Reviews by OtisTDog

Although choice-based games aren't my usual fare, this work by Victor Gijsbers was loads of fun to play. In turns humorous and serious, grandiose and self-deprecating, the writing quality has an incisive cleverness and ribald wit that strongly reminds me of Shakespeare. (Admittedly, most of my study of Shakespeare was compulsory, but to my high school English teacher's credit, he made us genuinely appreciate the good parts.)

Characters portrayed this well, in the context of a story this absorbing, make it easy to forget that you're "playing" this "game." The main character was not one with which I identified much, but it didn't matter; it gave the work the flavor of attending a play put on by actors so adept at reading the audience that they were adjusting the performance to heighten the drama and the comedy. I laughed out loud many times -- especially at the jokes portrayed via the presented options -- and lingered at several points to contemplate various items of philosophy espoused by the figures on the stage.

I don't think I agree with the style of morality advocated by the protagonist and princess, but to be sure they are hardly depicted as virtuous! I rather wonder whether the ending (Spoiler - click to show)prefigures bliss or tragedy for the main characters. Regardless, this is an extremely well-done bit of writing and a thoroughly enjoyable and recommended experience.

Parental advisory (in case you missed the author's warning): It does get NC-17-esque in its content at some points, so it's not well-suited for kids.

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.

As the title promises, this game begins with the player character about to engage in a sword duel. As soon becomes clear, the word "duel" is perhaps the wrong choice, because the PC is vastly outmatched by the opponent, known as The Countess. I came close to quitting at this point, because the work presents itself as a "one move" game. However, within a handful of cycles it is revealed that the PC has certain abilities that make it possible to evade certain death.

This game serves up thin slices of rich world-building with its vivid and evocative prose. The universe vaguely resembles ours with notable exceptions. First, everyone seems to be a hermaphrodite in the vein of Ursula K. LeGuin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness. Second, magic of some sort is real, in that the protagonist is able to perform impossible feats such as (Spoiler - click to show)flying to the moon. Third, the PC has the extraordinary capacity to move about in time as well as space, which is the core mechanic by which the story progresses.

Despite a limited range of locations and significant actions, this piece presents many contemplative and memorable moments to the player, and also many interesting experiments to the would-be author. In particular, a variety of NPC conversation styles are implemented, including a unique menu-driven interface with options phrased around question words (e.g. who, what, when, etc.) and a stripped-down enter-the-topic prompt that I found to be a remarkably smooth improvement over ASK/TELL. A very large number of endings are possible, too, giving it some replay value, which is welcome in a game this short.

Regrettably, the story is at certain points needlessly transgressive, apparently for no purpose other than shock value. It's rather a shame, because it limits my ability to recommend this otherwise exceptional work. Even though it is not suitable for young adults, it's well within bounds as fare for grown-ups, so if you're comfortable with NC-17 movies, you probably won't blink at this. For a more widely recommendable work by the same author, see Toby's Nose.

I admit: Everything about this game's packaging and presentation turned me off. The cartoon scroll, the Harry Potter font, the word "Junior" in the title -- all of it screamed "edutainment for kids" to me. I saw that it had picked up a XYZZY in 2018 for Best Puzzles, but I didn't give that much credence. I figured the voting crowd had a soft spot for kids that year or something -- a lot of math people seem to like IF, after all.

I am pleased to say that I was wholly, categorically wrong about this work by Mike Spivey. While it is a game rooted in math, it's math of the most basic sort, with nothing beyond late grade school level required. The crux of the game is purely logic-based and more closely resembles assembly language programming than anything else.

One has to give credit to Spivey for his design skills here. The simple setup quickly hooked me with its engaging "commentary" from the evaluating professors, and quite a lot of effort was put into showing the ropes to the disoriented new player in a seamless manner that is embedded in the fiction. Once I began to catch on to how the game is played, I was well-hooked by the combination of new "spell" rewards and acerbic commentary on erosion of academia in the game world -- an aspect by which the art reflects life in modern times.

The most impressive thing about the design is how smoothly the difficulty curve escalates, with appropriate variation in the challenge level as new capabilities are unlocked. This is just great game design, and it does an excellent job of leading the player ever onward to greater and greater challenges. In a concession to IF Comp's design criteria, the player is able to end the game at any time, with the most natural exit points being after having passed the exam either by majority or unanimous vote of the three-person evaluation committee. This also acts as a courtesy to the player, leaving those who aren't inherent point maximizers able to walk away with a feeling of accomplishment.

I'd recommend this game to anyone who likes a mental challenge, and I'd very much recommend this game as an introduction to IF for the type of person who enjoys the puzzles that one would find in Games magazine or the like. It makes an easy stepping stone to other games like Suveh Nux or any of the many games that adopt the Enchanter spell system.

Every so often I come across a work that plays so well that I think to myself: "This is the kind of game that Infocom secretly dreamed of producing."

To be sure, it really wasn't possible to produce a work like Alias, 'The Magpie' in Infocom's time. For starters, the game file is several times larger than would have been viable back then -- with the Glulx executable taking up just shy of 1.6MB, it wouldn't have fit on a standard 3.5-inch "floppy" for PCs, let alone on any of the various 8-bit micros in use during the mid-80s. That's not to mention that the Glulx virtual machine and Inform 7 are both light years beyond their historical counterparts (the Z-Machine and ZIL, respectively). However, I'm convinced that a text-based play experience like this one is the half-conceived ideal that lurked in the back of the mind of everyone working in the games group there, as well as the mind of every player of their products. It is, as Christopher Huang puts it: "damn-well near exactly what I come to IF hoping to find."

I'm having trouble expressing my appreciation for what author J. J. Guest has achieved with this piece in a manner that doesn't repeat observations from other reviews. Shall I extoll its high-quality writing (mentioned by 5 others), how polished and well-implemented it is as a program (4 others), its exceedingly fair puzzle design (4 others), or how just plain funny it is (4 others)? How it's like being in a Pink Panther movie (3 others) or a Wodehouse novel (3 others), or how it made me laugh out loud (3 others)? This game is truly remarkable! It's a perfect example of what parser games can be when done well: cleverly-conceived, nearly flawless in execution, engaging, entertaining, player-friendly as can be, threaded throughout with restrained but deft humor, and featuring a puzzle structure that emerges unobtrusively from the situation presented and is responsive to real-world logic. So much thought and work has gone into the kinds of small touches in writing and programming that are practically invisible unless one is watching carefully for them, but which collectively (and expertly) snare your attention and draw you in to become part of the story instead of a mere observer of it. I've heard it said that the mark of a true master is that they make what they do look easy; Guest does that here on a nearly constant basis, and this work places him firmly among the ranks of the New Implementors in my mind.

In particular, I agree with the praise from Ade McT, Sam Kabo Ashwell and others regarding the implementation of NPCs. NPCs are hard, and these are superbly done. Their actions and conversations react to the environment and situational history in myriad ways that together do a much better job than average of presenting them as other actual characters in the story, and which grant the setting a "sense of the place being alive," as Ashwell expressed.

If you know someone who doesn't "get" interactive fiction, this work would be an excellent introduction to the format, assuming that the newcomer likes witty writing and slightly absurdist situational comedy bordering on slapstick. This work is a welcome addition to my "great first game to recommend" list.

There are a few places where the implementation is not quite as polished, and even (to my surprise), a genuine bug or two. (Spoiler - click to show)(The only one that leaps to mind is an error when interacting with Leghorn; the game reported that he had left, but he still appeared in the room description after that... though it didn't seem possible to interact with him.) These are so surprising by contrast that they become the exceptions that prove the rule -- in a work as sincere as this one, such minor imperfections serve only to accentuate its excellence everywhere else.

As those who follow my reviews know, I am unusually stingy with my star ratings. It takes a *lot* to rank as a five-star game in my book -- it means that the work is the best in its category or otherwise qualifies as a landmark in the form. Despite its minor flaws, I have no reservation granting a five-star rating to Alias, 'The Magpie' which is surely destined to be considered a classic for many years to come.

It has been many years since I played the first installment of the Earth and Sky series. That episode seemed to do perfectly well as a standalone entity. Although certain mysteries were left open at the end of episode 1, it is, after all, consciously modeled after comic books, which are usually designed to be satisfying as single installments while leaving various plot elements unresolved.

For comic books, the desire to sell interested readers another issue is a clear motivation for this style of story-telling. For freely distributed labors of love, the style's purpose is less clear. Given that the original did not seem to require any continuation in order to accomplish its narrative goals, I wondered why author Paul O'Brian went on to create two sequels. Having finally played all the last installment, it's apparent that the story arc of the three epsiodes was planned out from the start as a single, integrated whole. There is evidence for this both large and small. A cryptic note found in the opening scene of the first episode makes perfect sense in the context of knowledge gained in episodes 2 and 3, for example, and the flow of pacing and action works much better for the two sequels when they are considered together instead of individually.

I agree with Mr. Patient's review that this work was not quite as satisfying of a conclusion to the series as I had hoped for, and for the same reason that this work feels incomplete. The perfunctory puzzle structure is so lightweight that it often serves only to slow down the action; it's certainly not meaty enough to satisfy someone who wants real puzzles. It almost seems as though O'Brian was trying to reconcile fundamentally incompatible objectives by including them at all, i.e. trying to balance the basically puzzle-free style of the first episode with the more traditional style of the second. A part of me wonders how the story would play if it had been created as a single large game instead of three shorter works -- such a structure certainly would have granted license for an obstruction-free ending sequence in which the story is carried to its dramatic conclusion, while still satisfying puzzle-seekers with part two's exploration of the planetoid. (It would probably also have been too large for IF Comp, so in that case it may never have been made at all.)

Looking over the awards-and-honors data on the series, I find it very interesting that episodes 2 and 3 each took first place in their respective IF Comps, while the first episode managed only 8th place. In part, this seems to be a function of weaker competition -- many leading lights of the IF world sat out both the 8th and 10th IF Comps. However, it's also clear that O'Brian's skill as a programmer and system designer improved noticeably over the course of the three episodes' development, and this third installment was a genuine achievement in the Inform 6 era. As other reviewers note, it is essentially bug-free, and O'Brian put in plentiful good work to support the technical innovation of being able to freely switch between the sibling protagonists. (Spoiler - click to show)(Regarding bugs: I did note a very minor one during the fight with the "simian hunters" -- after "freeing" one of them, the text produced while freeing the other seemed to assume that the first still needed to be freed and repeated the actions.) Perhaps surprisingly from a modern perspective, the second installment (which I found to be the weakest as a standalone episode while playing it last year) received the most enthusiastic community response, being nominated in six categories and winning Best Use of Medium. The third installment received more muted treatment, garnering only two nominations and no wins. I'm not sure what to make of this, other than to note that the second installment is the most traditionally puzzle-oriented of the three -- perhaps it's primarily an artifact of the old school bias that puzzles are a central measure (even the central measure) of quality in a work of IF.

I originally rated the game as three stars, but I'm upping that to four stars in recognition of this episode's context within the series as a whole. I do think that the trilogy achieves something notable by popularizing fast-paced action sequences and excelling in its design of player affordances for the type of story that it tells. I would recommend it to anyone as a decent introduction to IF suitable for older children (or just the young at heart). I would recommend to players starting the series that they plan to enjoy all three episodes in quick succession over a few evenings -- it's easy to forget details that are occasionally relevant to dialog in later installments.

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.)

Heroes is a delightful old-school fantasy-style work that took 3rd place in the 2001 IF Comp (following All Roads and Moments Out of Time) and received XYZZY nominations (but not wins) for Best Setting and Best Use of Medium. Much has been written in other reviews about what motivated these nominations: the game's novel mechanic (the ability to play through a scenario as five different PCs) and the quality of the writing, which captures the feel of an RPG like Dungeons & Dragons while structuring gameplay via tropes common to Infocom's works.

The prose and puzzle design are both of very good quality, working together to draw the player into the mindset of each PC and develop the story in a nonlinear fashion as the player moves through the sequence of roles. The framing story is more suggested than explained, and on careful review it doesn't seem to quite hang together as a unified whole; certain facts gathered through direct observation and hearsay are in contradiction with each other. It hardly matters, anyway, because the back story largely concerns two characters that are known by each PC but who share very little "screen time" between them. On the whole the framing story feels grafted on, but it can be ignored in order to focus on and enjoy the various vignettes.

The variety of play styles presented are in general well-supported by the mechanics of the implementation in addition to the writing. Of the five stories, I found the story of the enchanter to be the most well-designed in terms of puzzle structure. It feels the most "meaty" of all of the scenarios, too, and I wished that the other four had been developed to that level of depth. From a technical standpoint, the story of the thief was also quite interesting -- a strict but game-appropriate inventory limit is offset by the fact that the PC carries various items of equipment tucked away on his person so that they are always available for use. As another reviewer noted, the premise of the "royal" PC's scenario is quite funny; I actually laughed aloud as the gaggle of mostly useless sycophants began to accumulate. This does end up being among the weaker scenarios, however, presumably because developing proper puzzles for it would have involved a substantial subsystem around NPC interaction and knowledge.

Although Barrett's The Weapon (released the same year) is one of the most polished and bug-free games I've come across, Heroes is not crafted to that standard. I encountered several instances in which reasonable synonyms for commands were not implemented (e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)you can >GET X WITH Y but not >PICK UP X WITH Y), and a few bugs of the type that should have been caught with testing (e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)the stomachful of acid that can be dropped and picked up like any normal item). Twice I resorted to the walkthroughs; once was for a guess-the-verb/syntax scenario, and once was for a puzzle whose fairness is arguable. ((Spoiler - click to show)The barrel in the pawn shop is made of metal. Only one of the five PCs will notice this, and not the one for whom it is the most salient fact.)

Despite these rough spots, I found this game to be very entertaining. The effort of keeping the "same" scenario fresh through five different versions of the key events was not trivial, but the work paid off. After completing any two of the scenarios, you are likely to be compelled to play the rest. Perhaps the enchantment of the key McGuffin -- a gem which engenders a "compulsion beyond what its mere beauty should produce" -- works upon we players as well as the PCs.

(A technical note: A slight bug can cause the initial text after "[press any key]" prompts to be overwritten by the status line. This significantly impacts the epilogue text at the end of the game. The bug is negated by the Bocfel interpreter included with Gargoyle, so I recommend that interpreter be used to play this game.)

Released in the early days of the Amateur Era, this work achieved some notoriety by taking a definitive if hesitant step away from puzzle-focused interactive fiction. As the author states in the >AMUSING response at the end: "This game was an attempt to see if a serious and interesting story could be merged with traditional IF 'puzzle' elements without one overshadowing the other."

The work consistently presents itself as a morality tale, and the majority of contemporary and subsequent reviews categorize it as such, which presumably reflects most players' experiences. However, the author denies this description of the work in the associated walkthrough (emphasis mine): "...TAPESTRY may seem to be centered on morality and 'proper' choices. This was not my intention. There is a grander scheme going on (which the opening quote alludes to, and which, I hope, the epilogue makes clear)..."

The opening quote of the piece is from a book by Neil Gaiman: "Those who believe they must atone inflict this place and its tortures upon themselves... Until they realize that THEY, and only they -- not gods or demons -- create their hell; and by this they are freed, and take their leave... This place is evil, Timothy, but perhaps a necessary evil." The obvious reading is that hell is solely in the mind of the beholder, a self-inflicted torture that is ultimately unnecessary, serving only as a waystation for those on the path to enlightenment (or at least some other destination).

The author's use of the term "the epilogue" is interesting, however. This is program-mediated text, and although the final words of the game exhibit a dry, detached tone that is in stark contrast with the melodrama of the rest of the text -- a tone which on first reading implies that this is the "real story" of the PC's life -- the final text does, in fact, change depending on the course taken by the PC. The single identity referenced by the noun "epilogue" is therefore all three versions of the text. In two versions, the objective facts are consistent but what changes is the subjective narrative weaving them together. In the third (the one in which the PC successfully changes his past), the objective facts themselves differ.

I think it is fair to take the author at his word that this is not a game about morality. The ostensible moral dilemmas presented are almost parody in their contrived framing, and the story is not very subtle in its feedback that doing the "right" thing by changing the past to accord with commonly-held standards is in fact wrong. The encouragement you get in this path is from an "angelic being" who is (as the work will confirm if prompted) not a good guy. It soon becomes clear that the PC's attempts to do the "right" thing are at root just attempts to escape guilty feelings. What is not clear is whether that the guilt is even genuine -- the more closely one inspects the PC's thoughts, feelings and actions, the more he comes off as immature, narcissistic, and even sociopathic.

The most "winning" path (as implied by the tone taken in the text) is the path of (Spoiler - click to show)Clotho. In this path, the facts of the PC's life don't change -- only his attitude about them does. Though the work describes the transformative change as the PC "facing" his pain and guilt, in practice the change comes about via the PC simply denying all agency in his decisions as well as their negative consequences. (Spoiler - click to show)Regarding his absence from his mother's deathbed: "...you tell the Wraith ... how you wished you could have been in two places at once... only to find out it was too late." It is made unambiguously clear during that vignette that the PC should have been doing this work much earlier, and that he chose to go to City Hall knowing that it would preclude making it to the hospital in time. Regarding his "mercy killing" of his wife: "You tell [the Wraith] of Sarah's sickness, of her suffering. You explain that you wished to free her from all of it, that she herself found living impossible. You tell the Spectre that your act was one of love." In the vignette, the player must decide to kill Sarah before finding her note, and, as another reviewer notes, there does not seem to have been any discussion between them about this drastic decision beforehand. Moreover, on the path in which the PC ensures that she is given a new experimental treatment, she is cured! No matter how the PC prefers to tell it, a jury privy to the same evidence we are would have grounds to convict. Regarding the fatal car crash that ends his life as well as an innocent bystander: The PC makes no attempt to put a spin on this matter, but driving around late at night for no reason in a sleep-deprived and emotionally-unstable state is in no way responsible behavior. One might also note that his sole concern seems to be that he killed a woman, since he exhibits no dissatisfaction if the outcome is revised such that his victim is male.

Additional support for the author's claim comes from the design of the player interaction. The player gets, in effect, only two choices: whether to attempt to change all three "crisis" points in the PC's life as a group and whether to contest the accusation that he has done wrong. The former requires active effort on the player's part to search out the combination of events that will result in a changed history, while the latter is forced upon even the passive player since the game will interpret inaction as a choice. Very strangely, this second choice can be imposed even before the player makes any move that looks or feels like an intentional selection. (Spoiler - click to show)It is possible to leave the first and second scenes without resolving either. After being railroaded through the third, the player will be taken to a fourth location, where the Wraith will accuse the PC with three simultaneous questions: "Will you face me? Have you hubris enough to commit the breaking of your Moira? Are you fool enough to face your crimes?" (Apparently, in the author's mind, all three of these questions should be served by the same answer.) Simply saying "no" at the first prompt (the essence of denial) results in a choice being recorded -- from that point onward the player is only allowed to follow the script. Crucially, when the Wraith accuses the PC of being "a fool and a coward," an attempt to agree is rejected by the game: "You are about to concede defeat, when you realize that you cannot. You MUST fight this creature ... to the bitter end." To the PC, admission of any responsibility for his actions is tantamount to defeat.

The best support for the author's claim that this is not a morality tale is the endgame. (Spoiler - click to show)No matter which path is taken, the final result is oblivion for the PC; the choice truly does not matter for him. In the end, it seems to be a game about Nothing.

[A final note: This observation didn't fit well in the above review, but one item of interest about this game from an historical perspective is the surprising similarity between the climax of the third panel's vignette and that of Adam Cadre's Photopia (i.e. (Spoiler - click to show)being the driver in a fatal car accident that the player is powerless to stop despite being forewarned). This work predates Photopia by two years. As Paul O'Brien observes about the efficacy of the device: "[T]he feeling of not being able to (Spoiler - click to show)control the car despite what you order the character to do is an extremely chilling one, and it is an effect that would not pack the same potency were it attempted in static fiction." Cadre and other authors would experiment with limiting player agency more directly in later years, even to the point of replacing entered keystrokes with others to enforce pre-set commands in some cases, but the notability of the device in this work suggests that it may be the first time any author tried to limit player agency in a story-relevant way.]

OK, technically it's a house, not an apartment, but Moments Out of Time is one of the most interesting "my apartment" games that I've encountered. You play an AFGNCAAP "StreamDiver," someone authorized to conduct research into the the past via time travel. As the game begins, you are preparing for your "dive," which will be to a typical suburban home in the not-too-distant future from our player perspective, in order to collect what data you can about the inhabitants and their lives. The opening does a very good job of selling the setting, orienting the player to the goal, and instilling some urgency in both the short and long terms.

The prose is above average. The PC's clinical, semi-academic perspective on objects in the house serves both as exposition about the world of the far future and as commentary on modern life. The clinical tone does an excellent job of making the player feel both somewhat alien and at home at the same time, and its punctuation by occasional restrained eagerness characterizes the PC in a way that promotes player identification with the role. The technique creates an excellent pacing for the exposition, moving naturally in tandem with the player's own curiosity.

The high-level design of the setting is very well-conceived, and it creates many fortuitous excuses for the constrained gameplay. Causal contamination is a paramount concern for StreamDivers, but since the study site is about to be destroyed in a war, worries about such minor issues as the location of objects in what will soon be a pile of scorched rubble are alleviated. The greater fear is contact with inhabitants of the local time, which justifies limiting your interaction with the past to the house itself -- even looking out windows is off-limits, on the off chance that you are seen. NPCs are almost nonexistent, and the one conversation featured in the game is a no-nonsense debriefing of your mission that lends itself well to the clipped, keyword-driven responses that will be required of the PC.

Although the environment is mostly static, there are some dynamic elements that add interest over the course of the 12-hour study period being allowed. There is a good chance that when (Spoiler - click to show)a nearby explosion seals off an area or (Spoiler - click to show)a looter shows up and makes off with various items you will find yourself unexpectedly locked out of a portion of the residence, inhibiting your exploration and sealing off some details needed to get a full picture of what's going on. Although we, as players, are of course able to restart the game whenever we like, in-universe this will be the only chance to visit the site for the protagonist, who is constantly aware of the dwindling time remaining -- a limit enforced both by the fictional technology and an impending nuclear attack.

The mid-level design is also excellent. The techno-gadgets that the PC is allowed to bring along are interesting and well-implemented. The fact that only some of these toys can be taken with you into the past is a very artificial constraint that, as other reviewers have noted, serves primarily to enforce the need to replay the game in order to get a complete understanding of the situation being studied. (My advice is to bring the (Spoiler - click to show)autokey and the scan chip along on a first attempt.) The fact that the "rule of thumb" scoring system applied by the PC as the game progresses only loosely correlates to the "official" score based on the PC's performance in the final interview is clever, and neither is particularly well-correlated to the subjective satisfaction level obtained by the player. It does not seem possible to score the implied maximum of any of these in a single playthrough.

The low-level design suffers from numerous flaws. Object implementation is not as rich as it could be, and certainly sparer than expected given the apparent level of craft put into higher levels of design. In certain places, objects in rooms are not mentioned in the description; I found out about them only through console functions or unexpected disambiguation prompts. In many cases, specific verbs are required for interaction in a manner that I frequently found non-intuitive. Although it's true that the story provides a justification for everything to be well-secured (the house having recently been evacuated), the number of locked doors still seemed excessive, and the "treasure hunt" aspect of finding keys was (to me) unrewarding. The number of encrypted messages encountered, while partially justified by the associated character's personality, also seems artificially large; most teenagers would simply not write down anything they were so worried about someone else knowing. There also seem to be lingering significant bugs -- for example, I found that I could not (Spoiler - click to show)get access to one of the computers without the interface chip, even though the game supposedly lets you discover the password.

As another reviewer notes, the level of drama exhibited by the family under study is surprisingly high, with a convincing "reality TV" feel to the glimpses given. Willing suspension of disbelief is strained in places by the over-exuberant deployment of certain tropes (e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)boy genius inventor). My interest sharply peaked after encountering (Spoiler - click to show)evidence of another time traveler who potentially originates in an alternate future than yours, but (Spoiler - click to show)this seems to have been only a red herring (or possibly setup for the sequel, which I have not played). The rest of the story (Spoiler - click to show)ultimately doesn't amount to very much other than titillating teen drama.

Jeremy Douglass wrote in "Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media": "[T]he preemptive understanding of interactive works imparted by criticism is almost unavoidably destructive, both in the aesthetic sense and in the way it excises the experiences of ambiguity, exploration, and frustration. Where works are constituted by what the player does not yet know, as with mystery and suspense, this prevents the work." I have used extra spoiler tags in this review for just that reason; the whole point of this work is the experience of exploration. This game is one of the best I have seen at shaping the "ambiguity, exploration and frustration" that will constitute the player experience in an intuitive but subconscious way, via selection of mutually-exclusive tools to be taken along on the dive. By trusting your gut in choosing the loadout the first time, you automatically customize the play experience to minimize the kinds of interactions you don't like while leaving a level of challenge that you will find acceptable. This is the most brilliant part of the design, and my hat is off to author L. Ross Raszewski here.

The work makes use of limited multimedia in the form of sound and music. For the most part, the sound effects detract more than they enhance, and the only instance of music (played at the start of the game) seems to be a cover of the theme from (Spoiler - click to show)Terminator 2; hearing it is not essential.

While this work earned a very close second place in the 2001 IF Comp (removal of the single lowest-scoring vote would have changed history) and received more 10s from players than any other score for the first time in comp history (per the research of Greg Boettcher in "IF-Review" -- see above), it was completely ignored during the 2001 XYZZY Awards. How can this be reconciled? Personally, I would say that it's because, while many aspects of this game are very good, none of them are the best. (For example, it becomes clear at some point that in the future, humanity (Spoiler - click to show)is part of an interstellar civilization along with many races of aliens. If this were the case, one would expect the cultural impact to be of a magnitude that would manifest as more than footnotes and encyclopedia entries; the better writing choice would have been to excise this extraneous distraction.)

This work is highly recommendable as a player experience, and worth studying for its strengths and weaknesses by would-be authors. The three star rating means "good, not great" in my book, but it had the potential to score much higher. As a special note to anyone preparing to play: This game uses the Z6 format, which is the least well-supported of the Infocom formats. For the complete author-intended experience, you will need a sound-capable interpreter. At the time of this writing, Frotz is the best choice (though you may have to build the sfrotz executable yourself), but it is still playable using Gargoyle, and the experience using that interpreter should be improved in post-2023 releases based on a recent bug fix. Although I did not test it under WinFrotz, I would expect that interpreter to do a fine job, based on past experience with its excellent standards compliance. Use of one of the zblorb files available for download will avoid the need to put z6 and blb files in the same location in order to get sound.