Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

It has been 15 years since Textfyre released this work, the first in its intended lineup of introductory interactive fiction targeting a young adult audience. Although at the time it was shipped with a novel graphical user interface for playing it, the technology stack on which it was based has since aged into obsolescence, making it hard to experience the work as originally intended. Fortunately, the work itself is not lost, as David Cornelson, the moving force behind Textfyre, decided to release the game to the public in normal Glulx format after its day as a commercial offering was done.

It took me some time to pin down the reason why I was so disappointed by this game, which is that it systematically reneges on its implied commitment to the reader/player at every stage of the story. Let me explain: I believe that a well-written story engages in a kind of contract with the reader, i.e. "If you spend the time to experience me, I will make it worth the time that you spend." This is the basic idea behind the dramatic principle of Chekhov's Gun, i.e. that the author shouldn't place a potentially plot-significant item into the scene without making it plot-significant in some way -- by placing it within the fictional world the author cues the reader to think about it, think about its potential uses, and watch with anticipatory tension for which of those potentials will be realized. There are many methods by which a good story cues the reader to certain expectations, with the implicit promise that it will later either fulfill those expectations or deny them with deliberate artistic intent.

Again and again, Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter implies things about character, setting and plot that are simply not followed up or which are flatly contradicted later in the story. Some examples, but in no way an exhaustive list:

* (Spoiler - click to show)The player character styles herself as a top-notch street thief, but she never demonstrates those supposed skills. Every one of her thefts from market stalls is spotted. Is this intended as comedy, i.e. that she only imagines her capabilities? Is she just in such a rush that she's not using her usual subtlety? It's not clear. She later barely manages to pick a lock, seeming unused to the process.

* (Spoiler - click to show)Early characters made to seem important such as Teisha, the baker and the butcher, are never seen again despite substantial conversation menus that invite significant engagement with them. Additionally, at least one of these characters introduces an implicit subplot (the butcher's love interest in one of the PC's caretakers) that is never subsequently mentioned.

* (Spoiler - click to show)The player character's heritage is supposedly a secret, but a surprisingly large number of people in the town seem to know about it -- even the servants of the main antagonist.

The result is that there is no point at which the reader/player can properly "settle into" the story and become part of it, and thus it ultimately fails as both fiction and as interactive fiction.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the gameplay is rather devoid of actual play after the first chapter, which involves the player character escaping from a group of ill-intentioned mercenaries in pursuit in a crowded marketplace. Upon reaching the end and looking back, there were only three things that seemed to count as puzzles in the whole game(Spoiler - click to show): the escape from the market, refinding the secret entrance to get into the ball, and optionally escaping from your bonds in the climax scene. In a work that has about 140,000 words of source code, that's surprisingly few, and of the three, only the first feels properly designed for its target audience. (Spoiler - click to show)(The second is obvious enough to an experienced player, but I would expect some fraction of newbies to get stuck. The solution for the third just doesn't really make sense given the described physical situation. While solving it is technically optional, failing to do so results in a wholly unsatisfactory ending.) The first chapter implies that the rest of the game will be gated with similar light puzzles, but it presents the "hardest" mandatory puzzle of the entire game. Functionally, this makes it the climax of the game part -- which in the long run leaves the game feeling over before it started.

On the plus side, Michael Gentry's writing is very good. At the microscale of words, phrases and sentences, it keeps one's interest and keeps one reading. I doubt that I would have managed to finish the entire game if it weren't for the steady reward of being able to read another paragraph by that very skilled author. The IFDB entry lists both David Cornelson and Gentry (of Anchorhead fame) as authors. I can't be certain, but my impression is that Mr. Gentry was more or less writing to spec for this game, with the story and puzzle design largely originating with Mr. Cornelson.

One very interesting design element was the way that NPC conversations in Chapter 2 imply the passage of time as the player character moves west-to-east through the town for the first time. The earliest conversation with the baker has an out-of-breath tone reflecting the fact that the PC has just escaped the market, while later conversations imply that there has been time for the PC to calm down and rumors of the happenings at the market to make their way along the grapevine to the other side of town. It seems a risky device -- I'm not sure that the conversations are responsive to the actual order in which they occur, so it counts on the human player following the path of least resistance -- but the writing does a great job of guiding the player along the intended path.

On the minus side, the implementation of NPC conversations as a whole is particularly poor in this work, for the most part amounting to little more than the menuization of an ASK/TELL model over a relatively small set of standard topics. Only a handful of choices result in additional context-sensitive branches of the conversation, and this for only one or two successive replies at most. The result encourages a repetitive lawnmower approach that eats up time without offering much in return beyond extensive confirmation and reconfirmation of certain background information. One of my co-players joked that the PC seemed to be secretly conducting political polling for the fictional town's upcoming election.

About that election, which is central to the plot: It is very hard to suspend one's disbelief enough to experience any tension. The ostensible political situation is the fulcrum on which the whole plot balances, but it took me and my co-players quite a while to figure out how it made any sense at all. (Spoiler - click to show)(The PC is the daughter of a well-liked but long-gone regional leader... but so what? Are we really to believe that an unacknowledged, illegitimate daughter would be given the slightest consideration during a vote by an insular aristocracy? Or that mysterious beneficial forces would be content to let the naif whom they are backing wander through the volatile political scene without firm guidance?) Direct lampshading of the plot issues in later scenes doesn't actually resolve them, and in the end the entire plot seems to be chucked aside as irrelevant in a cliffhanger conclusion implying that much deeper political machinations are underway -- leaving the player unsure about what the point of it all was.

This game is historically significant and worth studying, but I can't say that either I or my co-players particularly enjoyed it. Anyone enticed by the premise of young adult interactive fiction in a fantasy setting may be better off exploring another work -- perhaps Textfyre's second release The Shadow in the Cathedral or the relatively recent The Princess of Vestria. (Yes, the latter is written in Twine, but really there is little about this work that leverages the parser.)

Chlorophyll is an almost rock-solid young adult science fiction "light puzzler" that emphasizes the relative importance of writing skill over coding skill when it comes to creating memorable and intriguing IF. Even though it generally sticks to the most basic verbs and object types, it is a thoroughly enjoyable work that adroitly blends story and puzzle in a carefully-crafted balance. The result is a rare treat to experience as a player.

This the second piece that I've played from author Steph Cherrywell, following her better-known Zozzled. To me, this work is far superior to the celebrated 2019 award-winner. What Chlorophyll has in spades that its successor lacks is a fine-tuned thematic unity, which is essential to creating a compelling and engaging play experience.

The setting is rooted in the idea that, somewhere in the universe, vegetation has developed mobility and sentience, then subsequently evolved into a humanoid form. The player character is such a humanoid, but other than the green skin and attendant consequences with respect to metabolism, she is portrayed as a pretty typical pre-teen. This is possible because the culture of the plant people, who are called Xylloids, is more or less indistinguishable from the modern Western lifestyle.

Does this sound like a failure of the imagination on the part of the author? It is not -- very clearly the sci-fi aspect is just window-dressing for the narrative half of the game, which is an adventure story caught in that awkward stage of being halfway grown into a coming-of-age story. See Emily Short's review for more on this; the more substantive craft here pretty much escaped me since I wasn't the target audience. Nonetheless, the adventure story hooked me easily and got me to engage with the game half of the story.

It's there, in the game part, that the sci-fi premise shines. Who wants light puzzles and hunger puzzles in games today? Cherrywell's inspiration to combine the two as a natural consequence of the premise is nothing short of genius in my view, showing off a Plotkin-like ability to reinvigorate old tropes. As the review by Sam Kabo Ashwell notes, this novelty does not overstay its welcome, and its retirement from the player's list of concerns is very skillfully combined with a significant story beat. (This is an example of the highest-quality craft in that it was perfectly invisible to me as a player. It's only in retrospect and after having it pointed out that I am admiring this brilliant touch.)

Cherrywell's instincts with respect to exposition and characterization are laudable, as well. As others have noted, these are delivered on a steady drip-feed that rewards the mundane exploration required to find and take the measure of the puzzles. There's not a text dump in sight, and although another reviewer found the introductory sequence to be too long, I gauge it to be just about right for a beginner player -- enough turns to experiment with basic verbs like >EXAMINE and >INVENTORY without devolving into >Z.Z.Z. I particularly liked the way that the base comes into view and then is briefly out of view again -- a tiny touch that injects an element of dynamism into a scene serving primarily to characterize the protagonist's mother. (That characterization is a building block needed to enable the incipient crisis to create any tension at all, and I am again admiring in retrospect how deftly Cherrywell juggles competing needs in this sequence.)

None of the other reviewers seem to have noted that there are two winning paths through the game: one "bad" (i.e. rule-breaking) and one "good" (i.e. rule-following). The game is scoreless and has only one significant ending, so it doesn't really matter which path one takes. (The situation is such that the required rule-breaking is justified, in any case.)

This game isn't perfect. I agree with reviewer Tristano that the climax was a bit too abrupt, especially after the apparently false foreshadowing of (Spoiler - click to show)the Polithea action figure armor vest accessory and the option for a "tough" leafcut at the salon. A better action sequence for it would have been an improvement to me, but again I don't think I was the target audience. There were also some minor bugs, most notably (Spoiler - click to show)a >USE verb that is non-functional and text spacing issues of the type that Inform 7 is prone to create, and some other small issues, e.g. a lack of exit descriptions in places and a critical path puzzle solution that requires a command that smacks of the era of two-word parsers. (Spoiler - click to show)(For replacing the fuse in the underwater area, it's only necessary to (Spoiler - click to show)>UNSNAG FUSE after having brought it along in the tunnel roller.) These flaws are vastly outweighed by the overall execution. There are also a couple of bits of adult-oriented humor, but these are done well in that they are likely to go over the heads of small kids and to be only half-understood by savvier older kids. If you have concerns about these, then avoid (Spoiler - click to show)the encrypted file on the mother's computer and the engineer's calendar in the engine control room, but they are no worse than PG-13.

I recently waxed poetic about Alias, 'The Magpie' as an avatar of the subconscious Infocom ideal. This game is also an exceptionally good expression of that style, and I agree with Mathbrush that Chlorophyll would have made an excellent addition to their beginner line. Works like this are strategically important for introducing younger generations to interactive fiction, and this work is certainly going into my file of games to recommend to newcomers.

Just as a side note: I give rankings based more on a power law than a bell curve, and 4 stars means truly excellent on my scale. If you are considering playing this work and are in the mood for something in the sci-fi YA zone, I definitely recommend that you try it.