Reviews by OtisTDog

From the first line, Mud Warriors reads as a gritty war novel. One could call this a stylistic parody, but that description doesn't quite hang right because it's not just imitation for comedic effect.

As the player begins to move through the scenario, the first reaction is pure amusement at the ironic contrast between the style and tone of the prose and the actual setting of the story. It may feel like reading All Quiet on the Western Front or Heart of Darkness, but it's just kids having some after-school fun in the mud... isn't it?

No... not really, no. As the protagonist encounters various teammates and opponents in this crayon doodle of a war, there are story beats that -- if one calls to mind one's worldview from the grade school era -- are actual tragedies at the scale appreciable during childhood: friendships damaged or destroyed, enemies made, promises broken, hopes dashed, seeds of cynicism strewn.

Each of the "warriors" is "playing" the "game" for different reasons. Some are confused but do not question the implicit rightness of anything that they are told is a rule. Some take advantage of the opportunity to unleash aggression without censure or punishment. Some remain eager as ever to please those in charge and accept the sudden change of what defines normal without a second thought, no doubt assuming that any dissonance they feel is a personal problem.

Two figures linger at the edges of the consensus reality shared by all of the other children. The first is the Oracle, a proto-adult, "the archetype of womanhood," whom the protagonist dimly senses has crossed some important threshold and now lives on a plane that he has not yet reached. Her small demesne constitutes a separate universe, one where rules are fluid and deeper principles rein. Already, she understands that some truths are too terrible to be contained in mere words and must be perceived directly to be accepted. She waits patiently and does what she can to help one person at a time, keeper of the bridge between the "living" and the "dead." One wonders: Is she part of the system of rules being imposed, or is she a spontaneous reaction against them?

The second is her functional opposite, "Mike the After-School Supervisor," the only grown-up appearing in the work. He is a figure granted authority by the children but wholly disinterested in fulfilling the responsibilities that he has ostensibly taken on. He sits "cross-legged" on his "spotless" bench, "keeping an eye on the war he’s engineered," a kind of anti-Buddha whose main concern seems to be interacting with his charges as little as possible. (In the wonderful GameBoy adaptation of this work, Mike's attention oscillates between self-congratulation and making a quick buck on the distress that he is packaging as fun. Since that version received the active assistance of author Ryan Veeder, I'm assuming that this characterization is intended to be canonical.)

It is so very poignant that the protagonist seems to consider it simply unthinkable to do anything that would break the rules set by Mike, when it's completely clear to the grown-up player that these rules exist solely for the microcosmic ruler's convenience and benefit. The protagonist understands that something is wrong about the game that he's being compelled to play, but he literally can't conceive the true nature of the causes of his plight.

I asked someone with a PhD in English literature how best to describe Veeder's core narrative device here in technical terms, and it wasn't easy to come up with anything succinct. The irony of the parodic prose style is itself deployed to ironic effect when the story turns out not to be entirely ironic, after all. Does one call this double irony, ironic irony, perhaps meta-irony? I don't know, I just know that I went from laughing about this work to frowning thoughtfully about it. And that the next day, compelled to go through it in detail, I began to feel a bit of awe at Veeder's subtle, dextrous -- even surgical -- skill in crafting it.

There's a long-standing joke about Shakespeare being overrated: "It's just a bunch of moldy old quotes and worn-out cliche." The joke, of course, is that these "old quotes" and cliches originated with Shakespeare in the first place -- it's their genius that has caused them to echo through the ages and be endlessly recycled in lesser works.

Playing Christminster today, it can indeed seem overrated. It's very hard to appreciate how amazing it was in its original context for someone who wasn't there, and because the game had such an impact on the form -- its best ideas diffusing out to redefine the ideal -- most of its achievements are easy to take for granted, if they're even noticed at all.

I had tried this game several times in the past and always put it aside after 20 minutes or so of absolutely zero progress. This time I was determined to get somewhere so eventually broke down and used hints. It felt like pulling teeth to get to the first important solution even then; there are 10 separate hints regarding the critical initial puzzle (fully 22% of all hints provided by the game). When the nature of the puzzle became clear, I found myself swearing out loud.

I went on to finish the game, sometimes running into more brick walls that exacerbated my grumpiness, but in between bouts of that I started to notice some of the work's cleverest parts. After finishing, I prepared a somewhat scathing review enumerating the game's many deficits. It wasn't until I reviewed the varied commentary on the game available from its IFDB page -- and dissected its source for fact-checking purposes -- that I started to have a change of heart. I had expected to find discussion of its flaws, but instead I encountered praise for its innovations in terms of NPC design, puzzle fairness, and story integration.

Before continuing, I am forced to acknowledge is that this is a very well-developed work by the standards of its time, and that it hails from the earliest days of the hobbyist era and therefore long predates modern conventions of player-friendliness. This work set new standards for many aspects of the ideal model of IF, and it did so using a less capable toolset than we have today. STILL... if you're trying to enjoy this game in the here and now, then you may, as I did, find parts of it to be seriously obnoxious. Very probably, you will also, as I did, find parts of it to be uniquely enjoyable and impressive.

If the game has one major problem in its design, it's the overall lack of consistency. To me, consistency is the most essential element of puzzle design and the fundamental backstop of fairness; when an author is consistent, the player can learn his or her style and adjust thinking accordingly. It may take a few cycles of misreading clues to catch on, but usually after two or three one is close enough in mindset to make good progress. If the required perspective is not a natural one, it might be necessary to consult hints or walkthroughs a few more times on the way to completion, but I personally consider a little "spoilage" to be a good tradeoff when the alternative is abandoning the work. After all, puzzles have their own aesthetics, appreciation for them is subjective, and a work of interactive fiction can be judged on other qualities such as story, writing and deftness of implementation.

Christminster lacks the necessary consistency in many places, and it was infuriating whenever one of these bare spots brought progress crashing to a halt. The thing is: Upon further study many of what I thought were gaps in the implementation turned out to be just gaps in my understanding rooted in incorrect assumptions. These assumptions were ones that I had made for what I thought were good reasons, and it may be worthwhile to share why.

The prologue puzzle, which consists of getting into the college, is a study in miniature. In a recent Rosebush article, Victor Gijsbers illustrates the way that this puzzle embodies the spirit of exclusion animating the fictional setting of Biblioll, but I hesitate to give credence to the idea that its design was consciously intended to do so.

(Spoiler - click to show)The game does not exactly play fair here. While a survey of the environs quickly gives the experienced player the idea that it might be possible to get a feather from the parrot to use in obtaining the key, and the interaction takes pains to alert the unobservant player to the existence of a suitable missile, the coding of the two NPCs offers no similar cluing. Indeed, their algorithms give every indication of being simple, typical-for-the-era automatons engaged in cyclic activity, and little else.

Although the player is obviously invited to interact with them by their very presence, the NPCs' ASK/TELL conversation capability is sparsely implemented and doesn't add much to their apparent intelligence. After a few low hit-rate "conversations" there seems to be little else to do with them. To the extent that either shows any goal-directed behavior, it's that the constable always shows up and lingers indefinitely when you are in the vicinity of the window. The source code, graciously provided by author Gareth Rees, shows that this behavior is intentional, and it yields the strong impression that the constable is keeping a special eye on the PC as a possible source of trouble.

There is some slight hinting that the constable is interested in the magic show, but his obvious puzzle-relevant behavior implies that he prioritizes his watchman duties over casual entertainment. This, in combination with the street magician's explicit request for a small item for his trick -- along with the wholly irrelevant interaction he exhibits with any of the three smallish objects obviously available during the prologue (i.e. cobblestone, telegram and map) -- all provide consistent feedback that there is no significant progress to be had from them.

The single solution is for the PC to give her handbag to the street magician, who will refuse to use it in the trick but will provide a toffee in response. The toffee can be given to the constable, and the constable told to give it to the street magician, who will proceed to go through his routine with it before the constable eats it.

But... so what? Even if this interaction is discovered (most likely through brute force interaction), there is nothing in the prior behavior of the constable to suggest that he will simply forget all about his duties and remain transfixed while the PC goes about a bit of ballistic vandalism. The constable's part of the dialogue exhibits the same sort of detached chipperness that he has in all interactions with the protagonist, and there's nothing to signal any particular level of fascination on his part.

I'm not sure that this solution would ever have occurred to me, though I suppose I might have eventually discovered -- purely accidentally -- that a period exists in which the PC can act in the critical site unobserved. Perhaps this is a cultural difference; perhaps it would simply be unthinkable in Britain for a police officer to leave a peformance abruptly in order to prioritize doing his job. However, I agree with Gijsbers that this feels like an intentional (if not conscious) design element, which strikes me as an attempt to turn away the casual player.

Even worse, having secured the feather, the don -- who sleeps like the dead up to this point -- almost immediately wakes up after the PC takes his key. It's necessary to wait through another cycle of the street magician's patter to get to where he is asking for an object, then grab the key and pass it to the magician. The magician will cooperate in hiding it, and the don will wildly accuse you of having stolen it, resulting in the don's arrest and the removal of both the don and the constable from the scene.

This is a functionally separate obstacle, and coming back-to-back with the distraction puzzle it effectively negates any sense of victory that the player might have had in gaining the key. It almost feels like truculence on the game's part. Opening puzzles set a game's tone and style, and shape player expectations. In this case, my own expectations were shaped to expect maximum pointless friction, making finishing the game into an unappealing prospect.

I have thoroughly spoiled that puzzle because it is, it turns out, considerably out-of-character with respect to the majority of the other puzzles found in the game. (Spoiler - click to show)(... Though on reflection, there does seem to be a divide in the fairness level between puzzles that involve the environment and puzzles that involve NPCs; the latter frequently provide feedback to the player that seems misleading in nature. Perhaps that says something about the author's view of human nature?) Although there are a handful of what I would label last lousy points to be had, these are described by the author as optional, and the ending is in no way affected by missing them beyond showing a lower final score. (Note that although I am a completionist at heart, I would not recommend trying to suss out these last points at the game's command prompt. They are by far the least fair puzzles in the game, and they collectively would suggest a certain thread of perverse cruelty running through the design if they had any impact on the best ending.)

Once past the wicket gate, the game's greatest weakness is its firm commitment to offering only the mathematically minimum possible hinting. I observe that this approach seems to be typical of British games, but, in general, coupled with that style is the notion that the player should never be in a position to say that the necessary information was not presented. The high art of the mode is presenting the needed information in a manner so subtle that someone not paying close attention can easily miss it. Fair is fair, and in several cases I was simply outfoxed. However, in a couple of situations I think Rees provides too few hints to be fair for plot-critical challenges. These are:

1. The bible -- (Spoiler - click to show) Here I'm talking about both the illuminated copy found in the Chapel and the standard King James version that can be found in the Library. Obtaining the latter is one of the unfair last lousy point puzzles: The player is expected to look up 'God' in the card index to find it, and this is the only way to obtain the item. (This is an index of surnames, mind you, and variants that one might expect based on actual names for the deity are not found.) Comparison of a critical passage of the KJV to the illuminated copy's version will give the linguistically-oriented player an indirect clue about a key alchemical ingredient. Lacking the ability to read Latin -- something that presents no real obstacle in the era of online translators but required an increasingly-rare classical education at the time of the game's release -- the player must get along with some knowledge of root words to compare the English version and notice the extra phrase in the illuminated version. As a last-ditch option, one can theoretically just notice the word 'myrrheum' and assume it means myrrh, but the first time this is encountered the player is unlikely to know that myrrh can be found in the game and is probably unmotivated to try deciphering each incomprehensible word individually. Later, at the point at which the player is most likely to want to revisit the passage in-game, it's gated by a second aggravating puzzle involving the beekeeper's veil. (The problem here stems from the treatment of hat and veil as a single object in the description text, i.e. responding identically to both >X HAT and >X VEIL. Per modern conventions, this generally means that the object in question is atomic and indivisible, but I don't know how consistently that was the case in the mid-1990s. Without assuming malice, I'll just note that it's very much a "gotcha" for the player of today.)

2. The student and the professor -- (Spoiler - click to show)On first encountering this NPC, you'll see the following: "'You must help me to find my parrot,' pleads Edward. 'Just tell me which way I should go.'" In obeying your directional instructions, it's implied that he is for some reason willing to submit to your authority temporarily, but he is prone to wander off immediately after going any direction that you give. Telling him to wait or stop doesn't seem to do anything. He will respond to only a few non-movement commands, and in only one case will he actually perform the action. It's made abundantly clear that he has no desire to see Bungay, even blanching should they happen to cross paths in the aftermath of the scene in Malcolm's room, and it's also made clear that Bungay keeps his door locked and wants no visitors. It really seems to require a latent desire to punish the hapless student to even conceive of the goal of forcing him to his "supervision," since it's not possible to know that the only method of entering the gardens is through Bungay's quarters. Even after having read the solution in the walkthrough, I was grinding my teeth in annoyance trying to shepherd Edward across the map and get the timing right to trigger their encounter -- a process made even more gratuitously difficult by the need to not be there when Bungay opens his door. It turns out that >EDWARD, FOLLOW ME does wonders to smooth this process -- I just didn't guess that he would be capable of responding, and I hadn't read the introductory help text that uses the >FOLLOW verb as an example. Most importantly, there does not appear to be any way to know that Bungay's door will be unlocked after inviting in the student; I double-checked, and there is not even the "negative information" cue of there being a different sound (e.g. minus the locking action) when the professor closes his door. Parked squarely on the critical path for the game, this sequence is even more off-putting than the prologue. Further, the method for gaining access to the desk drawer, an optional puzzle yielding a pair of last lousy points, requires moving the desk. Moving desks is a pretty noisy activity -- obviously not something to do when trying to be stealthy, as the PC well knows -- and doing so gives no indication that the drawer is now accessible. Only inspecting the drawer from within the gap will reveal the possibility.

Those aren't the only problematic points in the work, but they are the ones that caused me the most grief. Every snag that I encountered arose from either a complete absence of hinting (or hinting so miniscule as to blend in with other insignificant text) or implementation that provides no relevant feedback (or sometimes misleading feedback). I won't nitpick here, but my suggestion to prospective players would be to set a time limit in advance for being stuck, and to consult the hints whenever that limit is reached; this will give you a chance to experience the best parts of the game without undergoing too much frustration.

I suppose the laundry list of complaints above may seem hard to reconcile with my ostensibly positive attitude about the game. The thing is: Christminster has highs to match its lows. Rees shows in several places that he can craft subtle, inventive and unique puzzles whose solutions are pure delights to discover and for which the hinting is unquestionably fair. I'm intentionally going to say nothing about these gems, because I want you, the reader, to be able to discover and experience them without prejudice.

To explain more fully: I realize that it's tremendously unjust to criticize Rees for not solving every problem that plagued the old school style in one stroke. This game incorporates many features that may well be firsts for the form: automatic opening of doors (which required modification of the Standard Library), use of narrative time as opposed to clock time in a story spanning both day and night, reasonably intelligent "talking" NPCs with whom realistic cooperation is necessary to solve puzzles, objects used as part of the solution to multiple puzzles, alternate solutions to some key puzzles, and more. Having inspected the solid and well-organized source code, it appears that most of what I'm calling shortcomings could be addressed by either trivial or very modest effort. I'm mostly in agreement with Jim Kaplan's review, and I think he's right that with such minor adjustments in place Christminster would be very well-regarded were it to be released for the first time today.

Though this game often falls short of my idea of real fun when considered as a whole, there is much to admire in the best craft on display, and even its flaws offer pointed lessons in what to avoid (as well as opportunities to imagine alternatives). It is indisputably worth studying as part of a review of the history and evolution of the form, and any player willing to accept its contrasts with respect to modern ideas of fairness is sure to have an enjoyable experience. I'm torn between wanting to give it 3 stars for how it plays by modern standards and 4 stars for how prominently it stands out in the context of its original release. I'm going with the latter on the basis of its substantial impact on the form; if nothing else, this is a work to reckon with.

Having been recently alerted to this remake/adaptation, I moved its inspiration up on my to-play list, and as soon as I had finished that, I loaded this up to compare.

This game isn't really interactive fiction, but it's certainly IF-adjacent, and the fact that it exists at all is pretty awesome. I have nothing but admiration for the skill and determination shown in carrying this idea through from conception to a finished game. Substantial thought was invested in how to translate the original work's mood and mechanics to a different format, and it's clear that the author had a genuine love for Veeder's source material. Thank you to Lance Campbell for sharing this, and thank you Ryan Veeder for supporting the effort.

I'm not sure how well this version stands up when considered purely on its own. Some of the nuance of the original's atmospheric writing is lost in the graphical interpretation, and the not-quite-faux grittiness that makes up the emotional backbone of the original doesn't quite come through. On the other hand, there are many novel bits here that hew closely to the original's dialog and descriptive style, and there are a few touches (like the ending credits sequence) that wouldn't be possible with pure text. There's the hint of a secret side quest of some sort -- (Spoiler - click to show)I found an item that seemed like it was supposed to be part of something bigger, but if so I never found the other parts that went with it. If you know the secret, please provide some clues by comment!

As a reminder, 3 stars counts as "good" in my book, and I would definitely recommend this game to anyone that enjoyed the original Mud Warriors. Both can be played in the time that would normally be spent on a single comp-sized work.

Monopoly is one of the most popular games in American history. There's something telling about modern culture's inattention to history in the fact that many years passed between when I was first introduced to the game as an enjoyable pastime and my discovery that the game's designer intended it to be an object lesson-in-action of the inherent flaws in capitalism as an econonomic system.

If one actually plays Monopoly according to the rules as written, it is inevitable that from among a group of players all starting on an objectively even playing field only one will emerge as the sum holder of all wealth in the model universe. That result is simply baked into the system -- there's no avoiding it, and that's what playing Monopoly is supposed to teach the player. It also teaches various skills related to improving the chances of being the player who comes out on top, though the nature of the game ensures that there's never any real certainty until late in the trajectory of a particular play session.

Social Democracy: An Alternate History feels very much like Monopoly, both in that it plays like a board game and that it has a lesson to teach. Here the lesson seems to be about the essential fragility of democracy-like government and the functional priority of economic concerns in determining societal stability. You play the animus of the SPD, a "moderate" and "socialist" party that, despite a plurality of popular support at the outset, seems inevitably doomed to lose as the country suffers a series of economic and political shocks.

I've only played Social Democracy a few times, on normal difficulty. As other reviewers note, the simulation feels well-grounded in historical research -- I have learned a surprising amount about the Weimar era just from following up on key people and events online, and the work presents an extensive bibliography that invites more serious study. Needless to say, this work does not present the History Channel style of faux history that usually paints Hitler's rise as the result of some mysterious magical power over the German people; instead it shows the confluence of many trends in interwar history -- including the history of the SPD itself -- and how they shape both the choices available and the consequences of each decision.

As with Monopoly, both strategic choices and lucky breaks compound over the course of time. As the political pressure builds, the player will inevitably come to the point where the party's mode of survival is threatened. The resolution of that threat can take various forms, each imposing tradeoffs that will shape the range of viable strategies available in later parts. Will you sponsor strong socialist approaches involving state control of the means of production and the pruning of private wealth? OK, but then the "conservative" elements of the "centrist" coalition will become enemies, and support from the communist party is likely to be restrained at best. Will you throw in with the right wingers in an attempt to prevent the far right from gaining a foothold? OK, but then you will soon find yourself an ineffectual puppet supporting policies that are in direct opposition to your base's desires, and they will react accordingly. Will you stick to your historically "middle ground" position and try to ride out the storm? OK, but you will in all likelihood find the storm to be stronger than you anticipated and your steersman skills to be insufficient to come through intact.

These are just a few of the trajectories supported by the game's system. The list of achievements and various clumps of related cards suggest that there are many more. I'm looking forward to trying quite a few of them, and seeing what unconventional strategies are supported by the system that author Autumn Chen has created. Mike Russo's comparison to one of Paradox Entertainment's grand strategy games is apt, and if you like that sort of thing then you won't want to miss this. For those looking for something more directly comparable, Chen has also just released a similar treatment of the Russian Revolution.

While I don't personally think this game falls under the label of "interactive fiction," it does fit under the broader umbrella I assign to the phrase "text games." It's worth emphasizing that the label is secondary to the thing itself, and that this thing, whatever you choose to call it, is well worth your time. I'm giving it a rare 5-star rating in recognition of its singular value as edutainment; it is surely the apex of that category for works found on IFDB.

Given the release date, slapdash cover image and minimal blurb, my first thought was that this game was an April Fool's joke, or possibly malware. It does not appear to be malware.

This unusual work puts the player in the position of an IT support worker in a nebulous corporate setting. The strange tone and disconnected gameplay makes it seem more like a half-written training tool instead of something intended as entertainment. Its concise but bland language, heavy on bullet points, smacks of LLM-generated text.

As far as plot goes, the action is split into four phases. In the first phase, the PC is given a stack of problem reports for which prioritization must be assigned. Once this is done, the PC must investigate a particular scenario more closely. In the third phase, correction of the problem must be accomplished. The fourth phase seems intended to be a kind of team review with a supervisor.

From what I can tell, the required interactions are highly scripted and are basically spelled out in each section. Starting in phase 3, cause and effect start to break down, because in order to advance it seems necessary to take an action not called for based on other information. Phase 4 is quite strange, seeming to indicate that the exercise went both poorly and well at the same time.

Other than idle curiosity, there doesn't seem to be much reason to interact with this work unless you want to be exposed to a smattering of terms and processes relevant to corporate IT support. Although this work meets the minimum functionality that would normally qualify it for at least two stars by my rubric, I still think most people are better off avoiding it entirely.

In 1993, everyone knew that "text adventures" were a dead genre, but, as has been lovingly documented by Jimmy Maher and others, a few people here and there labored in obscurity to keep the nascent art form of interactive fiction alive. Art LaFrana was one of these, someone who eschewed the semi-commercial offerings of the time such as TADS and crafted his own custom system for MS-DOS.

The Abbey, LaFrana's second work (which is not to be confused with the 2008 title of the same name by Steve Blanding), received more attention than might be expected for a shareware entry with an extremely primitive parser. A review in SPAG Magazine by Cedric Knight suggests that it was considered worth paying for even 8 years after its release. I don't think I would have agreed at the time, but in an era when so few new games that even looked like a text adventure were being produced, it may have seemed a more attractive option than it does today.

To say that the game has a parser is being somewhat generous; my own interaction suggests that it is a simple keyword-matching system that doesn't really try to parse the player's command in any meaningful way. For example, a command such as >PUSH WAGON EAST will be interpreted the same as >PUSH WAGON or even just >PUSH. This doesn't matter as much as it might because the ratio of interactable objects to rooms is alarmingly low by modern standards, and the majority of the player experience is simple room navigation.

Other reviewers stress the text's ability to evoke an atmosphere, and I have to admit that I also found this to be the case -- but I don't understand it. It's really quite puzzling; the text is "evocative" in a paradoxical way in that on first reading it seems flat and uninspired but after extended exposure a fairly vivid mental picture of the environs emerges in one's mind. I'm not sure how much I can credit the author for this; in some ways it almost seems akin to the phenomenon of hallucinations experienced during sensory deprivation. (Is this the part that I've never understood about the appeal of Scott Adams games?)

Although the game is listed under the "Historical" genre, it certainly doesn't seem to be a very accurate portrayal of its ostensible period. (For example, the language of NPCs and signage can be anachronistically modern.) That's not to mention that Atlantis seems to have been a real place in the game universe.

It does seem more intent on historical accuracy with respect to architecture and living conditions. A large number of basically empty rooms are used to describe the sights and smells of the abbey complex, and I assume that this aspect is modeled after some real historical place -- there just doesn't seem to be any other motivation to include non-functional locations such as a pigsty. I have no special historical expertise by which to judge its correctness here, but it does feel believable.

The puzzles were to me the bad kind of old school, being based largely on intuition (which might not match the author's) and/or requiring a long series of essentially unmotivated steps without intermediate feedback. The largest part of player effort by far will be spent on creating a map, which is an essential step because room descriptions sometimes omit exit listings. Since I was trying to play this on a schedule (for the People's Champion Tournament) and wasn't finding anything to savor, I resorted to a walkthrough after a few hours, and I don't regret doing so.

I was ready to like this one, but in the end I found it to be a poor substitute for a proper parser, player-friendly puzzle design and minimally-interesting story. I'm tempted to go with one star, but, as mentioned, in the end it did end up engaging my imagination, and that part was enjoyable. I can't say I'd recommend it other than as example for someone studying the earliest examples of the form. Its most lasting impact might, ironically, have come from Knight's review: Inform 6's Standard Library 6/11, released afterward, implements many of the variations of the verb "pry" that he complained were missing in this game.

In my limited experience, works by Ryan Veeder never fail to delight on some level; if nothing else his signature wit is always good for a chuckle and tends to cast a rosy glow around the memory of playing. Winter Storm Draco is no different from any other Veeder work in this respect, and it easily clears the hurdle of "good" in my evaluation.

It's not "great," though. It feels like a piece primarily created as an opportunity for experimentation. The emphasis here is on challenging standard player expectations for interface elements, especially the "opening crawl" of the timed introductory text and status line modification during the unanticipated and delightful (Spoiler - click to show)"swordfight" scene taking place in (Spoiler - click to show)a cemetery. The latter was the apex of the experience, especially coupled with the highly-abbreviated commands and very short responses that lent a videogame-like feel to the action by greatly accelerating its pace.

For an opening act, the PC becomes lost in the woods during heavy snowfall and must use boy scout/junior MacGyver skills to figure out the way home. The interaction is a little fiddly and specific here (as I recall specifically around (Spoiler - click to show)pouring liquids), which is in unwelcome contrast with the solid puzzle design.

Mystical elements begin to intrude on the scenario, which shifts the tone ever more in the direction of survival horror as the PC continues to make progress. At the climax, the PC encounters (Spoiler - click to show)a personification of the storm which may or may not be (Spoiler - click to show)a Mayan god in the vanguard of a 2012 end-of-the-calendar apocalypse. I was thrown out of the story at this point, mostly wondering how much of it was supposed to be real and how much the hallucination of a PC freezing to death. Although that kind of ambiguity can serve a story well, there didn't seem to be much in the way of revelation on the PC's part to lend any drama to the scene, and at the end I was left shrugging my shoulders.

Perhaps there's more to the climax than I experienced, but the entertainment-oriented style of Veeder's prose doesn't invite a very deep analysis, and the work's brevity contributes to its lightweight feel. This game is still definitely worth a playthrough, and I don't hesitate to recommend it as an enjoyable short play experience to the average player or a study in technique for the would-be author of action sequences.

This game made a notable splash upon its debut, taking 3rd place in IFComp 2008 and garnering high profile reviews by top author Emily Short. It's a very short, very light puzzler in form, with its most outstanding features being its writing and illustrations.

As noted by Short, the writing style is reminiscent of that of Robb Sherwin, though it seems considerably less colorful on the whole. It echoes a style that was popular in the 1990s and is aptly described by MathBrush as "grungy." The protagonists are slackers in all their glory. The game's writing is economical and engaging, adding color to the visually-established scenes and weaving thumbnail sketches of the characters' personalities with admirable aplomb.

It's the illustrations, which are of professional quality, that make this game stand out more than anything. A picture's worth a thousand words, and the in situ character portraits convey copious details of scene and characterization in milliseconds. The character portraits are the backstop of the writing, which would seem too spare to pass muster without this support, and I admire the author's expert use of text and images to complementary effect.

The afterlife sequences are also illustrated, and, in fact, are only illustrated. The pictures themselves are opaque, but the image-only presentation feels like something different -- cf. the Gent Stickman series, or "reading" a child's picture book. I think this was a first for the form, and it is probably a significant part of what fueled admiration for the work.

In her contemporary review at playthisthing.com, Emily Short states: "IF needs to explore ways to change registers in order to achieve its full potential as a medium." This work is undoubtedly an experiment in doing so, and I believe that it points in some interesting directions, but the work itself seems to lack any real staying power as its star has faded considerably over time. The likely culprit here is that substance is entirely inferior to style: profanity for profanity's sake, scatological elements intended to provoke an easy reaction from the audience, a forced inciting event featuring an utterly irrational (and thereby utterly unbelievable) bad guy, an unexpected and entirely unexplained "mystical" framing that is accepted without comment or curiosity by the PCs, and a simplistic resolution which offers a fairy tale ending that clashes deeply with the doggedly gritty setting.

I'm happy to give three stars to any game that accomplishes what it sets out to do, but in this case it's not clear what the author was trying to achieve. It wasn't exactly enjoyable and when stripped of decoration it is a substandard story, so I'm settling on two. I'd still recommend this game as an object of study, and I think there is more to be done with its highly visual style, but if you're just in it for fun you might prefer Guilded Youth by the same author.

Let's be honest: You're probably assuming that this game is a low-quality (if sincere) effort riddled with technical problems and poor writing, written in a misguided attempt to proselytize. You are so, so wrong. I know, because I know how wrong I was about it.

This game was nominated for the People's Champion Tournament, and my first suspicion was that it was a troll entry. Glancing through reviews by MathBrush and Rovarsson convinced me to give it a try with an open mind, and I was consistently pleasantly surprised.

Although the setting for this game is the biblical tale of the three wise men, this seems almost entirely incidental other than defining the goals of the PC's quest. It's a pure comedy puzzler, with a wacky/zany vibe that is totally at odds with its religious framing, and the game is technically sophisticated for its era. Written in Inform 6 and making use of the Onyx Ring library, it is loaded with detail touches -- including some that require an expert knowledge of Inform to implement -- to a degree that's almost astonishing.

I played it hesitantly at first, and I was stuck for quite a while in the main puzzle portion. The breakthrough was realizing that, against what might be natural expectations, progress depends on PC actions in the classic mode of lying, cheating and stealing your way through. The puzzle design is competent, and there is plenty of non-essential but entertaining interaction to amuse you while you work out the solutions. Core puzzles required to advance the plot are fair and frequently seem to allow multiple solutions. The two most rigid puzzles are rooted in arithmetic and grammar, and like others I thought that these clashed with the prevailing tone. However, neither was a major obstacle, and they don't stick out enough to ruin what was overall a very smooth and polished experience.

The humor is a strong point; the style is a blend of offbeat and deadpan that often prompted a chuckle from me and those with whom I played the game. The author walks a fine line here, maintaining a consistently light-hearted and irreverent stance toward the subject matter but never (as far as I saw) resorting to mockery. I found myself scratching my head at what the author was trying to accomplish, but it occurs to me that perhaps the goal was to convince religious types of the value of IF instead of the other way around.

The execution of the ASK/TELL conversation model is extensive, but much of the interaction comes in the form of semi-randomized non-answers, and only a few conversations are actually necessary. In fact, quite a bit of what's present in the game is optional; I didn't score anything close to maximum points, and it seems like that's typical. The author-provided walkthrough doesn't show how to reach a full score, either, so I wonder if anyone has ever uncovered every secret. A little digging into the game file shows that there are whole layers of elaboration that I missed entirely -- almost a secret game, which to some degree seem to hinge on finding an unusually-placed rubber duck.

This game seems to have become almost entirely forgotten in the 15 years since its release, but if you enjoy the old school style then coming across this one will feel like finding secret treasure. My initial inclination was a high three stars, but it stands out as a highly-developed example using the rare Onyx Ring library, and it's certainly the first "religious" game that I would recommend to anyone who asked, so I'm going with four. Don't be put off by the blurb; you won't regret trying this one.

Repeat the Ending handily includes its own faux history, its own imaginary criticism, and its own projected audience reactions. The majority of these are fictional.

The work offers numerous prefab opinions of itself. Outside discussions of the work generally read like amplifications of ideas seeded by the author's own self-supplied analysis. In effect, the work talks so much about itself that it leaves room for little that is new.

To engage with the work at scale means going through two parallel fictions (the interactive work and the faux historical transcript) plus a third orthogonal fiction (the imagined history of the work and its invented public response). That's a pretty high bar to clear in terms of hours spent just to survey the whole.

One can turn this work round-and-round in one's head for quite some time, trying to find a perspective that makes its various parts line up into a coherent picture. This is tremendously complicated by the constant self-contradiction of the work as a whole. A thing given in one part of the work is most often modified, opposed or canceled by something in another part, leaving the reader always asking: Is depiction A or depiction B the truth, or are both or neither? That can become tiring when no unambiguous answer is on offer.

The total work as presented is akin to a piece of wrinkled origami paper. It's clear that it has been folded into something before -- even unfolded and refolded according to a different design, potentially more than once. The implicit task for the reader is to refold it, but which of the existing creases are clues? If the reader ends up with something that looks vaguely like a frog, is that what it was supposed to be?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the work itself has something to say about this idea. In the (theoretically fictional) voice of "Drew Cook": "I want people to wrestle with it, to decide for themselves what it means. Wouldn't it be ungrateful of me to interfere? To prevent anyone from honoring my work with their time? I'd never do that. I'd never deny them the freedom to interpret my writing as they see fit." Also, as a point of general philosophy: "[the reader's] interpretation is more important than [the author's] intent".

Clarity and self-consistency are not interference when attempting to communicate. It would be ridiculous to believe that Cook does not know that -- so what is the corollary? Is Cook really not trying to communicate, to generate specific ideas and understanding in the mind of the audience? Is the reader supposed to invert or discount these passages because it was "Drew Cook" speaking, not Drew Cook? Or are those passages supposed to be treated as true reflections of the author's thinking in real life, despite the work's insistence that "Drew Cook" is at most partially representative? Is it supposed to be a panda or a koala?

Is the reader supposed to use outside knowledge to validate or invalidate the fiction's assertions? Does its intertextuality extend to reference works? Should one consult the dictionary definition of bipolar disorder (the protagonist's stated ailment), look up the psychiatric usages of lithium in the 1990s, and notice that the list of the protagonist's symptoms is a much closer match to the dictionary definition of schizophrenia ("A severe mental disorder diagnosable by some or all of the following symptoms: blunted emotionality, decay of rational faculties, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions and hallucinations.")? Should one then go on to re-evaluate the narration's reliability in the context of what could be an intentional clue in a work that masquerades as a puzzle game and contains a plethora of subtly significant detail? Hey, look -- I made a giraffe!

The above is not intended to disparage origami, nor texts without clear answers, nor authors who seek only to prompt questions, nor the mentally ill. Highly convoluted works are often favorites of writers, and this work is certain to be satisfying for those who like to grapple with them. Trying to untangle a Gordian knot can be a pastime in itself, even enjoyable if the act of untangling some portions (though it be at the cost of retangling others) is seen as its own reward.

If you're looking to play a game as entertainment, however, you won't find one here, and the star rating I'm giving it is reflective of that. (I won't even bother to lay out a dissection of the pseudo-game; what would be the point? There's every indication that the parts I don't like are there by conscious and well-considered design.) Fortunately, the current version includes a "story mode" that is basically an integrated walkthrough giving the grand tour, and I would personally suggest just starting with that since it allows one at any point to stop and explore for as much or as little as one likes. Rest assured that the significant puzzles to be solved in this work aren't encountered at the command prompt, and if you're worried about completionism you'll end up reading the source code, anyway. I don't do literary criticism, and I don't come to IFDB looking for works of literature, but I will say that this work would make one hell of an assignment for an English class.

The orthogonal fiction looks to be squarely aimed at writers and critics, and it may hold greater interest for those in that more restricted audience than it does for the average player; no doubt one could make a convincing argument that the pseudo-game and transcript are best viewed as supplemental materials to that portion, in effect acting like very elaborate feelies for a printed work -- an argument strengthened by Cook's having added additional paratext since the initial release while leaving the "game" essentially unchanged (other than the addition of story mode). For the record, despite my negative reaction to the pseudo-game, the orthogonal fiction convinces me that the actual Drew Cook is a very capable author.

Because of the total work's many self-contradictions, the ratio of reader to author in any message "discovered" within will be highly variable. It wouldn't be fair to call this aspect a failure in a work so exhaustively honed, especially when there is good reason to believe (via the real world statements of the actual Drew Cook) that the author is not counting the successful communication of any particular message as part of what will define his own evaluation of its success. One could say that the work as a whole offers something for everyone, and also nothing to anyone. Make of that (and this review) what you will.