmony and cohesion." Among the available endings for Counterfeit Monkey, I felt only the capricious disaster; there seems to be nothing to learn.

Maybe that's not actually true. Maybe the deep message is that we are supposed to keenly observe how the limited perspectives of Andra and Alex make them focus on their short-term conflicts about items of lesser importance to their what-should-be-evitable mutual detriment. The fact that Short ultimately let the structural requirements of a tragic story outweigh the structural requirements of a fun game shows what her priorities were as the author, and this aspect of the work as a whole is good evidence that she was trying to craft something more than "just a game," i.e. entertainment alone.

Until near the end, the story that I felt sure was being told was one about a society whose authority figures have grown unresponsive to its citizenry, and which is on the verge of rediscovering what "democracy" really means. A society in which the power to manipulate symbols is equivalent to the ability to manipulate reality itself. A society whose increasingly authoritarian government knows that its ability to define the symbols is the basis of its control over the populace. Given the background of discontent and the "showdown" scene between a crowd of protesters and a policeman -- a scene so perfectly placed as the climax of an Act II, the resolution of which raises the dramatic tension of the societal conflict that has constantly threatened to break into the foreground -- given that setup, I fully expected the actual climax of the story to be one in which the masses descend on the Bureau's headquarters, interrupting the protagonists' escape plot but allowing the player to use the knowledge gained earlier to tip the balance one way or the other... perhaps at the willfully-paid cost of giving up the chance to reverse the corporal fusion.

As it is, the showdown scene is not foreshadowing, it's just a wonderful study in miniature of the highest potential of IF: a point at which everything that the player has experienced so far begins to resonate with a thrilling emotional and cognitive power so rarely reached in the form. (I personally haven't been so enthralled since "The Puzzle" of Spider and Web.)


Is this Short's best work? As a game, yes, undoubtedly. Counterfeit Monkey is a brilliant resolution of the archetypal conflict between narrative and crossword through skillful synthesis into something more than the sum of its parts -- with a clever meta-wordplay twist, to boot.

As art, though, I'm not so sure, and since it's not just a game, I can't rate it on that basis alone -- I have to take into account the story side at least as much.

My playing group spent a good month talking about this work, debating about the core message(s) it presents. One member was almost 100% on the author's wavelength and laid out an analysis that turned out to be very well supported by Short's own self-commentary when we got to the point of doing research instead of just comparing perceptions. Thus, it seems likely that the narrative part is a complete artistic success for a substantial portion of the audience.

Perhaps the shortfall that I perceive only seems important because the game part is so masterfully done that it comes off (very deceptively) as having been effortless to produce. As other reviewers note, it is an amazing gift to the public for Short to have released this work, her magnum opus, for free, and I don't want to be unappreciative here -- I had a lot of fun playing it, and you will, too. I just can't help but think that there was a missed opportunity to discuss larger aspects of society, aspects that I would have loved to see Short's particular genius explore in more detail -- indeed, aspects that were clearly part of her thought process while creating this work! -- and that doing so would have raised the artistic value of the result considerably. My gut instinct is that this could have been enduring literature of a quality comparable to Ursula K. LeGuin's best if themes about language and its impact on society had been the primary focus instead of just a prominent element. Even though Counterfeit Monkey as a game is an as-yet-incomparable synthesis of narrative and crossword puzzle, it seems to me that there are still greater heights to be reached by interactive fiction -- heights that, if they are ever attained, will be so in part because Emily Short with this work pointed the way.

My natural inclination is to go with 4 stars in acknowledgement of what Counterfeit Monkey might have been, but by the standards of my published rubric there is no doubt that, as a work which is "so incredible it effectively defines the genre or technique that it introduces or perfects," 5 stars are deserved for being the pinnacle of the wordplay puzzler. Kudos to Ms. Short, and thank you.

This is a pretty solidly-implemented short scenario using Inform 6 with the PunyInform library. It has 4500 lines of well-organized source code, which is available for download, and which demonstrates some advanced techniques such as use of a third noun. The PunyInform library has evolved significantly since the version used here (which is 2.4), however, so be advised that some changes may be necessary if adapting the code for your own use.

The review by MathBrush highlights the finicky nature of some parts of the interaction, which significantly detracts from the player experience. In addition to the strict requirements for phrasing, there are certain places in which the game provides feedback that teaches the player the wrong thing. Later in the game, this can be a problem where, as Mark Twain might put it, what interferes with your progress is not what you don't know but what you know that "just ain't so."

A couple of examples of this spring to mind. First, in the opening room: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a mouse hole. The protagonist, though expected to risk the anger of bloodthirsty pirates in the course of reaching the best ending, is too afraid to >SEARCH or >REACH INTO this hole. The >EXAMINE text for the hole implies that it's too dark to see into, but if a lit lamp is available, then a fresh >EXAMINE will discover something inside the hole. However, the >SEARCH and >REACH INTO commands don't change their behavior in response to light, and this seems a bit cruel, especially in the case of >SEARCH (which implicitly involves examining). Second, on the pirate ship: (Spoiler - click to show)While it is strongly hinted that the PC must create a diversion, it's up to the player to figure out how to do this. The correct solution, which involves (Spoiler - click to show)>BURN PILE OF STRAW after relocating it, might be fine if it weren't for a similar object (in the first room) which can't be moved. It's a case where the player being attentive to the game's feedback works against the player's understanding of the game world -- personally, I would think that the first room object was the more portable of the two in the absence of more information. More importantly, there is an opportunity to (Spoiler - click to show)>CUT ROPES which would seem more than satisfactory to create a diversion and would make use of an available inventory item, but for which no response is programmed.

I know that author Garry Francis is a champion of the old school style, and I still regard this game favorably in general, but its design ignores decades of genuine advances in puzzle craft and interaction technique. What essentials would have been lost by a "merciful" design (per the Zarfian scale) for the warehouse sequence, or by having the NPCs be a little less obviously keyword automatons? (Spoiler - click to show)(Harold never even gets up off the floor of the bar even while answering the PC's questions at length, and shows less life than Samuel, who believably passes out after drinking too much of the rum the PC gives him.) Why the occasional attention to admirably small details such as non-essential pieces of the pirate ship, and the presence of some descriptions of smells and sounds, but only about a dozen conversation topics per NPC? (Spoiler - click to show)(On review of the source code, the most talkative NPC -- in terms of available responses -- on land turns out to be Jerome, instead of Harold or Isaac, which surprised me because he seems the least important of the three.)

I'm going with 2 stars on this one because I think Captain Cutter's Treasure has potential that it hasn't quite reached. It really wouldn't have taken much to cross the threshold into 3-star (i.e. "good") territory, some of the items mentioned above would go a long way, and even doubling the topic count (about a dozen responses each) for NPCs and doing other things to add a touch of realism would make the protagonist's situation more convincing.

From the first line, Mud Warriors reads as a gritty war novel. One could call this a stylistic parody, but that description doesn't quite hang right because it's not just imitation for comedic effect.

As the player begins to move through the scenario, the first reaction is pure amusement at the ironic contrast between the style and tone of the prose and the actual setting of the story. It may feel like reading All Quiet on the Western Front or Heart of Darkness, but it's just kids having some after-school fun in the mud... isn't it?

No... not really, no. As the protagonist encounters various teammates and opponents in this crayon doodle of a war, there are story beats that -- if one calls to mind one's worldview from the grade school era -- are actual tragedies at the scale appreciable during childhood: friendships damaged or destroyed, enemies made, promises broken, hopes dashed, seeds of cynicism strewn.

Each of the "warriors" is "playing" the "game" for different reasons. Some are confused but do not question the implicit rightness of anything that they are told is a rule. Some take advantage of the opportunity to unleash aggression without censure or punishment. Some remain eager as ever to please those in charge and accept the sudden change of what defines normal without a second thought, no doubt assuming that any dissonance they feel is a personal problem.

Two figures linger at the edges of the consensus reality shared by all of the other children. The first is the Oracle, a proto-adult, "the archetype of womanhood," whom the protagonist dimly senses has crossed some important threshold and now lives on a plane that he has not yet reached. Her small demesne constitutes a separate universe, one where rules are fluid and deeper principles rein. Already, she understands that some truths are too terrible to be contained in mere words and must be perceived directly to be accepted. She waits patiently and does what she can to help one person at a time, keeper of the bridge between the "living" and the "dead." One wonders: Is she part of the system of rules being imposed, or is she a spontaneous reaction against them?

The second is her functional opposite, "Mike the After-School Supervisor," the only grown-up appearing in the work. He is a figure granted authority by the children but wholly disinterested in fulfilling the responsibilities that he has ostensibly taken on. He sits "cross-legged" on his "spotless" bench, "keeping an eye on the war he’s engineered," a kind of anti-Buddha whose main concern seems to be interacting with his charges as little as possible. (In the wonderful GameBoy adaptation of this work, Mike's attention oscillates between self-congratulation and making a quick buck on the distress that he is packaging as fun. Since that version received the active assistance of author Ryan Veeder, I'm assuming that this characterization is intended to be canonical.)

It is so very poignant that the protagonist seems to consider it simply unthinkable to do anything that would break the rules set by Mike, when it's completely clear to the grown-up player that these rules exist solely for the microcosmic ruler's convenience and benefit. The protagonist understands that something is wrong about the game that he's being compelled to play, but he literally can't conceive the true nature of the causes of his plight.

I asked someone with a PhD in English literature how best to describe Veeder's core narrative device here in technical terms, and it wasn't easy to come up with anything succinct. The irony of the parodic prose style is itself deployed to ironic effect when the story turns out not to be entirely ironic, after all. Does one call this double irony, ironic irony, perhaps meta-irony? I don't know, I just know that I went from laughing about this work to frowning thoughtfully about it. And that the next day, compelled to go through it in detail, I began to feel a bit of awe at Veeder's subtle, dextrous -- even surgical -- skill in crafting it.

There's a long-standing joke about Shakespeare being overrated: "It's just a bunch of moldy old quotes and worn-out cliche." The joke, of course, is that these "old quotes" and cliches originated with Shakespeare in the first place -- it's their genius that has caused them to echo through the ages and be endlessly recycled in lesser works.

Playing Christminster today, it can indeed seem overrated. It's very hard to appreciate how amazing it was in its original context for someone who wasn't there, and because the game had such an impact on the form -- its best ideas diffusing out to redefine the ideal -- most of its achievements are easy to take for granted, if they're even noticed at all.

I had tried this game several times in the past and always put it aside after 20 minutes or so of absolutely zero progress. This time I was determined to get somewhere so eventually broke down and used hints. It felt like pulling teeth to get to the first important solution even then; there are 10 separate hints regarding the critical initial puzzle (fully 22% of all hints provided by the game). When the nature of the puzzle became clear, I found myself swearing out loud.

I went on to finish the game, sometimes running into more brick walls that exacerbated my grumpiness, but in between bouts of that I started to notice some of the work's cleverest parts. After finishing, I prepared a somewhat scathing review enumerating the game's many deficits. It wasn't until I reviewed the varied commentary on the game available from its IFDB page -- and dissected its source for fact-checking purposes -- that I started to have a change of heart. I had expected to find discussion of its flaws, but instead I encountered praise for its innovations in terms of NPC design, puzzle fairness, and story integration.

Before continuing, I am forced to acknowledge is that this is a very well-developed work by the standards of its time, and that it hails from the earliest days of the hobbyist era and therefore long predates modern conventions of player-friendliness. This work set new standards for many aspects of the ideal model of IF, and it did so using a less capable toolset than we have today. STILL... if you're trying to enjoy this game in the here and now, then you may, as I did, find parts of it to be seriously obnoxious. Very probably, you will also, as I did, find parts of it to be uniquely enjoyable and impressive.

If the game has one major problem in its design, it's the overall lack of consistency. To me, consistency is the most essential element of puzzle design and the fundamental backstop of fairness; when an author is consistent, the player can learn his or her style and adjust thinking accordingly. It may take a few cycles of misreading clues to catch on, but usually after two or three one is close enough in mindset to make good progress. If the required perspective is not a natural one, it might be necessary to consult hints or walkthroughs a few more times on the way to completion, but I personally consider a little "spoilage" to be a good tradeoff when the alternative is abandoning the work. After all, puzzles have their own aesthetics, appreciation for them is subjective, and a work of interactive fiction can be judged on other qualities such as story, writing and deftness of implementation.

Christminster lacks the necessary consistency in many places, and it was infuriating whenever one of these bare spots brought progress crashing to a halt. The thing is: Upon further study many of what I thought were gaps in the implementation turned out to be just gaps in my understanding rooted in incorrect assumptions. These assumptions were ones that I had made for what I thought were good reasons, and it may be worthwhile to share why.

The prologue puzzle, which consists of getting into the college, is a study in miniature. In a recent Rosebush article, Victor Gijsbers illustrates the way that this puzzle embodies the spirit of exclusion animating the fictional setting of Biblioll, but I hesitate to give credence to the idea that its design was consciously intended to do so.

(Spoiler - click to show)The game does not exactly play fair here. While a survey of the environs quickly gives the experienced player the idea that it might be possible to get a feather from the parrot to use in obtaining the key, and the interaction takes pains to alert the unobservant player to the existence of a suitable missile, the coding of the two NPCs offers no similar cluing. Indeed, their algorithms give every indication of being simple, typical-for-the-era automatons engaged in cyclic activity, and little else.

Although the player is obviously invited to interact with them by their very presence, the NPCs' ASK/TELL conversation capability is sparsely implemented and doesn't add much to their apparent intelligence. After a few low hit-rate "conversations" there seems to be little else to do with them. To the extent that either shows any goal-directed behavior, it's that the constable always shows up and lingers indefinitely when you are in the vicinity of the window. The source code, graciously provided by author Gareth Rees, shows that this behavior is intentional, and it yields the strong impression that the constable is keeping a special eye on the PC as a possible source of trouble.

There is some slight hinting that the constable is interested in the magic show, but his obvious puzzle-relevant behavior implies that he prioritizes his watchman duties over casual entertainment. This, in combination with the street magician's explicit request for a small item for his trick -- along with the wholly irrelevant interaction he exhibits with any of the three smallish objects obviously available during the prologue (i.e. cobblestone, telegram and map) -- all provide consistent feedback that there is no significant progress to be had from them.

The single solution is for the PC to give her handbag to the street magician, who will refuse to use it in the trick but will provide a toffee in response. The toffee can be given to the constable, and the constable told to give it to the street magician, who will proceed to go through his routine with it before the constable eats it.

But... so what? Even if this interaction is discovered (most likely through brute force interaction), there is nothing in the prior behavior of the constable to suggest that he will simply forget all about his duties and remain transfixed while the PC goes about a bit of ballistic vandalism. The constable's part of the dialogue exhibits the same sort of detached chipperness that he has in all interactions with the protagonist, and there's nothing to signal any particular level of fascination on his part.

I'm not sure that this solution would ever have occurred to me, though I suppose I might have eventually discovered -- purely accidentally -- that a period exists in which the PC can act in the critical site unobserved. Perhaps this is a cultural difference; perhaps it would simply be unthinkable in Britain for a police officer to leave a peformance abruptly in order to prioritize doing his job. However, I agree with Gijsbers that this feels like an intentional (if not conscious) design element, which strikes me as an attempt to turn away the casual player.

Even worse, having secured the feather, the don -- who sleeps like the dead up to this point -- almost immediately wakes up after the PC takes his key. It's necessary to wait through another cycle of the street magician's patter to get to where he is asking for an object, then grab the key and pass it to the magician. The magician will cooperate in hiding it, and the don will wildly accuse you of having stolen it, resulting in the don's arrest and the removal of both the don and the constable from the scene.

This is a functionally separate obstacle, and coming back-to-back with the distraction puzzle it effectively negates any sense of victory that the player might have had in gaining the key. It almost feels like truculence on the game's part. Opening puzzles set a game's tone and style, and shape player expectations. In this case, my own expectations were shaped to expect maximum pointless friction, making finishing the game into an unappealing prospect.

I have thoroughly spoiled that puzzle because it is, it turns out, considerably out-of-character with respect to the majority of the other puzzles found in the game. (Spoiler - click to show)(... Though on reflection, there does seem to be a divide in the fairness level between puzzles that involve the environment and puzzles that involve NPCs; the latter frequently provide feedback to the player that seems misleading in nature. Perhaps that says something about the author's view of human nature?) Although there are a handful of what I would label last lousy points to be had, these are described by the author as optional, and the ending is in no way affected by missing them beyond showing a lower final score. (Note that although I am a completionist at heart, I would not recommend trying to suss out these last points at the game's command prompt. They are by far the least fair puzzles in the game, and they collectively would suggest a certain thread of perverse cruelty running through the design if they had any impact on the best ending.)

Once past the wicket gate, the game's greatest weakness is its firm commitment to offering only the mathematically minimum possible hinting. I observe that this approach seems to be typical of British games, but, in general, coupled with that style is the notion that the player should never be in a position to say that the necessary information was not presented. The high art of the mode is presenting the needed information in a manner so subtle that someone not paying close attention can easily miss it. Fair is fair, and in several cases I was simply outfoxed. However, in a couple of situations I think Rees provides too few hints to be fair for plot-critical challenges. These are:

1. The bible -- (Spoiler - click to show) Here I'm talking about both the illuminated copy found in the Chapel and the standard King James version that can be found in the Library. Obtaining the latter is one of the unfair last lousy point puzzles: The player is expected to look up 'God' in the card index to find it, and this is the only way to obtain the item. (This is an index of surnames, mind you, and variants that one might expect based on actual names for the deity are not found.) Comparison of a critical passage of the KJV to the illuminated copy's version will give the linguistically-oriented player an indirect clue about a key alchemical ingredient. Lacking the ability to read Latin -- something that presents no real obstacle in the era of online translators but required an increasingly-rare classical education at the time of the game's release -- the player must get along with some knowledge of root words to compare the English version and notice the extra phrase in the illuminated version. As a last-ditch option, one can theoretically just notice the word 'myrrheum' and assume it means myrrh, but the first time this is encountered the player is unlikely to know that myrrh can be found in the game and is probably unmotivated to try deciphering each incomprehensible word individually. Later, at the point at which the player is most likely to want to revisit the passage in-game, it's gated by a second aggravating puzzle involving the beekeeper's veil. (The problem here stems from the treatment of hat and veil as a single object in the description text, i.e. responding identically to both >X HAT and >X VEIL. Per modern conventions, this generally means that the object in question is atomic and indivisible, but I don't know how consistently that was the case in the mid-1990s. Without assuming malice, I'll just note that it's very much a "gotcha" for the player of today.)

2. The student and the professor -- (Spoiler - click to show)On first encountering this NPC, you'll see the following: "'You must help me to find my parrot,' pleads Edward. 'Just tell me which way I should go.'" In obeying your directional instructions, it's implied that he is for some reason willing to submit to your authority temporarily, but he is prone to wander off immediately after going any direction that you give. Telling him to wait or stop doesn't seem to do anything. He will respond to only a few non-movement commands, and in only one case will he actually perform the action. It's made abundantly clear that he has no desire to see Bungay, even blanching should they happen to cross paths in the aftermath of the scene in Malcolm's room, and it's also made clear that Bungay keeps his door locked and wants no visitors. It really seems to require a latent desire to punish the hapless student to even conceive of the goal of forcing him to his "supervision," since it's not possible to know that the only method of entering the gardens is through Bungay's quarters. Even after having read the solution in the walkthrough, I was grinding my teeth in annoyance trying to shepherd Edward across the map and get the timing right to trigger their encounter -- a process made even more gratuitously difficult by the need to not be there when Bungay opens his door. It turns out that >EDWARD, FOLLOW ME does wonders to smooth this process -- I just didn't guess that he would be capable of responding, and I hadn't read the introductory help text that uses the >FOLLOW verb as an example. Most importantly, there does not appear to be any way to know that Bungay's door will be unlocked after inviting in the student; I double-checked, and there is not even the "negative information" cue of there being a different sound (e.g. minus the locking action) when the professor closes his door. Parked squarely on the critical path for the game, this sequence is even more off-putting than the prologue. Further, the method for gaining access to the desk drawer, an optional puzzle yielding a pair of last lousy points, requires moving the desk. Moving desks is a pretty noisy activity -- obviously not something to do when trying to be stealthy, as the PC well knows -- and doing so gives no indication that the drawer is now accessible. Only inspecting the drawer from within the gap will reveal the possibility.

Those aren't the only problematic points in the work, but they are the ones that caused me the most grief. Every snag that I encountered arose from either a complete absence of hinting (or hinting so miniscule as to blend in with other insignificant text) or implementation that provides no relevant feedback (or sometimes misleading feedback). I won't nitpick here, but my suggestion to prospective players would be to set a time limit in advance for being stuck, and to consult the hints whenever that limit is reached; this will give you a chance to experience the best parts of the game without undergoing too much frustration.

I suppose the laundry list of complaints above may seem hard to reconcile with my ostensibly positive attitude about the game. The thing is: Christminster has highs to match its lows. Rees shows in several places that he can craft subtle, inventive and unique puzzles whose solutions are pure delights to discover and for which the hinting is unquestionably fair. I'm intentionally going to say nothing about these gems, because I want you, the reader, to be able to discover and experience them without prejudice.

To explain more fully: I realize that it's tremendously unjust to criticize Rees for not solving every problem that plagued the old school style in one stroke. This game incorporates many features that may well be firsts for the form: automatic opening of doors (which required modification of the Standard Library), use of narrative time as opposed to clock time in a story spanning both day and night, reasonably intelligent "talking" NPCs with whom realistic cooperation is necessary to solve puzzles, objects used as part of the solution to multiple puzzles, alternate solutions to some key puzzles, and more. Having inspected the solid and well-organized source code, it appears that most of what I'm calling shortcomings could be addressed by either trivial or very modest effort. I'm mostly in agreement with Jim Kaplan's review, and I think he's right that with such minor adjustments in place Christminster would be very well-regarded were it to be released for the first time today.

Though this game often falls short of my idea of real fun when considered as a whole, there is much to admire in the best craft on display, and even its flaws offer pointed lessons in what to avoid (as well as opportunities to imagine alternatives). It is indisputably worth studying as part of a review of the history and evolution of the form, and any player willing to accept its contrasts with respect to modern ideas of fairness is sure to have an enjoyable experience. I'm torn between wanting to give it 3 stars for how it plays by modern standards and 4 stars for how prominently it stands out in the context of its original release. I'm going with the latter on the basis of its substantial impact on the form; if nothing else, this is a work to reckon with.

Having been recently alerted to this remake/adaptation, I moved its inspiration up on my to-play list, and as soon as I had finished that, I loaded this up to compare.

This game isn't really interactive fiction, but it's certainly IF-adjacent, and the fact that it exists at all is pretty awesome. I have nothing but admiration for the skill and determination shown in carrying this idea through from conception to a finished game. Substantial thought was invested in how to translate the original work's mood and mechanics to a different format, and it's clear that the author had a genuine love for Veeder's source material. Thank you to Lance Campbell for sharing this, and thank you Ryan Veeder for supporting the effort.

I'm not sure how well this version stands up when considered purely on its own. Some of the nuance of the original's atmospheric writing is lost in the graphical interpretation, and the not-quite-faux grittiness that makes up the emotional backbone of the original doesn't quite come through. On the other hand, there are many novel bits here that hew closely to the original's dialog and descriptive style, and there are a few touches (like the ending credits sequence) that wouldn't be possible with pure text. There's the hint of a secret side quest of some sort -- (Spoiler - click to show)I found an item that seemed like it was supposed to be part of something bigger, but if so I never found the other parts that went with it. If you know the secret, please provide some clues by comment!

As a reminder, 3 stars counts as "good" in my book, and I would definitely recommend this game to anyone that enjoyed the original Mud Warriors. Both can be played in the time that would normally be spent on a single comp-sized work.

Monopoly is one of the most popular games in American history. There's something telling about modern culture's inattention to history in the fact that many years passed between when I was first introduced to the game as an enjoyable pastime and my discovery that the game's designer intended it to be an object lesson-in-action of the inherent flaws in capitalism as an econonomic system.

If one actually plays Monopoly according to the rules as written, it is inevitable that from among a group of players all starting on an objectively even playing field only one will emerge as the sum holder of all wealth in the model universe. That result is simply baked into the system -- there's no avoiding it, and that's what playing Monopoly is supposed to teach the player. It also teaches various skills related to improving the chances of being the player who comes out on top, though the nature of the game ensures that there's never any real certainty until late in the trajectory of a particular play session.

Social Democracy: An Alternate History feels very much like Monopoly, both in that it plays like a board game and that it has a lesson to teach. Here the lesson seems to be about the essential fragility of democracy-like government and the functional priority of economic concerns in determining societal stability. You play the animus of the SPD, a "moderate" and "socialist" party that, despite a plurality of popular support at the outset, seems inevitably doomed to lose as the country suffers a series of economic and political shocks.

I've only played Social Democracy a few times, on normal difficulty. As other reviewers note, the simulation feels well-grounded in historical research -- I have learned a surprising amount about the Weimar era just from following up on key people and events online, and the work presents an extensive bibliography that invites more serious study. Needless to say, this work does not present the History Channel style of faux history that usually paints Hitler's rise as the result of some mysterious magical power over the German people; instead it shows the confluence of many trends in interwar history -- including the history of the SPD itself -- and how they shape both the choices available and the consequences of each decision.

As with Monopoly, both strategic choices and lucky breaks compound over the course of time. As the political pressure builds, the player will inevitably come to the point where the party's mode of survival is threatened. The resolution of that threat can take various forms, each imposing tradeoffs that will shape the range of viable strategies available in later parts. Will you sponsor strong socialist approaches involving state control of the means of production and the pruning of private wealth? OK, but then the "conservative" elements of the "centrist" coalition will become enemies, and support from the communist party is likely to be restrained at best. Will you throw in with the right wingers in an attempt to prevent the far right from gaining a foothold? OK, but then you will soon find yourself an ineffectual puppet supporting policies that are in direct opposition to your base's desires, and they will react accordingly. Will you stick to your historically "middle ground" position and try to ride out the storm? OK, but you will in all likelihood find the storm to be stronger than you anticipated and your steersman skills to be insufficient to come through intact.

These are just a few of the trajectories supported by the game's system. The list of achievements and various clumps of related cards suggest that there are many more. I'm looking forward to trying quite a few of them, and seeing what unconventional strategies are supported by the system that author Autumn Chen has created. Mike Russo's comparison to one of Paradox Entertainment's grand strategy games is apt, and if you like that sort of thing then you won't want to miss this. For those looking for something more directly comparable, Chen has also just released a similar treatment of the Russian Revolution.

While I don't personally think this game falls under the label of "interactive fiction," it does fit under the broader umbrella I assign to the phrase "text games." It's worth emphasizing that the label is secondary to the thing itself, and that this thing, whatever you choose to call it, is well worth your time. I'm giving it a rare 5-star rating in recognition of its singular value as edutainment; it is surely the apex of that category for works found on IFDB.