Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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