Reviews by OtisTDog

After recently playing The Ghost Train by the same author and noticing the announcement that this work, too, had a recently-revised release, I decided to give this story a try to see how the author's craft had improved. My opinion is mixed.

The structure and flow of the story is very similar to that of the The Ghost Train: a catastrophic opening, followed by a fast-paced journey of exploration along fairly strict rails, followed by a chase, a time-limit sequence, and a couple of strongly-hinted "puzzles" (in function, light-duty obstacles) barring the way to the final conclusion. Less reliance on formula may benefit future works.

The implementation focus is somewhat better, with fewer elements that appear to be vestigial remnants of coding experimentation (though some(Spoiler - click to show), such as the food machine in the ship's kitchen, persist). The writing quality also seemed improved. Imagery was more subdued, and there were many fewer instances of repetition than can be found in its predecessor. However, like its predecessor, this story suffered from a fairly high rate of grammar and spelling errors, so additional proofreading efforts are warranted.

The coding quality seemed to have slipped a notch. I ran into several minor bugs that got in the way of the story, especially situations where two nouns could not be disambiguated(Spoiler - click to show), e.g. as occurs when trying to install the unburned circuit board during the lifeboat escape sequence. Also of note are those cases where critical objects are not mentioned in room descriptions and must be learnt of via other means(Spoiler - click to show), e.g. the CPU "circuit" object in the flight deck, which seemed to have no indication of its existence outside of the response to asking the computer about the CPU, even though it would have been plainly visible to the player character. In addition, synonym sickness is more evident(Spoiler - click to show), as when the lack of the word 'fuselage' as a synonym for 'ship' kept me busy for 20 minutes wandering the jungle and trying to enter through the implemented canopy object because the hatch can only be discovered via examining the 'ship', a word not used in describing the crash scene.

There is a famous quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." This is advice that any new author can benefit from, and it seems to be the single principle that best sums up the difference between this piece and its earlier cousin. Applying this maxim more diligently would surely continue the trend of improvement in future works from this author.

The incidence of first-timer foibles is about the same as in The Ghost Train, with #2, #8, #9, #10, #12, and #13 evident (this last being found mostly in out-of-place Microsoft and McDonalds humor sprinkled throughout).

Produced in response to the challenge of Speed-IF 6, this lightweight entry is competently coded and can be completed in short order, but is poorly designed both as a story (the premise and micro-story seem somewhat forced) and as a game (the single puzzle isn't even clearly presented as a puzzle). This speed IF had a particularly odd assortment of seed ideas; it will be interesting to see if any of the other submissions do better.

The deficiencies of this piece are hardly unusual for speed IF, and my one-star rating is typical for the mode. The apparent quality of the coding (written in Inform 6, where haste can easily make waste) leads me to suspect that the author's other works (some of which have good ratings from small groups of players) are worth exploring.

You might need the walkthrough to discover the winning moves, but the game universe is small enough that you will likely find them through brute force with a little patience.

The only reason I started this piece was because I came across The Warlord, The Princess & The Bulldog here on IFDB. I liked the introduction to that so much that, when I discovered it was a sequel, I decided to play the first installment of the series before continuing.

A Spot of Bother has a funny premise, and I liked the humor in the introductory backstory. The absurdist tone fits perfectly with absurdist version of the universe presented in a typical "text adventure." However, the joke started to wear off pretty quickly, because the style of humor in the writing (spoofy one-liners at a brisk pace) is entirely mismatched with the structure of the game (really, really oblique puzzles that bring the action to a grinding halt, and lots of them).

Some puzzles can be bypassed by taking a hit on your lives (you get 5 to start), but others must be solved to make any progress. The limited space to explore in the game between required solutions -- often allowing progress to only one additional room -- means that there's nothing but frustration to be had if you get stuck.

To make progress, sometimes it's necessary to examine things in great detail. The lopsided object implementation -- from items mentioned in room descriptions but not "there" to items with 4 levels of detail description available -- makes this requirement particularly cruel. Couple this with an irksome tendency to require performing the same action multiple times, and any sense of fairness to the player evaporates.(Spoiler - click to show) The final insult is the pure capriciousness of exchanges like this:

> examine metal bar
This looks like a javelin of some kind, although quite why Mrs Moog had it lying around her front garden you can’t imagine.

> throw metal bar at window
You don’t see any reason to go throwing things around.

> x spike
The spike is about an inch wide and an inch tall and has the look of a good poking device to you.

> throw spike at camera
You take aim and throw. The spike hits the bars and bounces back, falling onto the ground at your feet.

So there's no reason to go throwing things around, especially not hard metal javelin-like things, when a softer wooden spike described as a poking device is so much better for the job.

There are several other examples in the same vein, unfortunately.

And believe me, stuck you will be. I have a hard time agreeing that this game is a "puzzlefest" because it doesn't seem to have very many genuine puzzles. If you accept Nick Montfort's argument that a good IF puzzle is like a riddle, the kind of riddles in this work are a lot like Bilbo's "What have I got in my pocket?" in The Hobbit -- patently unfair and likely to drive the one trying to solve them crazy.

It's hard to believe that anyone could have possibly finished this game without resorting to a walkthrough or a decompiler. There are built-in hints, but I found them to be singularly useless -- either referring to puzzles I wasn't aware of yet or confirming the existence of puzzles I was aware of already, and offering no actual hints (i.e. a nudge in the right direction without spoiling the puzzle entirely) in either case.

The game also suffers with respect to quality of implementation. There are guess-the-verb challenges of the most elemental kind. In the first room, a key item offers different responses depending on whether you use "get" or "take." In another place, "examine sign" works but "read sign" doesn't. For one obstacle, "flick switch" but not "flip" or "change" or "toggle" or "turn" or "use" or "press" or "pull" or "push" or any of the others I tried before resorting to the walkthrough. There's even a game-critical NPC that you can't examine but can talk to.

As a side note, I think I like ADRIFT less every time I run into it. What it makes me realize is that the quality of the parser creates a fundamental difference in the quality of the player experience. ADRIFT's parser appears fairly primitive, with the most irritating aspect being that it is often not apparent to a newcomer whether a word has been understood or not -- in other words, one can't differentiate parser failure from referring to an unimplemented object.

All of the above said, producing this piece took a significant effort, and with a higher-quality implementation, I'm sure I would have had a much more favorable reaction to it. I really do like the writing and even found just reading the walkthrough to be an enjoyable experience once I gave up hope of actually working through the game on my own. Perhaps if every puzzle could have been bypassed with an amusing near-death sequence, allowing the story to be completed with few points quickly, reaching the end would have been much more enjoyable, and I would have been more motivated to figure out how to get the highest score.

I still plan on playing the sequel to this piece, but it may be a while before I'm ready to risk that much frustration again.

What this game lacks in plot, puzzles, and punctuation, it makes up with a simple earnestness and a fortuitous brevity. Navigating the simple linear path through 8 or so rooms nearly devoid of implemented objects is an exercise in perseverance and a relatively lightweight one at that.

There doesn't seem to be much here; figuring out the directions linking rooms together seems to be the biggest challenge on your way to the end location. You'll find a few letters of encouragement and an apparently unnecessary lantern on the way, but there are no obstacles to overcome or reasons to care about getting there.

This is an Inform 7 6G60 release, so I'm guessing this is a first time effort by someone who has read the opening chapters of "Writing with Inform." I encourage the author to read the rest of the Inform 7 manual as well as Coyne's First-Timer Foibles, because it's clear that the imaginative seeds of something much grander are already on display here. All that's needed is more patience and polish to produce something worth playing.

I'm generally not one for keyword-driven stories, which emulate the kind of interactivity you would find in hypertext. I've always felt that that type of interaction was inherently limiting; with all the connections drawn out for the reader, there isn't much interactivity to be had other than by exploring the graph that defines the story's structure.

That said, when considered with respect to some of the more railroaded story-oriented IF out there, it actually demonstrates some comparative benefits. No chance for hunt-the-verb, hunt-the-noun, synonym sickness, or many of the other opportunities for failure that "standard" IF offers. Non-interactive NPCs seem less of an affront when the illusion of free conversation isn't even presented. So maybe there's a natural fit between this format and an all-story, no-puzzles work.

As far as plot goes, this piece is short but very interesting. In the minutes it takes to play it, the author managed to interject some surprising ideas about the mindset of the protagonist -- things that I did not expect or consider but which are immediately obvious when pointed out, things which demonstrate that the author has put some time and effort into crafting the fictional world created. (Spoiler - click to show)I especially like the way some of the ideas are revealed through characterization; the response to "mirror" in the exercise room packs a lot into a few words. The short plot and ambiguous ending practically beg for a more thorough exploration of this fictional world.

This was the first work of the author's that I've ever tried, and it left me favorably inclined to try others. Worth the time if you are seeking a quick diversion.

Some people might think from my breathless review of Spider and Web that I am an Andrew Plotkin groupie. This is not the case. While I have tremendous respect for his fearsome combination of seamless coding and tight story-telling*, he is, in the end, only human. Shade is the reminder.

The start of this work exhibits all of Mr. Plotkin's hallmark qualities: his trick of making the mundane seem interesting with inventive prose, his expert sense of how long to keep the player in suspense before providing the next clue about what's going on, his knack for making the story follow you before you can follow it. The excellence of this work set up some high expectations about what would come next.

To me, everything about the first half of the game seemed to be pointing towards a particular moment of revelation, in which the player would literally "wake up" and begin a new section of gameplay. This never happened. Instead, things take a sharp turn towards the weird and abstract, and the story leaves the player in the lurch, confused and unsatisfied about which, if any, of the tensions introduced in the first half were resolved.

When abstraction is introduced, art is always in danger of sliding down the slippery slope from transcendent to incomprehensible. Shade, unfortunately, goes right over the edge. While it is tempting to think that I just "missed it", it seems more likely that Mr. Plotkin's profound intuition misled him here in deciding how to communicate whatever he was trying for. [edit: Turns out there was quite a bit I just missed. (Spoiler - click to show)The studied opinion of IF master Emily Short shows that a careful reading of the text provides plenty of evidence (subtle though some of it may be) to support a consistent and interesting interpretation of the end. I've upped my rating by a point to reflect this.]

This game is still worth playing at least once just to marvel at the genius of its functioning as the story's central mystery unwinds. I can't even conceive of what the underlying code for this game looks like, but it feels like something deeply elegant and beautifully simple. If the story had the same coherence, this might have been another landmark work in the field.

* Or is it tight coding and seamless story-telling?

This is the kind of speed IF that makes the whole idea worthwhile.

This particular competition (Speed IF Jacket 2) seems to have had a looser timeline than most, with license of up to a week given by the organizer and an IFMUD post indicating that entries were still being accepted a month after the official kickoff. I don't know how long Mr. Ashwell (who was the organizer) spent creating this work, but the original poem in the introductory sequence makes it obvious that Ugly Chapter is no rush job from a writing perspective.

This work quickly convinces you that it's going to be something very different and very good. In just a few short moves, Ashwell's masterful writing brings into focus the extremely inventive narrative framework he created in which to tell this story, while outlining enough features of the setting to show that he's invested some thought into making it all hang together.

There's a certain style of writing that I love, in which the author spends little or no time on formal exposition and instead builds up a picture through details. It's a difficult trick, but when done right, this literary pointillism gives the reader the vivid impression that he or she is looking through a window at a complete and consistent universe; the individual dots begin to merge into a coherent whole. Ugly Chapter pulls this off almost offhandedly, while it's busy snaring the player's attention with expertly crafted replies to the usual opening moves, replies that quickly make it clear that 1) this game will not have a "you" in in it in the conventional sense of IF, and 2) that won't reduce your enjoyment of the work one bit.

Ugly Chapter is an excellent use of the interactive fiction medium, conscripting even the parser interface into the service of making clear what's happening as the story unfolds. Once the method by which this story is ostensibly being conveyed starts to sink in, the player is quickly railroaded to the conclusion(Spoiler - click to show), before the novelty of the reader/player simultaneously experiencing "being" both the trapped protagonist and the pathos-inspiring narrator wears off.

I would not qualify this piece as a comedy, it's more like poetry. Perhaps what's most remarkable is the way that this work so dramatically exceeds the threshold of expectation set by Speed IF Jacket 2's structure: Authors were given a set of fictional, out-of-context blurbs -- each created by a different participant and given to one other -- and were supposed to create a work to which they would apply.

It's an interesting variation on the random-seed-ideas premise; instead of X components, authors are given X perceptions. As you might expect, many blurbs were silly. A silly piece in response would be entirely expected and appropriate. A story of this quality in response is astounding; Ashwell makes the pretend blurbs seem silly in an entirely new way.

Without knowing the development time, it's hard to say whether this should truly be considered speed IF. Either way, I'm glad I didn't miss it.

The first speed IF competition emerged as a sort of spontaneous affair, it's genesis on IFMUD (preserved for all time over at IFWiki) looks a lot like a transcript from "Whose Line Is It, Anyway?" Beginning with the ridiculously short development timeline of 15 minutes, it was extended in stages to two hours, at which point David Cornelson, the inventor of the concept, released Coffins. [edit: Yikes! It has been gently pointed out to me that Christopher Huang is the author of Coffins, as should have been obvious to me based on what I linked to above. That's what I get for writing while too tired.] It was the only submission.

This seminal moment might have passed unnoticed, but, about 4 weeks later, on the eve of Halloween 1998, Cornelson organized another challenge like it, and a new phenomenon in the world of IF began to take root. Dan Shiovitz participated in this event, now known as Speed IF 2, and he was one of three people other than Cornelson [edit: Again, that should read "Huang", not "Cornelson"] to submit a finished work.

This piece, with its ridiculously long title, reads like a kind of gleeful, drunken attempt to make up a ghost story on the fly while sitting at the campfire after a long day of hiking, sun, and beer. It's silly, and it's fun, and it's a good time, but it's hard to call the result a story. Nonetheless, it made me laugh, and it only takes a few minutes to play, so I'd recommend it to anyone on the grounds of its historical and comedic value.

Emily Short has pioneered a number of advances in IF, most notably the radically innovative conversation model of Galatea. Galatea was not universally loved; my sense is that many people thought of as too experimental or too "new school" (i.e. all story, no puzzles) to be generally accepted. Not one to turn down the implicit challenge, Emily set to work on Savoir Faire to demonstrate that she really did "know how to do it" in the old school style.

She succeeded dramatically, removing any doubt that she is one of the modern masters of interactive fiction, and joining the pantheon of the New Implementors. Savoir Faire is arguably her most acclaimed work: Too big for submission in the IF Comp, it swept up most major awards in the 2002 XYZZYs and was a finalist for the remainder.

Ms. Short's signature style seems to be daringly huge conception followed by lengthy and intense efforts to bring her new brainchild into being. In this case, the kernel of genius is her conception of the "Lavori d'Aracne", a type of sympathetic magic that allows users to link objects together, entangling them physically and conceptually in interesting ways. Where most authors might go on to write a perfectly delightful game full of special-purpose code to produce the "fun parts", Ms. Short seems to have labored to create an entire simulation system for it -- implementing not just the magic but its very laws.

This has two effects: First, the modeled world seems incredibly rich and deep as a result of your freedom to deploy this new power in just about any way that respects the built-in laws. It is entirely possible to forge links that are useless to the main character, but which nonetheless function in a consistent manner. Second, it sets the bar for coding very high, as the complexity of the game's system soars.

Unfortunately, Savoir Faire seems to have been a bite that was slightly too big to chew from a coding perspective -- though I played version 8, there are still (minor) bugs to be found. These are completely forgivable and do not detract from the entrancingly intricate story, but they did throw some jarring notes into an otherwise grand symphony.

Though this would normally qualify as a five star entry in my book, I'm only giving four stars because of the unfairness of one particular puzzle. Why "unfair"? Because:(Spoiler - click to show)The puzzle with the dancers and the letter was a sharp departure from the consistency of other linking puzzles. You are required to build a link between the two objects, but there is little to indicate that this should be possible according to the laws of linking as I gleaned them in a week of playing the game.

All other links seem to require at least two points of similarity from several categories: form, material composition, color, decoration, or physical relation/relative positions. This is true for both puzzle-related links and general case legal links, but no such correspondence exists for these two items. In my perception, the picture of the dancers would count as decoration on the old letter but must correspond to the physical form of the dancers themselves.

The dancing/encryption idea was very clever but this particular link seems not like the others; I am certain it is enabled by special-purpose code and would not be allowed as a general case. So, even though I knew the letter and dancers were related, even though the picture of one is on the other, so consistent was the negative reinforcement from my many failed experiments in linking that I spent a whole day without it ever occurring to me that a link of these two things might be possible. After all, some puzzle solutions do not directly involve links.

Maybe this incongruence was intentional -- many famous old school puzzles are at least as arbitrary, and there is a mocking undertone running through the game directed at old school fanatics (like me). I suspect this was just an error in continuity, though, and it had a disproportionate impact on my perception of the overall quality of the playing experience.

Then again, maybe I'm just annoyed that I didn't think of the solution on my own, since I was doing so well without hints to that point, and I may have eventually found the right command through brute force (a definite echo of the oldest of old school play). As she mentions in her own hints page, I always had the option of decrypting the letter out-of-game.

These minor flaws aside, there's no question that Savoir Faire is one of the great accomplishments of the new era, and I highly recommend this work to all players. It delivers the best of both the new school (dense story) and old school (great puzzles), and left me with a hunger for more that will no doubt be satisfied by the sequel, Damnatio Memoriae. Allow yourself one hint to avoid getting irritated like I did, and you'll probably end up giving it a five-star rating yourself.

[edit: With the passage of time, my irritation about that one puzzle has faded, and I have come to realize what a tremendous accomplishment this work embodies in its exemplary integration of a simulationist implementation with both the puzzles and the story. As such, I feel compelled to increase my rating to five stars, since it is undoubtedly the pinnacle of that class. Hats off to Ms. Short!]

After reading the fake newspaper provided as a virtual feelie for The Weapon, I was already hooked by the work's fictional universe and eager to see what the story would be. A few turns of experimentation showed that the protagonist had an interestingly different internal monologue, while the fairly convincing NPC who is your main antagonist provided some clues to the situation at hand. Sean Barrett's expert writing subtly (and, if need be, directly) clues you in that this will be a game of cat-and-mouse, that you will be the one providing the misdirection alluded to in the tagline.

At the point where the NPC asks you her first question, I took a cue from the protagonist's apparently close-mouthed nature and tried the command "nod". It was tremendously pleasing to see a realistic response. After the number of clunkier pieces I've reviewed lately, it was refreshing to see a work composed with such forethought and attention to detail.

I won't go into the details of the game, but this was definitely the best "hard SF" piece that I've played since Infocom's Starcross. As with Starcross, the logic of the puzzles was grounded in realism and did not require any feats of mind-reading to solve. In fact, one of the most remarkable aspects of this piece is the number of well-crafted puzzles that the author, Sean Barrett, manages to wring out of the relatively few moving parts implemented. It's like a haiku -- all the non-essentials are stripped away, and what's left really works.

The flipside of this is that the interaction lacks some of the meatiness that would be welcomed in such an intriguing game world. I found myself wishing for the ask/tell model of conversation just so I could pump Cheryl for information about the things mentioned in the feelie.(Spoiler - click to show) While the ending does not leave room for a sequel, I would have been very interested to see another story written in this setting. On the whole, however, I think Mr. Barrett's sense of balance is exactly right; more details might simply have diluted the experience and reduced the level of focus the current writing inspires. It says something about how engrossing I found The Weapon to be that I had nearly reached the end of it before I realized it was going to be a one-room game.

The Weapon took most of an evening of on-and-off play to complete; total length is probably about right for the IF Comp, though it seems this piece was not entered when it was released in 2001. While it made finalist for Best NPC and Best Puzzles in the 2001 Xyzzy Awards, it did not win in either category.

I teetered back and forth between 3 and 4 stars for this and ultimately decided on 4, on the grounds of its exceptionally thorough implementation, nearly frictionless gameplay, and memorable characterization and story. This is a great introductory piece of IF for sci-fi lovers, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone who likes the genre.