Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

This is a horribly broken game, so broken that I have to issue it a one-star rating... but I wish it wasn't.

The title of this review is a somewhat compressed line from the game itself. The NPC to whom you would be speaking at that point is Dr. Polter, one of a handful of significant NPCs in the game -- the others being a mute and unsanitary ice cream vendor, an enormous stag, and FDR. (Yes, that last is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The actual original, brought out of cryogenic suspension.) (Spoiler - click to show)Dr. Polter possesses a key that you will need in order to encounter FDR. It's a bit tortuous to trace out the decompiled Glulx game code, but I think (based on gameplay) that you have to exhaust all of these topics in order to get the key.

It's an example of the type of nerdy, goofy humor sprinkled throughout this half-finished piece. Here's another:


> spray stag with spray
It STAGgers away wheezing, clearing your path.


I mean, yes -- it's a bad pun. Some of you laughed, though. I know it.

There's no denying that this game is a mess as a program. It's also pretty messy in design, seemingly one of those play-around-while-learning-to-code types of efforts. Still, and perhaps surprisingly, the game is minimally playable and can be completed. I don't think anyone is likely to make much progress without resorting to decompilation, but the single largest obstacle is a terrible implementation of an elevator. I won't even wrap this in spoiler tags since it's more like an anti-spoiler: The key to using it is >PRESS BUTTON followed by >STEP INTO ELEVATOR. (Per the decompiled code, a special action is implemented for this.)

I have a soft spot for these neophyte efforts informed by Infocom tropes, and I'm often amused by absurdity, so it bums me out that author Sarah Bullard seems to have abandoned this game before finishing it, most likely due to frustration with learning Inform 7. If you're out there, Sarah: Join the intfiction.org forum and ask for help in cleaning this up -- I can see that you had a lot of fun ideas to share.

There is no point in even having an IFDB entry for this item, which the evidence suggests is the product of someone spending about an hour with Inform 7 before tiring of the effort of learning the basics and moving on to another hobby.

David Welbourn's "walkthrough" (a term which seems to have extra applicability in this case) is complete; I decompiled the Z-code to make sure that nothing else was hiding. The sum total of author-supplied text is as follows:

A Bottomless Void

Deep inside the void, you hear a quiet sobbing that surges from a source that you can not locate. The wailing sounds are weak and broken, almost feminine, but not quite. It seems nearly familiar, yet distant, like the relationship of the sun and the moon. Your sight betrays you, for even though you stare into this absurd reality, your concentration mirrors this realm, never fixating, and always in motion. The weeping rises in intensity, the cries assault your ears more often, and they increase in volume. A variety of strange, swirling and altering colours converge around you, and then suddenly retract, and converge once more. A ceaseless kaleidoscope of glowing lights and shifting imagery. The lament of the woman induces an abrupt pain above your right eye, causing you to close your eyes and avoid the tornado of colour, but the scene remains there, unaffected by humanity's natural hiding mechanism. You shake your head, trying to negate the invasive gaze of this indifferent scenery, but its hold never falters, and restrains you. The wails suddenly morph and alter into a distorted, masculine voice, and a strange gargling sound emits from deep within its throat. The throaty sound drones on, staying at a rather low note, but the sound does not alter, or form into a comprehensible fragment of speech. It seems as if it is waiting for you to make the first move, but you have no idea where the sound's host is, as you can only hear the low, gargling noise. Though you can't find the source of the deep, throaty sound, you decide that it would be best to look around this strange, colourful and eriee realm.

Whirlwind of Dancing Shapes

You look to your right, and notice a difference from the lights that were infront of you. Over here, they seem brighter, and their glow pulsates, shining incredibly bright, then suddenly dying down, and reapeating the process over and over. Shapes also appear from the swaying colours. Though, they are not such shapes like squares or triangles. These shapes are heavily deformed, mutated and absurd. Like a smudged, pastel painting, the forms and colours are slow and sluggish, and they excrete a presence of depression and despair. You can only go back, as there is nothing else of interest here.

A Dark Presence

To your left is a haven for a multitude of glowing lights that are shining incredibly dully. At first they were swaying and rushing around the space of this strange place, but the introduction of these dull, nearly lifeless lights has hindered the almost beautiful display of dazzling lights and colours. The last remaining glowing orbs finally followed suit of the now dead lights, and slowed to a crawl, finally burning out. Out of nowhere, a burst of black streams forward to where the dead orbs make rest, and coats the assorted colours and orbs, absorbing them, and one could no longer tell if they had even existed. Bubble like shapes appear on the areas where colour remains, and more of the black liquid shoots foward, staining the once majestic display of light and absurd colour. The whole left side of this alternate realm is now a giant, swirling blanket of black. The once, almost appealing, colouring of this world had been completely dissolved on the left side. The monstrous, dark and haunting sheet of black had suddenly stopped spinning and twirling, and now lies motionless. With its cease of motion, it almost seems inviting, as if it wants company to venture forth and explore its depths. You can go closer to the black ocean that blankets the entire left side of this strange realm, or you can go back and search for that voice.

The title of this review is the translation of the Sohoek Ekalmoe's title as provided by the work itself. It is also the name given to the player character, which is a kind of sentient plant.

The premise is inventive, and the portrayal of the protagonist's experience is memorable. Although the experience is quite short, author Caleb Wilson has crafted something very clever at the heart of it. Like his better known work, Lime Ergot, the essential mechanic here depends on rendering an extraordinary style of perception. In this case, it's the ability to perceive one's environs as a distributed entity across multiple locations.

This aspect, in combination with the novelty of a botanical body, creates a compellingly fresh play experience. I only wish that this work was longer; (Spoiler - click to show)the promise of conflict hinted at in the beginning turns out to be false foreshadowing. Though the protagonist seems to have barely survived a battle with his unnamed but apparently humanoid "enemies," an attempt to seek them out yields only the remnants of their long-destroyed kingdom. Presumably the protagonist's sense of time is wildly different than our own, especially in the energy-limited environment in which the story begins.

Short as it is, this work accomplishes what it sets out to do, delivering a glimpse into a different philosophy and reminding the player that (Spoiler - click to show)even civilizations die, but the dance of life -- here meaning life in the grander sense of the biosphere -- goes on.

The core mechanic of Lime Ergot notably inspired the very popular Toby's Nose by Chandler Groover. It will be interesting to see whether the new ideas showcased in this work are ever used for something of greater scale.

This game was a contestant in the People's Champion Tournament of 2025, and it was one of the more serious works on the roster.

When I start out with a new work of IF, I always try to ascertain as quickly as possible whether the author is aiming for simple entertainment or is trying to accomplish something more profound. As with literature or film, I consider both options to be worthwhile endeavors, but the mindset of appreciation is so different between these two types that it's usually helpful to determine this early on. (That's not to say that there can't be serious works with comedy beats, or comedic works with serious beats; both of these are often very effective techniques that enhance the playing experience.)

Thin Walls is definitely the serious kind. It depicts the life of several relatively young adults (likely in their 20s and 30s), all of whom live together in a strangely reality-defying building, one that changes and expands over time. Many of the characters seem to be searching for meaning in their lives, with varying degrees of success. A young couple finds that in growing they are growing apart, which puts stress on their relationship. A young lady obsessively documents her daily existence with social media in an apparent attempt to transcend reality and live the life she portrays on the internet. Others experience conflict over property rights and differing definitions of what constitutes appropriate care of the commons. Still others seem adrift, unsure of what they are seeking or how to go about it.

Another thing that I look at closely for any given work is how the author uses interactivity, and specifically how they use it to achieve their intended goal (or at least their apparent goal). The main device used by author Wynter for this work is to frequently reassign the player to different player characters as the story progresses. This is very effective in creating player empathy with the characters, particularly in cases where the player experiences both sides of a conflict. However, because one cannot simultaneously imagine being two different people, it also invites an "outside" objective perspective that is not aligned with any particular character viewpoint.

As I think about this work in hindsight, it is primarily from the objective perspective, i.e. as a disembodied observer of the society in miniature formed by the building's inhabitants. Among the inhabitants is one particular character who stands out, that of the mysterious landlord named Eddie who is never observed directly by the other characters. As with the building itself, there are supernatural aspects that defy easy explanation in a world that otherwise seems to be everyday reality. Eddie is apparently some fantastic entity of malign intent, as in at least one interlude (in which the player is shown the perspective of the landlord) that entity seems to have knowledge about what's been happening in the building that is not explained by events observed by other characters, and to be deliberately fostering conflict between inhabitants of the building.

If there is a center to this story, it is Eddie. Since Eddie is sentient but seems vaguely inhuman, I can't help but wonder what he is supposed to represent. Is he a representation of the corporate "personhood" of a rental management company? Is he the invisible hand of capitalism? Is he a vague personification of our basic primate nature, with its instincts that are sometimes at odds with civilization? Is he supposed to be a literally-existing personification of evil as seen in pretty much every major religion?

I haven't been able to come to any real conclusions, and that leaves the work's foundational message uncertain. The thing that looks most like a clue is the way that characters in the building are discouraged from talking about certain things that they all experience and know to be true; it is taboo for them to discuss the house and its changes over time. The current Wikipedia article on Taboo begins as follows: "A taboo is a social group's ban, prohibition or avoidance of something (usually an utterance or behavior) based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive, offensive, sacred or allowed only for certain people." Which (and how many) of those four aspects do the inhabitants of the building believe, and why?

Thin Walls hints at deeper questions but does not seem willing to address them directly, an aspect that I find to be unsatisfying. However, the complex of stories being told is absorbing enough to hold one's attention, and there is value in contemplating the questions raised indirectly, so it's well worth one's time to experience this work.

I experienced this game in an environment far different from its original release in 1998. More than two and a half decades have stripped it of the mystique that it held after years of pseudo-existence as presumed vaporware, and months of hopeful speculation about the return of commercial IF in the form of Cascade Mountain Publishing, a short-lived endeavor by none other than Michael Berlyn of Infocom fame.

This is a work of truly epic scale in terms of play time, and I admire author G. Kevin Wilson simply for the massive size of the effort put into it. Once and Future is easily two or three times the length of a typical long-form work, requiring substantial time at the keyboard even if one makes frequent use of a walkthrough. It's not just a matter of puzzle solving and navigation across the extensive map, it's also a matter of just plain reading; in SPAG #16 Gunther Schmidl notes that a printout of his transcript was 128 pages of 10 point Times New Roman. This is perhaps the only work of IF I've ever gone through that truly felt like reading a novel, and I'm not alone in that impression; in that same issue of SPAG -- which was dedicated in its entirety to this work -- Magnus Olsson compares Once and Future to the Great American Novel in IF form.

Olsson also notes that Once and Future is "a very American game." Its central preoccupations are with matters that had significant impact on American culture in the latter half of the 20th century. From its opening set in the Viet Nam war to its conclusion at (Spoiler - click to show)the site of the Kennedy assassination, American sensibilities dominate. Good guys are good guys, bad guys are bad guys, and where they meet violence is a foregone conclusion. This Manichean worldview translates easily to the world of Arthurian legend, where the majority of the action takes place, but other aspects of this mix of tropes only go together about as well as oil and water. The mishmash of tropes seems to originate in something personal for Wilson; to me the connections between the various categories seemed tenuous at best. (Spoiler - click to show)It was hard enough to try to reconcile the fairy tale atmosphere invoked by King Arthur with the gritty mood of the game's opening scene in a post-propaganda portrayal of the Viet Nam war, but adding (Spoiler - click to show)a literal demon to tempt Lee Harvey Oswald into being an assassin was ultimately stretching things too far for me.

They say that a cynic is just an idealist minus the hope. Wilson's magnum opus blends idealism and cynicism, leading to jarring tonal shifts in many places. The plot is undeniably escapist from the outset, but the protagonist's happy ending (Spoiler - click to show)(achieved when he escapes from our world into one in which JFK was not assassinated) is muted and not in keeping with a typical Hollywood ending; Wilson does not let idealism win at the end, at least on the individual level. (Spoiler - click to show)It seems that even the good endings are linked to a horrible future in which the protagonist is possibly the last person alive in a ruined world, waiting for the arrival of his past self in a scene that you must play through earlier in the game. The treatment of Snookums, an NPC that was much celebrated in contemporary reviews, is ambivalent in this context. It seems to be very vaguely hinted that her simplemindedness is the result of (Spoiler - click to show)brain damage received when she was drowned for being a witch in the real world, but similar logic does not seem to apply to the harm that the PC received in the process of dying, which leaves the portrayal of her interaction with the PC a little disconcerting.

The work's writing has both highs and lows. There are definitely memorable parts, and portions of the writing and craft on display show skilled shaping of the player's experience at the local level. It's at the macro level that it breaks down; although the work holds together well enough in terms of prose style, the story unfolds itself irregularly in a manner that isn't very satisfying.

As is relatively common in "old school" works, there are various distinct areas, each with its own feel to it. In an interview found in SPAG's dedicated issue, Wilson estimated the work to have 300 rooms, 1300 objects, and 35,000 lines of code (in TADS 2). (By comparison, Scavenger has about 15,000 lines of code, and Uncle Zebulon's Will has about 5500.) When you do the arithmetic, you might be surprised that this averages to about 115 lines of code per room, those lines also being spread across the objects within them. This leads to a rather sparse world, with a mostly empty map of rooms containing only limited description. Similarly, the estimate of 600 topics and 40 NPCs implies an average of around 15 distinct topics each, leading to largely uninteresting ASK/TELL interaction with them.

The attention to programmatic detail and game design is sometimes lacking. For example, the protagonist has a (Spoiler - click to show)suit of armor that, when carried, reasonably prevents entering a lake due to its weight and the possibility of damage. However, it is possible for the the PC to be magically transported into the lake while in possession of that object without negative consequences. To get the maximum score, the player must do some mind-reading, such as somehow deducing that all of the wrong pieces for a certain puzzle (Spoiler - click to show)(the planks in the mole tunnel sequence) must be broken instead of just determining which is best to use. Certain puzzles are just arbitrarily-included logic games that do nothing to support the central theme; this was still relatively common at the time when coding for the work began.

This game is historically notable, but I'm not sure how much the average modern player will appreciate it. Overall, Once and Future seems too late for its own time, and much too late for today. I would advise anyone trying it to keep a walkthrough handy and not to hesitate to make liberal use of it.

I happened across this game while doing some research on the history of the XYZZY Awards; this work received the 2008 XYZZY Award for Best Use of Medium.

This work is a rare example of a game that significantly leverages the multimedia capabilities of Glulx, featuring a splash screen, graphics, music and sound effects. There are some interesting innovations, such as the use of a background image depicting elements of the single room of the game -- a background that blurs when the PC dons a spacesuit. The soundtrack is thematically appropriate to the game world of the 1960s, sounding a bit like experimental music of the era, but it is unfortunately short and repetitive enough to irritate unless turned down in volume. (But don't turn it off or you'll miss the music at the end.)

The plot is part humorous and part serious. An average citizen of the Soviet Union is drafted to oversee a Soviet moon base housing nuclear missiles, intended as a failsafe against nuclear attack. When the Motherland is attacked, the PC sets in motion the counterstrike but soon has second thoughts. The rest of the plot concerns how you choose to resolve the situation, complicated somewhat by the unexpected presence of other interested parties.

Three significant NPCs allow conversation, and this is done via freeform input that seems to use some sort of keyword matching. I've run into this kind of experimental conversation engine a few times, and even games of the 1980s made attempts along this line. As with most experiments of this type, it does not seem like a huge improvement over the ASK/TELL model other than the reduction in required typing, and falls afoul of the usual inability to interpret the context of natural language. There is no disambiguation, and in at least one place there is a requirement to use a two-word phrase that the responses for the individual words don't suggest. Some replaying shows that the game is willing to work with the player somewhat here, guiding one forward if the input includes something relatively close, but it's still pretty finicky overall. The included walkthrough spells out the necessary keywords if one is stuck.

As described in Kake's review, the puzzles seem almost universally unfair by modern standards, mostly by virtue of the game not bothering to inform the player of its expectations. I don't think that I've ever encountered a game that has a smell-based puzzle before, for example, and although there is a single conversation response that offers an indirect clue here, the response to >SMELL doesn't help the player along much.

The game oscillates unexpectedly between the two poles of serious and goofy at several points, but overall it leans toward the goofy side. There was much to like about it, but for the most part those elements (Spoiler - click to show)(such as a robot that looks like a toy duck, or alien mice) are gated by a very old school aesthetic for puzzles which is grounded more in riddles than commonly-accessible logic. A more modern sensibility to puzzle design and interaction would improve this work tremendously.

I would still recommend this work as an interesting example as part of a study of the evolution of the form, or to anyone who craves the input-as-riddle aesthetic. For everyone else, you're probably best served by keeping the walkthrough handy and making liberal use of it.