Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

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.]