Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In its first moves, First Things First comes off as a kind of reverse "my apartment" game -- the protagonist has accidentally locked himself out of his house, and the spare key that he had hidden for just such an emergency isn't there. The modest beginning belies the scale of this work; structurally, it is something of a hybrid between Curses (Spoiler - click to show)(i.e. a quest in pursuit of a small and mundane goal that expands in scope and significance) and A Mind Forever Voyaging (Spoiler - click to show)(in which the action takes place across five time periods for the same location, each separated by a decade).

Per author J. Robinson Wheeler's description, this work, which was ambitious for its era, took about five years to develop. It was begun in 1996 and not released until 2001, then later improved in a 2006 re-release. As far as I can tell, the 2006 v3 re-release is the same as the original except for bug fixes.

As is to be expected in a game this old, gameplay is on the crueler side of the Zarfian scale, without apology. At first I thought it was truly "cruel," but the only verified dead-ends I encountered were of class "nasty," downgraded to at worst "tough" given the ability to >UNDO multiple times in a row. Certain occasions that I thought were dead-ends were not; many critical puzzles have multiple solutions, so it would have been possible to make progress despite appearances. Save games are a good idea due to the game's length if nothing else; although I did use them (or just plain >RESTART) to backtrack several times, I usually did so looking forward to the experience of trying something different.

There are also some significant flaws in terms of bugs and/or puzzle implementation. At least one bug allows a puzzle to be bypassed (Spoiler - click to show)(getting past a hostile dog by putting the things it's guarding onto something else without first picking them up), though there are multiple solutions for that trivial obstacle so gameplay is not really affected. Some of the information and feedback is inconsistent in a way that could be very frustrating, including (Spoiler - click to show)the necessity of putting something into something else that seems much too big to fit as described (Spoiler - click to show)(the cannonball in the drainpipe), the behavior of an oddly anthropomorphized squirrel (Spoiler - click to show)(it shows a very un-lifelike response to a book that is not typical of the game's style), inconsistency in awarding score on a puzzle that requires multiple cycles of an action so that it's not clear that progress is still being made (Spoiler - click to show)(while applying multiple doses of plant fertilizer), descriptions of thrown items that imply a very low likelihood of success for the action that turns out to be the required solution (Spoiler - click to show)(when throwing things at the small window), and a "secret" (i.e. unmarked) conversation keyword prompt at a critical point (Spoiler - click to show)(when confronted by the security guard and asked for a name) in which it is reasonable for the player to expect >SAY to work. These are the most significant of the issues that I encountered, but there are also numerous small errors of the type that are unlikely to be encountered and do not affect significantly gameplay if they are. (Spoiler - click to show)Examples: a disambiguation issue between a key and its copy, the functional presence of environmental features such as the sky in the basement of the office building in the farthest future time zone, incorrect scope resolution for the switch to a secret door such that it can be accessed from the wrong side, buggy implementation of "faceless" doors in the future office, etc.

Beyond definite flaws there are some questionable design choices, such as the fact that the map changes in small but annoying ways as the protagonist explores (Spoiler - click to show)multiple time zones -- many's the time that I entered a string of movement commands to get someplace only to find that it failed halfway. Additionally, there are several red herrings, which are fine as part of an old-school style but which irk a bit in a game with an inventory limit and doubly irk when they seem like they might work to address some of the problems encountered by the PC. Worst of all is something that strikes me as a straight-up dirty trick: (Spoiler - click to show)a locked door that has no key and can simply be unlocked by hand, but which is not described as having any kind of latch mechanism. (That's a terribly mean joke on the player at best, in the vein of +=3, but I have to admit that I laughed when I stumbled across the solution accidentally. Seriously, though -- don't do this.)

NPCs are present and fairly advanced for the era; they definitely present personalities, and two of them are major characters in the story. The ASK/TELL conversation implementation is limited by modern standards, with much of the effort of topic development having been put into certain key conversations that are required. One of the NPCs is designed to serve as the built-in hint system, though I didn't realize this when playing due to my limited interaction with him. Decompilation reveals pieces of an unfinished hint system using a >THINK or >HINT command or similar. This would have been a welcome feature, but the vast possibility space created by the premise seems like it would require a large effort to cover all of the possible variations -- possibly this is why it was abandoned.

Despite the above, there's a certain base cheeriness and sincerity to this game that makes it practically irresistible, plus a puzzle design sensibility that's often quite clever once past the prologue. I was well-motivated to overlook the various issues listed above. Although the game starts out with a goofy and trivial tone, it steadily -- almost imperceptibly -- becomes more serious as you progress. As tone and style shift, it begins to offer more philosophical beats. On top of that, the game keeps redefining the player experience as you progress in interesting ways, going from wacky "my apartment" antics to (Spoiler - click to show)intrepid time explorer adventure to potential romantic comedy to 80s corporate villainy, and then on to a dramatic climax that was definitely not what I was expecting. (Spoiler - click to show)The story's climax, which though memorable is one that offers little in terms of interactivity, reveals to the player that the player character is not the main character of this story.

There are other surprises, too -- places where the game lingers on states of affairs that would probably be culled in something other than a first work. The average author would be expected to trim this type of thing, because it's pure "waste" in terms of play time and programming effort... except it's not. Wynter's review notes an extended sequence in which the protagonist struggles to overcome an obstacle that seems like a legitimate avenue to reach a long-standing goal. It's not possible for the PC to succeed in this vignette, but while you're in it the game provides all of the signals that you're on the right track. Should you happen to encounter that scenario, once you've solved the puzzle you'll be left with a sense of wonder at the way that Wheeler went the extra mile to implement this sequence, part of an apparent commitment to supporting a broad range of potential trajectories through the game's possibility space in a manner that makes any one of them feel natural.

Really, "surprise" is the watchword of this work, and one of its best features. First Things First kept surprising me on the upside as I played it. It felt like the game covered a succession of stories -- almost like the old school "pastiche" approach to puzzle design was instead applied to the narrative. Since the frequent surprises were an essential part of the experience, I think the first time through it is likely to be the best time, and I strongly recommend approaching it with as little knowledge of the plot and puzzles as possible. Despite the possibility of getting stuck, I would also recommend avoiding hints from outside sources -- try the built-in ones by talking to (Spoiler - click to show)the proprietor of the sandwich shop instead, and don't forget to save the game every so often.

After finishing the game, my first thought was that -- over two decades since its original release -- it really cries out for a remake, or at least an update to clean up lingering bugs and sand off the remaining rough edges. Quite intriguingly, author J. Robinson Wheeler recently posted a screenshot suggesting the partial development of a sequel titled No Time to Lose. The serial number shown suggests that it was being developed in 2005, prior to the current release of First Things First, and it would be very interesting to see what Wheeler had in mind about the protagonist's future.

Time travel stories are something of a cottage industry in IF, but this is one of the best ones that I've played. If you enjoy that type of story and are prepared to approach this work with an old school mentality, you'll almost certainly enjoy First Things First. If those conditions don't apply, your mileage may vary, but I'd still encourage any would-be author to check this one out for its unique features -- it's definitely something different in terms of crafting style.

I have known about this game for a very long time, but I had always put off playing it because I understood it to be fairly difficult in terms of puzzles, and this impression was reinforced by a few sporadic attempts to get the ball rolling. That was something of a misunderstanding -- there's really only one puzzle, and though it is tricky it's not difficult in the sense of being hard to intuit what must be done; you have a definite objective from the start, and the scope of action is readily discerned.

All Things Devours is structurally composed of just that single puzzle; the provided story is the absolute minimum required to sketch out a motivation. I say that with admiration for the author's fine judgment of what that minimum was, because the game does a great job of providing just enough motivation to keep going even as the perceived scale of the puzzle's central problem keeps expanding in the face of early experimentation.

This game earns a lot of respect from me on a technical basis, especially for the elegant implementation of the core puzzle mechanic. (Side note: thank you to author half sick of shadows for releasing the source code!) However, the constraints of the puzzle feel somewhat artificial, and I'm not sure that I can put the label "fun" on a game that required putting together a spreadsheet to solve, even though I certainly did get satisfaction from the process.

One thing not mentioned in other reviews is the non-standard handling of the passage of time in this game. The author basically hotwired the Inform 6 Standard Library to be able to track time in five-second increments. As I recall, there are a few actions that require more than this span of time to accomplish; it would have been interesting to see this subsystem expanded to require variable lengths of time for different kinds of standard action, but that would have complicated both coding and gameplay in ways that would probably not be desirable. Although the overall impact is minor, one thing that is not minor is the effect on the player: Several reviewers note the way that the game instills a sense of urgency, and the extremely granular handling of the in-game clock does much to create and reinforce this feeling.

Another interesting sidebar is the code which handles duplicates of objects. These are not true duplicates in terms of dynamically created and destroyed memory allocations, but the subsystem is a remarkably clean way to handle the complexity introduced by allowing objects to be taken back in time. If you're interested in creating a strict time travel game with model of the process that presumes a single, unified and unalterable timeline, then you should definitely study how author Toby Ord handled the associated problems.

The game has been criticized for the fact that the story told by a successful playthrough depends on a superhuman level of foresight on the part of the player character, who finds that her original plan to sabotage her research won't work and must devise an alternate plan in a matter of minutes. I'm not sure how much that matters, since the real motivation for playing the game is the "because it's there" factor of it being a well-designed pure logic puzzle. I skipped the hard mode because it looked like the same type of exercise, only more so -- a little more story might have motivated me to try it.

If you like time travel stories, then this game will stand out as being one of the better "hard SF" implementations of the concept. I definitely recommend it for sci-fi fans and those who enjoy well-implemented puzzles that are well-grounded in the story. The technique used to implement the core restriction is also worth studying; it's a practically fool-proof method of handling paradox detection.