Reviews by OtisTDog

Let's be honest: You're probably assuming that this game is a low-quality (if sincere) effort riddled with technical problems and poor writing, written in a misguided attempt to proselytize. You are so, so wrong. I know, because I know how wrong I was about it.

This game was nominated for the People's Champion Tournament, and my first suspicion was that it was a troll entry. Glancing through reviews by MathBrush and Rovarsson convinced me to give it a try with an open mind, and I was consistently pleasantly surprised.

Although the setting for this game is the biblical tale of the three wise men, this seems almost entirely incidental other than defining the goals of the PC's quest. It's a pure comedy puzzler, with a wacky/zany vibe that is totally at odds with its religious framing, and the game is technically sophisticated for its era. Written in Inform 6 and making use of the Onyx Ring library, it is loaded with detail touches -- including some that require an expert knowledge of Inform to implement -- to a degree that's almost astonishing.

I played it hesitantly at first, and I was stuck for quite a while in the main puzzle portion. The breakthrough was realizing that, against what might be natural expectations, progress depends on PC actions in the classic mode of lying, cheating and stealing your way through. The puzzle design is competent, and there is plenty of non-essential but entertaining interaction to amuse you while you work out the solutions. Core puzzles required to advance the plot are fair and frequently seem to allow multiple solutions. The two most rigid puzzles are rooted in arithmetic and grammar, and like others I thought that these clashed with the prevailing tone. However, neither was a major obstacle, and they don't stick out enough to ruin what was overall a very smooth and polished experience.

The humor is a strong point; the style is a blend of offbeat and deadpan that often prompted a chuckle from me and those with whom I played the game. The author walks a fine line here, maintaining a consistently light-hearted and irreverent stance toward the subject matter but never (as far as I saw) resorting to mockery. I found myself scratching my head at what the author was trying to accomplish, but it occurs to me that perhaps the goal was to convince religious types of the value of IF instead of the other way around.

The execution of the ASK/TELL conversation model is extensive, but much of the interaction comes in the form of semi-randomized non-answers, and only a few conversations are actually necessary. In fact, quite a bit of what's present in the game is optional; I didn't score anything close to maximum points, and it seems like that's typical. The author-provided walkthrough doesn't show how to reach a full score, either, so I wonder if anyone has ever uncovered every secret. A little digging into the game file shows that there are whole layers of elaboration that I missed entirely -- almost a secret game, which to some degree seem to hinge on finding an unusually-placed rubber duck.

This game seems to have become almost entirely forgotten in the 15 years since its release, but if you enjoy the old school style then coming across this one will feel like finding secret treasure. My initial inclination was a high three stars, but it stands out as a highly-developed example using the rare Onyx Ring library, and it's certainly the first "religious" game that I would recommend to anyone who asked, so I'm going with four. Don't be put off by the blurb; you won't regret trying this one.

Repeat the Ending handily includes its own faux history, its own imaginary criticism, and its own projected audience reactions. The majority of these are fictional.

The work offers numerous prefab opinions of itself. Outside discussions of the work generally read like amplifications of ideas seeded by the author's own self-supplied analysis. In effect, the work talks so much about itself that it leaves room for little that is new.

To engage with the work at scale means going through two parallel fictions (the interactive work and the faux historical transcript) plus a third orthogonal fiction (the imagined history of the work and its invented public response). That's a pretty high bar to clear in terms of hours spent just to survey the whole.

One can turn this work round-and-round in one's head for quite some time, trying to find a perspective that makes its various parts line up into a coherent picture. This is tremendously complicated by the constant self-contradiction of the work as a whole. A thing given in one part of the work is most often modified, opposed or canceled by something in another part, leaving the reader always asking: Is depiction A or depiction B the truth, or are both or neither? That can become tiring when no unambiguous answer is on offer.

The total work as presented is akin to a piece of wrinkled origami paper. It's clear that it has been folded into something before -- even unfolded and refolded according to a different design, potentially more than once. The implicit task for the reader is to refold it, but which of the existing creases are clues? If the reader ends up with something that looks vaguely like a frog, is that what it was supposed to be?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the work itself has something to say about this idea. In the (theoretically fictional) voice of "Drew Cook": "I want people to wrestle with it, to decide for themselves what it means. Wouldn't it be ungrateful of me to interfere? To prevent anyone from honoring my work with their time? I'd never do that. I'd never deny them the freedom to interpret my writing as they see fit." Also, as a point of general philosophy: "[the reader's] interpretation is more important than [the author's] intent".

Clarity and self-consistency are not interference when attempting to communicate. It would be ridiculous to believe that Cook does not know that -- so what is the corollary? Is Cook really not trying to communicate, to generate specific ideas and understanding in the mind of the audience? Is the reader supposed to invert or discount these passages because it was "Drew Cook" speaking, not Drew Cook? Or are those passages supposed to be treated as true reflections of the author's thinking in real life, despite the work's insistence that "Drew Cook" is at most partially representative? Is it supposed to be a panda or a koala?

Is the reader supposed to use outside knowledge to validate or invalidate the fiction's assertions? Does its intertextuality extend to reference works? Should one consult the dictionary definition of bipolar disorder (the protagonist's stated ailment), look up the psychiatric usages of lithium in the 1990s, and notice that the list of the protagonist's symptoms is a much closer match to the dictionary definition of schizophrenia ("A severe mental disorder diagnosable by some or all of the following symptoms: blunted emotionality, decay of rational faculties, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions and hallucinations.")? Should one then go on to re-evaluate the narration's reliability in the context of what could be an intentional clue in a work that masquerades as a puzzle game and contains a plethora of subtly significant detail? Hey, look -- I made a giraffe!

The above is not intended to disparage origami, nor texts without clear answers, nor authors who seek only to prompt questions, nor the mentally ill. Highly convoluted works are often favorites of writers, and this work is certain to be satisfying for those who like to grapple with them. Trying to untangle a Gordian knot can be a pastime in itself, even enjoyable if the act of untangling some portions (though it be at the cost of retangling others) is seen as its own reward.

If you're looking to play a game as entertainment, however, you won't find one here, and the star rating I'm giving it is reflective of that. (I won't even bother to lay out a dissection of the pseudo-game; what would be the point? There's every indication that the parts I don't like are there by conscious and well-considered design.) Fortunately, the current version includes a "story mode" that is basically an integrated walkthrough giving the grand tour, and I would personally suggest just starting with that since it allows one at any point to stop and explore for as much or as little as one likes. Rest assured that the significant puzzles to be solved in this work aren't encountered at the command prompt, and if you're worried about completionism you'll end up reading the source code, anyway. I don't do literary criticism, and I don't come to IFDB looking for works of literature, but I will say that this work would make one hell of an assignment for an English class.

The orthogonal fiction looks to be squarely aimed at writers and critics, and it may hold greater interest for those in that more restricted audience than it does for the average player; no doubt one could make a convincing argument that the pseudo-game and transcript are best viewed as supplemental materials to that portion, in effect acting like very elaborate feelies for a printed work -- an argument strengthened by Cook's having added additional paratext since the initial release while leaving the "game" essentially unchanged (other than the addition of story mode). For the record, despite my negative reaction to the pseudo-game, the orthogonal fiction convinces me that the actual Drew Cook is a very capable author.

Because of the total work's many self-contradictions, the ratio of reader to author in any message "discovered" within will be highly variable. It wouldn't be fair to call this aspect a failure in a work so exhaustively honed, especially when there is good reason to believe (via the real world statements of the actual Drew Cook) that the author is not counting the successful communication of any particular message as part of what will define his own evaluation of its success. One could say that the work as a whole offers something for everyone, and also nothing to anyone. Make of that (and this review) what you will.

Despite its fame, The Edifice is a fairly rough-edged affair, and I seem to have bumped into just about every one of those rough edges.

As winner of IF Comp 1997 (the third ever), this game looms large in the early post-commercial history of the form. It has what may be the second-most famous puzzle in the history of parser games, the first being the climax puzzle of Spider and Web. I had tried The Edifice a few times before and never got very far, but this time I was determined to stick it out.

After an hour of mucking around in release 2, I took a look at the walkthrough. This is where I discovered that something I'd tried to do before, specifically (Spoiler - click to show)>SHARPEN STICK, will work, but you need to be holding something else in your inventory. The default failure message gives absolutely no clue about this, nor any clue that the verb in question can take an indirect object.

In the second scenario, I promptly managed to crash the game in a manner similar to what the release 2 notes say had been fixed. The same bug did not recur after a >RESTORE, and I was able to get to the part that makes this game notable. Author Lucian P. Smith took advantage of some rarely-used affordances in Inform 6 to create an NPC with his own language, which the PC (and by extension you, the player) must learn in order to communicate.

This puzzle is brilliant, and nearly unique. The only other game I know with a comparable task is Absence of Law. The constructed language used for the NPC consists of a relative handful of words -- only 25 are recognized by the game -- but the amount of interaction that is supported is surprisingly large. The "foreign language" parser takes a few shortcuts to simplify its implementation, which can result in confusing replies on occasion. It's not necessary to completely understand every word in order to solve the puzzle, and, in fact, even a complete understanding is not sufficient to do so.

Smith has been extremely open about his design and implementation of the puzzle, having provided an extensive overview of the former in XYZZY News issue #16 and an analogous implementation of the latter's code (using a different invented language) after the game's release.

For all of the effort that has been put into NPC conversation over the years, what's achieved here feels the most "real" of any that I've seen. The effect is almost totally an illusion, one created and maintained by the player's own slowly dissolving ignorance, but the breakthrough moments are extremely satisfying in a way that few puzzles based on comparably complex systems manage to achieve.

Unfortunately, the rest of the game isn't on a par with the centerpiece, though the apparent gap is substantially widened by relatively minor issues. As always, bringing a modern perspective to an older game results in certain small flaws being much magnified -- what was once an easily overlooked oversight can seem like a gaping hole in the interaction today. It's easy to forget that modern standards are informed by many years of lessons learned, and that a series of small improvements can result in a subjective improvement that is more than the sum of its parts. That said, my instincts run toward both two stars (for the numerous small issues) and four stars (for the brilliant centerpiece), so I'm splitting the difference.

By current standards, some of the frustration that a modern player might feel is very much not the player's fault, so for those trying the game my advice would be to seek hints as needed without worrying about spoiling the experience. Those interested in the game purely as an item of study might prefer to go straight to the materials linked above; these are undoubtedly worth the time to examine in detail.

I had heard about this game as one which has the conceit of being "unfinished" by design, as in taking place within a game whose construction was still underway. That is technically the setting, but that's not really the important part.

This game placed 10th of 34 in the 1997 IF Comp (only the third one held at the time), and what strikes me most is that this game ended up in the top third! The development of the form has come a long way since those days, and games like this are the proof.

The plot of this one is very strange. It feels like the core concept came from a Stephen King story, weirdly injected into a story with the plot of an action thriller. The implementation is quite limited in scope, leaving not nearly enough time to develop either angle into something intriguing over the course of a typical play experience.

Beyond its undue brevity, the game's puzzles and their solutions make little sense. The saving grace is the built-in hints, which allow one to get past obstacles that feel contrived, uninteresting, and in places just plain nonsensical -- yes, the basic design exhibits all of the worst habits of the old school era. One of the hints gives advice that does not work in the current release 3; I'm not sure whether this is intentional as part of the game's "meta" nature or the result of a programming error.

While A New Day verges on a 1-star rating, I can't say that it has no redeeming qualities at all. The seed idea could have potential, though it seems close to impossible to engender a genuine sense of threat to (Spoiler - click to show)you the player from any in-game character or events, as this game seems to attempt to do. Also, the initial "finished" portions gave the impression of at least decent quality.

This game has little to offer the typical modern player but offers a genuine challenge to the would-be author: imagining other ways to run with the core ideas on which this game was built.

This game interested me as a time travel adventure. It clearly takes its inspiration from ultra-terse games in the style of magazine type-ins. An earlier version, written for the Atari ST and reviewed by James Judge in SynTax, apparently offered graphics and occasional animations, but the TADS2 version available from the download link here seems to be pure text. (Note that I played it with Gargoyle, not QTads.)

Something might have been lost in the translation of the game to TADS. This was the author's first use of that system, and my impression is that the attempted approach was to directly translate the interaction of the original. If so, that would explain certain inconsistencies in responses: The author would have had to provide overrides for default behavior, and occasionally seems to have just skipped doing so. This makes the parser feel slighty untrustworthy, resulting in a lot of mechanical repetition of commands in an attempt to ensure that nothing important is being missed.

The game must be played in the "mind reading" mode that is very difficult to put up with today. The built-in hint system seems generally adequate, but the typical player may need to consult it rather frequently. (I certainly did.) Alternate solutions to puzzles are not welcome. Meticulous multi-level >EXAMINE is required to discover important things -- to the extent that the protagonist comes off as myopic and/or severely tunnel-visioned. Clues are in the form of obtuse riddles, and can take unlikely forms(Spoiler - click to show), such as a message written in stains on a bathtub. Mimesis is frequently broken.

On the whole the game is done well enough on a technical basis. The only bug of significance that I encountered was that in one case solving a puzzle requires a certain verb (>PICK instead of >UNLOCK) in order to get points for the task. It's still possible to complete the game. In another case obtaining a specific item requires >PULL instead of just >TAKE. The need to >SEARCH many things is a baseline expectation, aggravated by the fact that sometimes only >LOOK UNDER or >LOOK BEHIND will do. This kind of finicky and specific requirement is not really fun.

The three NPC sidekicks are, as Rovarsson's review notes, not extensively implemented. They are necessary to complete certain puzzles, and can be used to carry items should the protagonist's inventory limit be reached -- which it will because this is the kind of game where you never know just which item will be needed where, and red herrings abound. A casual fact about one of them (Spoiler - click to show)(insomnia) is the key to a puzzle. I don't recall this fact being disclosed anywhere, but as Rovarsson notes, it's easy to start to tune out their limited "chatter." Oddly, the game includes a hunger mechanic, but since the PC will be provisioned with what seems to be an infinite supply of sandwiches, it creates no additional difficulty.

The time travel aspect is definitely not the focus of this game; instead of a mad scientist with a time machine it could just as easily have been a wizard with a magical portal mirror. Although the author does seem to have done quite a bit of historical research for this game, the fruits of this effort are not well-integrated into the game itself. It mostly makes itself felt via "telling, not showing" in the form of a few paragraphs here or there in the style of a 500-word book report. Some of the facts are quite interesting, and they are something of a highlight of the game.

I can't say I'd recommend this game to a modern player, or even to a fan of time travel or old-school adventure games... Curses and Jigsaw both seem like they would have more appeal to this game's target audience. Nonetheless, it is an earnest attempt, and some of the puzzle concepts are pretty good; it may be worth studying as an inspiration for a similar scenario.

For the sake of completeness, here is a list of all possible point awards in the game:

(Spoiler - click to show)
10 finding various objects hidden under/behind others (6 times, 60 points total)
10 finding entrance to house
10 agreeing to try time machine
10 standing on stool to reach something needed
10 sharpening pencil
10 lighting sticks
10 lighting torch
10 frightening native
10 getting beauty treasure
10 getting feather
10 getting hairpin
10 getting page from record book
10 getting stuck sack
10 getting chocolate drink
10 knocking out Aztec guard
10 giving drinking tool to priest
10 getting slingshot
10 getting carving
10 picking drawer lock (point award will be missed due to bug if >UNLOCK is used)
10 giving cutters to bomb expert
10 giving magnifying glass to bomb expert
10 making bravery treasure available
10 taking correct picture
10 giving brooch to guide
10 frightening yeti
10 taking page from book
10 giving better tool to gardener
10 buying symbol of happiness
10 giving invitation to palace guard
10 giving correct gift to Japanese lord
10 getting medicine from priest
10 fooling bull
10 getting red disk
10 getting orange disk
10 getting white disk
10 giving beauty treasure to scientist
10 giving knowledge treasure to scientist
10 giving bravery treasure to scientist
10 giving achievement treasure to scientist
10 giving friendship treasure to scientist

It has been a long time since I've played a game that just didn't work for me... not even a little bit. The dominating design ethic of Frobozz Magic Support seems to be "player vs. author grudge match" at its most refined, something much more common in 1997 (when this game was released) than it is today but already facing heavy criticism at the time.

I played hundreds of moves of this game and made zero progress without spoilers. The game seems to purposely withhold necessary information as much as possible, making everything that you encounter seem like a red herring. This is apparently by design. Significant changes in plain view of the PC go unremarked, requiring the player to repeatedly inspect the environment in detail to even have a chance to notice them. The main sidekick, which would typically be used to provide orientation, almost exclusively alternates between a small library of useless stock responses and inane non-specific commentary. The included hints weren't even particularly hintful.

It may be the case that someone who has played Spellbreaker will be able to use knowledge from that game productively and get off to a much better start; since I haven't played that game, I couldn't tell you. After looking over the first several hundred moves of the ClubFloyd transcript -- and noting that the only real guidance about how to win appears to be an "encrypted" message (using a "code" that is clever but deeply unfair), my confidence in this game as entertainment was reduced to zero. The key to the code is (Spoiler - click to show)vaguely hinted at by the "mythical" spell noted on the syllabus, or you can just find the decoded text in the transcript.

On the plus side, it is very competently implemented as a program, with no observed bugs and a minimum of typos in the text. The most notable technical flaws are an indistinguishable noun issue involving granola, a picky distinction between >READ and >EXAMINE affecting the same puzzle, and an object with a blank name that can be a disambiguation candidate for the word "black."

Recommended only for would-be authors, with the advice to study the game's puzzle design and try to think up ways to make it more fun and/or more fair by modern standards -- as is, it's pretty much an encyclopedia of examples of what not to do. I see that the SPAG review cites a contemporary interview from the year of the game's release in which author Nate Cull reportedly claims to dislike the types of puzzles of which this game is made. If that's true, then the implication is that this was intentionally designed to be a poor game.

If approaching the game as a player, be advised that the parts of this game depend on the whole, so you should explore every available scenario to see the universe of items before attempting to solve any one scenario. Even that often won't be enough, because some key interactions are utterly opaque, so if all else fails it is probably safe to assume that mind-reading is required and that hints or the walkthrough should be consulted. Also, here's the orientation that the game should give you: (Spoiler - click to show)Touching the sphere lets you cycle through pending support calls. When a support scenario is displayed, the compass rose will indicate a direction that it is possible to go. And to avoid end-of-game aggravation: (Spoiler - click to show)Don't forget to log every task as completed as you go.

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 alternate outcomes (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 and/or design 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.

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.