Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

The intriguing title and premise of Crystal and Stone, Beetle and Bone seem to draw a fair amount of interest (with over 50 people having put it on their wishlists), but not many people seem to complete the game (only 10 people having marked it as played). The first and only work published by author Jenny Brennan, it does an admirable job of avoiding first-timer foibles and presents itself as a fairly lush setting complemented by above-average coding (especially considering that it is written in Inform 6).

In this work you play a deity -- a much-weakened monotheistic deity with fairly limited powers. In fact, the bulk of your influence on the world comes via your lone remaining follower, Lornedei, whom you granted certain abilities at birth which are now coming to fruition. You must guide Lornedei in her quest, which is oddly unspecified despite the fact that you are the one bestowing it. As the player, you are told only that the people of the world do not see a "coming darkness," so discovering and addressing this becomes the natural goal.

The world is presented in a rich, multi-sensory manner, and locations are lovingly described in terms of light, color, sounds and smells. There is lore to be found, and artifacts of the past, which together slowly tell the story of a catacylsmic change and a world left out of balance. There are many creatures with whom Lornedei will interact, helping or hindering her in her journey.

As play progresses, it turns out that you are not the only influence on the world... or on Lornedei. In her travels she can come under the sway of a malign entity, or simply become distracted with worldly matters. Interestingly, the work allows completion of the story under these altered states, with corresponding consequences for the fictional world. As the player, playing god, you will make the ultimate decisions.

CSBB is extremely player-friendly, with an in-world hint system (in the form of a summonable talking firefly) that provides strong nudges via ASK/TELL interaction. There is also a complete walkthrough available in-game, delivered in segments upon request, which describes how to reach the multiple endings. The limited lore divulged in the story hints at a deeper structure that is not made explicit. This grants a dreamlike quality to the work, which is enhanced by the intuition-based logic governing many puzzles. The author's voice is slightly inconsistent, occasionally breaking through with bits of detached and/or denigrating humor. An examination of decompiled code suggests that many possibilities(Spoiler - click to show) (e.g. your death at Lornedei's hands, her willing self-immolation, or surrender to and cooperation with the forces of darkness) are possible for the player who does not wish to see a conventional happy ending.

Although this game was enjoyable and interesting in its "standard fantasy" mode, it does have some flaws. There are bugs to be found, even in version 4, as well as various typographical errors. None of them are very serious, though it is possible to crash the game via stack overflow when (Spoiler - click to show)messing around too much with pouring water on things, so save often. (This advice is especially important since, though I believe the game is not intended to be so, it is "cruel" on the Zarfian scale due to what may be programming errors. See the ClubFloyd transcript for an example of a "stuck" scenario.) Some objects seem to be red herrings. The largest flaw is that it seems slightly incomplete -- truncated in certain aspects, whether due to the author's weariness or wariness. It is compelling enough to recommend to those who aren't disappointed by loose ends, and it is worth study by would-be authors for its implementation style, which provides a smooth gameplay experience.

Balances is labeled as a demo for Inform 6 (originally developed for Inform 5), and was distributed as such along with its source code when the language was in its early stages of adoption. Magnus Olsson notes in his review that discussion of the game (for it was widely regarded as a small game instead of a demo) produced "the first big flamewar of rec.arts.int-fiction" due to the "enormous" debate over the fairness of its puzzles.

It is interesting that the copyright notice for the game lists the years 1994, 1995 and 1996. I assume that release 1 made its debut in 1994. The following year saw the release of Nelson's influential essay "The Craft of Adventure," which includes his famed Bill of Player's Rights.

What I'm finding most surprising is the contrast between the two. I wonder how much the debate over this not-quite-game directly shaped Nelson's views about what constitutes fairness. There are several direct contradictions between the game itself and the Bill, namely:

2. Not to be given horribly unclear hints -- (Spoiler - click to show)The historical note from Olsson suggests that this one is arguable. I can't cite anything that qualifies unambiguously, but I can say that I did not find the "critical puzzle that hinges on a pun" to be "delightful."

3. To be able to win without experience of past lives -- (Spoiler - click to show)This may be technically true about Balances, but it seems extremely unlikely in practice. Showing up at the temple and learning after the fact that each cube should have been marked on acquisition (specifically, with their circumstance of origin) was not amusing, though in theory I could have marked them then and then taken 100+ moves to try all combinations. Perhaps those more familiar with Spellbreaker would have found it natural to do this immediately.

4. To be able to win without knowledge of future events -- (Spoiler - click to show)See #3 above.

5. Not to have the game closed off without warning -- (Spoiler - click to show)I hope that when you read 'Now the furniture is matchwood...' in the opening room you decided to >X FURNITURE instead of >X MATCHWOOD, or you might have gotten the impression that no such object was implemented, as is the case for just about every other scenery object. If you didn't, and you later >RIDE HORSE, then congratulations -- you have closed off the game! It's possible to get back to the starting location after the horse only if one has done this, in which case there is no need to do so.

6. Not to need to do unlikely things -- (Spoiler - click to show)To get the most difficult cube, one must take pains to win a stuffed pink elephant, then use a reversed spell on it to try to make it dangerous. Why would anyone be motivated to do that except by metalogic? Also, there is a sharp contrast between the Bill's advice that 'If you intend the player to stay somewhere for a while, put something intriguing there.' and the need to wait an indeterminate amount of time on an empty road to get a key item.

9. To be allowed reasonable synonyms -- (Spoiler - click to show)See #5 above. Also, I spent a frustrating span trying to figure out how to refer to the numbered tickets, which must have the form >TAKE TICKET 1234 instead of just >TAKE 1234.

Notably, at the tail end of the Bill, Nelson admits via footnote that "[L]ike any good dictator, I prefer drafting constitutions to abiding by them." Perhaps the disagreement between theory and practice was intentional. (I can't quite buy into the "it was only ever just a demo" argument; compare and contrast with other early Inform demo programs such as "Toyshop," which make no pretense of being games.)

In the context of its original release, Balances was surely a marvel -- a vignette of Infocom-level quality IF demonstrating techniques that recreated classic gameplay and which would become widely emulated. Olsson's contemporary advice to "current and future IF authors," which urges them to "not to use this spellcasting system in their games," is ironic in view of the numerous Infocom-style spellcasting games that were released in the wake of Balances, many of which no doubt cribbed from the example of its source code. Nelson's Bill of Player's Rights also became hugely influential, shifting trends in the direction of the modern "player-friendly" style very early on in the hobbyist era. My two-star rating reflects the very uneven quality of Balances as a game, which is handily surpassed by any of Nelson's better-known titles. Though I'd recommend this work as an object of study for its historical significance (and for its source code, which is beautifully direct and compact), its value as a game is dubious.

[Side note: Balances release 5 was constantly crashing for me under Gargoyle (i.e. the Bocfel interpreter), though admittedly my version is a bit out of date. I had to play it in Frotz, which produced several error warnings but did not crash.]

This is an enjoyable short puzzle game with an interesting mechanic, but it doesn't do much to realize its author-declared inspiration.

One can't discuss details without spoilers, so...

(Spoiler - click to show)
Per author Leonard Richardson's post-mortem, the original inspiration of this game took the following form:

"I had a silly idea which I was just about to start experimenting with, when I came up with an even sillier idea: a game which changed its version number as you played it. As I conceived it, you would start at the latest version, and as the version number slid inexorably downwards, objects would disappear, typos would pop up, and previously fixed bugs would come back like Jason back for another try."

The concept is intriguing! However, the author elaborates that: "It took about thirty seconds for me to connect this idea with the 'world in decay' scenario often seen in fantasy games."

I don't personally see the connection, and while I think the plot that Richardson invented for the game is clever and compelling, it doesn't quite jibe with the core mechanic of steadily reducing the version number of the game as it is being played. "Going back in time" in the game universe means something very different than "going back in time" in ours, so the metaphor doesn't really work.

There is certainly room for exploration with respect to themes of disintegrating reality (see Shade, for example, or the works of Philip K. Dick), but the regression of the protagonist's world to bare Inform 6 object implementations doesn't do this. The protagonist has no ability to understand it, and the player's understanding has no bearing on gameplay. The two conceptual schemes just seem totally divorced from one another -- not even books on Logick and Algorisms (or tomes on Conceptes Metaphysickal) in the baron's study to create a tenuous bridge.


Taken on its most basic terms, this is a relatively quick experience that makes for a fun enough bite-sized adventure. I only found one small bug: an issue with looking under an arm-chair that seems to be the result of a backwards condition in the logic that produces the response. A rather large amount of work went into what amounts to an extended Easter egg(Spoiler - click to show), or perhaps in this case an Easter Ham. It's definitely worth playing the game and examining its source code, which the author has graciously supplied.

[Update: As the author points out in comments, this review is based on an early release of the game, which has since been substantially revised. Also, I did find the game to be likable overall in its earlier form. Readers are advised to take both of those facts under consideration. I've removed my rating from the game's average.]

Inform 7 makes it easier than ever to code a game. It remains difficult to make a good game.

This is very clearly a first effort. Michael J. Coyne's list of "First-Timer Foibles" remains relevant, and this work earns a CQ (Coyne Quotient) of 6 for items 2, 9, 11, 12, 14 and 15.

It's hard to take this game very seriously on its self-proclaimed merits. The functional plot (i.e. what you experience as a player) seems more concerned with offering guided tours (especially around Ohio) than being a spy thriller. (I will admit that I found this to be something of a saving grace; some interesting facts are presented, which will probably be among the most memorable parts of the play experience.) The game also seems pre-occupied with paying homage to Infocom, Star Wars, Narnia, and various (presumably real) food establishments, to the detriment of its focus and continuity. In fulfilling the PC's mission and/or scoring all points, you will: (Spoiler - click to show)visit a pun-oriented maze; build a bonfire using flint, steel and 69,105 leaves; visit a privately-owned (and ostensibly secret?) space station; fly to Africa to retrieve a MacGuffin from a villain conveniently hanging out in one of the handful of locations there (using a weapon retrieved from the Oval Office, no less!); craft a lightsaber; enjoy a parade of junk food and sweets; visit several architecturally-significant buildings; make use of a divinely-delivered laser; find, wear and use a magical pendant; and do something else worth 2 points that I never figured out. Are you intrigued? If so, read on.

There are many "puzzles" that are pointless. They qualify for the term only because they are things one must do to score points; their impact on the world state with respect to the ostensible plot seems to be zero. These appear to originate solely as artifacts of the process of learning to code, and not as part of an integrated design of puzzle and story. (In fact, the points awarded for following the mission are a small fraction of the intended total.) While anyone new to coding can appreciate the thrill of victory felt when overcoming early technical challenges, such learning exercises are generally not appropriate to include in the final game. The adage "Be ready to kill your darlings." applies. (An aside: My final score was 352 out of a possible 214. There is a scoring bug in which a 10-point award can be repeated indefinitely.)

Certain other "puzzles" are classic examples of poor puzzle design in the vein of mind reading and/or guess-the-verb. The very worst offender here is the command needed to reboot a computer: (Spoiler - click to show)>CONTROL-ALT-DELETE. A close second is the command required to get out of a VR simulation: (Spoiler - click to show)>BLINK RAPIDLY. (Technically, there's something that might be counted as a clue -- by British puzzle fiends only -- for the latter. The VR environment seems totally optional, anyway.)

I note that the >CREDITS list "TBD" as beta tester. Obtaining beta testing is almost universally regarded as a prerequisite for a serious-minded public release, and its lack is keenly felt. I get the strong impression that this game was originally written for private circulation (in large part because it seems to contain a cryptic marriage proposal -- (Spoiler - click to show)"The display says: '01101101 01100001 01110010 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101101 01100101'" [which for the lazy translates into ASCII as "marry me"]). Based on the blurb, it's now intended to serve as publicity for the author's novels set in the same universe.

The fictional world presented borders on absurdist in its outlook. Here is the description of the President of the United States: "President Bridget O’Connor is a wise leader. She was formally the head of the NSA. The President is aware of Quotient’s operations." (Yes, "formally.") And here's that of the Prime Minister (presumably of the UK): "Prime Minister Jason Stevenson is a skilled martial artist in addition to an ingenious political leader." I could not help but interpret items like these as comedy.

All that said, I'm giving this work two stars, which I will note translates roughly as "has some positives but needs improvement." It is exuberant, yes, and silly -- but I still found myself liking it more than not. Your mileage may vary. I wish the author luck, and we can all hope that the recipient of the marriage proposal said yes.

The King of Shreds and Patches is the only published work by author Jimmy Maher, who is mostly likely familiar to readers as the author of The Digital Antiquarian, a blog about the history of videogames. His sole contribution to the form has faded somewhat from the popular consciousness after generating significant buzz at the time of its release 15 years ago.

Other reviews highlight the game's standout features for its era, notably its size, its included tutorial, its astounding level of quality for a debut work, its success in crafting a gripping player experience (being frequently labeled a "page turner"), and most especially the unusual sense of freedom that the player feels when directing the protagonist's actions. Many also mark its >THINK command -- which produces something akin to a quest log -- as a notable innovation in the world of IF even though similar features had long been a part of computer games in general. Few take note of the game's lingering minor bugs, or its inclusion of a music puzzle (which was perhaps the first of its kind). This review will focus on the techniques used by Maher to create the work's much-lauded sense of freedom.

Maher's fundamental achievement in producing this game is that The King of Shreds and Patches is a marvelous translation of the essential RPG experience to an IF format. The essence of the RPG play experience is that the players exert continuous influence on the simulated situation, and the game master judges how this influence (and also typically random influence from dice) affects the simulated situation in ways large and small. This RPG-style approach is the basis from which the game's sense of freedom derives, which I would argue is actually in part the mislabeling of a sense of agency.

Before proceeding a brief aside about Call of Cthulhu (aka CoC), the RPG on which King is based, is in order. The design of this RPG is unusual in that its mechanics undermine the pattern of campaign play with enduring characters. Rather than being focused on the growth of characters' skills and abilities as they surmount various challenges, a key principle of CoC is that player characters degrade over the course of play, their brushes with the supernatural causing their sanity to fray and eventually dissolve into madness. This mechanic subtly shifts the central focus of the experience for the table-top player in that satisfaction comes less from the reward accumulating to their avatar and more from the personal pride in having run the gauntlet to resolve the mystery plot presented by the game master. (Spoiler - click to show)(And it is always a mystery -- though of course not too much of a mystery, since one can be pretty sure to find guttural languages, malevolent cults, and plenty of tentacles on the other side of the veil -- because that's the only kind of plot well-supported by the mythology of CoC's inspirational source material.) Luckily for the player, Maher basically ignores the core mechanic; should the PC go too far in courting madness, the player is treated to one of the game's many possible deaths, but the PC never accumulates impairment.

If "mystery" is the noun, then "investigate" is the verb, and it's of interest here that what other RPGs call "characters" are referred to as "investigators" in CoC. King recounts an investigation conducted by the PC, which begins with the unexpected discovery of (Spoiler - click to show)the corpse of a friend recently returned to town and, after unraveling a tangled web of malevolent intrigue (as is typical for Lovecraftian stories), culminates in an event of potentially worldshaking proportions.

Framed as an investigation, King makes use of the kinds of tropes common to police procedurals, film noir, murder mysteries, and political thrillers. Scenes come in three basic flavors: forensic, in which the PC must explore a physical site to uncover clues about what has occurred there; interrogation, in which the PC must evoke information from other characters and try to correlate their potentially unreliable statements; and action, in which the PC's life is threatened by the forces with which he is interfering or physical forces that oppose his investigative action. King interweaves these three types of scenes in a seemingly loose manner that slowly but inexorably constrains player freedom in order to accelerate the pacing toward the climax. The author's website for the game claims that the plot is driven by "a sophisticated drama management system." The exact nature of this system isn't clear, but in a very recent interview, Maher implies that it relies heavily on Inform 7's scene mechanism. In broad strokes, at least part of the drama management seems baked into the structure of the scenario's plot itself.

As an RPG scenario, there is (as with IF) an expectation of a certain degree of latitude in the manner in which the investigation is conducted by the player, and the design of the scenario must accommodate that. As a narrative, there are (as with a novel or film) expectations that the action will rise, key tensions will be resolved in a climax, and elements receiving focus will be meaningful to the story being told. The basic incompatibility of these goals is the bane of both RPG scenario design and interactive fiction design, because freedom of action means freedom to dawdle, requiring the author to surrender some control over pacing -- and pacing is one of the most essential elements of any story. As noted elsewhere, horror is especially dependent on pacing, and this makes horror IF very difficult to do well. I agree with edgerunneralexis's review that the pacing of King is all wrong for Lovecraftian horror, and that the exposition in that first forensic scene is too much, too soon. The King of Shreds and Patches is less horror than it is a kind of supernatural noir, and it is well-paced for a noir story, undergoing a slow transformation from open-ended exploration to purposeful goal-driven action over time.

While the ability to dawdle is a form of freedom, it is not a meaningful freedom because exercising it amounts to not actually playing the game. Instead, the sense of freedom is enabled through offering multiple meaningful avenues to explore in the game's early parts while at the same time keeping careful track of the PC's actual trajectory through the possible story space. Maher has done a tremendous amount of work to not just accommodate but actually leverage the combinatorial explosion of world states that such freedom necessarily entails.

It is easy to underestimate the magnitude of this task. Sure, a human GM must juggle all of the facts emerging from the player's choices, but as a static program King must anticipate many possible paths. As Maher himself puts it in the recent interview, the original CoC scenario was "written for a game master who is sitting there at a table with the other players and can improvise all of that stuff. Well, there’s no improvising going on in a computer game. You have to hard code everything." This is in no way a new problem for IF, but I think that Maher did achieve a genuinely new solution to it. Through his innovative approach and the hard work that he put in over the two years plus of the game's development, he implemented a plot that feels extraordinarily elastic compared to typical interactive fiction. In effect, he ensured that the game can act as a virtual game master of a quality in some ways comparable to a human, preserving the flexibility that enables players to feel free.

King eschews puzzles for puzzles sake. The hours of gameplay experienced in King are almost entirely taken up by participation in the plot, which unfolds over several in-game days, each day being concluded after achievement of a plot goal. Later goals are dependent upon earlier ones being completed, but their structure is convergent instead of linear, so while players have a large degree of freedom in choosing which order to pursue early goals, the line of investigation will naturally and inevitably lead to the scenario's single focus: the apex of a pyramid of goals.

The daily day/night cycle of narrative time works in tandem with that pyramid. Time management is usually a factor in any tabletop RPG adventure, with time being treated as a resource that can be misspent as any other. King imposes a sleep requirement on the PC, similar to that of Anchorhead in that after a certain amount of plot advancement (in this case, achievement of one of the available goals) time advances to the end of the day. The daily cycle very naturally creates chapter-style breaks in the play experience, each of which immediately follows a significant plot development and so makes a good time to save the game and put it aside for a while to ruminate. These pauses are a real benefit to the player in a long work such as this, but, as the player and protagonist begin to understand the forces at work behind the scenes, they also begin to understand that those forces are moving even while the PC sleeps.

After a few game days of apparent freedom, the drama management begins to kick in: (Spoiler - click to show)The PC receives a note from a former love interest asking for help. This is a key inflection point in the plot -- the moment when events outside the protagonist's control will begin to drive the pacing. The day/night cycle is also cleverly used to accelerate the plot in the mid-game, when (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist oversleeps through most of a day after his trials in the Act II climax, the fictional premier of Hamlet. At this point the player knows enough to know that time matters, will still have a substantial checklist of to-do items, and will know that (Spoiler - click to show)the loss of a day means a significant opportunity cost. The effect of this light touch in ratcheting up the tension is brilliant, a masterful method of achieving rising action for Act III. Time is now working against the protagonist and by proxy the player, forcing both into a reactive mode as events proceed out of sight but far from out of mind.

While these two technical aspects, the goal system and the day/night cycle, support each other in creating a well-paced rising action story, the third pillar of the game's illusory freedom (and semi-illusory agency) is its knowledge tracking system, which is very well done and fairly detailed. The game frequently interjects bits of past experience into the conversations with NPCs -- a form of exposition that hovers somewhere between showing and telling the player about connections to be made. More importantly than its expository function, however, is that it in doing so the game affirms the player's choices even if only by simply acknowledging what has gone before. These are the "ways small" by which the game acknowledges the human player's influence, and they are the key to the illusions of agency and freedom.

Though the freedom is illusory, the choices are not, and King does offer players a wide range of choices. The game is inflexible about the protagonist's involvement with a key NPC, but it is extremely flexible about how the player chooses to conduct the PC's side of the relationship. (Spoiler - click to show)There is support for stances ranging from the bare minimum required by the honor of a disinterested gentleman to ardent hope of rekindling romance to bitter indifference to her ultimate fate. Even the final segment feels fluid, and according to Maher there are "a dozen or more paths through the end game in particular." Although some endings are "bad" endings by conventional standards, in the context of the scenario many of them are satisfying. In this aspect the game is similar to a typical RPG scenario; the player feels like a complete story was delivered, one in which events played out in response to a balance of forces of which the protagonist's actions were only a part.

King also reflects the tabletop RPG style via a carefully calibrated "cruelty" (in the Zarfian scale sense). In the recent interview, Maher indicates that he was critical of the trend toward "merciful" games that prevailed at the time of King's development and has since become the norm: "By the 2000s there were a lot of games that would not let you screw up... I remember at the time it struck me as 'wrong' somehow. If you wanted to do something blatantly stupid, then I would let you do it. Because my idea was that this was an interactive game. I want[ed] it to be responsive to what you were doing." The freedom for the player to "screw up" is a core aesthetic of tabletop RPGs, and GM advice to let players make mistakes is frequently proffered in introductory materials. In TSR's The Keep on the Borderlands what is surely one of the most widely read versions of this advice is found (emphasis in original): "Just as the referee of a sporting event, the DM must be fair. He or she cannot be 'out to get the players', nor should he or she be on their side all the time. The DM must be neutral. If a party has played well and succeeded, the DM should not punish them by sending more and more monsters at them or thwart their plans; on the other hand, if the players have acted foolishly, they should get their 'just rewards'." The same source stresses (emphasis in original): "The players must be allowed to make their own choices. Therefore, it is important that the DM give accurate information, but the choice of action is the players’ decision."

Although the work presents an investigation driven by narrative time, it is quite possible to miss significant pieces of evidence. This, too, conforms to tabletop RPG play patterns. To quote again from The Keep on the Borderlands: "Information should never be given away that the characters have not found out - secret doors may be missed, treasure or magic items overlooked, or the wrong question asked of a townsperson." King is happy to oblige for the first type of mistake during forensic scenes (though the output of >THINK will warn the player that something has been missed), but is much less so for NPC conversations during interrogation scenes, and this may be one of the work's significant faults. The prompted ASK/TELL system in use keeps the player from having to play guess-the-topic, which is good, but it also tends to promote an exhaustive approach (aka "lawnmowering") that doesn't really feel fun to play. I was quite pleased on a couple of occasions, namely (Spoiler - click to show)Moore's attempt to kill you and Dee's obvious stonewalling, in which this pattern was broken up -- in the first case by cutting short the conversation while topics were still available, and in the second by keeping the most important information out of easy reach of the lawnmower. Since the game's design is careful to ensure that the minimum information needed to progress can be obtained multiple ways, it might have added to realism and/or replay value to have an interviewee's time and attention be limited in more cases, or to have some responses to significant topics that weren't prompted.

Maher takes pains to create an atmosphere for the city setting, but once past the introductory sequence players are likely to begin ignoring these in-between places. The sights, sounds and smells of the city are well-described, and a sizable number of random flavor events occur as the PC moves about, but the rule is "look but don't touch" except in a handful of plot-relevant locations. The graphical map provided for the game in some ways seems superfluous; the game provides >GO TO navigation which makes it non-essential. Still, it is handy for fast direction-based navigation, and the way in which it expands as the game progresses subtly reinforces the idea that there's a whole city out there which you just might get to visit at some point -- provided that you have a reason. (Again, there is a parallel to tabletop RPG play. It's not uncommon for players to go looking for a certain type of establishment which, whether pre-planned or improvised spontaneously, becomes a functional part of the RPG world only at the moment of relevance.)

I had originally ranked this game as four stars, but on reconsideration I am bumping it up to five. It's not the best horror game, but it is certainly a landmark investigation game, and its exceptional sense of freedom models an ideal rarely approached in practice. While the work's pyramidal goal structure and linked daily time cycle are techniques that can be achieved by any dedicated author, these can not by themselves create the sense of agency that The King of Shreds and Patches produces. It's the third pillar -- the intensive state tracking and modification of event descriptions based on the order of events experienced by the player -- that does this, and there is no technological shortcut to the careful analysis and design that Maher must have undertaken. I heartily recommend this work to anyone who finds the idea of "supernatural noir" to be intriguing, and to any author contemplating a long-form work who wants to observe some masterful pacing in an IF context.

Released in the early days of the Amateur Era, this work achieved some notoriety by taking a definitive if hesitant step away from puzzle-focused interactive fiction. As the author states in the >AMUSING response at the end: "This game was an attempt to see if a serious and interesting story could be merged with traditional IF 'puzzle' elements without one overshadowing the other."

The work consistently presents itself as a morality tale, and the majority of contemporary and subsequent reviews categorize it as such, which presumably reflects most players' experiences. However, the author denies this description of the work in the associated walkthrough (emphasis mine): "...TAPESTRY may seem to be centered on morality and 'proper' choices. This was not my intention. There is a grander scheme going on (which the opening quote alludes to, and which, I hope, the epilogue makes clear)..."

The opening quote of the piece is from a book by Neil Gaiman: "Those who believe they must atone inflict this place and its tortures upon themselves... Until they realize that THEY, and only they -- not gods or demons -- create their hell; and by this they are freed, and take their leave... This place is evil, Timothy, but perhaps a necessary evil." The obvious reading is that hell is solely in the mind of the beholder, a self-inflicted torture that is ultimately unnecessary, serving only as a waystation for those on the path to enlightenment (or at least some other destination).

The author's use of the term "the epilogue" is interesting, however. This is program-mediated text, and although the final words of the game exhibit a dry, detached tone that is in stark contrast with the melodrama of the rest of the text -- a tone which on first reading implies that this is the "real story" of the PC's life -- the final text does, in fact, change depending on the course taken by the PC. The single identity referenced by the noun "epilogue" is therefore all three versions of the text. In two versions, the objective facts are consistent but what changes is the subjective narrative weaving them together. In the third (the one in which the PC successfully changes his past), the objective facts themselves differ.

I think it is fair to take the author at his word that this is not a game about morality. The ostensible moral dilemmas presented are almost parody in their contrived framing, and the story is not very subtle in its feedback that doing the "right" thing by changing the past to accord with commonly-held standards is in fact wrong. The encouragement you get in this path is from an "angelic being" who is (as the work will confirm if prompted) not a good guy. It soon becomes clear that the PC's attempts to do the "right" thing are at root just attempts to escape guilty feelings. What is not clear is whether that the guilt is even genuine -- the more closely one inspects the PC's thoughts, feelings and actions, the more he comes off as immature, narcissistic, and even sociopathic.

The most "winning" path (as implied by the tone taken in the text) is the path of (Spoiler - click to show)Clotho. In this path, the facts of the PC's life don't change -- only his attitude about them does. Though the work describes the transformative change as the PC "facing" his pain and guilt, in practice the change comes about via the PC simply denying all agency in his decisions as well as their negative consequences. (Spoiler - click to show)Regarding his absence from his mother's deathbed: "...you tell the Wraith ... how you wished you could have been in two places at once... only to find out it was too late." It is made unambiguously clear during that vignette that the PC should have been doing this work much earlier, and that he chose to go to City Hall knowing that it would preclude making it to the hospital in time. Regarding his "mercy killing" of his wife: "You tell [the Wraith] of Sarah's sickness, of her suffering. You explain that you wished to free her from all of it, that she herself found living impossible. You tell the Spectre that your act was one of love." In the vignette, the player must decide to kill Sarah before finding her note, and, as another reviewer notes, there does not seem to have been any discussion between them about this drastic decision beforehand. Moreover, on the path in which the PC ensures that she is given a new experimental treatment, she is cured! No matter how the PC prefers to tell it, a jury privy to the same evidence we are would have grounds to convict. Regarding the fatal car crash that ends his life as well as an innocent bystander: The PC makes no attempt to put a spin on this matter, but driving around late at night for no reason in a sleep-deprived and emotionally-unstable state is in no way responsible behavior. One might also note that his sole concern seems to be that he killed a woman, since he exhibits no dissatisfaction if the outcome is revised such that his victim is male.

Additional support for the author's claim comes from the design of the player interaction. The player gets, in effect, only two choices: whether to attempt to change all three "crisis" points in the PC's life as a group and whether to contest the accusation that he has done wrong. The former requires active effort on the player's part to search out the combination of events that will result in a changed history, while the latter is forced upon even the passive player since the game will interpret inaction as a choice. Very strangely, this second choice can be imposed even before the player makes any move that looks or feels like an intentional selection. (Spoiler - click to show)It is possible to leave the first and second scenes without resolving either. After being railroaded through the third, the player will be taken to a fourth location, where the Wraith will accuse the PC with three simultaneous questions: "Will you face me? Have you hubris enough to commit the breaking of your Moira? Are you fool enough to face your crimes?" (Apparently, in the author's mind, all three of these questions should be served by the same answer.) Simply saying "no" at the first prompt (the essence of denial) results in a choice being recorded -- from that point onward the player is only allowed to follow the script. Crucially, when the Wraith accuses the PC of being "a fool and a coward," an attempt to agree is rejected by the game: "You are about to concede defeat, when you realize that you cannot. You MUST fight this creature ... to the bitter end." To the PC, admission of any responsibility for his actions is tantamount to defeat.

The best support for the author's claim that this is not a morality tale is the endgame. (Spoiler - click to show)No matter which path is taken, the final result is oblivion for the PC; the choice truly does not matter for him. In the end, it seems to be a game about Nothing.

[A final note: This observation didn't fit well in the above review, but one item of interest about this game from an historical perspective is the surprising similarity between the climax of the third panel's vignette and that of Adam Cadre's Photopia (i.e. (Spoiler - click to show)being the driver in a fatal car accident that the player is powerless to stop despite being forewarned). This work predates Photopia by two years. As Paul O'Brien observes about the efficacy of the device: "[T]he feeling of not being able to (Spoiler - click to show)control the car despite what you order the character to do is an extremely chilling one, and it is an effect that would not pack the same potency were it attempted in static fiction." Cadre and other authors would experiment with limiting player agency more directly in later years, even to the point of replacing entered keystrokes with others to enforce pre-set commands in some cases, but the notability of the device in this work suggests that it may be the first time any author tried to limit player agency in a story-relevant way.]

Choice games are not my usual cup of tea, but I have taken the opportunity to play several of them as part of the Free IF Playoffs. As many other reviewers have noted, this ostensibly choice-based work offers surprisingly few choices. Although the reading experience requires quite a few clicks -- a design choice that works very well given its format and the PC's characterization, as noted in Rovarsson's review -- not very many control a decision that affects the PC's actions. I, too, counted a "handful" of these (five or so) over the course of the work, an average of less than one per chapter. The number of story-significant choices seems even fewer.

The writing is very good at the small scale, though CMG's pointed critique of the overall structure is accurate. I would add that what I thought was one of the story's major strengths, its pacing through the first six chapters, is abruptly abandoned around the midpoint, and the remainder of the story feels rushed by comparison. This does much to undermine the contemplative mood that prevails in the first half.

Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed my encounter with this work. It could easily stand on its own as a straight-up novella. I found myself quite absorbed by the Lovecraftian feel of the opening act and the various intriguing references to real-world utopian literature. I was not prepared for the sudden shift of tropes to H. G. Wells territory when the protagonist (Spoiler - click to show)discovers that the "gateway" built into the Astrolith is a time portal, but it did change the significance of the story in interesting ways. (Spoiler - click to show)I was particularly stricken by the portrayal of the modern era as a utopian dream come true by the story's villain. That was clever misdirection.

I did like the Windrift interface more than that presented by the average choice engine. Perhaps its biggest drawback is that it lacks an "undo" feature. It would have been nice to be able to go back and explore the other ending that I didn't pick, but since it will require another entire "playthrough" I probably won't be doing it any time soon. The story is interesting enough that there's a good chance I'll circle back around to it sometime in the future, though, especially after reading some of the novels that it cites.