Reviews by OtisTDog

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.

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.

This is a throwback-style, very easy, old-school "text adventure," just as it claims to be. It is apparently a group effort, and it bears the mark of first-timers at work, earning a Coyne Quotient of 6 according to Michael Coyne's First-Timer Foibles (for items 4, 7, 9, 10, 12 and 14).

You play someone committing industrial espionage at a company that apparently uses time travel to make accurate predictions for purposes of wealth management. That's not really important, though -- your job is just to collect several items of information or artifacts containing them and get out. The stand-out feature is the collection of yesteryear's computer technology on display in the simulated office.

This game could use a lot more polish, but it's quick to play and comes off as sincere in the Charles Schulz sense. If you're a fan of Scott Adams games or magazine type-in games, then you might find the exercise of solving this to be a welcome diversion. (It took me about 30 minutes to finish with a full score.) For anyone else, you would probably be happier with a more developed "light heist" game... perhaps Inside the Facility?

Playing Zozzled was a very strange experience. Because it was an IFComp winner, my expectations of it were set relatively high. These expectations were not met. Contrary to what many people seem to have seen, my own experience of the game was that it was a rather pedestrian puzzler notably hampered by a lack of integration between its story and design.

At that time that this was written, author Steph Cherrywell had already shown that she was able to put together a very competent and engaging scenario with Chlorophyll. Zozzled starts out well enough with an inciting incident that primes the player to explore a mystery and introduces some promising-seeming NPC characters. However, placing the player in the role of Hazel ensures that the player both begins and remains fundamentally outside the presented mystery and its associated story, which exclusively concerns the introductory NPCs. The tone wobbles significantly as the action moves from introduction to mid-game; the PC will have a (Spoiler - click to show)paranormal and/or hallucinatory experience in the men's changing room that introduces a brief horror feel, but this is quickly left behind (and in all likelihood forgotten by the player) as exploration continues in a light-hearted and jokey mood.

It's certainly OK for a work of interactive fiction to feature a PC with whom the player does not fundamentally identify. Still, the player is expected to adopt the role presented, and to work in good faith toward helping the work's protagonist reach his, her or its goals. I was prepared to do this for Hazel, the game's PC, whose main motivation seems to be to as quickly as possible recover the state of inebriation with which she began the game, but Hazel's "progress" is played as neither pathos nor comedy -- indeed, other than occasional asides concerning her satisfaction at having obtained another dose, it feels more like checking the boxes of a scorecard than anything else.

Checking off each box requires solving a small set piece puzzle of a form generally familiar to experienced players. These puzzles are decently designed and implemented, and my complaint does not lie with the puzzles themselves. Neither is my complaint with the story; it's a bit melodramatic but in a manner that's stylistically consistent and engaging enough to hold the player's interest. Where this game falls short is that the puzzles do nothing to synergize with the main story, leaving the game and story feeling only incidentally and artificially connected.

What is the story? (Spoiler - click to show)[No, seriously, these are major spoilers, so turn back if you plan to play the game.] (Spoiler - click to show)A married teetotaler falls in love with a young thug in training. She has what is secretly his daughter. Fifteen years later, in a moment of celebration as the thug decides to go legit and be a family with her and their child, the teetotaler agrees to a celebratory drink of champagne but ends up poisoned because it is adulterated with denatured alcohol. The thug turns out to be the owner of the speakeasy in which the game takes place. The daughter, unaware of her paternal parentage but believing that the thug intentionally killed her mother, grows up to be the Prohibition agent raiding the speakeasy. The mother, unaware that the poisoning was accidental, remains in residence as a spirit at the hotel, attempting to get her apparently long-delayed revenge. The protagonist can collect enough "ghosts" -- really pieces of the essence of the poisoned teetotaler -- to restore rationality to the vengeful spirit during a final showdown. At that point, the PC learns enough to set everyone straight, which yields something akin to a happy ending. None of that intersects meaningfully with the PC's given motivations, which are solely to get drunk and get out.

I can imagine a version of this game that plays up the humor of an increasingly intoxicated PC -- perhaps with puzzles whose solutions change and become more difficult as the protagonist gets closer to her goals. That sounds like a lot of work. I can imagine a version of this game in which you play the Prohibition agent raiding the place, featuring heavy interaction with the key NPCs introduced and placing the PC near the center of the existing story. That, too, sounds like a lot of work. I can also imagine a version of the game with a different PC whose motivations better mesh with the story -- perhaps the protagonist would be a 1920s "ghostbuster" hired by the hotel, and the ghosts' backstory would be adjusted accordingly. That sounds about the same in terms of work but with a somewhat more serious tone. Any of them would be better integrated than this work.

There were a few aspects of the implementation that caught my attention. The use of room descriptions to portray a tight fit inside the (Spoiler - click to show)scale model of the hotel was interesting; the technique of using room text that portrays ongoing action is generally frowned upon but works well enough here. The ability to finish the story without locating all of the ghosts, though it leads to a less "happy" ending, is a good design choice for a comp game, allowing casual players to finish the game and be satisfied. At several key points in the plot, the game switches to a choice-based mode; at the beginning and end of the game this is effectively just a more elaborate version of "PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE" since there are no choices of consequence, but in an early tutorial-like scene the choices presented are effectively parser commands. The intent seems to be to keep the player from becoming stuck while also ensuring that the essential command for progress is discovered, but the same could have been accomplished with appropriately heavy-handed hints in the text; the current formulation results in something lacking the better aspects of either parser or choice interfaces.

This is by no means a bad game, and I don't regret playing it -- it just seems like the realization of a flawed vision that could have been something more than it is. It is a fun game to play around Halloween, and the overall difficulty is slight enough that it is suitable for those new to parser games, but I would suggest Chlorophyll as an example of Cherrywell's work that offers a more coherent design. I look forward to trying Brain Guzzlers from Beyond by the same author. [EDIT: ...which turned out to be great -- Cherrywell's best work in my experience.]

With Inform's core code having grown so much that only the smallest scenarios produced by it will still fit within Z-machine, one might wonder whether that venerable format is destined for the dustbin of history. Sure, there are still people actively using Inform 6 with the PunyInform library to make Z-code games for retrocomputing platforms, but that's a niche within a niche. With this work, author Daniel Stelzer proves that the Z-machine is still a vital platform when used with the relatively new but sophisticated Dialog language.

Miss Gosling's Last Case plays very well. Puzzles are meticulously designed and well-suited to appeal to those who would be attracted to the murder mystery genre -- requiring an active imagination that takes careful notice both of what is said and what can be imagined about the scenario being depicted.

Only basic verbs and simple commands are in use, a constraint imposed by the separation of story protagonist from primary actor. By ensuring that there is an in-game reason for preferring simplicity, the player is subconsciously prompted to throw out any ideas for actions that cross a certain low threshold of complexity. It gives something of the feel of a limited parser game without actually being one.

The game's text has an emphasis on providing backstory and characterization, largely eliding physical descriptions of the scene outside of a few key objects. This is done skillfully -- at first I did not notice the style, because room description text provides introductory exposition as the player gets familiar with the situation. Should the lack of detail become noticeable, that is a cue the player should simplify the approach being taken. The object implementation is spare enough that, should imagination fail, even brute force approaches are likely to pay off within a reasonable number of commands.

Quite a lot of work has been put into creating a smooth and seamless play experience. New players will benefit from many "invisible" parts of the system that are designed to support that goal. First and foremost are >FIND and >GO TO verbs that make navigation as simple as can be. Object disambiguation is handled with a numbered selection that makes it very clear how the parser is "thinking," and that in combination with very descriptive error messages will rapidly train a new player in the preferred method of interaction. More subtly, the game design itself ensures a sharp focus on specific goals at all times, even during the middle game when one has a choice of order in which to pursue subgoals. Lastly, the introductory scene offers a tutorial voice that is sure to help total newbies get started with a parser, though it is extraneous to someone familiar with the form.

My initial impulse is to give this game four stars, which translates roughly as "distinctly above average" and/or "highly recommended" in my rating scale, but there are a couple of minor shortcomings that keep it just below that threshold. One of the segments (Spoiler - click to show)(involving identifying a rosebush of blooms with a particular color) does not feel as well-implemented as the others. (Spoiler - click to show)Specifically, although a point is awarded when the correct actions have been taken, the player is not notified about which rosebush is correct and must deduce it from some diagrams. This is not difficult, but neither is it particularly interesting, and stylistically it is out of step with the rest of the work by adding even a speck of unnecessary friction. Also, the multiple locations of the tea garden just seem "deader" than other parts of the house from a writing perspective; they are restricted to repetitive descriptions of largely undifferentiated locations with few objects. Perhaps less important but worthy of adjustment is the pacing in the final scene. (Spoiler - click to show)It took several tries to work out the correct move to trigger a win, and it felt very arbitrary that it should be that move which does so. Repeated barking should be just as effective given the situation, and would be the low-friction option to conclude the game after the real puzzle has been solved. As a final nitpick, it would be nice to be able to turn off the tutorial mode at the beginning. (Note that any or all of these criticisms may have been negated in release 2, which was recently posted.)

I'm going to go ahead and round up a bit for my star rating, though I'll hold off on letting it count toward the average in the hopes of a post-comp release to sand off the handful of remaining rough edges. In the meantime, I do very much recommend this piece to anyone looking for a bit of fun, and I would even suggest it (with reference to the provided hints, if needed) as a first experience with IF for someone who likes the murder mystery genre. My hat is off to Stelzer for creating a first-class introductory work easily on a par with Infocom's best of that type. Bravo!

[Note: It turns out that much of the preceding unintentionally -- but almost exactly -- echoes an off-site review by PB Parjeter, which was written prior to this and to which I've added a link on the game's page here. I guess that's evidence that the observations are well-founded!]

This game was the insipid edutainment experience that I had feared when I was preparing to play Junior Arithmancer.

When I first loaded this up and got through the short introductory segment, I thought that I was going to be treated to an extended version of the experience provided by the core mechanic seen in the author's other notable math-themed game. I was envisioning a game of "magical" powers rooted in mathematical operations that would phrase key breakthroughs in the history of mathematics as puzzles to be overcome, with an emphasis on the expansions of conception as opposed to the mechanical operations. Having enjoyed the optional puzzles and just playing around in the number space of Arithmancer, I thought I was looking at the fun and compelling core of that game turned up to 11.

The presentation and the setting were quite similar, and the first few segments (constructing and extending the set of numbers) seemed to support the title's implication that this game would be about learning to appreciate the "cold and austere" beauty of the vast and interconnected web of concepts and reason that is mathematics. Since Arithmancer was so unexpectedly fun, I was looking forward to the experience -- I even hoped that I might learn something.

Unfortunately, the game quickly devolves into something else entirely: an old-school-style puzzler with frivolous mathematical theming that seems almost totally at odds with the implicit premise. Although *A Beauty Cold and Austere* appears to be the author's sincere love letter to the beauty of mathematics, it singularly fails to communicate that beauty. Fundamental and important conceptual breakthroughs are handled at a remove of one or more degrees, via puzzles that for the most part pointedly avoid the crux of the mathematics themselves. The entire puzzle structure is crafted in the old school style, and at times the game almost seems a parody of it.

The actual reasoning required to make progress is typical for old-school puzzlers, and the game does little to explain or reinforce mathematical concepts. I frequently found myself imagining young players of this game huddled around an Apple ][ in a 1980s school computer lab, too interested in the novelty of a "talking" computer to notice that they weren't learning anything useful about math from overcoming the game's obstacles.

To be fair, it's hardly this work's fault that it wasn't what I had hoped it to be on the basis of a misunderstanding that it was written after Arithmancer. It was, in fact, written before, and the arrow of causation points the other way; Spivey quite admirably extracted one of the best ideas from this game and crafted a much better experience from it. Perhaps I was reading too much into the title and cover for a second time with one of Spivey's works. However, I was not particularly impressed with this work even when trying to take it on its own terms. The fairness level of many puzzles is debatable, and the only unifying structure is dream logic, i.e. non-logic. The most interesting aspect was (Spoiler - click to show)the roller coaster; with its multiple possible configurations, I had to admire its implementation as either very clever in its design or of impressively large scale in execution, if not both.

I think I would recommend this game to someone who really enjoys the old school puzzle sensibility of wanting to solve a puzzle "because it's there," and I imagine that there would be some appeal to mathematicians in the fact that many props and setting elements come from the history of their field. If the idea of Zork with math-themed puzzles appeals to you, then by all means proceed directly to playing. If what you want is fun with the math itself, then you may be better served by Junior Arithmancer from the same author.

[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.

This is another game that I would most likely have skipped if it weren't for the Free IF Playoffs. The moment I see "dating sim" in the description of a game, my interest drops to zero. Still, the intriguing provenance of this game, which was apparently produced by an outsider who has never participated in the online community, was enough to warrant at least loading it up.

With a blithe disregard for the tags on IFDB or other reviews (which I like to read after I've tried a work), I did so. My minimal interest was not increased by the Harry Potter-like feel of the opening chapter. A short time later, the game seemed like it was going to be over before it had even begun. Interest took an uptick when it became clear that what seemed like an end was actually just the beginning.

Here's where we get to the spoilery part, and like other reviewers, I recommend that you play the game before proceeding.

This is a time-loop game, and in terms of story structure it is well done. I agree with Passerine that author E. Jade Lomax has an excellent sense of how to anticipate changes to the player's viewpoint over time in a way that works well, though I felt that it failed to adequately convey how the protagonist must have felt after enough loops to span a normal human lifetime and more. After a period of exploration, one necessarily begins to treat each iteration as a chance to conduct one or two key experiments in how to affect the timeline. (Spoiler - click to show)As a memorable in-game description of science puts it, the player begins the process of "grinding the particles of the world down to answers and making new questions with them." The way that the description of events changes with the growing understanding of the total situation is remarkably smoothly implemented.

It does seem as though the opportunities for significant change are few and far between, but this is something of a necessity in a time loop of such scale. This is Groundhog Day writ large -- a Groundhog Decade or more. The time loop trope seems inherently more powerful in interactive fiction, where the player must guide the protagonist's discoveries and planning instead of being a mere observer, and Lomax explores many interesting ethical questions along the way. To achieve the implicit objective, the PC must become an interloper who lies, steals, commits acts of destruction that likely result in the death of innocents (and certainly result in large-scale destruction of property), and more. (At least, it seemed like that was the case; perhaps there are options to avoid such questionable trade-offs.) Are the "failed" timelines inherently unreal? Do your harmful actions somehow not count in them? Do the ends truly justify the means when trying to "win" the game?

In addition to the big questions, there are smaller ones. For example, a key NPC will more likely than not (Spoiler - click to show)go on a magic-induced rampage at a pivotal event early on, killing several people and possibly the PC. At a "later" point in the game, the player is presented with a choice that effectively asks whether or not to forgive her for something that she hasn't done in this cycle. Are you judging her for who she is in the here-and-now, or what you know she could be under the wrong circumstances? This question isn't new to time travel tropes, but it felt new here, stressing the way that both the player's and protagonist's perspectives shift due to the "outsider" viewpoint being experienced.

The "key scenes only" approach sometimes feels limiting. I would have loved a more fine-grained treatment of the plot -- one that starts to answer the in-game question (Spoiler - click to show)"How much are you changing things, by breathing and walking and sometimes being a little late for breakfast in unrepeatable patterns? How much is just the universe's randomness?" -- but I recognize that the complexity being managed is already quite large. The choice interface seems like an appropriate decision -- it's hard to imagine the same game with a parser. (Hadean Lands is the closest thing to it, but it has no need to implement NPCs.) To be sure, I'm probably underestimating the total complexity -- my own play took several hours but was far from a completist run, since I opted out of every romance thread. (A special hat tip to the author here: I truly appreciated that "none of the above" was an option for the romance subplots.) Since the PC can develop close but non-romantic relationships with various NPCs, it's clear that that the alleged dating sim aspect is driven by the author's diligence in exploring the potential of what RadioactiveCrow's review calls the "human connections" of the situation space.

This game is very good, but I'm going with 3 stars instead of 4 because there are a few places where it slipped a gear (i.e. seemed to be responding to things that had not happened or had happened differently, due to errors in state-tracking). The writing is a bit flat, as well, with a workman-like functional quality that doesn't always do justice to the scenes being portrayed. Relatively small improvements in either of those aspects would have gotten it over the edge. I definitely recommend this game both as an enjoyable play experience and as a rewarding subject of study in the craft of interactive fiction.

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.