Reviews by OtisTDog
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Fun and engaging short puzzler suitable for children and adults, April 29, 2024Mother Loose is one of those games that was developed as a labor of love and then subsequently released to the world. Its public debut was via IF Comp 1998, only the fourth such competition at the time, where it placed 6th of 27. This first effort by author Irene Callaci is now largely forgotten -- its more subtle charms lost in the glare of the multiple novae (Anchorhead, Spider and Web and Photopia) that dominated the public's attention in that year.
Ms. Callaci seems to have been something of a natural in producing interactive fiction. For a first effort, especially one that the author claims was produced while learning not just Inform 6 but object-oriented programming in general, Mother Loose is a remarkably high-quality result. It has a rich level of object implementation that encourages exploration and delivers plenty of vividly descriptive prose but which nonetheless does an excellent job of focusing the player's attention on those few things that are important. It makes use of a compass display in the status bar and has a built-in menu supplying author credits, an introduction to playing IF and in-game hints. There were essentially no bugs at the coding level, and I don't recall any misspellings or typos in the text.
This work includes several NPCs reflecting various levels of programming effort. Taken together, they are practically a guided tour of the major implementation styles, ranging from the practically inert and lifeless (a lamb) to the mute and command-ignoring flavor element (a kitten) to the comic relief chatterbox (a wolf) to the well-crafted exposition vending machine (an egg) to something occasionally engaging in life-like social interactions (a little girl). Ms. Callaci's successful efforts here were recognized; this work was nominated for both Best Individual NPC and Best NPCs in the 1998 XYZZY Awards.
Puzzle implementation is by contrast much sparer. There are only handful of obstacles in the game's dozen or so rooms. However, these have multiple solutions, and the greater difficulty in solving them comes from minor guess-the-verb issues rather than from deducing what must be done. (Of particular note here is one solution to a puzzle involving the well: (Spoiler - click to show)If you try to communicate with the stuck cat, be aware that it does not understand generic commands; one can only speak to it like a real cat. Commands that specifically work include (Spoiler - click to show)>SAY HERE KITTY or >CAT, COME OUT.)
The game's greatest innovation is the way that it gently mocks standard IF tropes by categorizing all significant PC actions as either naughty or nice. It's quite funny how certain actions yield both points and disapproving remarks. In addition to the running commentary provided by the narrator, the player's choices become significant at the end of the game. It's clear that the author intended the game to be enjoyable either way, and it definitely adds some richness to the limited scenario -- I couldn't resist replaying it to try out both paths.
A minor but still interesting novelty was the way that certain NPCs seem to "take over" some of the parser's responses when they are around. Where a command like >ASCEND TREE will normally result in a message about an unrecognized verb, when the wolf is present, the game instead responds "'Huh?' The wolf raises an eyebrow." This type of interaction does not seem to have much function and may be only a side-effect of the implementation of one particular puzzle, but it has a subtle though definite effect, reorienting the player's attention to the NPCs' presence in response to fruitless experimentation.
If there is a notable weakness to this game, it's that it takes some poking around to figure out what kind of game this will be and what kinds of goals are suitable. If one lacks the old school sensibility of wanting to solve puzzles just because they're there, it would be easy to walk around for a while and then give up in frustration. (This is especially true in light of the inclusion of several prominent objects without much apparent function. Some of these may be simple flavor elements, but others suggest the leftovers of abandoned lines of development.)
With a little guidance, this work is a very good introduction to IF for children. Even without guidance, the built-in hints will probably be enough, if they are necessary at all. Modern kids may need to be introduced to the very idea of nursery rhymes before any of it starts to make sense, but, as others have noted, nothing about the gameplay requires any deep knowledge of them in order to make progress. The more kids introduced to interactive fiction early, the more players there will be in the future, and games like this are essential to creating a positive impression of the art form in young readers.
The IrkMaster 2000(tm), a top of the line model, April 29, 2024Deep Space Drifter is another historically-significant game that has aged very poorly. Its place in history seems to be roughly akin to Curses, in that it was produced by the author (Michael J. Roberts) of its development system (TADS), presumably motivated by the twin goals of producing a game of the type the author liked while also serving to exercise said system.
The first time I played this, the PC died from explosive decompression after opening the hatch that apparently connects the cockpit directly to the outside. (It was not clear from the skimpy description that yours is a single-room spaceship.) The second time I played it, the PC died of sudden asphyxiation after the ship runs out of air in 20 turns. OK, then.
There are only two meaningful actions to take in the opening vignette -- pressing two buttons. In doing so, your ship will be automatically docked to a space station that serves as the first half of the setting. Since there's nothing of interest to do on your ship, it seems that, as a matter of design, one might as well have started the story with the docking sequence already accomplished.
Within the first few turns, hunger and sleep "puzzles" announce themselves. The problems to be solved consist only of locating food items and a place to sleep. You cannot sleep in your pilot's chair pre-docking because you're too worried about your survival, but you can take a nice refreshing nap on the couch in the "main room" of the exploding space station. The primary purpose of requiring sleep seems to be to deliver a dream that will serve as a clue later on. There is no purpose to requiring food.
I guess I should have trusted my gut feeling and just abandoned this game, but I wanted to see it through, so I started to consult the walkthrough. Most everything that counts as gameplay involves overcoming simplistic "tab A in slot B" obstacles, in a setting whose realism is limited solely to creating challenge-less difficulty (such as an inventory limit, and the need to lug around a single heavy power source). As Rovarsson's review notes, even keeping hold of your inventory is an annoyance in itself. Most old school games in this vein interject plenty of humor as a consolation for the frustration created by the arbitrary roadblocks, but the humor here is restricted to a long series of "___Master 2000(tm)" jokes. (Ironically, one line that I thought was an amusing throwaway joke about a fuse being "conveniently" located on the roof of a space vehicle turned out to be an accurate description of the situation. It stopped being funny.)
I'm generally OK with the old school style, which is often exclusively composed of this type of interaction. However, the network of interlocking tasks and obstacles that present themselves are usually intertwined with a narrative progression, such that advancing through even simplistic puzzles rewards the players with a steady progression through the story. That's not what happens here. Quite often, there isn't even a non-standard response to indicate that a significant action was special in some way.
The few puzzles that require thinking seem very much under-clued. (Spoiler - click to show)Can you guess that the red square is the one that controls the landing shuttle, or that it's the one you need to modify with the mysterious computer? Can you guess that you need to provide the security robot with the vacuum cleaner (hope you brought it along!) in order for your program switcheroo with the cleaning robot's tape to have a useful effect? Do you care to decode the black box of a reactor control system whose buttons are unlabeled but apparently execute nonsensical functions?
This game's writing style seems close to that of a Scott Adams game. (I've never played those, so I'm making this comparison based on second- and third-hand knowledge.) Room descriptions are so brief and unevocative that they don't even count as thumbnail sketches -- they barely meet the minimum functionality of listing the location's general type, exits and key objects (if any). Object descriptions mostly serve to confirm that the object exists as something interactable.
Lest you think my treatment above unduly harsh, allow me to quote a passage from the TADS 2 Author's Manual that describes the development of the game:
"After formulating the basic plot of the game, and mapping out the portion that takes place on the space station (roughly the first half of the game), we started implementation. We had a basic idea of the second half of the game, but it wasn’t even mapped.
Implementation went well for a while, but as we got further along, we started to run into details in the first half of the game that were dependent upon details from the undesigned second half. We improvised some details, and left others for later. As we did this, a strange thing happened: we started to realize that there were holes in the plot, and weird little inconsistencies that hadn’t occurred to us until we needed to think about details. As a result, we started to change our basic ideas about the second half, which led to even more inconsistencies and plot holes. It was like digging in sand, and before long we decided to throw out the entire original plan for the second half and start over.
However, we had so much time and effort invested in the space station that we didn’t want to throw it away. Instead, we tried to design a new second half that fit in with the existing first half. From this point on, the battle was lost. We went through a series of essentially unrelated plots for the game, trying to fit each new plot to an even larger set of existing implementation. We’d plan a little, implement it, then discover that the plan wasn’t working and would have to go - but the programming work we did would have to stay. The swamp, the cave maze, and the shuttle represented so much work that we couldn’t contemplate throwing them away, so whatever we came up with had to include them somehow; for a brief time, we were actually going to make the swamp a 'Swamp Simulator' because it was the only way we could make it fit.
In the end, we were totally sick of writing Deep Space Drifter, but refused to let the project die before it was complete for psychological reasons. To me, this attitude shows through in the last half of the game; I think there’s a room on the planet whose description is something like this: 'This room is very boring; you can leave to the north.' In fact, I think the entire game reflects its history: the space station is full of things to do, it has some nice running jokes, and it’s stylistically consistent. The planet, on the other hand, has an empty, barren feel; it’s spread out and there’s not much to do. The only parts that are interesting are essentially unrelated to each other and to the story in general, a reflection of having been forced into the game whether they belonged or not.
I’m not saying that Deep Space Drifter is a bad game - I like the space station a lot, and the puzzles on the planet are very elaborate and elegant. But the game has some serious flaws, most of which I attribute to the long, chaotic process of design and implementation."
Having gotten to the end via the walkthrough, I can't even begin to imagine having fought my way through this piece without "cheating." Can you guess your reward for having worked out a ridiculous "puzzle maze" that takes over a hundred moves to complete in the walkthrough? (Spoiler - click to show)The villain is chased away by a space beaver. You get to learn through dying just when is the best time to launch from the planet in an escape ship. Then you are picked up by the space highway patrol and thrown in the brig for operating an "unspaceworthy" vessel. Nice.
The amateur historian in me feels compelled to give this work at least two stars for recognition of its landmark status in 1990; in the aftermath of Infocom's demise and amid the general collapse of the commercial market, this game surely demonstrated that it was possible to produce large-scale, programmatically-complex works comparable to those that had set players' expectations in the preceding decade. However, there is nothing to recommend this work in terms of entertainment value, and the bulk of the educational value that can be gleaned from it is more easily obtained from the quote above than from the work itself.
Quite a bit like "Fallout" as IF, April 28, 2024Scavenger is the only game listed on IFDB from author Quintin Stone. Over 20 years old now, it made a notable splash when first released, placing third in the 2003 IF Comp (after both Slouching Toward Bedlam and Risorgimento Represso) and garnering nominations (but not wins) for Best Game, Best Puzzles and Best NPC in that year's XYZZY Awards.
Although the author cites Planetfall as an inspiration, the more obvious influence would seem to be that of Fallout. The setting is strongly remniscent of that franchise's early installments, minus the more fantastical elements. I could practically hear the soundtrack of that game as I played this one. Per commentary from the author, it is officially based on a setting called "Night's Edge" that was the basis for a total conversion mod for Unreal.
I had tried Scavenger a couple of times before, but each time I gave up after getting stuck. Since the style of this game's puzzles are clearly rooted in "real-world" logic, I was loath to resort to hints. This time, however, I decided to use them if necessary -- and I soon found out that the reason I was getting stuck was less to do with me and more to do with some lurking significant problems in the implementation. (Note that there don't seem to be very many of these at all; it was just my luck to encounter some of them.) To get the resulting gripes out of the way, I will list them:
1. This is the kind of game where looking under and looking behind things is important. OK, fine -- it's justifiable in this setting -- but it's not great to add a guess-the-verb layer to that sort of interaction. For one crucial bit of progress, it is necessary to >MOVE an item that can't be >PUSHed or >PULLed. Although many puzzles have multiple solutions, I don't think the one depending on this command does.
2. There is a computer interface requiring a login (with last name and password) to obtain another piece of critical-path information. Should you enter the incorrect name, there is no way to back out of the infinite password prompt that results. Even though the terminal explicitly says you can type "CANCEL" to restart the login process, this does not actually work.
3. This is not necessarily a game-breaking bug, but it's still a small issue potentially affecting the end: If you (Spoiler - click to show)decide to rescue the little girl on the way out of the military complex, it's easy enough to get her to follow you. However, if you subsequently talk to her while (Spoiler - click to show)wearing the raider jacket (which you probably are because you need to do this to escape), she will "dash out of the shack" -- apparently becoming afraid on a much-delayed basis.
I agree with Lipa's review that this game delivers solid entertainment, and on the whole it seems to be very well constructed. The issues listed above wouldn't loom so large in my mind if the rest of the interaction wasn't so smooth and polished. The NPCs are well-done, seeming sufficiently life-like without doing anything too fancy by way of implementation. Forewarned is forearmed, so don't let these quibbles deter you from trying out this work, which is one of the better sci-fi scenarios I've played.
An historically significant work, the crown jewel of AGT, but..., April 27, 2024Anyone interested in the history of interactive fiction will sooner or later come across references to this relatively famous piece from the "dark ages" of the genre, i.e. the period after the collapse of the commercial market and before the "renaissance" triggered by Graham Nelson's release of Inform 6 and the publication of the Inform Designer's Manual, 4th edition. In this period, the most prominent tools available to would-be authors were TADS 2, a C-like language of considerable power, and AGT, a less flexible and capable system designed to be easier to use for non-programmers.
Critically, the author of AGT sponsored contests (with at least the first prize paying money) for the best game written in the system, which surely served to spur the completion of many works and began the tradition later continued by the annual IFComp. Shades of Gray is among the works submitted to these AGT contests, and it won in the year that it was submitted. It was constructed by a group of seven disparate authors, one of whom was Judith Pintar, author of the well-regarded CosmoServe. Notably, the seven contributors cooperated exclusively through contact via the CompuServe platform, to which they all subscribed.
Based on the final result, it's not clear that there was much in the way of overarching design concept. As others have noted, the game's separately-developed segments vary in quality, but overall they are well-implemented by the standards of the time, and I must say that this was the highest level of command parsing quality that I have ever encountered in an AGT game. (AGT parsing is quite limited compared to TADS or Inform, based on word-for-word pattern matching instead of attempts to identify parts of speech. This creates a much higher burden on the author to ensure smooth interaction, and it also reduces the transferability of learning about what counts as proper interaction. For example, when trying to use a shovel -- of which there are a surprising number in this game -- the player will find that the correct syntax changes across different segments, reflecting each contributing author's own preferences.) In general, the quality of the interaction seems to go up as one progresses through the game, with its disjointed (and somewhat irritating) opening giving way to large portions of relatively smooth sailing.
What the work lacks is any sense of true coherence. While individual aspects can be picked out as high points for quality of implementation (e.g. the (Spoiler - click to show)tarot reading scene that is the structural backbone of the first half of the middle game) or writing (e.g. the various interactions with (Spoiler - click to show)spirits from voodoo mythology that are the backbone of the second half), the narrative is something of a mess -- layers of unmotivated and unedifying twists abruptly transform the story from gothic horror to lazy psychological drama to magical realism to Civil War survival story to medieval adventure tale to cheap political thriller. It's a ride that keeps the player guessing, which keeps up interest, but looking back from the end of it the question becomes: Why?
The title suggests that the theme is intended to be the difficulty of achieving strong moral clarity in the messy real world, but the gameplay does little to support this. The most direct treatment is in the climax scene, in which the protagonist must choose between (Spoiler - click to show)delivering some incriminating documents to either those incriminated by them and (Spoiler - click to show) delivering those documents to members of a law enforcement agency. This is... insufficient. As a clever person to whom I described the plot quipped: "Nothing says 'shades of gray' like a binary choice!" To the extent that this choice presents any kind of quandary to the player requiring thoughtful reflection, the game subsequently undermines itself by assigning one more point to (Spoiler - click to show)turning the evidence over to the CIA assassins threatened by it than (Spoiler - click to show)handing it over to the FBI, whose interest in it may be more about inter-bureaucratic infighting than bringing the conspirators to justice, which implicitly makes the former the "right" choice after all. (To be fair, the denouement section that describes the long-term effects of various events does not seem to put its thumb on the scales this way, and the various interludes of history supernaturally revealed to the protagonist present multiple perspectives... but in the long run that just makes the score's coded commentary less excusable.)
Other aspects of the game relate only weakly to the supposed theme. Robin Hood is a good guy fighting against abuse of power! No wait, he's a forest-dwelling thief and thug who must be punished for breaking the law! (I didn't bother to use spoiler tags for those because the two segments involved seem ultimately irrelevant to the main plot.) The protagonist shouldn't feel bad about (Spoiler - click to show)his father's death; he was just a kid, and it was an accident! (That's ultimately irrelevant, too.) It's probably OK that the protagonist (Spoiler - click to show)has a dalliance with a voodoo love goddess; it was a rare honor, and she'll (Spoiler - click to show)grant protection to him and his (alleged) true love forever after. I get the distinct impression that there were some last-minute adjustments made after the title was selected, in an attempt to better justify it.
Although there are frequent guess-the-verb and guess-the-syntax issues (as is typical for the era and the development system), these are offset by the very good integrated hint system, to which I found myself resorting frequently when my patience wore thin. Hints are graduated, so it's not necessary to completely spoil the puzzles in order to get help, but I recommend that the modern player make liberal use of them -- for the most part, the obstacles that I used them to bypass were not the type likely to be considered as rewarding to overcome unaided. I also strongly recommend that any player reaching the voodoo-themed jungle section reach for David Welbourn's excellent map of the area (available in the download links) -- this whole zone is a nasty and pointless old-school maze, and the game doesn't even have the good graces to provide sufficient objects to use as markers. On top of that, two rooms that are different enough from the others to not seem to need markers both have identical descriptions but are, in fact, different -- a design choice that comes across as pure spite. The hour that I spent trying to navigate the maze "properly" was completely wasted time. (The author of this section most definitely anticipated the difficulty being created; there are three tone-breaking "comic" cameos of other people wandering through that zone that are encountered if one spends enough time there.)
On the whole, I didn't find much to recommend about this piece. It does remain historically significant, and it clearly stands out from the pack when gauged against its contemporaries, but these qualities do more to justify its place as an exhibit in the museum of the history of interactive fiction than they do to earn it a place in the library of classic works worth playing today. One can point to it as an early example of collaboration-at-scale such as would later produce Cragne Manor or note surprising similarities between one of its segments and Adam Cadre's Shrapnel, but if one is not interested in deliberately evaluating it within its historical context, there is little reason to spend the time playing it.
Sophomoric (High School Level) Take on Religion, April 26, 2024The original Pascal's Wager is a "proof" that following the Christian faith is a rational thing to do. It is a fundamentally flawed and reductionist approach to a major philosophical question, which tries to make an arithmetic problem out of concepts that do not translate well into quantitative terms. Put simply, it is: "If there's any chance at all that God is real, then worshipping him is the smart thing to do, since going to heaven is infinitely rewarding."
This is not an argument that should be taken very seriously. Even granting its conceptual framework, the god in question is hypothesized to be omniscient and not particularly well-disposed toward hypocrites. It's also questionable whether "infinity" is a valid term to use in an expected reward calculation, or that the probability of a god's existence can be meaningfully established.
Pascal's Wager, the game, presents itself as an extension and criticism of Pascal's Wager, the thought experiment; specifically, it challenges Pascal's implicit assertion that the Christian God's existence (P) or non-existence (not-P) together cover the full range of relevant possibilities. This is a pretty good concept, and a pretty good hook -- the premise creates (as Emily Short's review puts it) "an invitation to explore or express one's own personal morality through the player character, by choosing and acting out an alignment." However, this work makes no attempt to grapple with the deep metaphysical questions inherent in its premise and instead seems to target the very concepts of religion and morality themselves.
Pascal's Wager treats each of its six chosen religions equally negatively in that every one of them is conveyed as shallow and simplistic farce. Want to be a good little worshipper of Hanuman, the "Hindi god of strength and fitness?" (Spoiler - click to show)Disobey your parents and hit a baseball! Join a sports team instead of doing homework! Escape from prison on a rowboat to prove you are strong! How about a worshipper of Bacchus, the "Roman god of intoxication?" (Spoiler - click to show)Pop a Valium instead of caring for your infant sibling! Smoke a joint plucked from a urinal instead of doing homework! Inject yourself with an overdose of morphine instead of bothering to escape from prison! These are laughable misrepresentations of what are (or were) serious beliefs for many people, and the treatment of other religions is no better.
The ludicrous and over-the-top portrayal of these faiths may be intended to be humor. It does not strike me as funny. It seems mean-spirited ("mean" in the senses of both "cruel" and "petty") and anti-human. Perhaps the worst part is that its mockery is so lazy -- I learned more about several of the religions portrayed in a half-hour's reading on Wikipedia than the author seems to have ever researched in the course of writing this piece. (For example, in some traditions the infant Hanuman mistook the sun for a fruit and tried to eat it -- a metaphor that seems apt to mention in this context.)
Emily Short's very evenhanded review suggests that this game has only minor flaws. In my opinion, it has major flaws. It verges right on the cusp of 1-star territory for me, but I am forced to recognize that programming it was not a trivial effort, and -- again -- as a concept, the premise is solid. To the extent that I would recommend this game, it would be as a warning to would-be authors about the amount of work required to even begin to fulfill the expectations set by such an ambitious premise, and the disastrous outcome certain to result from massively underestimating the scale of one's chosen subject.
Campy, goofy pseudo-horror comedy skit, April 25, 2024OK, so you're a police officer. A cross-dressing police officer who likes the styles of the 60s. (And a werewolf, but that's not important.) And you have a sidekick: the creepy, giggling pyromaniac Donald McRonald, who is technically not a trademark violation. And you have a gun, which: "Sometimes you shoot folks with it, other times you just point it at folks." And a boa -- the constrictor sort, but that's really more of a deadly prank played by your fellow police officers than anything you can use.
And you are investigating a disturbance at the cemetery. A cemetery where the locals buried all the members of an "evil circus" that once terrorized the town, an incursion handily repelled by the trigger-happy constabulary to which you belong. And there are jelly doughnuts.
So... this is the kind of situation that, as a player, one has to embrace wholeheartedly in order to get any enjoyment out of the game. If the wacky, goofy, random and bizarre doesn't amuse you, then you may find yourself blinking in incomprehension at this enthusiastically off-beat work by J. J. Guest, noted author of To Hell in a Hamper. Personally, I found it to be about 90% amusing. There were some wrong notes that didn't jibe with my own sense of humor, but it was generally an entertaining and engaging short play experience. (Note that I played the expanded Inform 7 version, not the original ADRIFT version.)
However, I got really, really stuck. A lot. So much was going on in terms of joke delivery that it was almost hard to pay attention to what serves as the plot on a mechanical basis. Implementation is very spare with respect to NPC interactions, many of which are required to advance the game. With so many generic negative responses to various attempts, the modern player is quickly trained to stop trying -- it takes a concerted old-school style brute force approach to discover certain possibilities(Spoiler - click to show). I'm thinking specifically here of the gorilla, which must be threatened for no good reason to obtain the cigar, and the fact that escaping the first encounter with the main villain can only happen at a certain point. This results in guess-the-verb situations that are always offputting in such an otherwise polished work, and the very constrained implementation of interactions leaves little to do by way of experimentation when one doesn't have a clear idea of what to do next. (Although there is a hint system, it's very vague and, as MathBrush notes, occasionally non-functional.)
The thing that impressed me the most about this game was the soundtrack. Guest assembled an interesting ambient score from various bits of free-to-use music and sound effects, and the game cycles through them over time. (It's actually one giant 17 1/2 minute track; the length keeps the repetition below the threshold of obvious notice.) The soundtrack plays extremely smoothly, and unlike many attempts at background music which I've encountered, this one does not begin to grate in short order. In fact, rather than searching for a way to turn it off, I found myself turning it back on whenever it was automatically stopped by an >UNDO command.
This work gets high marks as a concept, but the execution falls a little short of what it needs in order to be truly recommendable to the general public or the novice. For those who like "weird" humor, there is plenty to like about it as is, and for those who don't, well... Guest provides occasional laughworthy quips that don't rely on weirdness at all. (Example: "For the record: Alligator breath smells like people who wondered what alligator breath smells like.") I'm putting it in the "good, not great" category, which means I think it's worth taking the time to play and study, and I would gladly revisit an updated version.
Promising start, not fulfilled., February 1, 2024A Flustered Duck starts out seeming promising enough: The PC, a downtrodden pig-boy working on the farm of the tyrannical Granny Grabby, has somehow scrimped and saved enough to finally buy the diamond ring that he needs to propose to the girl of his dreams -- but, he is thwarted in his designs when the farm's duck, a favorite of Granny's, ingests the ring during an unlikely accident.
It's a fanciful setup, vaguely remniscent of Lost Pig, and after 50 moves or so (enough to get out of the prologue and off the farm), I was well-primed for the series of mildly-comic obstacles that would surely stand between the protagonist and his goal. What I was not prepared for was being plunged into a nonsensical world of odd vignettes connected only by the most tenuous moon logic.
I don't really have a problem with the classic "pastiche" style of Adventure and the Infocom canon. Nor am I opposed to humor based on silliness. This world, however, just fundamentally didn't make sense, often veering past silly to a level of weirdness that was so unexpected as to be disconcerting. I and the two people with whom I was playing lost our ability to suspend disbelief within a few hundred moves, but we persevered in order to give the game a fair chance to recover.
Unfortunately, it never did. Though we did finish the game, we did so only after receiving plentiful help from the integrated hint system, which is context-sensitive and well-implemented. There was no occasion on which we regretted having consulted it. Even after having run the gauntlet of puzzles, all three of us were fairly horrified by the actual retrieval of the ring -- instead of being triumphant this moment was more than a little repugnant, as it involved (Spoiler - click to show)hacking into the duck with a knife and pulling the gore-covered ring from its torso. Although this act has no lasting physical consequences due to a magical countermeasure, I think the experience would leave the duck in a state better described as "traumatized" than as merely "flustered." After delivering the ring and mentally reviewing the activities of the PC that day, I cannot say that I was left thinking that he and his love interest would share a happy future, which rendered the end unsatisfying.
On a technical front, this piece was put together pretty well. Aside from a scoring bug (explained below), the only other one that stands out is a repeated message on picking something up (Spoiler - click to show)(the television) that doesn't make sense after the first time. The prose is very serviceable, and I can't recall any typographical errors.
Although this game didn't work for the three of us, your mileage may vary. For the edification of would-be authors and to advise potential players, following are some specific gripes that we had with the game. Many of these are generic gripes against the "very old school" style, but I will still call them out here because the introduction of this game falsely suggests the more player-friendly style of later eras.
(Spoiler - click to show)
1. Information given about the observable environment is deliberately incomplete. Objects in plain sight of the PC (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. a penny on a table) go unmentioned unless the supporter on which they sit is examined. In some cases, objects in unobstructed view must be located with specific >EXAMINE commands. In an early and egregious case, even the presence of objects comparable in size to the PC (Spoiler - click to show)(furniture objects in the living room, including the penny-concealing table) are omitted from the initial description of a room.
2. Numerous objects are hidden inside or under objects described vaguely, often things whose existence and/or reason for being in that location are unhinted. While >EXAMINE and >SEARCH are generally equivalent, in at least one case (Spoiler - click to show)(berries on some bushes), >SEARCH gives no indication of a critical object's presence while >EXAMINE does.
3. The game implements a novel mechanic in which, upon taking an object for the first time, it is automatically examined... if it has not yet been examined. This is a neat idea, but it does not work well for a particular object (Spoiler - click to show)(a surfboard), which provides more information when examined while holding it. This critical extra information is easy to miss as a result. The effect is particularly off-putting in the context of a game including many objects that serve no specific purpose.
4. The game implements a hold-all object, but the logic controlling automatic shuffling of objects into it has faults, such that sometimes the object-juggling fails, causing the intended action to fail. It's not clear whether that's due to a bug affecting the "player's holdall" type of object in Inform 7 5U92 or due to an issue with custom code. While this would normally be a minor annoyance, this bug interacts with another bug related to scoring (Spoiler - click to show)(a point awarded for putting the poodle into the correct object so that it can be smuggled past its owner), such that the correct command will result in no score increase the second time it is tried. The combination of bugs creates an unintentional (and extremely irksome) last lousy point scenario.
5. Some actions must be repeated multiple times in order to trigger progress, even though the response to earlier attempts are failure messages that logically discourage additional attempts. This is particularly problematic in the game's opening vignette, in which the PC must try to >CATCH DUCK no less than four times to cause it to fly away, which allows the PC to leave the farm. (This was, incidentally, the first circumstance prompting use of hints -- an ill omen.)
6. In one miniature scene, the PC must select one of several items being offered by an NPC (Spoiler - click to show)(the gnome wizard). In reality, only one of the items can actually be selected, though choosing an "incorrect" one results in what seems to be a YES/NO prompt to confirm the choice. There doesn't seem to be any gameplay purpose to the frustration created for the player here; the scene would work just as well if the NPC just handed over the only allowable item.
>SHOOT THE PIRATE
This is the first line of Plundered Hearts. It is not a player command, but it looks like one. I don't know of any other earlier interactive fiction that begins this way. The text that follows looks like a response from the game, which is followed by a pause captioned with "[Press RETURN or ENTER to begin.]" After that, the game proper commences. The opening paragraphs give every appearance of being an in media res beginning, but they are not -- another actual beginning, also in media res, supplants it after the game's banner is displayed.
Whence that opening interlude? It is never explained within Plundered Hearts, and the scene portrayed, which is clearly not in the same continuity as the rest of the game, is most likely quickly forgotten by the average player. The game comes full circle at the climax moment, however, at which point this very command is the winning move leading to the "best" ending.
My first thoughts were about its similarity to the start of Wishbringer, which opens with the player character's daydream about fighting a dragon. Later, I considered that it might be an extended transition from the instruction booklet's sample transcript, perhaps doubling as hyper-abbreviated tutorial for those who had skipped reading it. Still later, I speculated that it was an excerpt from an alternate version of the scene depicting the player character's first encounter with her love interest, written earlier in the game's development.
According to the game's Invisiclues, the segment's origin is more prosaic: "You are asleep, dreaming this when the pirates attack.", "It's a preview of things to come.", "It's a sample of the writing style of PLUNDERED HEARTS.", and -- perhaps most importantly -- "Romance novels always have teasers of this sort." These are four answers, suggesting four separate purposes. In some ways it seems an echo of the Dreamtime of romance novel genre conventions, deliberately and skillfully inserted straight into the player's subconscious by Briggs (who has studied both psychology and narrative). Based on the Invisiclues answers (which evidence suggests were prepared by Briggs herself), it seems like an attempt to simultaneously reassure the player while preparing them for something different. For the player already familiar with text adventures, a sketch of the protagonist's relatively strong characterization and the game's atypical subject matter. For the player well-versed in romance novels, an illustration of the alien but essential interaction with the parser.
Plundered Hearts is commonly known as Infocom's first (and last) interactive romance novel. Released as the company was leaving its best days behind, it suffered disappointing sales and was widely panned in contemporaneous reviews. Although the marketing department had hoped it would be the bridge to a new market of women players, it sold only about half as well as a typical game. Author Amy Briggs, in an interview with Jason Scott, is blunt in relating that at the time she considered the game to be a failed experiment.
... and yet, here it is in 2023, three and a half decades later, and Plundered Hearts suddenly makes a strong showing on the Interactive Fiction Top 50, placing (alongside others) at a respectable 18th place, where it outshines even Trinity, which was long considered by the community to be Infocom's apex. The game has not changed at all in those years -- so what has?
I can point to Aaron Reed's 2021 analysis of the game as a possible contributor, but I note that Jimmy Maher's broadly similar treatment from 2015 produced no comparable shift in public opinion. Is it just that there's something in the air this year about nautical themes?
Let's look a little more deeply.
Plundered Hearts is remarkably different from most earlier Infocom games. Another review describes it as "story-forward," a useful term to differentiate it from both "puzzleless" and "puzzle" games. There are puzzles here, but they are lightweight by Infocom standards. Every puzzle is eminently fair. Solutions are rooted in the reality of the story world and standard genre tropes -- there is no "moon logic" here, nor anything that comes off more as riddle than as cause-and-effect. In short, these puzzles are not designed to stump; they are designed to engage. Although it is possible to get into an unwinnable state, it is not very likely if even the slightest prudence is exercised. The style of play is very close to the modern norm in which it is simply not possible to become stuck.
Almost shockingly in the context of an Infocom game, several of the significant puzzles have multiple solutions, and by this I mean genuinely viable and effective alternate options for surpassing obstacles. In some previous Infocom games there are false solutions which allow limited progress but will ultimately require restoring or restarting to win (or at least to achieve the maximum score) -- in effect, what looks like an alternate solution turns out to be only a promising-looking dead end, because the story structure takes the form of a maze with only one correct path. Here there is much less of a maze, and the available choices send the player character on separate but equal paths through the story space, enabling different players, using different methods, to finish the story in their own style.
The most direct consequence of this player-friendly design is a total play time on the order of 2 to 4 hours. This is extremely short by Infocom standards, and it seems that many players and reviewers mistook kindness for weakness -- complaints that the game provided too little entertainment for the money were prominent. But in an interview from the Winter 1987 issue of Infocom's marketing publication "The Status Line" (cited by Aaron Reed), Briggs is clear that she designed "a game that [she] wanted to play" -- the kind of experience that Infocom's marketing had been promising to the world on every box with the claim that their games were "like waking up inside a story." Jimmy Maher sums up her success in this endeavor well: "Plundered Hearts might just be the best expression — ever — of the Infocom *ideal* of interactive fiction... There’s a plot thrust — a narrative urgency — that’s largely missing elsewhere in the Infocom canon, coupled with many more of the sorts of things the uninitiated might actually think of when they hear the term 'interactive fiction.'... Amy Briggs took interactive fiction as Infocom preferred to describe it and made her best good-faith effort to live up to that ideal."
There are four "winning" endings to the game. Each of them yields the full total of 25 possible points, but three of the endings inform the player that "There are other, perhaps more satisfying, conclusions." I can't help but draw the parallel to Inform 7's "end the story" vs. "end the story finally" statements; what is standard convention now was something unheard of in 1987. This was an arrow in the sand, pointing the way to a broader definition of interactive fiction. Even Steve Meretzsky's boundary-breaking A Mind Forever Voyaging doesn't escape the straitjacket of convention calling for an endgame puzzle with a single solution, but Plundered Hearts takes a big step into new territory by granting all four endings equal scores, regardless of the outcome of the climax scene.
The game would fit very well in this year's IFComp if it weren't somewhat underimplemented by modern standards. I hasten to point out that the "under" part of that statement is rooted in a perspective influenced by 35 years of evolution of the form (and its supporting technology) since the game's publication, and that the reduced level of implementation is almost certainly entirely a consequence of 1980s technical limitations. The game file is 126K, which is at the absolute limit of size for Infocom's Z3 games. In the same interview with Jason Scott, Briggs describes the need to edit the original version of the game down to a size that would fit on the microcomputers of the era and says that it took months to accomplish. Despite the implication of drastic editing, production notes show that at its most expansive the compiled game was only about 2.5K larger than its final size. Briggs may be referring to cuts to the design on paper, ideas that never made it to code in the first place.
The decision to stick with Z3 (which in particular seemed intended to preserve access to the Commodore 64 market) meant that Briggs had very definite constraints on the realization of her vision. Perhaps the central challenge in designing this work was that by its nature it calls for extensive characterization and character interaction. According to Briggs, Meretzky warned her not to try this story as her first attempt -- while she does not say what specific challenges were anticipated, the most obvious stem from the difficulties inherent in developing characters. Undeterred, she plowed ahead, placing herself into a position where necessity became the mother of invention (mayhap following a brief dalliance with desperation).
Briggs partially solved the problem through the use of cliche. I do not say this as criticism, because I do not think that significant characterization for so many different characters is achievable within the limits of Z3 except through heavy use of cliche. (If you want a character to be different, you have to illustrate the difference, and that takes text.)
The plot is similarly a collection of standard tropes and beats, but I note that the use of cliche does not preclude effective entertainment. Many of the same elements are present in that other famous pirate adventure game of the era: The Secret of Monkey Island. (In a twist of fate that sounds too good to be true, it turns out that Amy Briggs used to babysit Ron Gilbert, the lead designer of Monkey Island, when she was a young lady. See the video interview of Gilbert cited on Briggs' Wikipedia page.)
Conversation was exceptionally dangerous territory; it was always weak in Infocom games due to the ASK/TELL model. The Achilles heel of ASK/TELL is that the frequency distribution of possible topics has a long tail. An NPC with just a few significant responses seems less like a person and more like the virtual automaton that it is. It takes scores of responses to make a suitably "lifelike" NPC (even assuming that responses to a given topic do not vary), and while some players will delight in an NPC that has a wide range of responses, most players will give up quickly after drawing a few generic replies in a row.
Although later non-commercial works such as Galatea, Anchorhead or Lost Pig show that ASK/TELL can work reasonably well, they also show that it requires large amounts of text to be dedicated to conversation. (Compare Lost Pig's single NPC and 279K file size.) The standard dodge was (and often still is) to create an in-game reason that serves as an excuse for an NPC's poor conversation skills -- and indeed this method is used for the characters of Cookie (who is nearly deaf) and the "butler" (who exhibits a stock combination of quiet menace and bland formality).
In the context of ZIL and Z3, where every byte matters, devoting substantial text to responses that have a low probability of being discovered by any single player is simply a bad bet when weighed against the other needs of the game. It is unsuprising that Plundered Heart's ASK/TELL conversation doesn't fare any better than the Infocom average, but Briggs makes use of a new invention for the most critical interaction with NPCs: the YES/NO conversation model, in which the PC must respond to yes/no questions from the NPC. Only an embryonic version of the technique is on display -- fewer than a score of these interactions occur -- but they demonstrate a way to add characterization to both PC and NPC in a very economical manner from the perspective of the programmer. Although similar code can be found in other Infocom games, the technique is generally used to conduct humorous and/or snide metaconversational exchanges between the parser/narrator and the human player; the exception is A Mind Forever Voyaging, where in a minority of instances the technique is deployed to interact with other characters. Plundered Hearts seems to be the first to use YES/NO responses primarily to drive player character actions. (Andrew Plotkin would later use the YES/NO conversation model to great effect in Spider and Web.)
Another innovation worth noting in passing is the game's implementation of clothing -- and layered clothing at that. Though the layering has little functional significance, it seems that the clothing system was a substantial development effort with its own module of about a thousand lines of code (around 5% of the total source by line count). Changing clothes is more than mere disguise, it is a social act within the game, and NPCs frequently react to the PC's outfit -- providing a way of squeezing a little more characterization out of the limited interaction that was possible.
In a further departure from contemporary Infocom norms, hallmarks of the house style of humor are conspicously absent. As pointed out by Jimmy Maher: "There aren’t 69,105 of anything here, no 'hello, sailor' jokes, no plethora of names that start with Zorkian syllables like 'Frob,' no response to 'xyzzy'..." The only whiff of that vein of humor to be found is in the player character's family name of Dimsford, and it is soon forgotten if it is even noticed in the first place. (Exhaustive interaction with the environment will yield a smattering of other jokes in the Infocom style, such as the motto on the Jamison family ring and the name of the piece being played by the band in the ballroom, but these are exceptions that are easy to miss.) The game's playability today is much improved by this choice.
It is very interesting to wonder about what the game would have looked like had Briggs been given the freedom of the Z4 format with its expanded capacity. There are hints due to the release of the Infocom hard drive, such as: the name for a fifth ending called "Femme Fatale," which an associated comment describes as "You desert -- Lafond dead"; a spyglass with a special interaction from the crow's nest of the ship; the possibility of the protagonist injuring her ankle and approaching the mansion along the road north of it; a number of interactions involving Lafond's hat; snipped objects such as a bent key, a candle, and hoops for your frock; and suggestions of a somewhat more lurid style in certain places.
We know that Briggs wanted to do more. In the Jason Scott interview, Briggs recounts her reaction to seeing "Pirates of the Caribbean" for the first time: "*That's* what I was trying to do. That *movie* is what I was trying to get my game to play like -- that whole experience." She wasn't the only one who wanted more action, in a separate anecdote she recounts: "I remember one reviewer just lit into the game because she was trying to karate chop and to do tough guy stuff, and the game wouldn't let her." It simply wasn't possible to do much more than she managed with the materials at hand in 1987.
In the end, the collapse of Infocom and the shift to graphical games was a turning in the tide of history, and Briggs' arrow in the sand was washed away... but not before it was noticed, not before it turned eyes to the horizon and kindled dreams of what distant shores might lie beyond it. Now, in a time when those shores have been charted, pirate-themed interactive fiction continues to be produced in a steady stream -- but has any of it managed to do better than this pioneering first?
As game, passable. As technical demo, wow!, January 14, 2024From time to time, Andrew Plotkin has written works that are more about demonstrating what is possible from a technology standpoint than they are about delivering great stories. Lists and Lists is one of this type, and it certainly makes a deep impression when one finds oneself interacting with a Scheme interpreter instead of a normal command prompt.
The provided plot is the flimsiest excuse for presenting a test of programming skill in a language that few people are likely to be familiar with. The difficulty curve of the challenges is not linear, and it increases sharply toward the end of the series.
I don't normally recommend IF that is purely about the logic puzzles, but this piece is such a unique achievement that I think it's a must-see for anyone interested in IF as a whole. Arguably, at its core it is not so much IF as it is INF (Interactive Non-Fiction). Equally arguably, it is a stand-out example of puzzle design featuring a consistent, discoverable logical framework with very fair hinting and considerable challenge -- though I think any such argument would be disingenuous because none of Plotkin's genuine games are so derivative of the work of others. In any case, it is worth reviewing as a notable experiment, and as a bonus you'll learn something about an historically-significant programming language!
(Note: My scoring rubric implies that this work should earn a five-star score on the basis of its introduction an entirely new technique. However, although it was enjoyable and remarkable, I can't honestly say that it feels like a proper game to me, nor do I think it was truly intended to be thought of as one.)
How far can you get with a dozen rubber bands?, January 14, 2024There is something deeply endearing about the Frenetic Five franchise to me. If there was anyone out there long-awaiting another episode of this series, I was that one.
What do I love about the series? It's not just that it hits the superhero satire sweet spot better than anything since the Tick animated series, but that it does it in such a clever way. Author Neil deMause's sense of humor is both shallow and deep, running from playful one-liners such as
> QUIT
You can’t actually quit, since as an independent contractor you’re not technically employed.
> QUIT
Oh, *that* kind of quit.
Are you sure you want to quit?
to the refrigerator logic perfection of the fact that even though the superpowers of the main characters seem foolish, they truly *are* superpowers in the context of an interactive fiction game. (To wit: Improv is the player avatar whose "power" is to come up with improbable solutions with at-hand materials. Lexicon knows all the words in the game's dictionary, defeating guess-the-verb and guess-the-noun issues. Pastiche can violate the physical world model's containment rules at will, so no locked container is a barrier -- plot requirements of this episode notwithstanding. Newsboy's awareness is not bounded by scope; he can theoretically see anything happening in the game universe. Clapper's power bypasses visibility and concealment rules, obviating any lightweight "puzzles" that are based on objects being hidden in a room.)
This prequel is written in Inform 7, a departure from the TADS platform used for every previously-released episode. The author's notes indicate that writing it was partly an exercise in learning the new language, and the oft-noted bugginess of release 1 is undoubtedly in part a reflection of this fact. (As relevant background, a certain level of bugginess can be found in the author's TADS-based works, as well.) The presence of bugs (even the serious one noted by other reviewers) was not enough to prevent me from enjoying release 1, and in any case they are substantially addressed by release 2.
I found this episode to be as good as any installment of the series, in that the plot was just as flimsy (in a manner entirely in keeping with the superhero genre), the jokes were just as funny (in a manner entirely in keeping with the author's trademark style), and the writing was just as entertaining as ever.
For a newcomer to the series, this may not be the best first episode to play, because much of the strength of the series comes from the interaction between the PC and other members of the team. That kind of interaction in this game is almost entirely lacking -- the relationship between characters is (appropriately for an origin story) that of newly-introduced co-workers instead of familiar friends (and even roommates) as seen in episode 1. There is still enough to entertain in the way of deadpan comedy, unexpected puns and puzzle cussitude, but it just doesn't have the same feel of being a dynamic situation full of active and interesting characters.
The puzzles were more enjoyable in this episode, though I'm not sure how much of the difference is attributable to improved design vs. better alignment of my expectations. There is automatic hinting for several of them when no progress is being made, so I assume that an effort has been made to be "fair" in the strictest sense, even if necessary actions don't always make sense at first blush. Sometimes it may be necessary to stumble on a solution through experimentation, and it certainly appeared to be the case that involving NPCs was not optional in some places. As a result, there doesn't seem to be any reason to refrain from calling for help early and often.
The ending is somewhat anti-climactic, and the "post-credits" scene will make little sense unless the player is familiar with (or goes on to become familiar with) the chronological sequel: The Frenetic Five vs. Sturm und Drang.
The author's notes claim that he "will absolutely be writing more games sometime in the next two decades," and I hope that is true because I definitely look forward to whatever else he might publish. Welcome back, Mr. deMause!
Significantly less than the sum of its parts, January 12, 2024After finishing this game, I was surprised to learn that it placed a respectable 4th of 27 entries in the 2007 IF Comp. This is remarkable -- it clearly demonstrates how much higher the average quality of comp entries has climbed over the course of the last decade and a half.
This game is very competently programmed in Inform 6 and presented no bugs during various playthroughs. The writing is serviceable, and I noticed only a handful of typographical errors (all of which were misplaced homonyms). The story, however, is a mish-mash of unrelated elements that create essentially no synergy.
In terms of "marketing materials," the game patterns itself after the Infocom style -- and especially after Planetfall. As with that game, feelies include a military service ID card and various documents relevant to the PC's new career. The feelies also imply that this game takes place in the same universe as that commercial-era classic, with the player character being the sibling of Planetfall's recently-enlisted Ensign Seventh Class who serves aboard the S.P.S. Feinstein. The most innovative item among the feelies of Across the Stars was the sample transcript, which covers the player character's experience when first joining the crew of the ship aboard which the story begins. (This is a departure from Infocom's practice, which presented sample transcripts from stories that were similar but unrelated.) The ostensible background provided by the feelies is wholly irrelevant to actual gameplay, though, and they can be skipped without losing anything of value.
The game itself is difficult to describe, because it mixes several elements and styles without committing to any of them enough to warrant a strong categorization. The basic segments of the plot are as follows: 1) (Spoiler - click to show)sabotage your ship while avoiding the occasional search by pirates who have captured the rest of the crew, 2) (Spoiler - click to show)explore an ancient temple from an alien culture to learn about their culture and history, 3) (Spoiler - click to show)defeat some dangerous creatures and rescue an NPC, 4) (Spoiler - click to show)get to the NPC's ship and activate its emergency beacon so that you can both be rescued. One or two of these segments might have served as the whole plot of a modern comp game; here, each is treated so breezily that it feels like four half-stories and zero complete ones.
In terms of richness of setting, most of it is found in plot segment 2, which -- oddly -- seems almost wholly optional. In fact, the IFDB-linked walkthrough (which seems to have been for an earlier version of the game) pretty much skips this part. It appears that much of it was grafted on later, and complications to the main plot added to require engagement with these new pieces.
If this was the development strategy, then it is easiest to explain the game's shortcomings as simply the result of it not reflecting any integrated vision of a whole. However, this is a fatal flaw, because in its final form the plot basically requires the player character to (Spoiler - click to show)secure the primary magical artifact of an ancient world religion solely in order to use it as a light source!
At first I thought that this aspect of gameplay was the result of the authors allowing plenty of freedom in the path that the player takes through the game, such that being a good guy is optional. I would have respected that, but review of the source code suggests that this is part of the critical path to reaching the end. I found the overall experience to be somewhat distasteful.
The authors themselves seemed to have trouble coming to grips with the game as a whole; the subtitle of "the Ralckor Incident" seems an odd choice, as the subtitular creature really only figures prominently into plot segment 3. If tasked with naming the game, I might suggest (Spoiler - click to show)"the Taking of the Supalace" (segment 1) or (Spoiler - click to show)"Prophecy of the Protector" (segment 2) or even (Spoiler - click to show)"Escape from Brakis VI" (segment 4). The pacing and structure of the game made it seem to me as though the proposed segment 2 title would fit best, but given the resolution of that segment it would really only do so in an ironic manner.
Playing this game may still be worthwhile as an exercise for the would-be author, because on the local scale of individual rooms, objects and actions there is much to admire about this work. I would not really recommend it to players as entertainment, however. If you want action-adventure, a rich fictional history with layers of meaningful symbolism, engaging and purposeful NPCs, and epic quests to save a world, then you will likely be disappointed by this work that seems to offer all of these things but ends up delivering none.
The only thing missing is an ad for breakfast cereal..., December 15, 2023[Full Disclosure: I know the author of this work personally, and I served as a beta tester for this game.]
"I don't want to play in a world where I can't kick a pirate using karate." So said Janet Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck, in a 1988 article about Plundered Hearts (MIT Technology Review, May/June 1988, p. 16). Well, Janet... it took almost 35 years, but your cri du coeur has been answered!
A Matter of Heist Urgency is an unusual offering. Rooted in a series of silly short stories written for a grade schooler who enjoys horses and superheroes, it was developed into a short game as a fun way of introducing that grade schooler to interactive fiction. Having reached about 25,000 words in size and a level of playability that was very newbie-friendly, it was then further developed to be an entry in IF Comp 2022, doubling its word count in the process. The result is a fast-paced, smoothly-flowing, and very amusing short game that has been favorably compared to a Saturday morning kids' cartoon.
The game is "puzzleless" in the sense that there is nothing intended to impede the story's progression to its successful conclusion. By the same token, it is "merciful" on the Zarfian scale -- the player may be left with varying degrees of satisfaction at the outcome, but the player character cannot die or even really lose. That said, the game does reward engagement, and there is some light thinking to be done in order to achieve the highest rankings, which are issued at the end of the game even though there is no formal score. (To be less ambiguous, I should instead say that the game has no point rewards; it does indeed have a musical score.)
Critical reception in the context of the competition was mixed. The "marketing materials" (i.e. cover and blurb) developed for the game emphasize the word "heist" in the title, which may set genre expectations of a complex puzzling-solving exercise involving tight timing and intricate details. (This perception may also be reinforced by the blurb's claim of a "robust" hint system, though in hindsight that is clearly tongue-in-cheek.) In contrast, the cover illustration depicts cartoon horses and a pirate ship, and the blurb characterizes the game as "a delightfully short action-comedy" with "intense fights with kung-fu llamas," so arguably it delivers exactly what it says on the tin.
The humor of the piece is its strong point, but it is also perhaps idiosyncratic. Players seem to decide whether or not the game appeals to them very quickly, beginning with their perception of the pun in the title. Much of the humor depends on juxtaposition: The illustration of Anastasia as a rainbow-maned equine invites a comparison to "My Little Pony," but the way the plot plays out is closer to "The A-Team."
The game's tone is unapologetically playful, and it works best when approached in a playful mood. The setting is essentially the Land of Make Believe, which you may recall spending time in as a child. Character archetypes are deployed without any consideration for historical accuracy; instead they are chosen to evoke a specific mood and expectations in the player. This creates a fluid version of in-game reality that can subject the player to surprises(Spoiler - click to show) (a pirate with a jetpack??) but still feels consistent in the sense of keeping the scenario and the interaction fun.
Personally, I have found the game to be very enjoyable, even through many replays, because there are countless details in the implementation that reward you for poking around by responding with small jokes. I am especially impressed by one of the new scenes added post-competition (in release 5): It is a very "cinematic" flashback sequence using a method of synchronized music and text that I hadn't encountered elsewhere, though a similar technique was later employed in Little Match Girl 4. (Note that this scene is shown only if you are victorious in the first fight; if you lose, you instead get to play a very funny interlude from the protagonist's early training.)
As you have no doubt gathered by now, this is not a "serious" piece. However, its development was taken seriously by the author, first with the intention of creating a memorable and enjoyable introduction to interactive fiction, then with the intention of crafting a light-hearted and diverting short experience for judges working through a field of entries that generally strive for more literary merit.
Given my involvement, it's not appropriate to let my star rating count toward the average, but I give it high marks due to its very good implementation quality, memorable and amusing characters, and judicious use of sound. I encourage everyone looking for a half hour of pure entertainment to give this piece a try. I also highly encourage use of a sound-capable interpreter, which is essential for appreciating the scene-enhancing music and the special flashback sequence mentioned above.
A "bridge" episode that doesn't stand on its own, October 31, 2023Another Earth, Another Sky, the second installment of the popular Earth and Sky series, is a significant step up from its predecessor in terms of technical sophistication. Object implementation is complete but not very deep, matching a relatively spare descriptive style for locations. What stands out most is the "situational implementation" -- the game's bug-free logic is prepared for a wide variety of actions that the player character (Earth) might take, or might ask the key NPC (Sky) to do.
This attention to scenario detail was atypical at the time, and the game was exceptionally well-received. Not only did it win the 2002 IF Comp, it received 2nd place in the comp's Miss Congeniality rankings and was later nominated for five XYZZY awards (winning only Best Use of Medium). This last is almost certainly due to the use of comic-book style graphical elements (title cards and onomatopoeia-based "sound effects"), an affordance of the Glulx virtual machine that was still little-used at the time.
Unlike the first installment, which sweeps the player along quite quickly, this episode has a slower and more contemplative pace. The bulk of the action occurs in three parts: (Spoiler - click to show)a short investigation at an abandoned cabin, a much longer investigation on an unusual artificial planetoid, and a brief climax and denouement. The second portion will take up the bulk of the playtime, consisting of one long puzzle about gaining access to the endgame. The scenario is designed such that you must explore the entire area to find the pieces that you need, creating a "travelogue" type of experience that encourages you experience the sights, sounds and smells of the various geographical sections. Sprinkled through this are various optional discoveries that let the thorough player unravel the mystery that serves as a plot, but a full explanation will be provided before the cliffhanger ending in any case.
The game does not stand very well on its own, since the plot continues the events of the first game and seems largely designed to supply backstory for the third episode. The climax encounter with a new NPC is disappointingly short, especially when contrasted with the earlier interaction with the PC's superhero sibling. Rather than attempt this as standalone entertainment, it is probably best enjoyed as part of the series.
One minor item of interest is that the startup menu allows the player to optionally specify details of the resolution of key events that occurred during his or her playthrough of the first episode. The answers have a small impact on the introductory text, but I did not notice any other consequence.
If at all possible, know nothing about this game before starting, October 25, 2023I downloaded An Act of Misdirection many years ago, having seen it mentioned in passing in a positive way. The only thing that I remembered about it when I loaded it up this morning was that you play the part of a stage magician, and that you had to figure out the steps of the performance.
"Well, this should be interesting," I thought after reading the run-up to the first command prompt. Imagine my delight as I found that the way had been carefully prepared for my bumbling first attempts, that hints and nudges were craftily placed within every turn of phrase of the interaction. These hints began small and subtle but escalated to large and glaring when needed to get my attention, and rapidly taught me both to follow their lead and to take advantage of the breaks in the action to "work the crowd" for a response.
I have noted in the past about certain games' ability to follow the player until the player can learn to follow them. This is accomplished so expertly here that it seems effortless. The only point where I got stalled too long was a place where a little thinking about the logic of performances of this type would have sufficed. (Spoiler - click to show)Specifically, having used a blunt instrument for its intended purpose, it makes sense that it can be disposed of thereafter. (Spoiler - click to show)A hint from your assistance about which item he expects to catch would have smoothed the way here; if there was one, I missed it. The correct move was apparent enough when I stopped to consider it... it just took me a while to do so because I was swept up in the urgency of keeping the show going. The author, Callico Harrison, should truly take a bow for this achievement; not many games manage to instill this sense of immediacy.
Having come to this game mostly "cold," I wasn't even aware that there was a horror component to it. I would imagine that this situation has been relatively rare since the game's initial release -- this IFDB page, for example, clearly labels it as such -- but knowing about it is a massive spoiler! If you have already played the game you can imagine my own shock, echoing that of the fictional audience, as the performance reaches its culmination. The first act had been an Act of Misdirection, indeed.
Moving on from there, Ms. Harrison demonstrates a surprisingly rich and deep command of language in painting the scenes of the protagonist's origin story. Many people seem to find this second section to be inferior to the first; I did not. The same craft and skill is used to keep the action moving with clues, now less blatant in their prompting of the right command. The parser is fairly free in its interpretation of your input at this point, redirecting your intent when you are "close enough" in order to keep the scene moving briskly. Call it "railroaded" if you like, but I prefer to think of it as the game urgently requesting your cooperation to play along so as not to ruin the intended pacing. I found myself eager to catch up as the game led me through a chaotic situation, glancing this way and that at glimpses of Victorian life before being tugged along to a more contemplative setting where the horror begins in earnest.
Here Ms. Harrison shows that her command of the psychology of horror is as great as that of her command of language -- indeed, I found this section to be a master class of the technique for "showing, not telling" in the context of interactive fiction. I expect to spend much time scrutinizing the writing here to better understand how she so expertly conveys key knowledge indirectly; important realizations suddenly appear in your mind at the center of a flourish of well-chosen connotations. A second bow in encore is called for here.
If there is anything to criticize about this work, it is that it is over too quickly, and that certain details of the scenario are not clear after a first playing. I am glad to see that other reviewers almost universally recommend a second playthrough, and I look forward to doing so... preferably with other players who don't know what to expect.
As a final note, I want to point out that this game was written in Inform 6, and it is a remarkable feat to achieve such a level of polish with that toolset. Very few games of the era are its equal in this respect, though nowadays Inform 7 makes it easier (if not exactly easy) to build scenarios of comparable quality.
Ms. Harrison does not seem to have ever produced another standalone work of IF (though she did contribute to Cragne Manor), but if she does she will find me among those waiting "in anticipation of something magical" to try her next work.
Fun but sometimes frustrating, October 25, 2023Back to Life... Unfortunately is an entertaining but significantly buggy game. I played version 3, obtained from the IF Archive. (At least, I think it was version 3. The game banner claims to be version 2, but the response to the command >BUGS implies otherwise.)
As noted by another reviewer, the game's humor starts well but doesn't hold up for long; there are really only so many ways to tell the same joke. However, by the time the humor has worn off, you are likely to have achieved several "successes," so you will be well-motivated to finish the game on the basis of wanting to complete the remaining puzzles. Regrettably, you are likely to run into trouble while doing so.
Many of the issues stem from the use of ADRIFT to write the game. As I've noted elsewhere, the most frustrating thing about ADRIFT as a player is that it lacks a proper parser and does not differentiate well between errors that are caused by failure to understand the arrangement of words vs. the failure to understand the words themselves. The game's gravest errors are where it provides inaccurate feedback, giving the player the perception that certain required commands would have no effect or would be unrecognized. I got hung up for quite a while on the syntax required to mark boxes on a form; since the need to do this is immediate and obvious, it is no spoiler to relay that the correct syntax is of the form >TICK BOX 1. (Just >TICK BOX is treated as a totally unrecognized command -- a disambiguation message would have helped tremendously here.) The worst offender of this class was (Spoiler - click to show)(see numbered hint 3 below). Attempting to use any other direct object results in a message instructing the player to say which of several indirect objects is intended. Specifying the correct indirect object in the command via its typical adventurese abbreviation (i.e. color only) will not work and falsely claim that there is no effect.
There is a built-in hint system, but it is not very extensive and does not help with guess-the-* problems. (Even here there is a significant inconsistency: While >HINT works as a command, the response to >HINTS claims there are no hints in the game.) (Spoiler - click to show)If you get really frustrated, there is a command >CLUES that will point the way to 100% spoilage. Since the game is enjoyable and worth playing, I offer the following hints:
1. Handling an intruder: (Spoiler - click to show)After exploring a bit, you will hear the sound of an intruder in your chambers. (Spoiler - click to show)You should immediately >LISTEN as soon as you are notified of this. Should you fail to do so, it will seem as though the noise was a false alarm. Go back to the Throne Room and >LISTEN to trigger the next part of the sequence. (Spoiler - click to show)An assassin! Oh, no!... but wait a minute, don't you want to die? (Spoiler - click to show)As the game hints, you don't want to die at the hands of this particular person -- once was enough.(Spoiler - click to show)You can't handle the intruder alone. He will kill you.(Spoiler - click to show)The guards can help here. (Spoiler - click to show)You have to call them -- but it only works correctly from the Laboratory. (Spoiler - click to show)If you don't do things this way, you will miss two opportunities to die.
2. Dealing with the problems of the kingdom: (Spoiler - click to show)You don't want to rule anymore. That's someone else's job. Someone specific. (Spoiler - click to show)Your High Chancellor is very... effective, shall we say, but he can't do the job alone. (Spoiler - click to show)Your layabout son is the proper ruler at this point. You will need to "encourage" him. (Spoiler - click to show)Did you know that you can >CALL GUARDS from the Throne Room? (Spoiler - click to show)They will provide you with a ring allowing telepathic communication. Pay attention to its introduction. (Spoiler - click to show)Examine it carefully before putting it on. (Spoiler - click to show)Your son isn't eager to take up his duties, but he is eager to avoid any displeasure. (Spoiler - click to show)Especially pain. (Spoiler - click to show)>SMASH RING -- but only while wearing it in the Throne Room, for inexplicable reasons. That will get his attention. (Spoiler - click to show)Then >TALK TO TOROMIN again -- but only somewhere other than the Throne Room, for inexplicable reasons.
3. An optional death: (Spoiler - click to show)If you have handled the intruder correctly, you will get two items that he was carrying. (Spoiler - click to show)One is easily applied to your goal. The other requires some work to use. (Spoiler - click to show)The leaf has an odor that reminds you of something. (Spoiler - click to show)Your lab has something that can help. (Spoiler - click to show)You want to heat it up. Which potion is best for this? (Spoiler - click to show)For inexplicable reasons, >PUT LEAF IN PURPLE won't work (and falsely claim that nothing happened), but >PUT LEAF IN POTION or >PUT LEAF IN PURPLE POTION will have a result.
4. A required death: (Spoiler - click to show)As you have discovered, your minions are quite adept at bringing you back to life. How can you stop them? (Spoiler - click to show)You need to be not just killed but obliterated. (Spoiler - click to show)Earthly methods are insufficient here; you need divine intervention. (Spoiler - click to show)Divine is not the same as infernal! (Spoiler - click to show)You probably found a scroll discussing "words of power" in the Laboratory. (Spoiler - click to show)Oh, darn -- the words are missing. But this was your scroll, supposedly, so maybe you already know them? (Spoiler - click to show)You can just say >WORDS OF POWER to use them -- in the right place. (Spoiler - click to show)The right place being someplace open to the sky. (Spoiler - click to show)No, not the balcony. (Spoiler - click to show)The Throne Room needs to be prepared before it will work. So do you. The scroll is specific about this. (Spoiler - click to show)Holy water is the tool for the job. (Spoiler - click to show)You can drink some to prepare yourself, but you need a way to get some to the Throne Room. (Spoiler - click to show)The only container that can be used for this must be ordered using the mouldy scroll (obtained via >CALL GUARDS in the Throne Room). (Spoiler - click to show)The genie in a bottle is a red herring. (Spoiler - click to show)The fiery potion won't kill you but does provide you with a container. (Spoiler - click to show)You can >FILL VIAL in the Laboratory and >SPRINKLE WATER in the Throne Room.
Although the goal is to reach a score of 10, the way to achieve this best score is, unexpectedly, to forego one of the opportunities (Spoiler - click to show)(see numbered clue 1 above). Doing so provides the PC with needed items that can't be obtained any other (legitimate) way. Sharp-eyed players will note that the score (measured in "successful suicide attempts") goes up even when the PC chooses not to die here, and that this mysterious extra death is needed to get to 10. The reason for this is not clear; it seems to be a bug.
The least bothersome issues encountered in the course of play were several misspellings that looked like the result of depending on a spellchecker instead of human proofreading. Of particular note were two phrases: "the semi-literature Toromin" (instead of "semi-literate") and "full extent of the water" (presumably instead of "of the law"?) -- the remainder were sound-alike errors that are easier to miss.
The problems were frequent and severe enough to sharply reduce my opinion of the gameplay experience, which is why I've given it two stars. However, I did like this game, and I encourage people to try it out. Its premise is solid, and the writing is above-average. It ended up being the first of a series, followed by two sequels that received respectable rankings within the competitions in which they were entered. With some corrections in place, this game would definitely warrant three stars. Until that happens, don't hesitate to use the clues above as a way of smoothing out the roughest parts.
... the entire universe was nothing more than a rhetorical device..., October 24, 2023Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist is a short game with an unusually ambitious scope. It is intended as an homage (self-described as "fanfic" in the game's banner) of an RPG system proposed by Jenna Moran (the outdated URL for which is also shown in the game's banner; the Wayback Machine has an archived version).
I had never heard of this RPG, and a cursory review of its rules suggests that it was proposed as a game mostly in jest. Rules are frequently written in a joking manner, such as the following passage: "Don't play WTF when operating heavy machinery. Use caution when playing WTF while tired, drunk, or punchy, as it may increase the chance that the shadow lurking beyond the edge of the world shall immure you all in timeless misery. If you are or think you might be pregnant, talk to your doctor about playing WTF." Even the RPG's acronym (WTF) implies that it is not intended to be taken seriously.
However, the author of the RPG has published other commercial role-playing games, and the part of the WTF rules that are not in jest describes a collaborative story-building RPG system. That system as described appears to be at least 90% satire. I don't have enough experience with this type of game to comment on WTF's playability, but I assume that it is possible with the right set of participants. (A word of warning: The rules' example of play, from which the title of this review was drawn, might give you pause.)
The remaining 10% of the non-jest portion appears to be an outline of the RPG author's philosophy and/or methodology for creating fantasy stories (and/or possibly for living), which is interesting but is not the point of this review. The only part that is relevant is the prescribed gross structure of a game of the RPG, which begins in the the Civilized Lands. (Per the prescribed outline, the story is intended to progress from there to the Savage People and the Fairies, then on to the Ur-Toads -- optionally first attempting to reach the Dragons of the Deeps -- and thence to the Conclusion. Understand that these segments of the journey and their names are in some sense composed of mythic archetypes, and would seem to be highly fluid in their execution. The only requirement is that certain types of narrative challenge are overcome at each step.)
Xavid, the author of the work of interactive fiction which is the point of this review, seems to have been inspired by the RPG's more poetic sections to create a parser game rooted in the RPG ruleset. This is a goal that on the face of it seems manifestly impossible, as the ruleset is unapologetic about its massive ambiguities, and computer programs don't do ambiguity well. As a consequence, many (indeed, most) of the mechanics of the RPG are simply ignored by the IF. Perhaps unexpectedly, what remains seems, in fact, to be a pretty good adaptation of the intended play experience to the parser medium.
The human player takes the role of the player character, who is the Wisher, and indirectly takes the roles of the Theurgist and Fatalist, who are both non-player characters that become obedient to PC commands after minor puzzles are solved. Each of these roles has the ability to influence certain in-game objects by injecting those objects with a quality that is associated with the role. For Wishers, this is "valence," the relevance of that thing to the narrative. For Fatalists, this is truth (as judged within the story world). For Theurgists, this is "mechanical support," ostensibly referring to RPG game mechanics (but rather significantly re-defined in the IF).
Each of these qualities will be discovered in the course of play and can be used by the appropriate character to invest objects with supernatural influence for the purpose of solving the IF's puzzles, all of which offer multiple solutions. In addition, the Wisher and Theurgist characters have a limited ability to use other special influence, by affecting the thoughts of creatures and physical qualities of things respectively. (In the RPG, the Fatalist's special power is the ability to declare what is true about the history of the world. It would be difficult to implement in a meaningful way, so in the IF this character is largely reduced to the source of in-game lore.)
The events of the game cover the characters' travails in the first part (i.e. the Civilized Lands segment) of an RPG game, in which they must obtain the (vampire) queen's blessing to set out on their quest for the Jewel of All Desiring. This portion is very sparsely implemented, largely composed of single-sentence room descriptions and "You can't see any such thing." parser errors. However, mechanically the game performs very well, implementing some relatively tricky things without any noteworthy bugs. The built-in hint system is available if needed, which goes a long way toward keeping player interest from getting derailed by guess-the-verb and/or guess-the-noun frustration. The writing, limited though it is, is well-focused on what is necessary to create a minimum of atmosphere and adequate context for the game's puzzles.
The conclusion of the game is quite unexpected... and very thought-provoking. (Spoiler - click to show)Having reached the object of the quest, the player must wish the world into existence. (Spoiler - click to show)(In accordance with the rules of the RPG, this will be the world that the characters experienced -- yes, it's very meta that way.) The game asks a series of questions about the actions taken by the characters, soliciting your -- as in you, the player's -- input on the matter. Questions are phrased such that they ask whether or not you agree that aspect of the story. At the end of the ten questions, your score is given, and the maximum score accords with answering yes -- answering yes honestly -- to all questions. If the player does not like their score, they are implicitly invited to play again to find other solutions to the puzzles.
This game left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the concept behind it is compelling, and the implementation reflects insightful and inventive design in adapting the more ephemeral aspects of the RPG as written. On the other hand, everything about the game's text and interaction is so bare-bones that on the whole it feels flat and empty -- in stark contrast with the tidbits of evocative and compelling text pulled from the ruleset and delivered via the Fatalist. Ultimately, I decided that this flatness is what would matter most from the perspective of the average player, which is why I've given this work only two stars.
I remind the reader that, in my book, two stars is not a bad rating. I certainly think that this game is worth experiencing and contemplating -- it doesn't take long. Perhaps Xavid will return to this project and expand it to the point where it better fulfills its potential. If not... well, perhaps someone else will come along to take another shot at realizing the vision shimmering in the distance here.
Long-standing champion in the IF Horror genre, January 7, 2023(Note: Would-be players are well-served by other reviews; this one is for would-be authors.)
There aren't really that many works of horror IF. Well-known works are fewer. Award-winning works pretty much come down to a handful, with Anchorhead being the first and only for at least a decade.
What makes it so hard to write horror IF? My usual argument is that it comes down to the problem of controlling pacing, which is critical to building the player's mood, and which is extraordinarily difficult to manage with the toolkit of interactive fiction. Control it too much, and the player is likely to feel "railroaded" and thus cheated of the promise of interaction. Control it too little, and the player will inevitably dawdle and poke about in the world you've built, which has the effect of constantly draining away the tension that you're trying so hard to keep on the rise. The player may enjoy bits and pieces of the experience but will not come away with the whole you envisioned.
Mr. Gentry seems to have very consciously grasped the challenge here and created a number of subtle innovations that go a long way towards overcoming both it and other obstacles to translating the methods of horror into IF. It is well worth examining these innovations in detail to try to understand what they solve, how they work and how they might be improved.
Anchorhead is patterned after the works of H. P. Lovecraft, which typically feature a protagonist who, beginning in a relatively humdrum setting, discovers previously-unsuspected horrors and subsequently struggles (often unsuccessfully) to retain his sanity as he grapples with the redefinition of his reality. In following this formula, it is first necessary to establish a starting point of normality, and Mr. Gentry clearly went to great lengths to do so. The "normal" presented in this work differs significantly from what is typically found in interactive fiction -- it's closer to actual reality in several ways.
First, as Emily Short notes, Gentry's prose offers players a multidimensional sensory experience that is far above-average in its quality, and which is delivered with amazing grace and economy. Not just sight, but sound, smell, touch are all intertwined throughout the room and object descriptions. The work that went into all of this writing was enormous, but with it Gentry achieves an important goal: As a player, you feel much more immersed in the environment than you would in most games.
Second, there are nuances of interaction that faithfully mimic the mechanics of reality in ways surprising to long-time players. Most notable here is the implementation of a model of the PC's hands -- the game keeps track of how she's holding her inventory and interacting with objects, causing failure of some actions when neither hand is free. While this level of realism has the potential to be a major annoyance, Gentry's coding skills ensure that, for the most part, you won't have to worry about it, as the PC will automatically shift things around on your behalf. The mimesis is somewhat broken here by the presence of a "holdall" object with unrealistically large carrying capacity, but since inventory limits are anathema to most players, this is an acceptable tradeoff. From time to time, the lack of free hands or pockets asserts itself in a realistic manner, once again reinforcing an underlying normality that brings you another step "into" the game world.
Third, again surprising, is the implementation of the weather. The game's storms are almost as annoying in Anchorhead as they would be in real life, prone to interfering with your inventory in ways which, though not hyper-realistic, manage to catch the essentials of the situation(Spoiler - click to show). That hurricane lamp you just walked outside with? It's out. That box of papers you had? Well, you still have the box. A well-implemented umbrella, working in conjunction with your hands, deals with most of the hassle, but Gentry has cleverly managed to make it just real enough that you have to worry about it as a player, elevating it above mere background description and again forcing you deeper into the PC's situation.
Fourth is the implementation of NPCs. I agree with Peter Pears that this is an exceptional example of the potential of the ask/tell system in the hands of a good writer, which makes talking to people feel like real interaction. The topic depth here is again evidence of hard work done with great skill; NPCs respond to topics that many players might not think to ask, if they haven't been paying attention to all of the minor details presented elsewhere in the game. This has a positive feedback effect for you as the player in that you are rewarded for making these connections in a way that does not affect the game's playability but once again draws you further "in". (Incidentally, this is a great variation of the "show, don't tell" technique for confirming the player's understanding of the situation, as such connections are rarely noted by the PC.)
Last but not least, the handling of the PC strikes an excellent balance, leaving enough AFGNCAAP-like interaction to allow anyone to project themselves into the lead role while retaining a narrative voice that colors the whole experience in a meaningful way. From time to time, the PC's mentality injects itself unobtrusively into the game, always in a way that reinforces immersion and enhances the player/PC connection(Spoiler - click to show). I am especially fond of the PC's unwillingness to go to sleep with the doors unlocked the first night in the house. Though it means having to get back up, put your clothes on, go downstairs and deal with it, it also makes sense that the PC would be too agitated about the situation to go to sleep without doing so, and I love how it's presented as though you simply forgot to do this -- even though wandering around leaving doors open is perfectly normal behavior in most IF. Again, this is a very restrained and subtle reinforcement of the game world as "real" that is amazingly precise in that it doesn't quite annoy you as a player.
These efforts to enhance reality don't really affect the gameplay very much, but they do affect your experience as a reader. After investing a lot of work to align the player's perceptions and mindset into an expectation of realism, Gentry is able to start introducing the surrealism that is the backbone of Lovecraftian horror. Gentry's success in this effort springs from the insight that underlies the Lovecraft quote which opens the game: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
Mr. Gentry's first key perception was understanding that the right place to develop tension is in the mind of the player, not the mind of the PC. Despite the trials of the experience portrayed, the PC has almost no observable emotional reaction -- if there is an emotional reaction, it comes from you, and it's achieved because the player/PC identity alignment has been so carefully managed. As the situation becomes more desperate, the PC becomes willing to do things that either explicitly or implicitly would have been balked at normally(Spoiler - click to show). Examples: stealing her husband's faculty card, spying on her husband, "hacking" his computer, stealing the mechanic's key, crawling through sewer pipes. Since many of these actions are necessary to advance the plot, in effect, the way the PC's reactions are modified to suit the mood that has been targeted almost acts as an emotional puzzle structure that ensures you feel the way Gentry wanted you to at each point(Spoiler - click to show). I say "almost" because not all of these actions are necessary to "win" (though they are to achieve maximum points).
Gentry's second vital intuition was in understanding that the way to keep the tension from dissipating is, unintuitively, to build it very slowly. Since no number of exclamation points is sufficient to induce a surprise reaction in the player, Gentry instead uses the technique of scattering numerous small clues to the central mystery throughout the game world. As Peter Pears phrased it you build your understanding "piece by piece" from these brilliantly interlocking clues in a way that makes your uncomfortable comprehension seem to well up from the dark recesses of your own subconscious instead of being handed down from above(Spoiler - click to show). I particularly like how this technique interacts with some of the "red herring" ideas introduced during the library research portion. As a player, you're not sure which to expect to materialize in-game. Notably, there are multiple clues for key information, making these realizations easier to achieve for the player and reinforcing the realism style. Even more notable is Gentry's craft in writing some of them. The "visual" clues (Spoiler - click to show)(i.e. the paintings in the gallery) are so well-written that I can recall them to my memory as though I had seen an actual image.
Overlaid onto the plot is a well-formed "scene" structure that divides the game world both chronologically and geographically. While the division of time into day and evening cycles is a bit too crude to be completely believable(Spoiler - click to show)(see Brian Uri's Augmented Fourth for a similar but more granular and thus more effective treatment), large portions of the game world are only accessible during certain times, giving a very dynamic feel to the story compared to games that depend solely on spatial barriers to enforce the plot structure.
In addition, there are a few timed or "action" sequences sprinkled throughout the game to add variety to the pacing. With respect to these, I found very effective Gentry's technique of giving the player the opportunity to explore certain spaces in advance of action sequences that would take place in them. The first time you are in an area, your exploration (unrestricted by time) advances your understanding of the plot. The second time there, the application of timing restrictions seems perfectly fair, as you've had a chance to develop the knowledge needed to "survive" them and your attention is not diverted by the need to explore the environment(Spoiler - click to show). My personal favorite example is the slaughterhouse scene, in which the two modes occur back-to-back in the same area. It is a vividly cinematic sequence, though it is marred by the rather ludicrous (if effective) presence of the crayon drawing and inconsistent use of the verb "hide".
As a last note of praise, I admired the way that the author found a couple of interesting ways to discomfort long-time players via subtle manipulation of expectations(Spoiler - click to show). Example: The fly in the real estate agent's office is a persistent presence in the prose, but can't be interacted with as an object. It's irritating and disquieting since generally for IF prominence in the text equates to prominence in the object structure. Example: The inability to explore the house due to darkness on the first night. A touch of pseudo-realism that doesn't quite fit in the typical IF experience -- having gained entry to the house you, as a player, expect to get to check it out. I think it is small details such as this that left me not quite knowing what to expect from the rest of the story while still feeling grounded within it. This slight disorientation is the mark of encountering something new (which is very, very rare for long-time players), and that, more than anything else, is what makes this work stand out in my mind.
All of the above is not to say that Anchorhead is perfect. I actually felt that the introduction (pre-arrival at the house) was quite poorly done. I had tried this game before and put it aside after 50 moves a couple of times, but this time I gritted my teeth and powered through it -- and I'm very glad I did. In addition, there are quite a few small bugs and places where the polish wears off towards the end of the game(Spoiler - click to show). For the nitpickers interested in a tour of these inconsistencies in the otherwise very high implementation quality:
* There seems to be an unintentional "last lousy point" issue due to a sensitivity to the order-of-events between researching birth and death dates and reading about the Verlach family in the library book. If you read the dates first, you make a connection and gain a point when you read the book, but not the other way around.
* Messages about flute resonance can sometimes call both columns the "right-hand column" in the mound.
* The madman in the asylum mimicking your voice doesn't seem to work correctly. I got garbled text that I am fairly sure should have been repeating back what I had typed.
* The way the magic word "ialdabaoloth" is handled is problematic; quotes don't work and the failure of commands like "say ialdabaoloth" and "door, ialdabaoloth" make it an unintentional guess-the-syntax puzzle.
* Examining the lighthouse after it is destroyed shows it still "there" from multiple vantage points.
* Trying to push William off the bridge gives a default politeness-based refusal that definitely does not fit with the situation.
* The bum's corpse still seems to be treated as animate after his death; you get default NPC responses for many interactions.
* Michael's corpose seems to be absent as an object.
* The luggage default message stays the same no matter how crazy the situation gets. So does taking a bath.
* Automatic key logic doesn't take into account keys not on the keychain -- very noticeable in the madman chase scene.
* There are a few disambiguation issues in conversation topics, e.g. "the book" or "the professor".
Beyond these, there are some places where design choices seem antiquated today even though they are closer to the norm for 1998:
* gratuitous mazes, though small and at least one can be bypassed
* darkness in the hallway during the madman scene; this turned into an annoyance for me and screwed up the pacing of the scene because I didn't have a light source, though this doesn't seem like an intentional "puzzle"
* the torn square of canvas being semi-hidden though it would clearly have been visible to the PC is strange and requires a careful search in a sequence otherwise oriented around a fast escape
* the climactic puzzle with the mirrors has many problematic details (Spoiler - click to show)(Why can you only mess up a replacement? Why doesn't Michael/Verlach notice the label on the replacement mirror? Why can't you "touch mirror" with an oily finger to get the same sabotage effect?) and definitely took a walkthrough for me
. Most likely, this is due to the scale of the work being so large that a) Gentry's skills in writing and coding improved over the course of its development and b) playtesting to perfection would take more hours than were available from volunteers. Space constraints may also have been a factor -- this work was developed pre-Glulx and must have stretched the limits of the z8 format.
Perhaps the greatest criticism I can muster is that Anchorhead very nearly succumbs to the pacing problem that kills so many attempts at IF horror. This is most obvious during Day Three, where I wanted STORY, not puzzles, and my patience for them was wearing thin enough to start consulting the walkthrough.
My natural rating for this work would have been 4 stars, or "exceptional" by my scale. I'm compelled to give it 5, however, because, in my experience, it is the king of the genre, far surpassing its Infocom-produced cousin, The Lurking Horror.
Cute premise, but basically nonsensical gameplay, December 1, 2022The author of this short adventure bills it as "an old-fashioned 1980's style text adventure" and notes: "[T]his isn’t modern IF, it’s an old-fashioned puzzle game with a wafer-thin plot and dated concepts like darkness, And, yes, there are a couple of things you can do to make the game unwinnable, although I’ve tried to make these somewhat obvious." It was also apparently produced as a first attempt of using the PunyInform library (version 4.0), and officially left beta status last month.
The premise seems intentionally absurd: You are a duck -- a toy plush duck -- living in a world that seems to be made of a combination of toy building materials, natural caverns, and occasional technology ranging from antique to futuristic. If that bothers you even a little, then you will find little to enjoy about this game. If the idea of a mashup between "A Bear's Night Out," "Planetfall," and a generic Scott Adams game sounds fun, however, then keep reading.
The PC wakes with amnesia and does not seem to understand why he/she is a plush duck. The "wafer-thin" plot consists of trying to escape an abandoned research complex by summoning help from the associates that left you behind while evacuating. To do this you will need to solve a series of arbitrary puzzles. So far, so good.
The gameplay experience rapidly breaks down, however, because many of these puzzles are significantly underclued. This is aggravated by the fact that there are numerous red herrings. It is further aggravated by the presence of what look like serious bugs that can lock out a win state without explanation or warning. (Spoiler - click to show)I don't know for sure what is causing these, but they seem to be related to lighting conditions. Key objects and object components can "disappear" either intermittently or permanently. Make sure that you have light when conjuring vegetables, and try turning the torch on and off if anything seems to be missing an essential component.
The essential flaw of the design is a failure to provide feedback to the player regarding partial progress on puzzles. This is absolutely critical for any complex puzzle requiring an extended series of actions, so that players can understand that they are on the right track. The most egregious example here is the puzzle involving retrieval of a piece of paper wedged under a heavy desk. Despite understanding the basic idea of needing to lift the desk to free the paper, this was not easy to accomplish even with a found item that seemed perfect for the task. (Spoiler - click to show)The actual solution requires use of multiple objects stacked onto one another in order to get the jack high enough to work, but there is no indication that the reason it doesn't work is that the jack is not high enough on its own. Multiple items must be stacked under the desk to get it high enough. (NOTE: The first version of this spoiler said that the need to turn one of these items over was "inexplicable," but it is in fact quite explicable and consistent with a similar item. I just wasn't paying very close attention to the default game output about this object. My apologies to the author!) There is no indication that the player's plan could work if conditions were adjusted. I had to resort to decompiling the game file to get the solution here.
Another flaw, arguably one that is stylistically appropriate for 1980s works, is that certain events occur "off-screen" as a result of your actions without any indication that this has occurred. The key example here involves obtaining a head of celery; the player simply won't know when this puzzle has been solved. In fact, the feedback given when the correct action is taken implies that the task failed. The player must wander to another part of the complex to find that the celery can now be obtained (with a little more work).
The last serious flaw involves a failure to communicate important in-game information to the player. I'm thinking here of a snake that prevents access to certain areas. Although the PC claims to remember something about the species, the essential information (Spoiler - click to show)(what it eats) is not provided, even after a puzzle has been solved that the game states should improve your memory. Good luck finding the solution here via anything other than brute force.
This game is littered with what look like author in-jokes, or possibly references to sources (like cartoons) not made explicit. A mysterious "ethereal" voice that harangues you every so often has no explanation, but it seems to be linked to a red herring that can be found. An even more mysterious event that happens at move 37 seems to have no bearing on the plot or in-game explanation. The ending makes no sense at all, as far as I can tell.
Despite the above, I basically wanted to like this game. The author clearly put a significant amount of work into the implementation, and the main set piece puzzles (involving a blender and an automated surgeon) are competently executed. There are some clever bits here (like a light puzzle not based on batteries running out), and the oddball humor appealed to me where it was accessible. The two-star rating that I'm giving it means "almost there" in my ranking system, and it would rate three stars (aka "good, not great") with better focus and the cleanup of game-threatening bugs. I'll keep an eye out for a release 2.
My new "go to" introductory game for children, December 10, 2021The Lost Islands of Alabaz has been out for more than a decade now, and, while it did make a splash by winning the Spring Thing 2011 competition, it seems to have faded into something like obscurity in the years since.
This is a grave oversight.
Michael Gentry's overlooked gem is an exquisitely well-planned introductory adventure for children (or, indeed, for adults sufficiently young at heart). Developing it in the years after his work on Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter, he seems to have been prompted to write this piece as a test of his own insights about how to craft a kid-friendly IF experience.
In the same way that his genre-savviness elevates Anchorhead above the pack, his deep intuition about children's storybooks serves him well here. The very first interaction, the simple device of asking for the protagonist's name, is a remarkably-effective hook for young players, especially as it is phrased ("What is your name, brave Knight?"). Immediately, the player is invited to either enter his or her own name (thereby stepping into the story with an actual identity) or to invent a heroic-sounding name (creating an avatar to embody an archetypal persona). From there, the target player is deftly drawn into the fairytale world that will be the story's setting while at the same time being shown the ropes of interactive fiction. The spare text style of just a few lines to describe each room is appropriate to the genre, won't tax even intermediate readers, and leaves plenty of room for the imagination to fill in the details -- especially after it has been sparked by a few carefully-chosen adjectives. The tropes at play are simple, and the story progresses with a light-hearted sense of fun that is both charming and compelling. In the first few moves, during which the tutorial mode is active, I was powerfully reminded of Infocom's Wishbringer, but it is important to note that this isn't an "old school" style game.
Once again, the author's talent for integral design of the play experience is evident; a few careful changes to the mechanics of interaction do much to set the mood for those familiar with interactive fiction, while smoothing the way for newcomers. The world model is somewhat simplified from the standard: Only four cardinal directions are supported, and objects never leave inventory once acquired. NPCs are talkative enough within the game's ASK/TELL model, which can be daunting for beginners, but implementation of a "topic-prompting" system (similar to that of Lost Pig) and functional combination of the verbs ASK and TELL make it very easy to get started. The SHOW and GIVE verbs also can also be used, a discovery that new players seem to make intuitively once they have had a few interactions with people in the world.
Trig, an almost ever-present sidekick who is the most prominent NPC, arrives early and takes over as the game's tutorial voice after the first few moves. By the end of the first chapter, he stops dispensing tutorial advice, and from that point on he doubles as a hint system. Repeatedly asking Trig about an active problem (as identified in the self-updating journal) will yield increasingly larger hints. It's quite intriguing how this plays out psychologically with young players -- they seem naturally resistant to asking him for help whenever they think it is something that they should be able to figure out themselves, even when stuck. Perhaps this has to do with the way that Trig's personality is implemented; he is somewhat dull, in the style of Trent/Tiffany from the Infocom canon. (The logic seems to be "If even Trig can figure it out, I should be able to!")
NPCs are an integral part of the game. In addition to Trig there are two other crew members, Javier and Zoey, that the protagonist is nominally in charge of as captain of a ship. These at first seem to be information-dispensing cardboard cutouts (the dominant but wholly-appropriate style used in the game), but at several points the protagonist needs to gain cooperation from one of these team members to complete a puzzle. This is a small but important touch, moving them out of the realm of background decoration and into the realm of supporting characters. At least one of these occasions requires issuing a command to Trig, an affordance that might not be obvious to new players but which Trig himself introduces as an optional interaction during one of his last tutorial voice comments.
Although the hint system is in place, it is rarely needed because the puzzle structure is masterfully designed. It works marvelously in conjunction with the game's "journal" system that serves in place of a score. Reading the journal lists achievements that have been accomplished as well as the pertinent puzzles to be solved at that point. The effect of reading over the list is much like a FULL SCORE command without any numbers attached, and it's interesting how over time this creates a sense of progression through the story's highlights without implying a precise measure of how much of the game remains.
Initial puzzles barely count as such, with solutions on the order of opening a container or walking between rooms, but the difficulty level slowly increases over time. While even the most difficult puzzles in the game are on the easier side for experienced players, several are clever in their construction and require small leaps of intuition that are just the right length for kids. Using Andrew Plotkin's definition of a good puzzle as being one that makes the player feel smart, these are very good puzzles indeed. There is also quite a bit of variety to the types of puzzles, including a superb racing sequence that makes for a very memorable action scene (and adds a new companion NPC: the mount, which the player must name). Wonderfully, the puzzles dramatically reduce in difficulty as the plot reaches the top of its arc, allowing for a quick denouement before the sense of victory is lost.
The story's pacing is also excellent. Its structure involves exploration of several islands, each consisting of a small number of rooms (generally 3 to 10) and each relatively self-contained. Access to each island is granted by obtaining one of ten magical pearls, and much of the functional plot revolves around obtaining these. As the range of traversable locations expands, more and more interactions between locations become possible (and necessary to progress). Although the central mystery of the plot remains a mystery until near the end, the player is rewarded with snippets of history that are revealed through exploration. These snippets contrast with the expectations set by the game's well-crafted "feelie" (an almanac of the kingdom written 50 years previously), giving a sense of deep dynamism to a world whose present is generally static. The command GO TO assists in navigation on each island, but it is not 100% reliable, suffering bugs in certain places(Spoiler - click to show) [confused by basket-o-vator, or presenting occasional malformed disambiguation questions] and outright refusing to cooperate if the destination is too nearby. This is another of Gentry's bits of subtle genius; it frees players from long sequences of navigation commands while still encouraging them to create a map of their own, in their heads if nowhere else.
One feature that I particularly liked about this work was that it includes some strategically-placed red herrings in a couple of places. These are items that seem like they could have a use somewhere, but which never actually do. Players are left to mull over these and deduce which items among them are the ones that can actually be put to use. Their presence does quite a bit to vary the pace of the story (allowing for thoughtful, slow-paced experimentation phases) and to engender the sense of a world of possibilities, even when in practice there are few options for progress. They also contribute to the satisfaction of working out the relevant solutions by sorting trash from treasure.
Although a version 2 was released to correct bugs, there are still a noticeable number of typos and a few issues with the interaction. These are minor, and they do not detract from the story. Perhaps these will be addressed in a future release, but most players will probably be more interested in seeing the sequel that is promised at the game's end.
There's something in the alchemy of this work that may particularly appeal to those who enjoy games in the old school style. It manages to retain the heart of some of the best elements of that style while adopting (and adapting) several innovations that inarguably improve the play experience. I'm not sure how well playing this would prepare someone to try older games, which might seem primitive in comparison to this work, but it certainly seems likely to encourage young players to view interactive fiction as a category in a positive light, and that aspect alone makes this a valuable contribution to the field.
This game earns five stars for me, as it has become my first suggestion whenever someone asks for a recommendation for a children's game. If you are looking to introduce a grade school child to interactive fiction, this is definitely the one to try. Even middle school aged children may enjoy it if they can get into the proper mindset -- especially if they are teamed up with younger kids and can help them think through the puzzles. The same applies to parents: It's sure to be fun if played with kids, even if it's not the kind of thing that you would choose for just yourself.
A genuine comedy of errors, November 30, 2021Having very much enjoyed Risorgimento Represso, I was eager to play this sequel when it was first released in 2018. It didn't manage to grab me the way that its predecessor did, so I put it aside and only got around to trying again recently. It was definitely enjoyable for someone who appreciates the old school style of play, and it is a solid sequel to a well-regarded first episode.
One of the hallmarks of the old school style -- found abundantly in the most popular games of Infocom -- is a kind of wacky comedy to interactions with the presented world. Plenty of more modern works offer the same, but this is not mere imitation. Instead, the technique survives because it is a relatively easy way to deliver entertainment to the player that is of particular value within interactive fiction because it doesn't rely on proper pacing. After all, "brevity is the soul of wit," and bite-sized jokes fit neatly between command prompts.
Although this piece frequently incorporates that type of comedy, it takes the form of more than one-off jokes. Instead, it is the framework for an extensive comedy of errors, a genuine farce growing like rich ivy over the cottage of the game's simple action plot. Jokes build on one another and escalate over time as the player, in the typical old school PC style, conducts a minor crime spree in pursuit of purely personal goals.
It should be noted that knowledge of the original is wound throughout the sequel, though not in ways that make that knowledge required to finish the game. If you happen to have played Risorgimento Represso recently, Illuminismo Iniziato will feel like an unbroken continuation -- following almost as directly as Zork II follows Zork. (In theory, quite a bit of time has passed between the two episodes, but it's not clear what the player character has been doing in the duration. You don't seem to have changed, and you begin with a few familiar items.) In the first half of the game, the setting will be Blumph, a city mentioned but never visited in the original. In the second half, the scene will change(Spoiler - click to show), and you will return to the town of Vechlee, revisiting many of the same locations and objects from the first game.
Several characters appear in both episodes, albeit in different capacities. Ninario, the centerpiece NPC of the first episode, barely appears in this one, and he is never on-stage. Instead, pride of place is given to Crystal, a talkative companion that serves up continuous "color commentary" on your actions. Much of this takes the form of reminders/exposition about events in Risorgimento, but over time this slowly morphs into observations that help to focus attention on the central thread of the plot.
Crystal is an extensively-implemented sidekick(Spoiler - click to show) who develops into a G-rated love interest. She has a ton of things to say, quite a lot of which is non-essential. This creates a life-like presence, but the drawback is that players expecting typical goal-directed expository interaction may find themselves stuck in a morass of verbiage with no end in sight. [In fact, the reason that my first attempts at playing didn't grab me is that I found myself standing in the first room talking endlessly to Crystal about seemingly inconsequential topics(Spoiler - click to show). After her insistent introduction, I assumed that speaking with her was important at that point. Perhaps a device such as her refusing further conversation by saying "We can't stand around all day." after a certain number of interactions in the same location would have served well here.] She is explicitly cast as the "talks too much" type, and one humorous innovation is that her replies for unrecognized topics often take the form of anecdotes about unrelated matters, each of which eventually ends with the acknowledgement that she didn't really hear your question.
Once one realizes that conversation with Crystal is entirely optional, the rest of the game beckons. Although the player is warned by the opening sequence that Big Things Are Afoot, the protagonist's quest begins as the simple task of picking up some dry cleaning. This task is quickly derailed, and in the "natural" course of events (i.e. initiation of the aforementioned crime spree) the protagonist and Crystal catch up to what the player already knows: The villain from the first episode is trying to widen the interdimensional rift that brought the PC to this world. Although it might not seem like this would be a problem to solve, it is(Spoiler - click to show) because, as it surprisingly turns out, the returning villian is some sort of vampire who plans to suck the life force out of students back on Earth. That this was never mentioned in the first episode -- and that this changes my earlier metaphor in a way that suggests the ivy is the only thing holding the ramshackle cottage together -- is beside the point. As with the first episode, the emphasis here is on having fun, not making dramatic sense. This becomes clear through the use of "tyromancy" (a hallmark of the series), which is the art of using cheese for divination. Tyromancy works somewhat differently in this episode, functioning as a series of dramatic cut scenes while also occasionally reprising its previous role of inciting curiosity through clairvoyance of yet-to-be-visited locations(Spoiler - click to show). Most of the cutscenes take place in locations that seem copied word-for-word from the original, which is probably useful for those who haven't played the original for some time but is less effective for those who have recently replayed Risorgimento.
The puzzle structure is a little uneven. Some solutions are quite obvious by virtue of being repeats of tropes from the first episode. Others involve repetitive use of the same objects for similar tasks. Few mysteries are present, and none of them seem exceptionally difficult to resolve, with discovery of the function of the hoop(Spoiler - click to show) and its interaction with the satchel being the most obscure. (The major clue to its use cites the zifmia and aimfiz spells from Infocom's works without mentioning what they do, which are to summon a target person to the caster's location and to send the caster to the location of a target person, respectively. This is a minor unfairness to someone not familiar with those works, but there are other clues available to make up for it.) It is worth taking particular note of how Coyne varies between playing some solutions "straight" while others have surprising and delightful twists.(Spoiler - click to show) The bit about the grappler and the gate of the estate that one plans to burgle is especially funny. These shifts in tone play well with the dual nature of the plot's "unseriously serious" core, with the balance heavily weighted in favor of light-hearted amusement.
Coding quality is improved over the original, with the "graphical" map and continously updating front page of a magical newspaper being the most apparent results. I don't recall encountering anything that seemed like a significant bug, though there are some quirks of interaction that I'm not sure were intended.(Spoiler - click to show) (For example, it is possible to solve the vault puzzle while retaining both the hoop and the satchel, which doesn't seem right given the setup.) The play experience is quite smooth, and the use of sound livens up the occasional sequence without being a functional requirement.
All in all, this work does exactly what a sequel should, namely to deliver more fun with familiar elements. It is well worth playing if you are a fan of Risorgimento Represso, and if you're not familiar with that work, consider this as an invitation to check it out.
Where "old school" means Homer and Virgil, January 26, 2018Barry Volain, the author of Myth makes no secret that the puzzles in this work are grounded in well-known Greek and Roman mythology. In the "readme" file accompanying the game file, he even goes so far as to recommend reading Bulfinch's Mythology (which is out of copyright and available via Project Gutenberg and at this web site) as a primer. In the era of Google and Wikipedia, such preparation is probably not necessary.
Myth is austerely minimalist. Descriptions are short for both rooms and objects. Many words mentioned in the text aren't recognized by the parser. It falls victim to a few First-Timer Foibles, including laconic locations, oral offenses (though only mildly), and close-mouthed characters. Yet somehow, this work did intrigue me, and I felt compelled to play through to the end.
I wish I could say that my patience paid off. Instead, it wore thin. After making about 100 points worth of progress, I hit something of a wall. As I could find no hints other than the walkthrough, my only choice was to read it and hope I didn't get too much given away.
Of course, I saw several things I didn't want to, including some things that I had tried to do but hadn't used the right word for. Once I realized synonym sickness was one of the first-timer foibles I was up against, I was a lot less willing to sit and puzzle things out when I was stuck. Doubly-so when I realized there were areas you could only visit once in a game with an inventory limit.
It's really too bad, because there were quite a few puzzles in the "hard but fair" category that I ended up missing out on this way. In the interest of letting others avoid that, here are my own hints -- restricted to extreme guess-the-verb problems and things that are basically impossible to figure out without mind-reading:
#1 (Spoiler - click to show)The sapling (yes, it's important)(Spoiler - click to show) - you need to get it(Spoiler - click to show) - with something sharp(Spoiler - click to show) - it's for making a weapon(Spoiler - click to show) - a spear(Spoiler - click to show) - like the ancients made them without metal(Spoiler - click to show) - "sharpen sapling" is part of it(Spoiler - click to show) - they were also treated some way(Spoiler - click to show) - for hardening(Spoiler - click to show) - "put sapling in <fire source>"
#2 (Spoiler - click to show)The grapes (yes, they're important)(Spoiler - click to show) - you need them to make wine(Spoiler - click to show) - you'll know how to make wine when you find the right equipment(Spoiler - click to show) - it's not the oak bucket, it's something with purple stains(Spoiler - click to show) - put the grapes in it(Spoiler - click to show) - how can you squish them? can't get in with them or stand on them or crush them or press them(Spoiler - click to show) - "step on grapes" is the magic phrase here
#3 (Spoiler - click to show)fighting things(Spoiler - click to show) - at least one critical battle appears to be semi-randomized, save before fighting and try again if you die, if you don't die the same way every time, keep trying
Don't worry, there are multiple layers of spoiler tags in the above, so you will have to click multiple times to be completely spoiled.
The size of this game surprised me. There must be around 75 locations. You will want to create a map for this one, complete with notes of the objects found in each location. It's probably too big to fit it all in your head.
Some of the puzzle designs in this work are clever. While in some cases the cliff notes of mythological texts provide virtual step-by-step instructions, in others the author takes license with the mythology to make you think a little sideways. This work would have benefited tremendously from a more literary touch and more thorough programming.
It's unfortunate that the scoring is implemented in such a way that necessary and irreversible steps don't always award points. It's a bit unnerving, leaving you wondering whether you're on the right track or heading for a dead end. Although I believe you can get this game into an unwinnable state, it's generally safe to assume that anything that appears to make things happen is a step in the right direction -- there is little interactivity that isn't directly aimed at the conclusion.
Another note about scoring: The walkthrough seems to indicate that its author got less than the maximum points. I got more than him, but less than the max. Out of curiosity, I decompiled the source code to look for those last lousy points, but it seems that they should all be awarded if you win the game. It looks like some actions may award points if you use one verb but not its synonym, so I wouldn't worry about it if you finish with less than 300.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon vs. "Cabbage Man", January 26, 2018Maybe it's because Halloween is coming up, or maybe it's because I just read Jimmy Maher's analysis of Transylvania at The Digital Antiquarian, but when I saw the announcement on IFDB that release 7 of this game was available, I decided to give it a try.
According to the author's own description of the game's origin, it was inspired in large part by a carnival ride of the same name. My own experience with such rides is very limited, but the ones I've encountered all seem to suffer from at least two common failings. First: In their quest to create a suitably "scary" setting, the makers heap image upon image until they have far overshot the mark, resulting in a panoply more bewildering than frightening. Second: The production quality is usually so low that suspension of disbelief is impossible for anyone but very small children. Unfortunately, Ghost Train seems to reflect both of these qualities, leaving the player with sense of having run into something that had the potential to be terrifying but didn't quite pull it off -- an encounter with Cabbage Man instead of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Although I give this work 2 stars, it does show some promising elements. The thing that impressed most me was the author's attempt, for at least the first half of the story, to keep the setting alive and vibrant through the use of transitory events and details happening "in the background". This isn't easy to do well, and it shows a dedication to polishing the player experience that is very much to the author's credit.
However, this level of polish is not consistent, and it is most noticeably absent in some key scenes(Spoiler - click to show): as an example, the encounter with "The Demon" that opens the final act. Here, the challenge is not pulling the player's attention to the background to give the illusion of a broader world, but focusing the player's attention on the foreground and (ostensibly, at least) forcing a plot-critical choice. It's quite odd that the player can dither about for as many turns as he or she likes while the antagonist waits patiently for a keyword.
Coding quality was, in general, good enough, though there is definitely room for improvement in those cases where the author feels compelled to clumsily spell out the correct grammar to achieve certain actions. The only thing that looked like a true bug to me ended up helping instead of hurting(Spoiler - click to show), when 'x parchments' was interpreted as referring to an object named parchment due to Inform's word length limit.
This game would benefit significantly from additional attention to proofreading and editing. It is rife with errors in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and other aspects of grammar, and it suffers from an irritating tendency to repeat the same adjective, phrasing, or information multiple times in quick succession. In some cases this is probably not desired by the author (as when an object is mentioned both in the location's description text and via default room description rules(Spoiler - click to show), e.g. the clock in the abandoned station), but in other cases it appears to be the result of simply not re-reading what was written(Spoiler - click to show) (e.g., in the opening sequence: "On silver moonlit track it races clear" followed shortly by "The steam engine 'Bluebell,' races fast and clear").
As I've said elsewhere, horror is an exceptionally difficult genre within interactive fiction, and this piece is another example in support of that claim. I would expect most players would find it about as entertaining and diverting as the carnival ride that was its namesake -- amusing enough if you're in the right mood for it. Outside of those rare occasions, its main value is in challenging the aspiring author to ponder how one might improve on the original.
On that note, I point the reader to Michael Coyne's list of First-Timer Foibles as an evaluation guide for this work. I spotted #2, #4, #8, #10(Spoiler - click to show) (most bothersome in situations where multiple locations are used when one would suffice, such as the signal booth area), #12, and #13(Spoiler - click to show) (e.g. the spelled-out instructions for certain actions, the prompt encouragements like 'Tell me what to do.' that aren't set off as being separate from normal story text).
Corruption. Intrigue. Baked Goods., November 15, 2014This slightly silly (but highly enjoyable!) piece by Ryan Veeder is perhaps inspired by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, as its story is built around the escapades of two minor characters from his previous work, Taco Fiction.
I came across this work first, then later played Taco Fiction to compare. The two are not related in any meaningful way, so perhaps it's not really appropriate to think of Dial C for Cupcakes as a sequel. Certainly, this piece works well on a standalone basis.
The first act of the story seems almost conscientiously designed around exercising some of the latest features of Inform 7, specifically the ability to do floating point math and to switch the perspective and tense of rendered text. Once the exposition is done, however, it settles into a more typical style of interaction, in a scenario that poses the question: Just how far are you willing to go for friendship, justice, and/or frosting?
The second act is well-paced and entertaining, and it does a good job of demonstrating how careful design of NPC interaction can provide an appropriate level of satisfaction to the player without demanding too much from the author.
With a semi-realistic setting and a story that gives license to be somewhat mischievous, this is one of those pieces that probably has broad enough appeal to hold the interest of casual mainstream players -- or even those new to interactive fiction. I'll be adding it to my short list of recommended pieces for those just trying IF, and I would definitely point it out as a great seasonal piece around Halloween. While it might not quite be kid-safe (since an understanding of certain adult motivations is necessary to complete the story), it's certainly no worse than PG.
One of the Best One-Room Games I've Played, November 14, 2014I'm not a huge fan of one-room games, but, as others have noted, this game turns what is normally an artificial limitation into a natural extension of the premise.
The start of the game is, aside from its unusually long length, a textbook example of how to provide immersion, orientation, and urgency all in one go: The initial diary entries set the humorous tone and sketch the broad outlines of the main characters' personalities, the problem to be overcome by the player is both clear and logical, and the first steps on the path to winning are almost immediately apparent.
Most importantly, this game was fun! The mounting tension had me both typing and reading faster as the game progressed, with just enough comic relief thrown in to keep me grinning.
Though I did find some bugs, they were not enough to seriously impact the playing experience. Definitely worth checking out if you've missed it so far.
Compelling and intense., November 14, 2014Simon Deimel's Enigma starts out like an off-kilter version of "Hello, World" for Inform 7.
You start in a room frozen in time, and the whole game plays out as the protagonist's experience of a single moment oriented around one decision(Spoiler - click to show): to shoot or spare your best friend. Starting with only immediate sensations, you must build a chain of association between memories and perceptions that let you come to a realization about the truth of the situation you are in.
Exploring a memory may let you perceive things more clearly. Exploring a perception may trigger a memory. On occasion, a threshold can be reached that allows a kind of breakthrough into new conceptual spaces. Sometimes memories or perceptions will be enhanced, providing a more connected impression over which to mull, so you must return to a topic to see how new scraps of information fit into it. The text is delivered in a fast-paced, heart-hammering style that seeps into your attitude and keeps you rapidly typing until you arrive at the conclusion.
There are really only two verbs that make a difference(Spoiler - click to show): 1) "examine" and 2) "remember" or "think about". If you somehow get lost, the "hints" command will offer specific topics for introspection. This is probably not a good thing to use as a first resort, but it's helpful on a second run through.
It's really quite remarkable that Mr. Deimel has managed to create such a compelling experience out of such a small range of action, and the extent to which he has achieved this speaks to his creativity in developing and executing the concept. While he notes in the post-game INFO block that the basic concept is not new, it was new to me.
From a technical standpoint, the execution is good but could use a bit more refinement to reduce repetition of certain topics and smooth the experience. As a player, it's sometimes clear that you have hit a dead end, but it's also difficult to ascertain which topic will advance the situation without resorting to hints. Perhaps a routine that would "auto-associate" previously-explored topics that have been updated due to new information after a certain number of turns?
On the other hand, the sense of urgently and repetitively reviewing bits of experience very much conveys the mindset of the PC, and perhaps it enhances rather than detracts from the play experience overall.
From a writing standpoint, there are opportunities for improvement(Spoiler - click to show)-- for example, it's not made at all clear what drove Tim over the edge, and this leaves the whole scenario feeling a bit forced. Then again, it's not always clear in real life, either, so perhaps that's intentional.
In addition, although I liked the writing style, some additional work to smooth out the line breaks when reviewing the scene would have greatly improved the impression of a fully completed and polished work.
Overall, a good comp entry and an enjoyable short work. I look forward to more from Mr. Deimel in the future, and will be interested in exploring some of his past works.
Intriguing little vignette., October 23, 2014This decade-old SpeedIF entry takes only a few minutes to complete, and is not a fully-developed work by any means. Still, it seemed worth it to put together a quick write-up, since it demonstrates a narrative device from which would-be authors can learn.
The interaction here is done in the style of a combat scene in a typical war movie, though the setting is a strange blending of fantasy and modern (or possibly sci-fi?) tropes. The action starts in media res, with you pinned down, low on ammo, and basically doomed.
What's interesting here is the way that you, the player, are not given a complete description of your environment; instead, significant new elements are injected serially over the course of several turns.
This is a clever trick, in that it takes advantage of the deeply-ingrained player's instinct to examine everything new to encourage him or her to "play along" with the developing narrative. (A similar "pointillist" style can be seen in Ashwell's Ugly Chapter, but in that case it is used more for the background than the foreground.)
While this piece is almost over before it has begun (it only lasts 10 turns or so), and there doesn't seem to be any possibility for meaningful interaction with the scene playing out, I was struck by how cinematic the sequence feels. Forcing the player to constantly reorient to the PC's situation this way seems similar to the technique of fast panning used in cinema to draw the audience "into" the action.
Uniquely invertible puzzle structure, January 19, 2014If you're a long-time player of IF, you might have skipped this work by Andrew Plotkin, which is typically billed as an "introductory" piece for those new to the genre. If you approach The Dreamhold with this mindset, that's almost certainly how you'll experience it, but that is not all that is offered.
Upon first completing this game many months ago, I found it to be a typical Plotkin work in the sense that it almost flippantly demonstrates the power of top-notch prose and programming to revitalize otherwise stale conventions in the genre, but I didn't see much else to recommend it. The most obvious innovation is the "tutorial voice" (well-covered elsewhere) which earns the work its status as one suitable for novices, but this held little magic to me: first, because I'm not a novice; second, because its success is questionable based on the various online reactions of actual newbies; and third, because this approach has been pushed even further since The Dreamhold was released, rendering it no longer state-of-the-art.
I gave an up-vote to Brian Campbell's IFDB review, decided I had nothing to add, and moved on... until the next day, when, still puzzling over the somewhat cryptic ending and the various loose ends, I started playing again with a walkthrough nearby for reference. Before long, I had experienced many of the hidden nooks of interaction and seen the alternate ending, which was equally cryptic and not particularly more satisfying.
Over the ensuing weeks, however, I slowly came to realize that this alternate ending is not your typical example of branching narrative structure, and that realization is what eventually drove me here to write this.
Most interactive experiences with multiple endings very explicitly present the choices relevant to shaping the outcome as choices; that is they are framed as mutually-exclusive, either-or options that can reasonably be expected to alter the outcome in a significant way. For many games, some or all of these choices are illusory, as multiple branches of interactivity will converge on the same situation again later, but generally at least a few will genuinely change the outcome.
In addition, most games that have multiple "winning" endings are quite careful to remain neutral or ambiguous in the guidance they offer about which branch to take. The signposts are up indicating the forks of the road, but there is no author influence about which direction to take. One reason for this may be that, given the amount of work required to implement the different branches within the game, the creators don't wish to do anything to discourage players from exploring them all in separate playthroughs.
In The Dreamhold, Plotkin does not follow these conventions. Challenging them seems to be one of the key experiments of this work.
With respect to determining which ending the player will see, the important branches in the action are not explicitly framed as choices for the player. Only one branch of action is even implied by the prose, and that path is framed not as one of two binary choices but as the single solution to a particular challenge. These are well-designed puzzles in the sense that they are well-hinted without the solution being immediately obvious, but, for clarity, I will term these the "obvious" paths.
Here is the part that I find fascinating: (Spoiler - click to show)The obvious path (i.e. hinted puzzle solutions) is often dependent on a particular linear mechanic, meaning the solution is driven by moving a world state in a specific direction(Spoiler - click to show). Examples that spring to mind are the puzzle about finding your way in darkness and interacting with the hot springs. In each case, however, there is a corresponding solution using the same linear mechanic, but requiring that the player push the world state in the opposite direction from that needed in the obvious path. I'll call doing so taking a "non-obvious" path.
"Non-obvious" is perhaps not strong enough of a description -- "obscured" might be better. The prose does not hint at this option in any way I detected. The only hint is found in the very nature of the underlying linear mechanic; there is no reason, in the abstract, that the mechanic should not be reversible.
On the somewhat less abstract plane of writing code, the very fact that the author has to program interactions in both directions means that any theoretically invertible game mechanic will normally only have one "interesting" (i.e. story-relevant) direction. Not so in The Dreamhold, where Mr. Plotkin has taken the trouble to create what almost amounts to a secret game accessible only to those who discover the uniquely reversible nature of the puzzle structure.
I want to be clear: I don't think I would have known anything about this "other" side of the game if it weren't for the walkthrough. I feel confident that most of the people who play through this (especially novices!) would not hit on even one of these non-obvious solutions. (Spoiler - click to show)To hit on enough of them to see the pattern, to grasp the... meta-puzzle? meta-mechanic? and work all of the alternate solutions through to the end is asking a lot. In a piece with a significant number of intentional red herrings and dead ends, offering only the slightest and most indirect indications of the existence of the alternate solutions or the fact that associated prizes have any significance (via the mural) can be fairly called unfair. But then again, asking a lot from players is par for the course in much of Mr. Plotkin's work.
So, given the lack of a direct explanation, what's it all about? (Spoiler - click to show)Having mulled over both endings at length, the overarching theme seems to be about the choice of how to use power. The PC has reached the extreme of power within his current plane of existence, and the player's actions drive him towards one of two paths. In the first, via the "obvious" path, the PC continues his attempt to dominate the entire plane. This is perhaps a more dubious endeavor than the PC believes, given that it was an error during a previous attempt that left him in the state in which you find him at the start of the game. In the second, via the "obscured" path, the PC turns that power inward and transcends to a new plane of existence -- beginning anew to start the climb all over again from the bottom. This is the path of legend as laid out in the game world, the path that is perhaps more promising for the PC and more satisfying for the player, since it lacks the malevolent and maniacal overtones of the first path. Of course, the preceding is my own interpretation; your mileage may vary.
As a final note, I think it's worth pointing out that, despite the prose's uncanny ability to make you feel "there" (as Magnus Olsson's review puts it) in terms of the game world, it seems to intentionally avoid trying to do the same thing in terms of the PC's mind. True, the PC quite deliberately begins as a blank slate, but surely some of the previous personality should be emerging as the player progresses through either of the two core collection quests? Given the arguably distasteful nature of the obvious ending, adding an ever-more-megalomaniac tinge to the PC's thoughts would provide some players the motivation to avoid it. This, coupled with a some real hinting at the existence of the second path would elevate the overall narrative structure to a true and conscious choice for the player, which I, personally, would have found tremendously more satisfying. As it is, the effect of hiding the second path so thoroughly is to render it invisible in the course of typical play, leaving the average player with seems like half of the intended experience.
Somehow, I doubt this is unplanned. It seems clear that Mr. Plotkin wants you to work for the extras offered, that this other path (and the resulting opportunity for greater insight into the story) is primarily there for elite players. Whether intended or not, hiding one path results in players being directed towards the other; The Dreamhold does not seem neutral here, even though it can be argued that such neutrality is implicit in a game about unguided exploration of an unknown environment. The counter-argument is that players cannot assume that a work of IF is open-ended -- they are at the mercy of authors to provide nudges about which of the endless possibilities of imagination are realized within the work at hand.
Perhaps Mr. Plotkin thought this all out, and perhaps this is The Dreamhold's central challenge to the player: to make the choice to look for a choice, instead of following the obvious path. If so, the unconventional design is very cleverly and subtly executed, but it's not clear to me why this poker-faced approach is superior to offering additional encouragement (delivered in his deftly minimalist style) to players to discover the alternate path.
In conclusion, this is a game well worth your time, but I do not recommend it for novices. Long-time players who have not yet experienced it should approach The Dreamhold with explicit instructions to dig deep and try to think outside the box of how IF typically works; without such preparation you are likely to miss the aspects of this work that separate it from the pack.
Marvellously polished but the tuning could be improved, March 7, 2013The first and only work ever published by author Brian Uri, Augmented Forth is an astounding debut piece. Coded via Inform 6, its half-a-megabyte source code is a testament to levels of dedication and attention to detail that are extremely rare.
I often comment that a game could use more polish -- not here. Augmented Forth may as well be lacquered! Its interaction is extraordinarily smooth and fairly gleams with charm and wit from every angle. I found myself marveling again and again that the author had covered the situation with some special bit of flair, whether it was one of the many small jokes sprinkled throughout or just a simple variation on standard wording to show that you were still "within bounds" of the planned interaction.
I can't stress enough how impressed I am by this aspect of the game, and this alone makes it worth playing to experience. If you've ever tried your hand at writing IF, you know how much work all of these little details add up to, and my hat is off to Mr. Uri here. The only places I found any hiccups in the flow were in cases where there is a vocabulary overlap between objects that causes undesirable disambiguation requests, a notoriously tricky issue to handle using Inform 6's parse_name routine.
However, having spent some time admiring this beautiful instrument, I was a little disappointed with actually playing it. As Emily Short pointed out, there are "irritating patches, mostly related to the design of the puzzles", places where the expected final nudges (or even telling silences in the form of careful omissions) are not forthcoming, even though I had a partial solution.
Thinking about this, I came to believe that, in such instances, the tremendous level of polish actually works against the gameplay. In a typical work of IF, the "shininess" of world interaction is itself a form of hinting: Often, one knows one's on the right track by virtue of the differences from more general default responses. The richly embroidered surface detail of Augmented Forth magnificently camouflages any such hinting, leaving the player sometimes at a loss to differentiate between threads of plot and threads of whimsy.
Most puzzles are relatively straightforward, sometimes of the physics (or silly physics) variety and sometimes along "hey, let's see if this new spell can do that" lines. There were only a few that didn't work for me(Spoiler - click to show):
#1 the fern -- (Spoiler - click to show)The hinting in the description about it is misleading. This isn't one of those "help the plant thrive" puzzles. (Spoiler - click to show)The responses to basic actions are misleading. They give the impression that you shouldn't be dealing with the fern now (but maybe should later) when it definitely is relevant in the immediate context. (Spoiler - click to show)First, you have to understand the basic goal here, which means you should have already visited the other cottage and gotten to understand its inhabitant a bit. (Spoiler - click to show)The framed music gives a strong hint of the goal here. (Spoiler - click to show)If you want these two to fall in love, the first thing you have to do is get them in the same room. (Spoiler - click to show)She's a bit too wrapped up in her book to move, but he is just waiting at her beck and call. (Spoiler - click to show)What will make her call him? (Spoiler - click to show)Well, he's a butler, what do butlers do? (Spoiler - click to show)Yes, they introduce visitors... except here. Yes, they bring food and drinks.... except here. (Spoiler - click to show)Maybe you've noticed he's really tidy? Might he tidy something up for her? (Spoiler - click to show)Now even if you have the right idea, you're up against a guess-the-verb challenge. Try the most basic verbs. (Spoiler - click to show)Not "spill soil" or "knock over pot" or "throw dirt" or "break pot" (another misleading response)... just "push plant" is the magic command. This particular interaction is so antithetical to the rest of the work's tone that I really don't understand how it was left as is during playtesting.
#2 the safe -- (Spoiler - click to show)The basics here are easy enough to understand, you need to get on the platform to access the safe, and additional weight on the platform sets off a trap. (Spoiler - click to show)No problem, there's a spell for that right? (Spoiler - click to show)Only it doesn't work. Even though there's a presumably heavy safe on the platform, and increasing gravity should add quite a bit of weight. (Spoiler - click to show)Put something heavy on the platform instead, like one of the big books lying around. Again, this one just kind of leaves me shaking my head, as it would be trivial to implement the alternate (and, in this game, perhaps more natural) solution.
#3 Moilan -- (Spoiler - click to show)This one can't be solved until you have made some progress gathering music, so stop here unless you've been to all the initially-accessible places. (Spoiler - click to show)He's a gate guard, and you want through the gate, a common type of puzzle. (Spoiler - click to show)So you have to bribe or divert or disable him, of course. (Spoiler - click to show)You should pick up some clues that he has a favorite kind of food from one of many places. (Spoiler - click to show)Where can you find some of that stuff? (Spoiler - click to show)... that he doesn't eat the moment you try to get it? (Spoiler - click to show)No dice on finding any, huh? Maybe you can trick him? (Spoiler - click to show)Anything that looks like fudge around? (Spoiler - click to show)Perhaps something brown with a thick texture? (Spoiler - click to show)Bring him some mud in the cup. (Spoiler - click to show)You might have to make some mud first, using magic. (Spoiler - click to show)It's a bit indirect, but stand in the Center of Volcano and use "Rainy Day" to cause a storm, then gather mud in the quarry ("fill cup with mud"). Here, the design issue is the very weak link between fudge and mud. ANY kind of relevant hint would have worked here, such as an infinite supply of fudge that he never stops eating (to clue you that getting him to ingest something fudge-like might be possible) or changing his food mania to coffee (especially strong black coffee, sometimes referred to as "mud", and which, unlike fudge, is served in a cup).
Also, I encountered only one bug in the game, but it is something of a doozy(Spoiler - click to show): As Levi Boyles mentions in another review here, in Release 2 it is possible to defeat the obstacle of one puzzle (involving learning a difficult piece of music) by removing it from your inventory via a method other than dropping it. In my case, I put it back on the stand and got the same effect -- being able to play the music without learning it.
Inspecting the source code, this appears to be due to the way it is handled programmatically: An array of booleans is used to track whether you can play a particular song, and the relevant boolean is not set to false for all verbs which allow its written form to leave your inventory. Thus this logic thinks you are still holding the sheet music even when you are not.
Since this is only piece that requires any effort to learn (and the puzzle structure prevents you from having both its sheet music and your trumpet at the same time, so it's the only time when the ability to play a non-memorized tune is meaningful), it probably would have been better to just test the world state directly (is the sheet music in inventory when the trumpet is played?) instead of trying to track this state of affairs with the same variables used to track memorization. Oh, well.
These (subjective) flaws left me with a much lower opinion of Augmented Forth as a game, but your mileage may vary.
Finally, I want to point some special attention to the handling of time in this game, which I thought was very well done. (Spoiler - click to show)Rather than being dependent on turn count or the default clock, time in Augmented Forth is plot-driven, with completion of certain puzzles advancing you to the next nebulous period of the day (e.g. "early morning", "midmorning"). Each advancement is coupled with a brief cutscene, filling you in on activity elsewhere in the game world in a plot arc with which your actions will intersect during the end game.
I don't know if this is the first work of IF to use this particular combination, but the well-written cutscenes together with the loose timekeeping produce a powerful synergy. With the cutscenes decoupled from turn count, the player is in no danger of being left behind by the outside events' timetable. With the resolution of time being so fuzzy, it doesn't seem as obvious that external events are waiting for your key actions (an illusion that the cutscene writing, with its indefinite pauses between scenes, is careful not to dispel). The net effect just seems to work for the purpose of telling the story in the IF medium in a way that is subtle, but wonderful.
Other reviewers have commented on the copious spoofy humor, and I agree that it only serves to add flavor for those who get the reference without excluding those who don't. Sometimes, the touch is so light that you might not even realize there was a joke unless you know what it refers to(Spoiler - click to show), such as the casual mention that you're feeling hungry at the start of a game (very topical in a time when the presence of a hunger puzzle was considered exceptionally stale and bitterly despised). Others are so blatant as to be inescapable today(Spoiler - click to show), like the presence of "Mollug" and a very amusingly-described ring.
All in all, this work is significantly above average in quality and sure to be fun to play for most people. Though the few problems I encountered were minor, they seem terribly out of place in a work that gets almost everything right (from an old school perspective). Consistency rates highly in my book, and these missteps knock off enough of a star to bring it just short of 4 star territory.
As a reminder, my ratings are unusually harsh, and 3 stars counts as a very good game. I would eagerly play another piece from Mr. Uri, should he publish one in the future, and old school fans should definitely try this one if they haven't yet.
Vicious and insipid., March 1, 2013This short piece received fairly positive reviews upon its release in 1999, and, when judged in the context of what was available then, I can see that it must have compared much more favorably against the field than it does today. By today's standards, it is poorly implemented, weakly written, and lacking enough positive qualities to outweigh its negatives.
My introduction to this work was via an IFDB poll, the very title of which serves as something of a spoiler for Bliss. As a result, after making my way through the implementation problems plaguing the opening scene, there was little surprise in the revelation that (Spoiler - click to show)All Is Not What It Seems.
Ultimately, this twist is all that Bliss has going for it, and a twist by itself can't provide meaning to this story any more than it does in a typical M. Night Shayamalan film.
The lack of greater meaning is what dooms this piece. The activities you (as the PC) engage in are revealed to have quite horrific consequences, so horrific that they demand more than just simple derangement of the protagonist to justify their commission. If I'm going to find out that "I've" done something as awful as (Spoiler - click to show)committing infanticide, the author better have prepared that ground pretty carefully to leave me with anything more than a sense of revilement and disgust.
Unfortunately, Mr. Wilkin does not. (Spoiler - click to show)The protagonist's home life is shown to be plagued by a drunken, abusive father, but, without minimizing the tragedy of such a situation, it must be pointed out that countless people have lived through similar unpleasantness without being driven to a sudden killing spree.
To make this piece work would have required a) much deeper characterization and backstory for the PC, so that the reader is left at minimum with a sense of pity for him, and b) a substantially more well-thought-out mapping of things happening in the PC's fantasy world to reality. The insult of the baby's death is further compounded by the fact that, apparently, it was unrealistically posed by the author as inexplicably unattended on a city sidewalk in the real world.
In my view, everything past the reading room calls for some well-developed conceptual framework to support the PC's delusion as he flees the asylum. I don't care what that framework is, it just has to attempt to make internal sense of the PC's actions. Does the PC know the shopkeeper beforehand? Does he have some unreasoning fear of babies? Is the victim who takes the form of the dragon someone significant to him?
None of that supporting framework is present. It seems that, akin to the "lazy fantasy" setting that frames the game's opening, it concludes on a "lazy psychothriller" note.
I initially gave this piece two stars, but, upon further reflection, discounting the problematic story leaves only the multiple programming errors, guess-the-verb challenges, and weak puzzles to define it. As such, I find myself left with only a lingering sense of distaste that marks this work as belonging to the "better off avoided" category.
Does better with the fiction part than the interactive part., February 27, 2013This short piece wouldn't be out of place as an entry in IntroComp, because all that really happens is an introduction to a significant new character and plot development in the story world Müller has invented for this series. The attention of Mr. Blask seems to have improved the overall quality of the result, though the final product is still lacking in distinction as a work of interactive fiction.
As with the original entry in the series, what stands out most are the unrealized possibilities present in the setting that has been created. What little exposition there is hints at a sprawling vision of the Clockwork Boy universe in the mind of the author, a vision that does not seem to naturally fit with the mechanics of IF and which would probably be better served as a straightforward written tale.
Throughout both this work and its predecessor, the elements required by interactive fiction seem to have served only to interfere with the communication of the story that the author wants to tell. Puzzles feel grafted on and are not integrated into the telling of the story. Locations remain so shallowly implemented that they are little more than painted stage backgrounds for the intended events to transpire in front of. NPC dialogue is not implemented in depth, and what's there is so terse and direct that it offers neither the sense of discovery nor the sense of a living conversant.
I say all of the above not as mockery of the author's continuing sincere efforts but to point out that the work required to implement this story as interactive fiction may not be worth it. Think how much more story could have been told if the coding effort required to make this IF were simply put aside!
That said, if there is to be a Clockwork Boy 3, I strongly suggest that the author spend some time considering how to make the medium of IF work for the story instead of against it. The challenges are surmountable, and it would be a true shame if the rest of this vision never materialized in any form.
Mechanical., February 27, 2013Intrigued by the announcement that a sequel to a story I'd never heard of had been released, I thought it might be interesting to check out the original.
This turned out to be more challenging than I expected, as the provided download link does not function (apparently due to a bad permissions setting on the file). A little online sleuthing led me to a working download link over at IFWiki, however, so I was quickly off and running.
Playing the role of the clockwork boy alluded to in the title, your apparent task is to reunite your "parents" (a human King and a fairy Queen) who have separated during the long period between when the game begins and the last time you were wound up. The introduction led me to much speculation about what I might encounter: a substantial backstory to discover about what happened while the PC was "off", extensive NPC interaction in resolving the royal dispute, strange and subtle differences between the human lands and the world of Faerie, perhaps even puzzles about how to keep the PC from running down. Instead, I soon discovered that there wasn't much to recommend this work, which, although founded on an interesting premise, offers only a simple, mechanical experience as interactive fiction -- one which does not take advantage of the possibilities offered by its setting.
Implementation quality is fairly low. NPC interactions seem to follow the ask/tell/show model, but the only responses provided appear to be for asking about a small number of topics. The handful of puzzles, such as they are, consist of an arbitrary arrangement of interrelated obstacles that make little sense within the context of the story. Descriptions are flat and generally reference many objects that cannot be interacted with.
In a matter of minutes, I had seen the extent of the tiny world (fortunately just 7 locations, as many room descriptions omit the list of exits) and, while I could see what would need to be done to advance the plot by assisting the queen, I found myself stymied while trying to get a critical item from one of the two minor NPCs. I had a strong feeling of what was necessary, but the game just would not respond to any of the expected commands. Frustrated, I looked for some assistance and found it in the form of the ClubFloyd transcript of a playthrough of this piece.
While my hunch about the solution was correct (including the idea, the verb, and even the required syntax(Spoiler - click to show), which not-so-fondly recalls the era of two-word parsers), the command simply doesn't work in the version I found, so I was forced to read through the remainder of the transcript to see how things played out. The few minutes of gameplay that I missed as a result were on a par with what I had already experienced, and the plot winds up so quickly from there that I didn't lose much.
While I can't recommend this piece as worth one's time as a player, it is obviously the product of a sincere (if minor) effort springing from a well-conceived (if not well-developed) seed idea. I remain curious enough about the sequel to try it, especially given the fact that it was produced in cooperation with another author.
Useful case study for would-be writers., December 29, 2012Calling this work a game seems to miss the mark; instead, the overwhelming impression I got was that it is the result of the author's studied effort to learn Inform 6.
In a beginner's shop class at school, the focus is on learning to use the tools to create something basic and functional but not necessarily aesthetically pleasing. This thoroughly pragmatic product is in exactly that style -- a simple scenario, solidly constructed.
I would like to add "with no frills" to that description, but that would be inaccurate. There are, in fact, several frills -- a built-in hint system (which is ridiculous overkill in this context), plus several hidden items and joke responses to non-obvious behavior. The thing is, unless you are perusing the supplied source code, you are unlikely to encounter most of these details; clearly, they were implemented more for the author's amusement than the players.
Even though I don't believe this was a serious attempt to create something entertaining, Perilous Magic is instructive for the aspiring author and worth reviewing simply as a case study to compare the playing experience vs. the code supporting it, especially when it comes to deciding which interaction elements matter enough to be worth the implementation cost. That's a design skill (not a coding skill) that seems hard-won for many authors, but which quickly makes itself evident in the best examples of IF.
An historical curiosity for the historically curious., December 27, 2012Baf's guide says this piece "has been called an anti-game." I'm willing to bet it's been called a lot worse.
With thorough exploration, when armed with some knowledge of IF programming and history, this work can be appreciated for some of the nuances of coding and genre that it subverts. However, it is entirely unsatisfying from a narrative perspective, offering only a raw "puzzle" (technically a riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma) that is disconnected from the story's ostensible premise and any conceivable player motivation other than sheer will-to-complete.
It's really too bad. The seed idea (allegedly: trying to complete an adventure game that has become corrupted and no longer functions correctly) is the kind of scenario that might have actually happened in the nostalgic era of oft-pirated 5 1/4" floppies. It seems like it would be possible to build a surrealist story with clever puzzles on this foundation, and, based on his later work with the Frenetic Five series, I am certain Mr. DeMause had the creativity to do so.
Although I did not like this particular example of the author's handiwork, it is competently put together, and some small part of me does appreciate it how it can be appreciated. As such, I am compelled to give it two stars, though I recommend avoiding it unless you are interested in its historical value as an entry in the very first IF Comp.
Minimalism must be consistent to work., December 23, 2012"Minimalism," as defined in today's edition of Wikipedia, is a style of design that attempts to "expose the essence or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts" or "in which the simplest and fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect."
This is the word that kept coming to mind as I played this short piece, which does a fair job of stripping away the non-essentials of a pure puzzler. The player character's backstory and motivation are treated thinly but both efficiently and sufficiently, encouraging just enough thought to allow the player to start ignoring them. This is a good trick, and it is done competently here.
However, once the three challenges are overcome, the pacing falters in that the game does not end as rapidly as it should(Spoiler - click to show) -- a problem exacerbated by a small guess-the-syntax issue with the final command. I think the author was trying to provide a greater emotional impact to the resolution of the story's framing tension, but since that tension had been built up so little, the attempt to embellish it is unnecessary and quickly begins to appear melodramatic.
My original title for this review was "Minimalism and romance don't mix," but, on reflection, I don't think that's true. Cutting away some of the extra elements(Spoiler - click to show) (e.g. the extra location to travel to, the additional actions required to trigger the end, flying off on the back of an unexplained magic tiger) might have made for a stronger and more romantic conclusion.
Mad Cow Disease (Zombie Edition), December 16, 2012You're a cow. A zombie cow, which, it turns out, is fully qualified to engage in the standard zombie shtick -- as a cow!
Did I mention you're a cow?
Very silly, very short, mildly amusing and (oddly enough) very likeable. Not bad for something produced in 3 hours as part of the ADRIFT 1st Three Hour Comp. If it weren't for the frustration of dealing with parser limitations, I would probably spend some time trying to find out how to get all 130 points in the author-envisioned optimum bovine undead rampage. As it is, I'll be satisfied with 80 points and a chuckle.
Starts with a bang, and ends with a whimper., October 13, 2012As others have noted, it would be difficult to avoid presenting spoilers for this work unless pretty much the whole review is wrapped in a spoiler tag. So:
To start, I want to make it clear that (Spoiler - click to show)I came across this work as a result of the "Doing things backwards" poll here on IFDB, so arguably I came to it pre-spoiled. I believe that this actually increased my appreciation of it, though your mileage may vary.
I didn't find many other reviews of Keepsake in my cursory search, but a couple of the ones I did see indicated proofreading and/or debugging were needed. The version I played this evening (yes, this is a fairly short piece) was release 3, and I saw no evidence of any such issues. Both the coding quality and the writing quality felt above average within the story's limited scope.
There are two things I really liked that I think speak to the author's potential. Neither of them is the overall concept itself(Spoiler - click to show), which the author makes clear is inspired by the film Memento (from which the title is derived via synonym).
First, the opening sequence does an excellent job of plunging you into the role of protagonist. The leading quote very subtly frames your expectations about the kind of situation the PC is in, and a few deft touches in the details set up the tensions of that situation very well(Spoiler - click to show). I love the way the initial description of the brass casing practically screams that you need to start cleaning up the crime scene, but a few simply-repeated words ("the sirens are getting closer") scream just as loudly that you need to get out NOW. It was a great opening(Spoiler - click to show), it's just not the opening that goes with this story.
Second, the first encounter with the central mystery is extremely well done(Spoiler - click to show). In the alley scene, the author has taken great pains to ensure that descriptions of things and events are precisely ambiguous enough to work whether you do or do not understand what's happening, i.e. whether they are presented forwards or backwards. It quickly becomes clear you are being given a choice, and it's not hard to work out how to make that choice.
Unfortunately, after these first few minutes of gameplay, Keepsake falls apart. Emily Short cuts right to the heart of the matter when she asks "[Do the choices the player makes] matter? What story is told by these details?" Gimmicks are not necessarily bad, but carrying this one through to the point where people would stop referring to it as a gimmick would probably take a mind-numbing amount of work in both the writing and coding departments. It almost seems that the author realized exactly this mid-project then just decided to wrap things up and be done with it.
The only thing that looked like a mistake at a high level was the epilogue presented once the story is finished(Spoiler - click to show). While I appreciate the effort that went into it from a technical standpoint, the effect is similar to playing Memento scenes in their "correct" chronological order... that is to say, it pretty much ruins the story completely. Rather than providing an instant replay of the scenes already seen, some other device (a police report reconstructing the protagonist's actions?) is called for to reveal the mystery. Then again, maybe my perspective here is driven by the fact that it wasn't really revealing anything new to me, due to knowledge beforehand of the story structure.
Again, I remind readers that my rating system is unusually harsh, and the two-star rating does not mean that this piece isn't worth the time it takes to experience it. Keepsake shows the marks of real talent: If what's on display here were paired up with more attention to story construction and consistency of player experience, I would expect to see future efforts from this author perform much better in the IF Comp.
An old-school delight that fondly recalls the era of Infocom, October 11, 2012Berrost's Challenge seems to have been released at a point when old-school text adventures were considered thoroughly déclassé by the IF community. It earned 10th place in the 2008 IF Comp -- a respectable showing for a first effort, but far from the limelight shining firmly on Violet.
At first glance, it looked like this game had every reason to simply fade away, ending up consigned to the dustier directories over at the IF Archive where it would never bother sensible people again. What made me explore it further was its one mark of distinction: It was the 2008 winner of the Golden Banana of Discord. (For those unfamiliar with it, the Golden Banana is presented to the work that has the greatest disparity in high and low marks in scoring for the IF Comp. In other words, it goes to the entries that people seem to either love or hate.)
Many of the negative sentiments seem to be rooted in the idea that puzzle games are useless and lame. If you agree with this idea, then read no further because this game is not for you. Another strong sentiment seems to be that this is the wrong kind of puzzle game -- that its puzzles are annoying and offensive relics of an era long gone, not suitable for this enlightened time. If you find no value in the Infocom aesthetic, this criticism makes sense. However, much of that decried by critics (e.g. hunger and sleep puzzles) is really little more than window-dressing. Given how prominent these aspects seem when starting the game and how little they actually impact gameplay, one could almost argue that they function like a insect mimic's protective coloring, giving a false impression primarily useful in keeping casual predators away.
If you do appreciate the early Infocom canon, this piece offers much to love. To me, it feels like something that made it all the way to the playtesting stage there before being put aside for marketing reasons. I give Mr. Hatfield credit for capturing the feel of the Zork-era games so well: Homage of this type is often attempted and only rarely achieved. Deviations from Infocom conventions are handled fairly well, with the "about" command providing a good overview and the menu-driven conversation model neatly intercepting attempts to use the ask/tell model.
Reviewing my own notes, I see that much of what I planned to mention has already been covered by others: the comparison to Wishbringer instead of Enchanter, the guess-the-verb issues, the regular (if infrequent) encounters with spelling and/or grammar errors, the lack of a proper ending. I will limit my remarks to those that seem likely to encourage those on the fence to play this piece.
This game is unapologetically puzzle-based, not story-based, and the puzzle quality is only decent, not extraordinary. What makes this an out-of-the-ordinary puzzler is that (as Merk's review point out) the clueing in this game is exceptionally well-done. In most cases, the author's careful commitment to ensuring that puzzles are fair under old-school rules is evident. Responses can be terse, and, as with many early Infocom titles, close attention to game responses is warranted. Near misses are not labeled clearly; instead of that last nudge in the right direction that most modern titles provide, there is a tendency to offer a reply that feels like discouragement but which, for those with a keen eye for nuance, provides the information needed to guide further experimentation. As with The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass Of Sherbet, this information sometimes comes in the form of what's not said, as opposed to what is.
I only rarely ran into anything that felt like a genuine guess-the-verb issue. If a noun or verb didn't work, one of the first few alternates I tried did. It quickly became apparent that this game was picky about terminology, but I did not find it to be unreasonably so. Arguably, in some cases, the semantic precision required encourages the mindset necessary to interpreting game clues. The are only a few instances I considered problematic(Spoiler - click to show), with the only offender that resulted in any real delay being the requirement to use "thumbwrestle" instead of "wrestle", a distinction that makes no sense until it becomes clear that both can occur in the game, and which really should have been handled by friendlier hinting if "wrestle" is used first.
Some significant problems were caused less by verb and noun implementation than by dissimilar treatment of similar situations at the coding level(Spoiler - click to show). The most notable item of this type was the way that the lamp oil and the grease were handled; the same verbs and syntax do not work equally well on both, and the way the oil was presented (always in a container, never spoken of as being in said container when examining the container) never made it clear this would be something you could directly interact with, unlike with the grease. These flaws are forgivable in a first work with no further revisions, but they speak to the value of obtaining proper playtesting before release, and to reserving enough time and enthusiasm to incorporate the feedback received.
With enough additional polish and/or more inventive puzzles, this game could have earned four stars from me. As it is, I give it a solid three stars and a recommendation that old school fans give this piece a try if they've overlooked it so far.
Surreal sci-fi lark, October 7, 2012After 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).
IF equivalent of a doodle, February 24, 2011Produced 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.
Self-proclaimed "puzzlefest", February 3, 2011The 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.
Wait for the v2 release., January 31, 2011What 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.
Hypertext fiction with interesting premise, January 16, 2011I'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.
What happened?, December 29, 2010Some 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?
Wow. Just wow., April 23, 2010This 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.
High-intensity silliness, April 21, 2010The 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.
A fresh take on the old-school style, April 21, 2010Emily 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!]
Amazingly fluid play in a thoroughly enjoyable sci-fi scenario., April 21, 2010After 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.
“Come on you daft bugger, we’ve got a war to fight!”, April 19, 2010So shouts one of your mates as you dash to fulfill your role as a WWII anti-aircraft gunner in Australia's Pacific theater, and up until then, everything was running quite smoothly in this "second runner-up" of the 2008 Intro Comp. Shortly thereafter, the interaction essentially fell apart.
Although I would normally give a game with this many functional problems only one star, when considered purely as an intro (and imagining it in a much more functional state), this piece is compelling enough to earn two. After all, it did beat the honorable mentions on some sort of merit, which I have to assume was rooted in the scenario and the writing. The author makes light use of multimedia (graphics and sound) to add a touch of immersion over and above what could be achieved with text alone, and it seems that with some additional investment of time and effort, this piece could really shine.
Let me preface the remainder of my review with a chunk of the transcript from my playthrough:
(Spoiler - click to show)
The gun emplacement
Crew members scramble to their stations around the tall anti-aircraft
gun mounted here; the drone of the approaching single-engine
Japanese “Val” dive bombers sharpens to a distinctive strum.
Your heart pounds as the routine of countless drills races through your
mind: get a shell from Smith, set the fuse on it to the appropriate time
for the height of the aircraft then pass it to Jenkins for loading.
You wait nervously for Smith as he disappears into the armoury to fetch
a shell.
> look at bomber
You can’t see any such thing as “bomber”.
> look at plane
You can’t see any such thing as “plane”.
> look at sky
You can’t see any such thing as “sky”.
> look up
You see the Japanese “Val” bombers approaching Darwin Harbour from
the northeast at between fifteen and twenty thousand feet. Depending
on air pressure, humidity and wind speed, experience tells you that you
will need a fuse setting somewhere between four and five seconds.
ERROR: In function “eachturn_gun_emplacement”, reference to
undefined container “FIRST”.
Smith returns from the armoury with another shell and stands beside
you.
Smith ducks back into the armoury.
> x shell
You can’t see any such thing as “shell”.
> ask jenkins about shell
Gunner Jenkins doesn’t have anything to say about the brass
anti-aircraft shell.
ERROR: In function “eachturn_gun_emplacement”, reference to
undefined container “FIRST”.
Smith returns from the armoury with another shell and stands beside
you.
> take shell
You take the brass anti-aircraft shell.
> x shell
The shell is about one foot long and made from brass. Around the nose
cone of the shell is a series of rings that form a complex powder fuse.
> x fuse
The fuse is composed of a series of three rings, each filled with
gunpowder and separated by felt. The lugs on the fuse setting tool are
designed to engage with small holes in the top ring in order to rotate it
to the required time. Markings around the fuse ring indicate the time in
tenths of a second, starting at 20 and finishing at 100. The fuse on this
shell is currently set to the disarmed position.
> arm shell
You can’t use the word “arm” in that context.
> arm fuse
You can’t use the word “arm” in that context.
> set fuse
To set the fuse you need to specify a length of time to set it to. For
example, to set the fuse to three and a half seconds, simply type “set
the fuse to 35”.
> set fuse to 45
You will need the setting tool to set the fuse on the shell.
Shockwaves and dissonance as a bomb explodes nearby.
> i
You are carrying a cricket ball, a steel helmet (being worn), a brass
anti-aircraft shell and your dog tags (being worn).
> x tool
You can’t see any such thing as “tool”.
> x setting tool
You can’t see any such thing as “setting tool”.
> l
The gun emplacement
The floor of the gun emplacement is a circular concrete pad almost ten
metres in diameter. Sandbag revetments, back filled with earth on the
outside, form the perimeter of the pit. The 3.7 inch Vickers anti-aircraft
gun stands bolted to the concrete, its barrel protruding through
fragments of camouflage netting suspended high above your head. The
only exit from the emplacement is a gap in the revetments to the
northwest, while a small room set into the south wall serves as an
armoury.
Gunner Jenkins is standing on the gun by the breach.
Sergeant Thompson is standing on the gun.
Smith is standing beside you holding an anti-aircraft shell.
> ask jenkins about tool
Gunner Jenkins doesn’t have anything to say about the setting tool.
> ask thompson about tool
Sergeant Thompson doesn’t have anything to say about the setting tool.
> ask smith about tool
Gunner Smith doesn’t have anything to say about the setting tool.
Another bomb falls too close for comfort just beyond the camp
perimeter.
> find tool
You can’t use the word “find” in that context.
> search for tool
You can’t see any such thing as “for”.
> look for tool
The sentence you typed was incomplete.
> s
You try to push your way past Smith who drops the shell he is carrying
and grabs you, pinning your arms to your side. “What are you doing,
Davis?” he yells in your ear, confusion and concern in his voice.
Fumbling desperately he relieves you of the fuse setting tool and
recovers the shell from the ground as another bomb explodes nearby...
*Sigh*. There's a spoiler of some sort in the above, all right, but not the type you might think.
The spoiler is definitely not the quality of the writing or the intended structure of the interaction, both of which seem to be significantly above average. Is it something wrong in the Gargoyle layer? Some issue with the JACL 2.5.2 interpreter it uses (which has been updated since the last integration with Gargoyle in August 2009)? Basic problems with the code for The Bloody Guns or with the JACL system itself?
I can't tell. I'd like to know. Because if it's something easily fixable, then it's a true shame that it stood between me and the intended experience.
It seems quite clear that the author, Stuart Allen (who invented the JACL system and is apparently the only one who ever uses it), has something valuable to offer to the world of IF, even if it is not the wonder of a new IF programming language. [edit: I've since come across at least one other game, Prison Break, which uses JACL. Also, the author assures me that the functional problems I encountered were likely due to interpreter incompatibility, making my comments in this and the following paragraph unwarranted.]
My gentle suggestion to Mr. Allen is that he come in from the cold and give another development system (e.g. Inform 7) a try. It has to be less work to build whatever custom extensions you want in Inform than it is to create and document a new language from scratch all by yourself. Releasing the source for a successful work in Inform (along with a JACL version) might even stimulate more interest in your brainchild.
If this piece is fleshed out into a full-length entry, I would definitely give it another go.
Maddeningly uneven., April 19, 2010The conceptual foundation of Vendetta is a frustrating mix of originality and cliche, embedded in a compelling and often richly-envisioned universe that begs for further development and exploration.
Five minutes into this piece, I was in complete agreement with Dan Shiovitz's assessment: "Stories about supercompetent badasses who have No Time For Love always make me feel a little dirty, like I'm seeing parts of somebody's psyche it is embarrassing to be looking at..." The prose style and dramatic content reminded me of that B-movie kind of adventure fiction where men are men and women are ornaments with incomprehensible emotions. It almost seemed like the style found in pre-pubescent fiction, and my estimate of the author's sophistication -- as well as my interest level -- kept dropping.
Anyone who feels the same way at that point is encouraged to continue(Spoiler - click to show), because shortly thereafter, comes a surprising plot twist. It's revealed that the narrator is an artificial being built for military purposes whose personality has been "modified" (or maybe just mangled) by the removal of key human elements like empathy and love. It's also revealed that the narrator's memory is mostly composed of the memories of another, much older person, which were artificially "written" to his brain. This revelation knocked my judgment for a loop; so many things that had seemed odd and out-of place, from the child-like interaction with Sally to the incongruous use of "young man" to describe others to the casual disregard for recent accomplishments, suddenly seemed appropriate. This sort of resonance between the large and small details is brilliant, but I'm not 100% certain it was intentional. Accepting this premise immediately raises the question of why an artificial being is walking around the world unsupervised in a world where such beings appear to be nearly unique.
The writing style is strange and uneven. Fluid and competent prose alternates with stilted, forced writing sprinkled with spelling and grammar errors. In several places, there is repetition of a word (or variations of a word) that can be jarring. In others, the exposition takes abrupt detours to work in a bit of background that probably should have appeared earlier.
As a work of interactive fiction, it has several weak spots. For the first half of the game, much of the player's time is spent waiting for multi-turn "conversations" to complete. One glance at the walkthrough should have raised red flags; there are far too many z's in it.
While on one level I thought it was interesting to be doing other things while the conversation takes place (like multi-tasking on the phone in real life), the object implementation is so shallow in some scenes that there's not really anything else to do but wait. Eventually, it crossed a line. The sensation was similar to how I once saw someone describe an RPG GM who gets too active with the party NPCs he controls: At some point, the players begin to wonder if they're just there to watch the GM entertain himself.
However, all of this changes (another significant discontinuity) when you get to the second act. Immediately, the player finds himself in the middle of a sprawling map full of interesting scenery objects. It's such a change in the nature of the play, and the depth of object implementation is so spotty, that adjusting to the transition is somewhat annoying. You find yourself trying all of the mentioned nouns, never sure which commands will result in a "no such thing" message, and which will result in two or three layers of irrelevant detail. Most of the object descriptions are done well -- more consistent implementation depth might have made for a very interesting effect(Spoiler - click to show) as you ransack the area while racing the clock. After all, when you're in the unknown, you don't know what's significant at first, and a real office would be filled with plenty of useless objects.
This part feels like a more traditional piece of IF, and it takes a while to explore. Just when my previous irritation at being inexpertly railroaded in Act I had started to fade, the sudden introduction of a CYOA format during the endgame left me shaking my head in disbelief.
The level of realism, like so much about this work, is lopsided in its application. While I was impressed with many details like the "bit player" NPCs in the hotel environs and the changing weather as you venture outside, they stand in stark contrast to the cartoon-like interaction with later hostile NPCs, who seem to be implemented as little more than combination punching bags and bowling pins.(Spoiler - click to show) As an example, I spent several turns goofing around with a locked gate, while the occupant of a nearby guardhouse patiently sat there staring into space, waiting for me to walk in and break his neck.
Vendetta was developed using ADRIFT, which my limited investigation leads me to believe is a sort of point-and-click code generator intended for non-programmers. Perhaps the author, James Hall, had no background in programming when this was written, in which case some of the problematic parser interactions that I encountered are easier to understand. Some choices in verb-to-action mappings, as well as the author's tendency to translate your apparent intent into a series of actions you did not specify, lead to a strange kind of abstraction to what you do. From time to time, it's almost like you're just offering suggestions instead of controlling the PC.
There are also some out-and-out problems with the code or writing, such as:
* an important (if optional) item is placed in scope(Spoiler - click to show) (the cell phone when you kill the first guard), but you are not notified and could easily miss it if you don't "look" again,
* the response to one critical command makes it appear as though the verb is not recognized, when in fact it simply requires an indirect object(Spoiler - click to show) ("reflect laser" vs. "reflect laser at x"),
* some descriptions are misleading, in a way that is out of character with the rest of the work.(Spoiler - click to show) (e.g. "In the corner of the room is the reception desk, which has nothing of interest on it other than a few pieces of office stationery." -- which gave me the impression they were blank pages, though I admit that's subjective.)
If the entire work was written as well as its current best parts, Vendetta would definitely rate three stars. With better consistency and some additional conceptual and thematic development, it could have hit four. I'm left with mixed feelings about this piece, as well as curiosity about what Mr. Hall has been up to for the last 5 years -- it seems like he has not released anything since Vendetta placed 14th out of 26 in the 2005 IF Comp. If Mr. Hall has continued to practice and develop his writing skills, I would expect his next work to realize much more of its potential than Vendetta does.
As you can tell from the length of my review, this piece managed to get under my skin. I want to give it a higher rating than I can objectively justify. For a pure player, there are enough negatives to warrant avoiding it. For new authors, there are valuable lessons to be seen in studying what's done right and what's done wrong. My suggestion: Decide which camp you're in, and choose accordingly.
Hodgepodge of ideas, but likeable result., April 17, 2010Since I don't share Dan Shiovitz's dismay over beholders, I thought I'd give Sparrow's Song a try. Having never experienced the work of J. D. Berry before, I was pleasantly surprised by the overall quality of this piece, which was entered into Emily Short's SmoochieComp in 2001.
Although the presence of the beholder implies the story is grounded in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, nothing else does. While it was interesting to see what Berry thinks the personality of one of these iconic monsters is, there was no compelling reason I discovered that the being in question had to be a beholder. For story purposes, it could just as easily have been a demon, or even a grizzled old veteran. It's a rare and unexpected failure of originality in this otherwise highly creative work.
The writing often has a certain poetic and lyrical quality to it that I found compelling, though on occasion the similes were a bit forced. The author has a way of adeptly conjuring huge swaths of history and exposition by sending your imagination soaring along suggested lines. The universe feels more complete by virtue of what you imagine being unchallenged by the text, which actually provides very little information about the world the protagonist inhabits.
When I first finished Sparrow's Song, I was a little confused. It seemed like much of what was implemented in the first half of the story had no relevance to either the central plot or the theme. For a while, I speculated that maybe this was a partially-finished work that had been adapted for entry into SmoochieComp by grafting on a storyline about love. However, on further reflection, I decided that this may not be the case(Spoiler - click to show): Each NPC you meet presents an exploration of love in some form: dead love, love of mankind, simple fidelity, pure lust, etc. Not a very deep exploration, it's true, but I'm willing to give Berry the benefit of the doubt.
One intriguing aspect of the story is the way it ends.(Spoiler - click to show) Having met your apparent soul mate, you discover that she is a different species and you are not biologically compatible. There are three possible solutions to this: either you change to her species, you change her to yours, or you meet half way. Each option is available, but the significance of the choice is not explored, though each would likely have serious consequences in the protagonist's universe.
This work leaves some key questions unresolved. As Emily Short notes, the nature of the love that forms the foundation of the story arc is strangely anvil-like, to say the least.(Spoiler - click to show) Personally, I thought it was strongly hinted that it was an unnatural, magic-induced kind of supercharm -- we know charms exist because of interaction with the nymph, that Tamta has been studying magic, at least one of Tamta's responses (I thought it was to "magic!", but I can't seem to recreate it now) has her explaining that she'd hoped to "set love in motion" using magic, and in another she admits to summoning the titular sparrow. In addition, Tamta has clearly been aware of you for some time, and it seems from the locket that your sister, a powerful magician, had a hand in your destiny here. I would imagine that much of the reader's opinion about the overall story would be shaped by the particular conversational topics they'd come across -- pretty good use of the medium, in my mind.(Spoiler - click to show) Another glaring question: What's up with the combinatorial explosion as a manipulable object? Amusing as the concept is, it doesn't fit the rest of the style and has no apparent purpose in this work. Maybe it should have been saved for another setting?
The conversation warrants a brief note. Opinions about it seem to be mixed, but I, for one, found the liberation from having to type "ask person about" in front of every topic to be quite welcome. Other than that, there is little functional difference between this model and the standard ask/tell. Although at least one reply seemed to indicate the system was designed to allow the spread of knowledge about topics between NPCs via talking to them about it, I did not spot any differences in behavior as a result.
I would definitely recommend trying this piece, though first-timers may be frustrated by the attention to detail necessary to get past the primary obstacle.(Spoiler - click to show) Hint: Mantras are for repeating.
All the subtlety and charm of a giant middle finger..., April 16, 2010I have not yet found any good documentation on the parameters for Dave Cornelson's 2000 DragonComp, but the gist seems to be that authors were invited to write a funny game involving dragons.
The opening of Here Be Dragons!!! started out kind of clever and amusing in a genre- and form-subverting kind of way. Unfortunately, that was the high point.
The author, Gunther Schmidl, seems to have deliberately disabled the "examine" verb and its synonyms, which takes nothing away from the brief and uninviting experience of this work. It probably saves time in navigating the sequence of empty rooms that lead you to the dragon, which is two inches long and non-threatening, but whom it is apparently your destiny to kill. You do, you win, it's over.
This appears to be one of those games deliberately written to be bad, though I don't understand why anyone would go through the trouble of programming even a short piece like this as a kind of joke. If it's a joke, don't fall for it like I did.
The wrong kind of nightmare IF., April 16, 2010The premise of Speed IF Let's Make a Nightmare is:
"In three hours or less, write a work of IF about a nightmarish game show, in which the contestant is presented a small number of doors to choose from. Behind each door lies a prize, or a monster, or nothing. Bonus points for including a flying elephant or the phrase 'a random number of dollars.'"
In this entry by Jake Wildstrom, you stand on a stage, participating in an alleged game show that mostly features an ever-growing pile of empty container objects. It's nightmarish, but only at the level of the playing experience.
Schrödinger's Door is either unfinished or simply designed to be a waste of the player's time. Either way, I'd recommend skipping it.
Straightforward and short puzzler, April 16, 2010An entry for Speed IF 12, Plaque is a relatively simple and mechanical puzzle game in which you must create an award for Chuck Schmendiman. In this interpretation, the protagonist has somehow managed to put off making the award until the actual ceremony takes place, and must slap one together with the materials at hand before it's needed by the presenter.
The components of the game are a fairly straightforward rendition of the specified seed ideas. The author, who goes by the handle Admiral Jota, dutifully uses each bonus concept with a methodical checklist approach that favors completeness over imagination.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this piece is the opening dream sequence, which uses a scaled-down effect similar to that deployed in Shrapnel, which had been released a few months earlier.
It only takes a few minutes to complete this piece, so I'll leave it up to the reader to decide whether it's worth the time. You might find yourself better served by going directly to Jota's award-winning full-length piece, Lost Pig.
... but can you punch it in the face?, April 16, 2010Hedge is a strange tale of one man's journey into The Hedge, fortress retreat of a shadowy "elite" that you desperately want to join... or perhaps destroy.
Billed as a "modern fantasy jaunt" by the author, I found the tone to actually be part comedy, part psychodrama. Much of the gameplay feels like a surreal blend of The Prisoner and Monty Python's Flying Circus, with just a pinch of Little, Big thrown in at the last minute.
For work of a first-time author, this piece is richly implemented. Most objects have layers of detail attached to them, and most verbs have at least a few synonyms. Parser interaction generally shows evidence of both attention to detail and proper levels of testing. I took note of many unexpected niceties in the way descriptions are rendered in response to varying world-states.
Hedge is reasonably well-written in terms of atmosphere and mood, and the status bar helps maintain a mood by displaying the protagonist's emotional state. Although there is a scoring system, score notification is disabled, and the scoring process appears only loosely correlated to the intended story. Interestingly, the "full score" command yields not individual point contributions to your total but a list of unusual "achievements" based on your actions.
The story's structure seems somewhat arbitrary, but this may be by design. Although there is little explanation of the protagonist's motives, the inclusion of multiple winning pathways allows the player to define the protagonist's motives by his actions.
The puzzle structure is frequently obnoxious, particularly in the beginning stages. Red herrings abound; there's even a fountain full of them if you don't get the point. Fortunately, the "about" command yields valuable insights into the mindset of the author, and you can summon a hint fairy at any time by using "help" or "hint."
Although I did find a couple of bugs(Spoiler - click to show) ("take transmitter", "x mayans"), they did not negatively affect gameplay. My two-star rating reflects disappointment that this game seems intended to frustrate traditional players in the first half, for no real reason other than the amusement of the author. This hostile edge probably contributed significantly to Hedge's middle-of-the-pack placement in the 2006 IF Comp.
Mr. Richards clearly has above-average capabilities as a writer and programmer, and I would like to see more from him in the future.
Z-Machine abuse with potential?, April 14, 2010As other reviews mention, this is not really interactive fiction -- it's a recreation of an old game from the days when "computer graphics" was completely synonymous with "ASCII art."
The game does seem to be implemented well and was probably something of a pain to write. I didn't particularly enjoy the gameplay, so I'd normally rate it 2 stars, but I was struck by the way this piece is framed -- it made me think about the possibilities of throwing a mini-game like this into the midst of a standard IF work. (As if writing something of substance isn't hard enough!)
The only attempt at that sort of thing that I'm aware of is Infocom's Border Zone, which was somewhat controversial due to the real-time nature of the mini-game's action. In this case, the game is turn-based, which might work with the "stop-and-think" nature of IF instead of against it.
Indianette Jones and the Secret Syntax, April 12, 2010Take One is a likable but mildly frustrating jaunt through your memories of playing "Indiana Jones" when you were younger. Ostensibly, you play the director of a movie, guiding an actress playing Indianette Jones through a scene about raiding some temple for an artifact. Submitted by Robert Street as an entry for the Finish the Game Comp held in 2005, it placed a close second.
As with Mr. Street's Turning Point, this work introduces certain interesting elements that don't end up having a recognizable impact on the story.(Spoiler - click to show) It's written in the third person, presumably in support of your observational status as director, but the gameplay works as though you yourself are Indianette -- there is no functional separation of "you" from her. The actress playing Indianette is decried as a useless airhead in the introduction, but this is not used for any story-telling effect (e.g. bawling her out when "she" makes a mistake, or ditzy commentary as "she" struggles on the set). In fact, she expresses no personality at all during gameplay, leaving me wondering why she is characterized that way.
Orientation to the game goal is well done. As the player, you immediately are told how to start the scene, and, while there are numerous hints about the outline of the puzzle you have to solve, there is enough left unspecified to make for a small challenge.
Unfortunately, what could have been a smooth gameplay experience was frustrated by programming and/or parser problems.(Spoiler - click to show) Though you are given instructions to read the journal then rub the ring, you are unable to rub the ring while wearing it. If you try, you are told "Indianette Jones can't rub the ring," which is unhelpful, to say the least. I spent several turns in an unproductive hunt for a synonym of "rub" that would apply before I figured out the glitch.
In a similar vein, it took me far too long to discover how to get the jewel from the statue.(Spoiler - click to show) Unlike Inform, the ADRIFT parser doesn't seem to provide any help if the player hits on a correct verb but incorrect syntax. Thus, the command "use whip" gives the same result as "<any nonsense> whip", which makes it seem like the verb is unrecognized. In fact, "use whip on jewel" would work. Since I am conditioned to the Inform type of parser response in this case ("What would you like to use the whip on?"), and since most authors avoid implementation of the verb "use" in favor of more specific wording, I spent several playthroughs trying things like "crack whip", "attack jewel with whip", "whip jewel", "throw whip at jewel", etc. before hitting on "get whip with jewel".
The situation isn't helped by the fact that the game lies and tells you the jewel is lying on the ground -- a serious error for a final release.
Those issues aside, it was smooth sailing and a fun scenario. The overloading of the "restart" action to begin a new "take" of the scene was a clever touch.
Mr. Street definitely has the ability to come up with good premises and puzzles. With better use of the conceptual pieces he puts into play and a less journalistic writing style, his work would probably attract more attention.
An amusing dose of pure silliness., April 11, 2010Two hours isn't much time for coming up with a good story, let alone coding it. Gilles Duchesne demonstrates with this piece created for Speed IF 16 that you can produce something likable in that timeframe... and have a great time while you're at it.
This episode has every indication that it was written hastily and with a devil-may-care attitude about literary or artistic quality. A decided lack of pretense saves the day, though, making it easy to overlook any minor faults and experience the author's glee at lashing together the seed ideas he used from the contest: Marie Antionette, antiques, cheese, monkey heads, and Brandon van Every.
It's a 15-minute experience that I didn't regret, and I look forward to trying other works in the absurdist Captain Speedo series. If the others are like this one, they are a brilliantly-conceived framework well-suited to the handful-of-random-ideas category of SpeedIF.
Decent puzzle design, but bland writing., April 10, 2010This game is small, but there's good reason: It was submitted as an entry to the Commodore 32 Contest, which challenged entrants to create a Z-code game weighing in at 32K or less (the memory size limit of the fictional Commodore 32 computer).
The competition was created to showcase mInform, a minimalist library designed to replace the Inform 6 standard library. I'm not sure what the point of mInform was (other than the standard engineer's motivation of "because I can"), but mInform can be used to create quite functional games, as author Robert Street demonstrates with Turning Point.
The introduction of this piece sets up a backdrop of interstellar war that comes across with all the excitement of a USA Today news blurb. As the action starts, you are standing on the oddly-placed bridge of a starship as the Captain (whom you are a clone of) issues assignments to handle various problems on the ship. You are shortly assigned to investigate a "disturbance" which turns out to be a firefight with an alien infiltrator.
It's actually not a bad setup, but the execution as a story leaves much to be desired. Though the 32K limit leaves precious little room for exposition, much of it is wasted on an unnecessary and frivolous detours(Spoiler - click to show) -- the fact that the PC is a clone of the Captain, and some backstory about an accident the Captain had which has caused him to take a more juvenile mindset. Neither of these has any relevance to the plot that I could detect, and good editing would have trimmed them out.
There is also a tendency to use humor when justifying restricting the player's actions. While the jokes are amusing, they do not fit with the serious and straightforward quality of the puzzle design.
Regardless, the writing is good enough to create an engaging atmosphere without unduly taxing the player's willing suspension of disbelief, and it is complemented by solid (if basic) programming technique and better-than-average puzzle for such a short game.
It's about a 15-minute diversion to win, and any new authors who are better writers than coders can use this as a benchmark for basic functionality.
Short, but hits the sweet spot!, April 9, 2010IF author Sean Barrett's brief homage to Douglas Adams on the occasion of his death (one of several produced as part of the DNA Tribute Speed IF) is an excellent example of what short-form interactive fiction can accomplish.
Using just three locations, a handful of objects, and two non-interactive NPCs, Mr. Barrett creates a brief but engrossing experience combining elements of Adams' Hitchhiker and Dirk Gently universes. Fans of Adams' work (such as myself) will appreciate the attempt to render Dirk Gently's unique worldview faithfully, while those unfamiliar with the underlying novels will probably still find themselves drawn into the puzzle that Barrett presents.
While the piece has a cliffhanger ending (and is unlikely to be continued due to intellectual property laws), it provides a satisfying and well-balanced dose of exploration, problem-solving, and humor. The puzzle is just the right level of complexity for an introductory sequence, requiring the player to begin coming to grips with the uniqueness of the game universe but not requiring mind-reading.(Spoiler - click to show) The manner in which the obvious solution doesn't quite cut it, and the humorous game feedback it generates, is perfect for easing the player into greater effort of puzzle-solving without presenting the frustration of a dead-end brick wall.
Though I doubt The Sofa at the End of the Universe would live up to Mr. Adams' preferred level of diabolical complexity in interactive fiction, it is a fitting tribute to the most highly-regarded "crossover" IF author in the field's history. Adams fan or not, I recommend this piece.
More like notes than a completed work., April 9, 2010Submitted as the first chapter of a six-part work proposed by the Segment Mini-Comp, this incredibly brief piece is under-implemented, uninspired, and did not encourage me to continue on to the next chapter. It seems like what might result from 30 minutes of sketching out an idea in code, then calling it quits.
Skip it, and see Mr. Carbol's Spring Cleaning as a better example of what he's capable of.
If this were a movie, they'd call it a 'fun romp', April 9, 2010Earth and Sky is a popular piece that is probably most notable for two things: introducing the superhero genre to IF, and successfully founding the first serial adventure in the medium. [edit: After writing this, I realized that the Frenetic Five series probably has a better claim to both of these distinctions.]
An IF Comp entry, Earth and Sky takes no chances with the recommended timeline for gameplay; it seems impossible that you might not finish within the allotted two hours. Its relatively linear story -- usually a big turnoff for me -- is compensated for by the fact that this story is fun to read and still somehow offers a sense of freedom. Rather than feeling railroaded by the plot requirements, you feel swept along by the fast-paced events you are involved in; instead of feeling pushed, you are racing to keep up.
Like the early Lone Ranger or Flash Gordon serials, this work is unapologetic in its use of cliche conventions and its cliffhanger ending. It has no need for apology -- indeed, it shows us why those cliches exist in the first place, and the authors have delivered on their promise for more in the game's two award-winning sequels.
Though I haven't felt the urge to replay the game since I first tried it a few years back, this is a fun one that's well-suited to a lunch-hour diversion, or as a friendly introduction to the form for an IF newcomer.
Epic on a scale rarely seen!, April 8, 2010Written as the original implementation of Inform neared maturity (this work uses version 5.5), Spiritwrak is an old-school epic of a size and complexity comparable to the larger Infocom titles.
It seems that Daniel S. Yu, the author, firmly believed in the adage that "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." This work treads a fine line between those paths, starting with a premise rooted in the climax of Infocom's Spellbreaker and playing like something that came right out of its development team. As Duncan Stevens notes in his SPAG review: "[T]he magic system is suspiciously reminiscent of the Enchanter series, and the humor captures the Zork style." However, Spiritwrak adds a heavy layer of originality to the geographical and mythological framework created by Infocom, allowing it to stand as an achievement in its own right.
Spiritwrak is extremely difficult. Even for an old-school piece, the puzzles can be brutal. Some puzzles are arguably fair but lack what would be considered the minimum reasonable hinting by modern standards. Other puzzles require feats of mind-reading of the type that would have sold a lot of Invisiclues™ back in the day.(Spoiler - click to show) (For example, can you guess how to hide behind some curtains when the "hide" verb is not implemented and opening them results in you immediately shutting them again? Can you guess the significance of a small boat's name, or which of the many topic-poor NPCs might be able to tell you about it? Can you guess that using your triplication spell on a certain item won't actually triplicate it, but instead produce variations of it that contain plot-necessary items?) A few puzzles appear to be virtual -- they halt progress like a designed puzzle but are probably due to flaws or limitations in the coding. This last group is especially frustrating because, in a game with so little hinting, it's easy to think you are missing key items or actions when in reality you have the right idea and everything you need(Spoiler - click to show), but are not holding the right objects "directly", i.e. in the top level of your inventory.
This is the kind of game that requires you to take notes, to draw maps, to learn by dying, to spend significant time pondering dead ends and red herrings, and to continually second-guess what you thought were solutions to the puzzles you've solved. For old-school aficionados, it's heaven! For everyone else, be prepared to seek hints -- though I highly recommend you do so via rec.games.int-fiction or IFMUD, as the "hint" files you can download here contain copious spoilers that are impossible to avoid.
Interestingly, this game claims to be released under the GNU Public License v2, which means that anyone should be able to expand and improve it. Unfortunately, however, it is not distributed with the source code (as required by GPL), and I was unable to locate the source online. If anyone else happens to come across it, please leave a comment here -- it would be interesting to explore cleaning up some bugs, making certain key descriptions of objects and action slightly clearer(Spoiler - click to show) (especially the brick puzzle in the endgame), and implementing an in-game hint system.
Glimpse of a parallel universe's zombie ferret apocalypse..., April 8, 2010Toeing the Line is a product of Speed IF Autocratic Fist, which tasked authors with producing a discourse on the theme of hubris using an improbable combination of "vestigial tail, environmental policy on ferret populations, phlogiston, a pink parasol, sudden undeath, or crappy madlibs."
The author, Gregory Weir, seems to have mostly ignored the overarching theme in favor of crafting an experience that combined as many of the random seed elements as possible. To my surprise, he does a creditable job of doing so in this strange and silly piece.
Though much of the gameplay is mechanical and not particularly rewarding, Weir does an excellent job of pacing the short play experience. The brief introduction provides all the characterization and backstory that is needed to make the restraints placed on the player's action reasonable, while leaving most of the specifics of the situation undefined. The new player has just enough turns to familiarize himself with his equipment and the surroundings before the main action begins. Weir shows a deft touch in his descriptions, painting broad strokes of mood and style with compact and clever writing.
While it was disappointing to find how little could be done in the main sequence, it captures the frenzied mindset that would no doubt prevail in that situation. The result is much the same regardless of how many points the player scores, and the entire experience seems far too short -- a mere glimpse of what I quickly found myself wishing was a larger experience.
The coding quality and attention to detail seem significantly above-average. This, coupled with the writing expertise and intuitive feel for pacing, makes me very interested in seeing what Mr. Weir can produce in a longer development timeline.
Flunky for 14 1/2 years. Saboteur for one night., April 8, 2010One of four entries for Speed IF 12, The Hose was produced by formerly prolific author Peter Berman in 2000, his most productive year (at least in terms of works released). Challenged by a premise in which the narrator must prepare a special surprise in honor of the undefined Chuck Schmendiman, Mr. Berman crafted a short tale featuring frustration, revenge, and beautiful flanges.
Although the opening text seems somewhat drab, Mr. Berman's prose quickly starts sketching a believable universe. Some of the techniques he uses are instructive. For example, he immediately presents the reader with the challenge of understanding "extemporous hose technology" -- the secret to Schmendiman's success and the focus of the narrator's career. Also, by repeatedly mangling the name of Schmendiman in a vaguely derogatory manner (Schmendrick, Schmindleman, etc.), he subtly establishes the players distaste for his employer (and the task at hand) without being required to justify the emotion. In the description of the main item, he establishes the narrator's dissonant admiration for the products of Schmendiman's genius. It's a remarkable job of mood-building in a few dozen paragraphs.
However, this piece slips into two-star territory due to the lack of coherence in the central puzzle. The unusual dream imagery brought to mind the technique used in Planetfall, in which the dream sequence is a metaphor providing hints for the major puzzles encountered by the player, but this was apparently not the purpose of it.(Spoiler - click to show) Instead, it is a timed guess-the-verb challenge, during which you must perform an optional action to gain an "insight" that will advance the plot. The player need not do anything after waking up to see the plot advance, which happens in a way not credibly related to the dream action. The dream imagery seems to have been chosen solely to meet one of the "bonus" items in the speed IF premise.
The end sequence is abrupt, and the narrator's success seems out of proportion with the level of dislike established beforehand.(Spoiler - click to show) I would expect more dramatic tension than non-specific job dissatisfaction to motivate blowing up the whole lab! Better puzzle design and a little more editing would have gone a long way here.
Short, bewildering, pointless., April 8, 2010This very short piece is labeled by the author as his first speed IF (Speed IF 17), and it may have been his first published work. Several self-deprecating remarks in-game demonstrate a lack of confidence that was probably justified at the time.
The premise (racing the clock in a building wired with bombs by terrorists, on New Year's Eve) is very ambitious for speed IF, and it sets up anticipation that would be difficult to satisfy with a full-fledged game, let alone something rattled out in a couple of hours. However, the more pressing problem is the author's flat writing, which does nothing to generate interest or involvement.
While the piece is functional as a program, the short plot is basically nonsense. The game can be "won" in a very short series of moves, and the very limited two-room, three-object, 1-NPC implementation makes it relatively easy to discover the winning path, even if nothing about it is comprehensible. One of the objects is stolen from Emily Short's Metamorphoses, something which really does not belong in a piece with this premise unless the author were taking it in a very surreal (or possibly sci-fi) direction.
I will say that, some minor errors aside, the author does appear to have a basic grasp of some of the mechanics of programming and puzzle design -- what's missing is the creative narrative to tie them together. I would not shy away from other works by this author to track his progress as his skills mature.
On the threshold of something great..., April 7, 2010Another speed IF entry -- this one for PAX East 2010 -- that gains tremendously by throwing away most of the random seed ideas and developing a small set of them into a more coherent narrative.
You play a conference attendee who is struggling to get the last open seat at a one of the overcrowded panel discussions. Competing with you is an antithetical antagonist, whose interest in the panel is unclear. You start out empty-handed, armed only with your wits, determination, and a handy portfolio of famous spells from classic IF.
An engaging and witty comedy puzzler that won't take too long to solve, this piece does a good job of blending old and new in an interesting way. There are some minor-to-significant flaws, as might be expected for a first release of speed IF, but none that should inhibit your progress for very long.(Spoiler - click to show) (Except maybe one... be sure to "rezrov crowd" at some point.)
By all accounts, the IF-related portions of PAX East 2010 drew significant interest from attendees who did not know much about the field. This, in turn, sparked dreams of a resurgence of mainstream appreciation for IF. Such a hopeful mood permeates Ms. Morayati's piece, which ends on a "gooey" note of optimism on this theme. As the number of member reviews on IFDB passes the 1,000 mark, I find myself hoping right along with her.
"Why did the chicken cross the road?", April 6, 2010How about: 'What was the chicken thinking as it crossed the road?'
This short piece can't seem to decide if it's an 'interpreter abuse' type of game implementing Freeway(Spoiler - click to show) -- at which it fails since you can only go one direction -- or an actual attempt at humor. It does a better job of the latter than the former, but not enough to make it actually funny, though I might qualify it as mildly amusing.
It is competently put together as a program; I encountered no bugs. Based on the 'bad' version of the ending, it seems that the author was aware of the work's artistic shortcomings, but decided to release it anyway.
Given the number of other titles by this author with better ratings, I think it's safe to skip this one. As a warning to anyone else who wants to try it out: Gargoyle is not the best client, since the game expects a fixed-width font. You'll either have to download a different interpreter, get Gargoyle to use a different font, or (as I did), copy-and-paste the descriptions to a text editor to see the intended representation.
[edit: I've upped the rating to two stars because the major problem I had (text rendering in Gargoyle) was a function of my interpreter, not the work.]
The original 'hard SF' game, April 5, 2010Starcross is the only Infocom game with an 'Expert' rating that I ever completed without any outside help. This was no doubt due to my near-limitless enthusiasm for hard science fiction at the time the game was released. Although no particular story was instrumental in helping me figure out the game's many puzzles, the background in basic physics and familiarity with hard SF space travel conventions were essential to feeling at home in the game universe.
The most notable feature of this work is its extremely consistent internal logic. There are no quirky or humorous solutions here -- though you may need to have a flash of insight to comprehend a particular puzzle's symbols or structure, the solution is always clear enough (if not necessarily immediately reachable) once this occurs. The author does a perfect job of providing you the information you need to solve a puzzle without making it instantly apparent which information is significant to which puzzle.
This game is definitely 'old school', and, as such, may seem unfair to someone more attuned to the modern IF style. It is extremely easy to make the game unwinnable without realizing it. Somehow, this fits the style of Starcross well -- you are exploring an unknown vessel full of alien technology, and it seems right that you must rely on your own intuition instead of an author-supplied 'revelation' that you just made a mistake. Sure, you should make use of the save command frequently, but, when you find yourself stuck, you should always be able to deduce where you went wrong after some reflection.
If you're an SF junkie, you'll probably love Starcross. If not, expect to feel frustrated and lost a good chunk of the time.
What treasure lies locked in this shareware tomb?, April 2, 2010By all appearances, this is a below-average but sincere and functional fantasy adventure, oriented around your quest to save the princess at great peril to life and limb. However, it's difficult to say so definitively, as the version of the game here on IFDB is shareware, and it only allows you to play for 30 turns.
In the context of an abundance of free games of comparable or better quality, nothing I saw in the first 30 moves suggests that it's worth the $10 Canadian requested by the author. Also, given the age of the included contact information, it seems doubtful that it's still possible to register legally. Perhaps the author will see fit to release the full game as freeware, so that the public can appreciate his work. Until then, we can only wonder.
Garbage In, Garbage Out, April 1, 2010Here we have an unusual animal: an Inform 6 port of a BASIC port of an original in an unknown language. I can only assume that the terrible gameplay is a high-fidelity recreation of the original, minus the pain of dealing with a two-word parser.
As this piece comes with both BASIC and Inform 6 source code, it's an extremely instructive example of the advantages of using a well-established IF-oriented language instead of trying to create your own parser from scratch. This game's real value, however, is in showing new authors what NOT to do when writing interactive fiction for the first time.
For starters, I'm not sure the output of this game qualifies as prose, let alone fiction. Single-sentence room descriptions abound, many for rooms that contain nothing and serve no function. NPCs are zero-dimensional obstacles. Object descriptions omit key details about their features and function. Critical information about a locale may not even be visible from within that locale.
There's a low inventory limit, which is especially obnoxious given the need for certain items at certain points that can only be reached once. And there are some highly-questionable implementation choices, such as(Spoiler - click to show) the need to type "enter rope" to use it to traverse an obstacle. (Even for a two-word parser, why not "climb rope"?) and(Spoiler - click to show) a magic teleporter device (cleverly disguised as a non-descript box-with-a-button-on-it) that only functions in two locations, with no hinting as to which two they might be.
Since the source code was available, I used it as a "strategy guide" after reaching my frustration limit, marveling at how convoluted and arbitrary the puzzle structure was. Hoping to have the satisfaction of at least seeing the end, I instead discovered that an apparent timing bug makes it impossible to actually complete the "adventure."
AVOID. AVOID. AVOID.
If salvation were this easy..., April 1, 2010Before today, I didn't really understand the point of speed IF. Making good interactive fiction is hard, making it quickly is damn near impossible. I thought the best that could be said is that it allows for experimentation, and by labeling a work as "speed IF", the player is more inclined to treat its shortcomings favorably on the assumption that they may stem from a lack of time and not a lack of care and/or capability. I didn't realize until writing this review that speed IF competitions aren't completely free-form endeavors, and that authors are supposed to craft the story around a collection of random ideas.
Approaching this piece in ignorance of its origin, I found it to have an intriguing premise with a lot of potential for exploration. You play the part of a fallen angel, freshly released from Hell to complete some (undisclosed) nefarious assignment. As the action opens, you find yourself at a sort of crossroads, dreaming of a return to Heaven.
The writing quality is somewhat less than average, comprised mostly of straightforward descriptions not in keeping with the thematic tone. Though you play a supernatural being, little is done to offer you insight into that condition. Many, many questions beg for answers: What was it like to be an angel? What inner conflict led you to side with Lucifer? What is it like to work for evil? Why do you seek redemption now? What do you make of the human world today? Thematically, there is a rich, rich vein of possibility that this work barely scratches.
From a technical standpoint, The room implementation makes little sense -- several are nothing more than superfluous clones of each other. Object implementation is weak, but this is entirely expected in a work completed in a couple of hours. Also, you earn 10 points before you do anything in this game, for reasons that are unclear.
One interesting aspect of this work is the hint system.(Spoiler - click to show) The command "help" brings responses from God, and sometimes the Devil. In a work about temptation and salvation, this device offers numerous possibilities. When people face moral dilemmas, they are often depicted as having a little angel and a little devil on their shoulders. Who does an angel get?
Given all of my interest in the premise, the actual gameplay was something of a disappointment. Both good and evil paths are available, but it's not immediately apparent how to proceed on either. It would have made sense to outline the evil path in the opening description and be much vaguer in the hints about the good path(Spoiler - click to show), provided that the player is clued into his supernatural creation power some other way. The path to salvation is ridiculously short and easy, and does not require any difficult choices.
On the whole, this piece verges dangerously close to 1-star territory, but I liked the premise so much, and it inspired so much thought about what this story could be, that I give it an extra star for potential. If someone else were to give the same premise a more extended and polished treatment, it could easily become a classic.
For reference, the seed concept of this particular competition was: "Write a game that includes decency, a Toys-R-Us Bag of Rusty Lead-Painted Metal Bits, a cursed angel, and the phrase 'thy gills are as unclean as a lobster's arse'. Bonus points for including the darkness intrinsic to the human soul, alligators and the women who love them, or professional girls gymnastics." Although many of these items are ignored, I think it's to the piece's benefit -- no need to take such a serious premise in such a silly direction.
Ambitious subject, but limited implementation., April 1, 2010This short piece has a rather unusual premise, in that it take place within IFMUD. IFMUD -- aside from being the place to be for authors and fans of the modern IF community -- is a MUD , a virtual environment that behaves very much like the type of virtual environment emulated by interactive fiction parsers. It's an interesting and strange experience to find yourself in a simulation of a simulation, when the "underlying" simulation uses such a similar interface to the "top" one.
The goal of the author was to recreate the experience of "attending" the 2003 XYZZY Awards, a full transcript of which is available online. In preparation, I read the entire transcript myself, for comparison purposes.
It took me much longer to read the transcript than it did to play this piece, partly because the author (David Welbourn, aka DavidW) only implemented the first couple of awards, and partly because he edited out much of the audience activity. The official presentations of the announcers are faithfully recreated, along with the notable acceptance speech by Triage.
This work is speed IF, so there are limits to what you can expect. The most richly-implemented feature of the environment appears to be the artwork surrounding the stage (murals and paintings). I don't know whether these descriptions are original creations of the author or what you would have seen had you been on IFMUD for the ceremony, but they are amusing, either way.
NPCs are barely sketches, but to implement them in more detail would require taking considerable license with the personalities of real people. The main focus is the presentation of the awards, and I congratulate Mr. Welbourn for creating a minor puzzle to advance the action -- a clever twist.
Another crack at the conversation challenge., March 31, 2010This is not quite a game, but it's definitely something more than a simple example of the Inform 6 conversation system it's intended to demonstrate (which seems to have been updated since the release of this work).
The intended demonstration is of a flexible conversation system that controls standard ask/tell behavior through a keyboard-driven interactive menu. Selecting from the menu generates the equivalent command, which is entered for you at the main prompt. It's an interesting approach, that allows for a pretty direct comparison between two classic methods of NPC interaction, and it gave me more appreciation for the narrative flow that a well-done menu system offers when compared to ask/tell.
The fatal flaw of the system (to my eyes) is that it seems maintain a running list of "open" topics for you long past when they are conversationally appropriate, and this contextual distance is not reflected in the way the NPC responds if you suddenly change topics. Thus, as your list of options increase, the conversation can go from seeming very natural to seeming very odd as the NPC gamely responds to any thread you choose to continue.
I'm not saying simulating more realistic responses here would be easy -- far from it. I want to be clear that this apparent oddness is a symptom of success; it's a side-effect of breaking the illusion of natural flow that the menu system so ably provides at first. That the oddness wouldn't be noticed using the ask/tell model is likewise an indicator of just how unrealistic "conversations" using it are.
Putting model details aside and considering Medusa as a brief interactive fiction experience, I can't help but think that it's above-average, and that it would make a great opening sequence for a longer work. It would also be a good start on a decent "slice of life" entry for a one-room game competition, though, in its present state, it's a far cry from more widely-known works such as Emily Short's Galatea.
Take note: The split-screen display doesn't quite work right using Gargoyle, but it worked fine with plain old Frotz.
A bracing shot of old-school masochism!, March 31, 2010Oh, my. When browsing at random through the IFDB, you can go way, way, way, way back through the archaeological layers of IF. This work hails from the primordial era of 1993 (quite possibly predating the release of Inform version 1!), and, boy, does it show it.
Although built using the stalwart TADS 2 platform, Shadowland I: The Tower of Iron seems positively atavistic to modern eyes. Much of this is a result of the chosen style; it plays more like one of the RPG-simulating MUDs it was contemporary with than it does a typical text adventure.
The game actually starts off fairly well. If you ask for it, you are treated to a lengthy introduction to playing IF, such as you might have found in the manual for an Infocom game. The opening description is basic but competent, and then you find yourself killed because you failed to beat a guess-the-verb challenge within 5 turns.(Spoiler - click to show) (Hint: "remove straps") Okay, then.
The title hints that this piece was intended as the opening installment of an entire series. In this exciting first chapter, you will face many terrifying challenges, such as:
* randomized combat between low-level characters (in the context of a largely unexplained magic and combat system),
* the twin demons of guess-the-verb and guess-the-noun,
* hunt-the-topic with uncommunicative NPCs,
* and unexpected starvation puzzle(Spoiler - click to show) (in a world with just one thing to eat, that you probably will use immediately upon finding it since it also the only thing heals you, apparently), and
* subtle programming errors that inhibit basic functionality!(Spoiler - click to show) (a lingering requirement for a skill roll to pick something up, even when no longer in combat?)
Playing this game was a terrible experience for the modern player. But playing this game was a wonderful experience for the old-school IF aficionado, taking you back to the days when each point(Spoiler - click to show) (out of a well-rounded 1000) was a hard-won battle pitting your wits against the author.
Seriously, I actually did enjoy this game, in that grudge match kind of way. I was determined to make it to the end, even though it wasn't entirely clear that this piece was completed enough to do so. When I thought I'd tried absolutely everything possible but still found myself stuck, I took it up a notch and decompiled the code to look for hints.
To the author's credit, he may have anticipated this possibility, and his puzzle design skills continued to challenge me even in this "god mode". By cleverly omitting the names of objects involved in actions, he made it virtually impossible to determine how the last barrier between me and success was to be surmounted, though I scanned vigilantly through the uncommented spaghetti code churned out by the decompiler.
When I finally ferreted out what the correct item/object/unique-action combination was, my hat was off to this brave pioneer, for the daring masterstroke of inexplicably requiring one particular item to be used out of context to(Spoiler - click to show) open a grate... No hints in the relevant object descriptions. No hints when an incorrect object was used with the right verb. A cunningly-placed red herring, in the form of a different object that much more plausibly could have been abused in this way. I nearly cried at the genius of it.
My greatest regret is that I didn't get to experience the related follow-up puzzle without preparation, as I had already accidentally "solved" that while tracing code for the one above. Figuring out that one cold would have required a level of transcendent insight akin to the Dalai Lama's.
Taking my tongue out of my cheek for a moment, I actually did enjoy this enough to rate it in two-star territory. It is an honest first effort that took no small amount of work to realize. Minus the bugs and with slightly fairer puzzles, I might even have gone for three stars. Mr. Claburn, if you're still out there somewhere, consider dusting off this project. Give Inform 7 a whirl. You've already got your first player lined up for Shadowland II.
Just another day in paradise... except for that darn cat!, March 30, 2010I'm having a hard time expressing what I liked about this piece.
You direct the actions of a good-natured, young, domestic everyman, nearly fresh out of college and getting established in the world alongside the "Honey" that has become the center of his universe. Well, maybe "center of the universe" is strong, but certainly she's the bed along which his stream of consciousness runs.
Since Honey's parents (his future in-laws?) are coming to dinner, he has a minor errand to run -- pick up some photos that she wants to show them. Easy enough, right? Only this is IF, so certainly something will stand in the way.
The author stuck to genre here, in that the challenges you face are the very believable everyday challenges of existence.(Spoiler - click to show) There are plugged toilets, lost keys, escape-oriented pets, and the like. Although this sounds like it would be tremendously boring to simulate, it's not, thanks to the continuous characterization of the narrator as he grins his way through these obstacles.
As some of the other reviews I found online mention, the "puzzle" structure is fairly straightforward, with much of the delay resulting from the choice to reveal context-relevant things only as you need them. This was an interesting twist, emulating the way that so much of everyday existence lies beneath your notice, but I agree that it was a bit irksome because of the way it forced you to revisit the all of the rooms again every time you change context. On the other hand, perhaps this device was necessary to accommodate the author's method of characterization, which is grafting context-relevant information on the descriptions of everything.
The hunt for new items was certainly not too burdensome to endure, especially when you recall that you can navigate to any room by name(Spoiler - click to show), and there are only about 10 locations total. It's a technique worth looking at, and there are ways to cut down the irk level when using it.(Spoiler - click to show) (For example, when the narrator realizes his keys are missing, he recalls where he last saw them, eliminating the full apartment search for this item.)
As a first work, it is very well-done -- especially the major NPC, your adorable/terrible cat, Azrael, who is light-weight in coding but has a definite personality. The most noticeable errors I spotted were some lingering action contexts in descriptions and a few glitches in the NPC's idle behavior (doing two different, incompatible things on the same turn).
In the end, I think it was the narrator himself that I liked best about this piece. You'll notice that my description above switches back and forth between the treating the narrator as a third person and the player. This is an artifact of the author's use of the first-person in describing game actions, which creates a strange sensation of both being and not-being the narrator as you direct him through his world. On reflection, what it seems to do most is force you to consider the narrator as a separate person instead of a role you are trying to fulfill, giving it the feel of "hanging out" instead of "let's pretend".
The game experience was just long enough to feel like I'd hung out with him for a while, amiably killing time on a lazy long-weekend morning. It feels like three stars, but I give it two for the coding errors and the lack of puzzle "meat." Still, it's better than average, especially for a first-timer, and anyone considering an in-your-apartment work should review this one to see how the author manages to hold the player's interest in a potentially banal setting.
In retrospect, surprisingly similar to regular Quake..., March 30, 2010Since I hadn't heard of this piece before, it wasn't immediately apparent to me that it was released as an April Fool's joke. Although the Quake setting is portrayed in a tongue-in-cheek manner, the use of "special effects" in the opening sequence does a fairly good job of setting the right mood for anyone who remembers playing the original.
A little map-connection legerdemain ensures that any of the multiplicity of apparent options will quickly funnel you towards either a generic dead-end or to the main path of progress. You'll soon find yourself happily blasting away with a virtual shotgun, much as you would when playing the real game.
The randomized combat means there is a decent chance you will die before reaching the end, but it only took me twice to run the gauntlet and reach the ending sequence, where a mysterious figure lets you in on the joke and ends the game.
It's not much of a game, but I congratulate the author for the effort it took to put together the opening sequence, and the work as a whole is actually not too shabby for a first attempt. It's worth the time if you've ever played the first-person shooter it's based on, just for the novelty of having the experience translated to IF.
Asteroid Impact Hypothesis, outlined in Inform, March 29, 2010In this micro-work, you are a dinosaur of unspecified type, standing in a featureless plain you can't leave. A few turns from the start, you will be killed as a result of a massive asteroid impact nearby.
As near as I can tell after several "playthroughs", this is all that happens -- all that can happen. It would probably take about as long to recreate this game in Inform 7 as it did to write this review.
Although it might be interesting to try to depict this scene in a realistic way, this piece make no attempt to do so. Skip it.
E for Effort, March 29, 2010You have to use the bathroom. Eventually, you do.
That's pretty much the whole story of this piece, which, although it didn't center around potty humor as I had feared, offers little in the way of interesting gameplay.
This work is probably best considered as a companion piece for Michael J. Coyne's list of "First-Timer Foibles." It handily illustrates many of them, including synonym sickness, aberrant articles, oral offenses, shocking spelling and grisly grammar, laconic locations, and action abortion.
As a program, this piece is mostly functional, but is close to broken at several points. I encountered a number of apparent bugs, one of which mercifully allowed advancement of the "plot" without what I would assume was intended to be a critical item(Spoiler - click to show), unless, of course, boiling water in a rusty pot is supposed to magically make glue.
Upon reflection, it is clear that the author was actually trying here; you can sense his struggle to learn Inform 6 in the design of the puzzles, such as they are. Presumably, the end result was the best he could do at the time. According to IFDB, it's been ten years since this piece was released, so there's a very good chance that the author's skill as a writer and programmer have substantially increased.
New voices are always welcome in IF, so, if you're still out there, Mr. Gaertner, why not give it another try?
Too early to tell, but shows real promise, March 29, 2010This cooperative creation by two apparently new IF authors carries many of the hallmarks of the newcomer, but it also shows some surprising hints of both depth and capability.
As someone who never appreciated The Lurking Horror, I approached this piece with some skepticism. Horror is a difficult genre to write; it takes a very subtle skill to craft prose that will possess the reader enough to generate real discomfort. With interactive fiction, the challenge is sharply increased, as the pacing -- so important to managing the reader experience -- is subject to the flailing and detours of the player.
The authors seem to have an intuitive grasp of how to manage the pace through a series of gently-railroaded sequences. The illusion of player freedom is fairly good. It wasn't until I was finished that I realized how expertly I had been swept along. Within each sequence, the story world evolves through changes in the protagonist's mental state even if your actions fail to make the desired changes to the world's physical state. There was only one place where I stalled out for a bit.(Spoiler - click to show) It was at the ranch entrance, where, after discovering I couldn't walk to the house, I was at a loss about what to do next. It would probably be in keeping with the overall pacing to have the protagonist spontaneously notice the broken lock piece after 10 turns or so, instead of forcing multiple examinations of the gate.
The first time this game impressed me was in the opening sequence.(Spoiler - click to show) Though the introduction is somewhat confusing, and the transition to the first move felt somewhat forced, I was quite fascinated by the touch of "cinematography" (for lack of a better word) as the color scheme changed on the words "Your child is waiting." It was a very effective way, in conjunction with the change in punctuation, of emulating a cinematic match cut, and very clever use of the medium.
The writing quality is patchy. It needs some proofreading to weed out misused homonyms, run-on sentences, and the like. In addition, there are certain discrepancies in tone that disrupt the experience -- some out-of-place jokes that work against the mood-building, some points where the anger and violence of the protagonist are so over-the-top that it strains suspension of disbelief. However, the writing at its best shows flashes of real talent, as evidenced by the feeling of creepiness stealing over me in those places that seemed to have the most polish.
The overall implementation quality is quite good. The authors make excellent use of changing descriptions to keep you focused on the important part of the story. The biggest gaps I noticed are certain unimplemented details(Spoiler - click to show) (e.g. you can look at the house but not the stables from the entrance to the ranch) and the lack of hinting on the correct conversation model ("talk to", not "ask/tell").
Written for the 2009 IntroComp (where it placed first of three), it is by definition an unfinished work. As a result, I gave it an extra star for the potential that I sensed this work could have as a cleaned-up, full-length story.
The true test of an intro is whether you would be interested in continuing, and, in my case, the answer is a definite yes.
Funny! Funny! And then..., March 29, 2010As I started playing the third (and final?) entry in the Frenetic Five series, I found myself immersed and smiling almost immediately.
Once again, you take the role of Improv, MacGyver-disciple and leader of the City's most available group of superhero temp workers. This game opens with you at the tail end of a party, playing "Battle Cry" with some other local crime fighters after indulging yourself a bit too much. I knew I was already hooked when I immediately replayed the prelude to get another crack at this game-within-a-game. I was extremely disappointed to discover that the catchphrase "Able to carry wood furniture up a flight of stairs in a single bound!" was not for a superhero called The Prime Mover.
Author Neil deMause really seems to have been getting the hang of writing IF by the time this piece was created. As before, the story universe seems alive, with the action for many scripted scenes and exchanges taking place over several turns. There is little temptation to keep entering "wait" to see them play out, however, for two reasons: First, there is a lot to keep you occupied in the game environment. Second, the way they are written doesn't necessarily tip you off that they will continue from turn to turn.
This method is an extremely effective way of creating a convincing social atmosphere; the interaction amongst the NPCs gives them a sense of independent life (in stark contrast with the stage puppets that many IF NPCs resemble), while at the same time feeding you a steady drip of characterization, backstory, and hints. The technique's potency won the work an XYZZY award for "Best NPC" -- the second for the series.
The work required by the author to create this mirage is significant, and there are limits to how long it can be sustained. Spend too long in an area without moving the plot forward, and your companions will become oddly silent, an after-effect of the compelling illusion provided when they are "on".
Long-time players will recognize the site of your team's mission as the setting for Zork. Perhaps that is why this episode feels like it has some meat to it, and that it will take some real effort to reach the end. This is just another trick, however -- the total length is typical for a modern, non-commercial piece.
The implementation quality is much improved when compared to previous entries in the series. I did encounter a few small bugs, but nothing significant to gameplay.
As with previous episodes, the highlight of this piece is the author's sense of humor. It starts funny, it stays funny, and then... (Spoiler - click to show)well, then there's the ending.
To call the ending unsatisfying is an understatement. I was powerfully reminded of the movie The French Connection, for the strange and sudden severing of the viewer from the plot thread, leaving the story to end not with a bang but a whimper. (Well, figuratively, at least.)
Frankly, I couldn't believe that the ending I saw was the only one available. I scoured the internet for hints and walkthroughs, finding only a single walkthrough that delivered the same ending. A few more iterations of the climax scene offered no other options, so I took the unusual step of decompiling the game file to look for other possible variations. There were none.
Why you would go through the effort of creating a work of this scale to deliver such a disjointed, downer ending is beyond me, but doing so is the author's privilege. Mr. deMause seems to have a penchant for challenging player expectations of the medium, and this certainly qualifies.
Assuming you don't want to read the spoiler above, all I can say is that the ending is different from what you might expect of this genre or this series.(Spoiler - click to show) The only takeaway seems to be: Friends Don't Let Friends Fight Crime Drunk.
In addition to being mostly enjoyable as entertainment, this is an excellent piece for study of technique -- both writing and coding. Even with the spare object and verb implementation, the world is vibrant and animated in a way that few works of IF manage to be. I gladly recommend it to anyone looking for some laughs, which are delivered at their usual "frenetic" pace.
Well, it's interactive..., March 29, 2010This extremely short work is an entry to "The Great IF Toaster Contest". See http://www.ministryofpeace.com/if/toaster-comp/ for details.
As the site explains:
"The rules are very simple: Make a toaster. The toaster should have a lever on it (to push down the bread) and a slide or dial to set the toastedness to. See how much of a game you can make out of it -- let your imagination run wild, as they say."
This piece seems to interpret the instructions as one might an assignment for a programming course. There is a toaster, and the author's imagination does seem to have run a little wild.
While it would get at least a passing grade in the imagined course, it is completely lacking in any of the things that would qualify it as interactive fiction. It is an interactive coding exercise, and nothing more.
It seems safe to assume that the author, Duncan Cross, was new to writing IF at the time this piece was created. I see that there are several other works by the same author available on IFDB, and I would certainly not shy away from trying out another one in the hopes that his talents have matured.
Cute, engaging, but a little rough around the edges, April 20, 2009I found myself with a few free minutes this evening and thought I'd try the latest on IFDB. I ended up spending at least an hour with this game, which was surprisingly engaging.
The genre claimed for this work is "fantasy", but it's more comedy than anything else. It has a chattery, bantering tone that did a lot to endear this game to me, and did so quickly -- which is important because I very nearly quit after the first move. (Let's just say the command "read sign" did not produce a very promising result.) The text is frequently silly, but it only crosses the line into *too* silly once or twice. It made me chuckle on a few occasions.
The game proclaims itself as geared for a novice, and it mostly lives up to the promise. Puzzles are not difficult in terms of a thinking challenge; they are immediately recognizable as the "insert tab A into slot B" type of artificial roadblocks that litter both IF and other role-playing games. This is frequently reinforced by the fact that, in many cases, uses for objects are strongly suggested in their descriptions, often with comic effect.
Some puzzles were difficult, however, in terms of implementation choices. Object implementation is fairly rich -- perhaps too rich in some places.(Spoiler - click to show)At least one critical object is only discoverable after examining a seemingly-already-adequately-described scenery object in the first room... and then examining something mentioned in that object's description. This seemed like an artifact of the programmer having some fun, and it was not in keeping with the description style of the rest of the game. On the other hand, conversations were implemented so sparsely that they barely existed. If you don't hit on certain keywords, the NPCs issue only unmodified default responses.(Spoiler - click to show)This was particularly frustrating in dealing with the first NPCs I encountered, outside the mines. They did not react to keywords based on the nouns in the area, and for several minutes talking to the foreman gnome got nothing but "no response" results. I eventually went back and read what he first says and found that keywords there get real replies. After that, conversations went more smoothly.
Fortunately, the author includes a walkthrough, but, unfortunately, it is in the form of a series of commands to win the game a certain way. A better hint system would have been nice, since I did find myself consulting the walkthrough at one point (see first spoiler above), and in doing so, I inadvertently saw the solution for another.
All in all, I liked this game, but I think it needs significantly more polish before it can be considered complete as an introductory piece of IF. A real novice would probably have been confused and frustrated by the numerous small bugs and issues I encountered, and anyone turning to the walkthrough for help would have a lot of potential fun ruined.
Keep an eye out for future work from this author. There's definitely potential here.
Less is More, More or Less?, March 18, 2009Having enjoyed my good time playing the first Frenetic Five adventure, and having been left "hungry for more", I chose the sequel (The Frenetic Five vs. Mr. Redundancy Man) as my next game to review. Let's just say: It made an impression, and I won't forget it.
Neil deMause, the author, seems to have profited from the feedback he received for Sturm and Drang. As Baf's guide notes, this is "smaller and tighter than the original". Geared for the IF Comp, this piece railroads you to the enemy hideout almost immediately, avoiding the meandering feel of the midgame of the original. This is an improvement, and totally appropriate as part of the lightweight style of this series.
Also gone is the dependency on having random items to solve puzzles. Everything you need to solve the game's puzzles are either in the immediate vicinity or provided by a teammate. The focus is getting you to think like the PC you are playing: Improv, whose superpower is coming up with improbably effective plans a la "MacGyver". Again, an improvement.
One thing that's consistent is Mr. deMause's wit and sense of verbal humor, which shines through this piece as much as it did the first. For the second time, I found myself laughing out loud, which doesn't happen very often unless I'm reading something by Douglas Adams.
Unfortunately, another thing that seems consistent is the quality of implementation. I found myself running into strange bugs, finding aspects of the game revealed to me by bad parser guesses, and even a straight-up TADS error of some sort. Once more, I found the technical issues interfering enough with the content to slip into two-star territory on my rating system -- even though they did not prevent (and sometimes even helped!) my progress.
Perhaps Mr. Redundancy Man was another rush job (as I assumed with Sturm and Drang), or perhaps Mr. deMause's talents as a writer far exceeded his talents as a programmer when this was written. If the former, I fervently hope the day comes that we see a fully-matured work from him. If the latter (and if coding is still a challenge for him), perhaps collaboration is what's called for; there are certainly plenty of people involved in the IF community with the converse problem of being better coders than writers.
That said, I urge the reader to note that my rating system is unusually harsh, with a tendency to underscore decent games so that the four- and five-stars stand out. I would gladly recommend this piece to anyone who enjoyed the first "episode" in the series, and I would gladly recommend both to someone who hasn't played either of them yet.
One final note that may indirectly be a spoiler so I'll tag it as such: (Spoiler - click to show)Aaron Mumaw's review of Undo, also by deMause, made me think of the members of the Frenetic Five in a different way. It occurs to me that the superpowers of the team members are related to the common frustrations and foibles of interactive fiction. Lexicon could be the counter to "guess-the-verb" puzzles, Clapper eliminates "Fedex quests", Newsboy embodies the device of sudden revealing obscure-but-necessary information to solve puzzles, and Pastiche represents the need to guess what the author has made it possible to actually do in work if it's not well-hinted. (Either that, or she's a counterweight to the inexplicable dearth of frequent pop song references.) All this works well in keeping the action flowing and centered on Improv (i.e. you), whose talent is the sideways thinking any puzzle-based IF calls for, but it seems only a few critical puzzles require your help, with most of the rest easily solved by asking teammates for help.
It's been a long time since deMause produced a Frenetic Five piece, and he may never do so again, but it occurs to me that this character setup is ideal for enabling multi-solution puzzles as in Wishbringer. It would be an excellent device for providing a graduated point system (so far missing from each game) that rewards players who solve more without the help of teammates, and would provide some replay value without throwing up roadblocks for those who just want to see the story.
Great Premise, Terrific Writing, Poor Execution, March 16, 2009I was a big fan of "The Tick" back when the animated series was on. One of my favorite jokes from the series was the hapless group of pseudo-superheroes known as the Civic-Minded Five, whose absurdly ineffective "powers" consisted of things like having four legs or being able to deliver static electricity shocks. Neil deMause may or may not have been familiar with the Civic-Minded Five, but it seems likely that he was, as the characters in this game are clearly cast from the same mold.
You are Improv, leader of the Frenetic Five, a group of part-time superheroes in between gigs. Your superpower is coming up with MacGyver-like plans, which is no doubt the result of long hours of radiation received while watching the show on TV. You are trying to do just that, as a matter of fact, when your team's junior member, Newsboy, arrives to announce that evil is afoot... and it's up to you to stop it!
I must congratulate Mr. deMause for his writing talents. The story unfolds and the personalities of your teammates emerge in a convincingly lifelike way through various timed scenes. The jokes come fast and often, and several had me laughing outright. Everywhere the author paid care and attention, the payoff for the player is delightful.
Unfortunately, the care and attention the author paid seems to be wildly uneven. High expectations set by the opening scenes rapidly dwindled once I left the apartment, and by the time I reached the ostensible goal of the evil villains' hideout, the game world had lost its fizz and gone flat. I ran out of patience and resorted to a walkthrough, which left me totally bewildered as to how anyone could realistically have completed the game without it.
It's possible that I just missed an awful lot, that I couldn't tune into the author's wavelength and just didn't interact the right way. However, it seems far more likely that this work is simply unfinished as a result of of trying to get it out the door in time for that year's IF Comp, where it placed 13th. It's really a shame, since the story's universe held a lot of promise and left me hungry for more, despite the relatively unenjoyable time I had trying to reach the end. The good news is that there are two additional Frenetic Five titles out there that I have not yet played, and which I hope earn higher scores.
The coding quality is competent. What works, works well, and I encountered no notable bugs. It's obvious that Mr. deMause has it in him to produce some truly top-notch interactive fiction -- even half-baked, The Frenetic Five vs. Sturm und Drang did take the "Best NPC" Xyzzy Award for 1997, which is no small achievement. I look forward to playing more from this author.
Graham Nelson's Homage to the Start of It All, March 15, 2009It was 1996, and Graham Nelson -- creator of the Inform language and the father of modern IF -- had just released Inform 6 in April. The Second Annual IF Competition was underway. What better chance to show off the new stuff? Professor Nelson completed the intriguingly-titled piece known as The Meteor, the Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet and submitted it to the IF Comp under the pseudonym (and anagram) "Angela M. Horns".
This is a game in the old-school style. That means the pastiche of elements that are assembled into the story is contrived, but the beauty of it lies in the assembly. It's like a patchwork quilt: You can clearly see the seams attaching various unrelated flights of fancy together, but if that's where you focus your attention, you'll miss the striking overall pattern.
At the outset, you play a diplomat, caught in an interminable "tour" of the land you are assigned to. Before long the setting changes to what long-time IF players would consider more familiar territory -- almost literally. Allusions are made to a secret mission, but it's up to the player to figure out what the mission is and how to accomplish it as you go along.
This work predates the modern style of detailed implementation, and its object and room descriptions are remarkably spare. This is clearly not carelessness, however; a rich world is presented as your imagination fills in the artfully-carved blanks. Perhaps it is the nature of a mathematician like Nelson to pay such close attention to negative information, as this same tendency shows through in the design of several puzzles. There is often as much of a clue provided by what is not said as there is by that which is.
Echoes of Zork abound, but they do not define the experience. The story comes into its own towards the end. If you, like me, find yourself completing the game without achieving the maximum score, then you'll also find yourself diving right back in to see how to dredge up those last few points. And if you, like me, find yourself looking at the built-in hints to speed that process, it's only proof that you've been well and truly hooked.
There are a few bugs (including one I found that crashed Frotz), a few quirks (potentially unplanned "solutions" to puzzles) and a couple of instances of find-the-syntax, but on the whole gameplay was smooth and of professional quality. If you enjoyed the original Infocom Zork and Enchanter series, or the more recent Enlightenment, this is a must-play. Three stars for this work from a five-star contributor to the art.
A New Implementor is Born, March 24, 2008When I first discovered that interactive fiction had started a renaissance of sorts, I was mostly excited about the possibility of playing the old Infocom titles again. I had tried several games before Spider and Web, and, like so many of those before it, this game started out bland and uninteresting. Like the others, it seemed to be the product of someone with far more enthusiasm than skill as either a programmer or storyteller; its most interesting feature seemed to be the title.
Three minutes later, I was surprised to find that this game had a point and was interesting. Ten minutes later, I was awestruck.
I still hold the Infocom games up as the gold standard, but this game was the first I encountered that rated a "platinum" label. Daring in its conception and almost always brilliant in its execution of both programming and prose, Spider and Web shows the true power of the medium. This story simply couldn't be told in any other format in such an effective way.
I reserve five stars for works that are not just good, but that reach the epitome of a particular genre or otherwise earn a "landmark" status. Such works are the yardsticks by which all others are measured. I'm happy to bestow my first five star rating here on Spider and Web for its sheer genius in terms of premise and construction.
Kudos to Mr. Plotkin, who well deserves his reputation as a star in the IF community.
Easy, but too charming to discount, March 12, 2008Wishbringer was part of Infocom's "introductory" line -- an attempt to bring a wider audience to interactive fiction by creating works that would appeal to those who had never played a text adventure before. Only a few introductory titles were produced, and this one is my favorite by far.
It is also the most effective. Unlike the other introductory titles (Moonmist and Seastalker), Wishbringer provides an easy-to-follow orientation to the IF interface in its opening sequence; the first tasks are going someplace, taking something, looking at it -- all of the basic commands experienced players take for granted. As with all introductory titles, the first few moves use an explicit prompt ("OK, what do you want to do now?") to hold the hand of those who are not sure how IF works.
This courtesy extends throughout the rest of the game. Puzzles are solvable in at least two ways: easy (using a wish) and hard (using your brain). Maximum points are awarded for solving puzzles the hard way, but those who just want to see the story advance will not regret wishing their way to the end -- though they may be prompted to go back and improve their score.
Part of the game's allure is its "once upon a time" tone, which is well-suited to freeing the imagination. This is enhanced by -- or perhaps the product of -- the enchanting writing style of Brian Moriarty (author of Trinity, which many people consider to be the best Infocom title ever). Most of the rest of its allure is probably due to the unforgettable platypi.
Those new to the game will likely have to do without its wonderful "feelies". The glow-in-the-dark Wishbringer replica was a little cheesy, but it was one of my favorites (second only to Planetfall's postcards, stationery, and Stellar Patrol ID). Even without these, Wishbringer is probably the ideal IF primer for young people and those young-at-heart.
A near miss of an intriguing target, March 10, 2008LASH was written by Paul O'Brian, the maker of the popular Earth and Sky trilogy. This work demonstrates that he is capable of creating an original premise just as easily as he can put together a story around conventional superhero tropes.
This piece has been difficult to review. The code is solid. The writing is good. The gameplay is smooth. The hook hooks. The dramatic arc is clear. LASH has every reason to succeed. And yet, I'm giving it only two stars. [edit: I revised this to three stars, since it is good, just not great.]
Like Duncan Stevens, I felt the premise of LASH had something significant to deliver. Like Duncan Stevens, I felt it didn't quite reach me in the way that the author probably intended. While I find the piece interesting, most of my interest involves trying to understand what went wrong in the execution of what is clearly a compelling vision.
Functionally, I think it boils down to two issues. The first is time, and the second is the essential mechanics of player/PC interaction.
Regarding time, LASH is simply too short to build up the tension that is required to deliver the message well. Though the work was not entered into the IF Comp, it would have been well-suited to that venue owing to its short playtime and multiple endings. While this has been a winning formula many times for Comp winners, this structure shows its essential weakness when taken outside of that artificial environment.
Regarding player/PC interaction, it is hopefully not too much of a spoiler to state that the story's conclusion depends on a successful division of the player from the PC in the player's mind. It seemed to me that this division occurs somewhat abruptly and artificially, a perception that is very probably related to the short playing time.
There may also be a problem at the broader thematic level. Though I try to avoid spoilers in my reviews, I can't see how to get around that this time while still being clear, so please don't read the following until after you've played: (Spoiler - click to show)The main problem may be that LASH's story depends on achieving an identity between the historical slaves of America and the fictional slave machines in the game universe. This is both conceptually and ethically challenging in light of the fact that the machines are, by definition, purpose-built tools, and the conceptual gap between "tool" and "slave" is naturally much wider than that between "person" and "slave" -- especially in an era where nothing like the artifically-intelligent PC exists in the real world. Building a bridge across that gap is a hefty undertaking, and further complicated as described below.
While I am sympathetic to the idea that no sentient should be held captive, the crux of this story revolves around making the player realize that he or she has, in some small way, adopted the mental habits of a slave master while dealing with the PC. There is significant interference here as a result of the default player/PC relationship in interactive fiction, which is to some degree dependent on forgetting that you, as the player, are not the PC. The key difference between player and PC is the "realness" of their existence in their respective worlds (actual vs. fictional).
This dynamic is very different from what I would expect between slave master and slave, where the owner and slave by definition inhabit the same world, and the key difference is the "realness" of the slave's status as a free and equal human being. Mr. O'Brian may have done better by trying to achieve the player/slave master identity directly instead of indirectly through the analogy of "Player is to PC as 'owner' is to slave."
Overall, this work clearly had the potential for greatness but ended up falling short. Its finalist (but not winner) status for every major XYZZY award in 2000 shows that this is a pretty common perception. I do recommend that authors examine this work as a study in how to implement well on a functional level, and also as a thought challenge -- to explore how one might successfully achieve what Mr. O'Brian set out to do.
Nails that classic Zork feel..., March 10, 2008I knew I liked Enlightenment right from the start. Sure, Taro Ogawa (the author) has appropriated just about every last detail from the Zork universe, but he does it so well that you can't help but forgive him. This game is not just fan-boy homage or unimaginative plagiarism, this game is something new that was lovingly crafted using familiar elements. This game is Zork turned up to 11.
As in Zork, the game's terse replies are just encouraging enough to get you to continue for another few moves even when you feel stuck. Perhaps it's because this game emulates that iconic look-and-feel so well that I had the patience to keep trying after nearly an hour of play without a single point scored. Yes, there is that much non-essential material to keep you busy, with many jokes to discover, footnotes to unlock, and interesting-but-not-useful things you can do with the assortment of equipment you start with.
The game's title is well-chosen; once that first point is scored, they become easier and easier. For the last few turns of my game, everything fell into place, and I felt I truly had achieved enlightenment.
The game's end notes state that this piece is actually 19K larger than the original Zork I. I am surprised, but not too surprised. No course of action seems inherently off-limits or "wrong" for this game -- a difficult-to-achieve perceptual illusion that is no doubt the product of vast amounts of coding work and exceptionally careful playtesting on the author's part. Mr. Ogawa is to be congratulated for having pulled it off.
Enlightenment is a one-room game that you wish would go on to "feature length." Though Mr. Ogawa seems to have never produced another piece for public release, I sincerely hope to see more by him in the future.
Extremely funny throughout, March 8, 2008Leonard Richardson's writing in this work is the most consistently funny piece of interactive fiction I've encountered. He has a flair for doling out expert satire using a tongue-in-cheek style that somehow never lets you know the joke is coming before you've already started laughing.
The game's concept was inspired by the eponymous "guess the verb" problem found in many poor-quality games, but you won't encounter that problem yourself, since the unusual verbs required are deliberately spelled out for you. Your not-too-difficult job is to find when to use them.
I simply can't understand how this game scored just 11th place in the 2000 IF Comp. Only two possibilities come to mind:
First, players might not have caught onto the central puzzle of how the verb-guessing booth's attendant can be fooled. Without this, the game would have never gone anywhere or ended very quickly. The real comedy starts after you've figured this out.
Second, players might have panned the game because it is not a traditional piece of IF; there is not a central well-defined story. Rather, this piece is more of a playground for both author and player, stuffed to the gills with hilarious riffs on both famous works and IF in general. Every "examine", "show", or "ask" is an opportunity for Mr. Richardson to make you chuckle yet again.
Either way, this ranking was a grave mistake -- Guess the Verb! is a gem and a must-play in my book. I am tempted to give it 5 stars, but I am holding onto that "perfect" score for the future piece from this author that will surely earn them.
Warning: This is not interactive fiction., March 7, 2008In 1995, Inform 6 was under development and the first IF Comp was organized. The modern era of interactive fiction had not yet begun. Author Gareth Rees has been instrumental in bringing about the modern era; he helped kickstart the adoption of Inform by contributing to the Designer's Manual and producing the well-regarded Christminster. It is not necessary to be enthusiastic about The Magic Toyshop to acknowledge the debt of gratitude we all owe him.
This game is much more akin to "Hunt the Wumpus" or some other ASCII mainframe relic than it is to a work of IF. It has a framing story, but that story in no way affects the gameplay. Gameplay consists of a series of increasingly devious logic puzzles, most of which are based on the kinds of pen-and-paper games that kept kids busy on rainy days before the invention of the game console. To advance, you often have to figure out a way to creatively cheat. While this is somewhat amusing, it is also slightly perverse -- you have no motivation for doing so other than to "win" by any means necessary.
As if that weren't enough, the game loses its consistency about two thirds of the way through and introduces a "puzzle" requiring knowledge of the Infocom classic Trinity (and others?) to even have a clue how to proceed. Resorting to the walkthrough did not leave me with a sense of failure -- only puzzlement that the author could expect anyone but himself to figure out the right sequence of moves.
Should you make it to the end of this player/author grudge match, you are sent packing with little more than a cursory "*** You have won. ***" and no sense of accomplishment.
It is hard to imagine, but this all-work-and-no-play entry scored 3rd in the Comp. While this piece may be worth examining by a programmer for its noteworthy adaptation of classic timewaster games, it holds little value to a player -- except maybe the kind of militant puzzle fiend one can only find in Britain. I would not bother with this one unless you really get the urge to solve bent logic puzzles using a text parser.
More fun than I expected, March 5, 2008This IF Comp entry may be a little gimmicky, but the gimmick definitely worked for me. What's not to like about a story that features a teddy bear as a protagonist?
A Bear's Night Out (ABNO) is Mr. Dyte's first released work, and it has the feel of a first work -- a little rough around a few edges, a sense that maybe more effort was spent on code than prose. Nonetheless, the main character seems to touch a soft spot in the hearts of most people, and this -- coupled with the consistent but novel logic of the teddy bear universe -- is what makes the piece stand out.
ABNO's fifth place finish in the 1997 IF Comp is a testament to the quality of Mr. Dyte's originality and style, as is the game's receipt of the "Best Setting" XYZZY Award for that year. Lest you think this piece is all gimmick and no meat, note that it was a finalist for "Best Game", as well, and that fans of the story have taken the time to translate it into both German and Spanish.
I do think this game would be suitable for a children's story, assuming the child has some capacity for sustained problem-solving and perhaps the over-the-shoulder advice of a few family members. Only one puzzle seemed likely to stump a group of players for any length of time; be prepared to use the gentle in-game hint system to avoid the bad kind of frustration, if needed.
Though I give it only three stars overall ("good, not great"), it is one of the more memorable stories I've played. I do recommend that you try this game, particularly when you are feeling young-at-heart.
A labor of love that anyone can enjoy, March 1, 2008Mr. Wheeler seems to be a man of extremes. His works, which are often submitted under a pseudonym, have scored both low and high in various competitions, and they include 'Being Andrew Plotkin', aka 'BAP'. While 'BAP' is an in-joke laden spoof that is most popular among the authors and IFMUDders at the core of the modern IF community, 'The Tale of the Kissing Bandit' is at the other end of the accessibility extreme -- a complete novice to IF should have no trouble playing this story through to the end while appreciating every word along the way.
The game was apparently written for a target audience of one (Wheeler's significant other), and anyone who's tried their hand at writing IF can sense the Herculean lengths the author went through to ensure a smooth playing experience. You won't be "guessing the verb" in this one... indeed, I suspect the game could teach you a few synonyms if you inspected the source code.
Some might say that this game is 'for girls', but this should not be an issue for anyone who's gotten past the 'girls are icky' stage of growing up. Though the final ending is perhaps a bit too personal to satisfy everyone, the story leading up to it is like a good G-rated movie: fun for the whole family. It is cute, original, and violence-free, and the player character is so memorable that it's easy to see why it won the 2001 XYZZY award for Best Individual PC.
'The Tale of the Kissing Bandit' should be a fun diversion for any player who wants a light-hearted break from their busy day, and an instructive example for any author who wants to see the impact of a gold-standard grammar implementation on playability. Take the time to try it out; you won't regret it.
A personal favorite of the New Era, February 27, 2008'Risorgimento Represso' placed second behind 'Slouching Towards Bedlam' in the 2003 IF Comp, and, if you ask me, Mr. Coyne deserved the top spot.
You start this game in a boring college classroom. Then, you discover an interdimensional vortex under the seats. Why is it there? Because it is.
The lack of finesse in this opening is almost comical. What seems at first like bad writing instead ends up being a signal that this is an "old school" game. You go through the vortex for the same reason you break into the white house in 'Zork' -- because it's your gateway to the quest that awaits. How else were you going to get there?
With this opening, 'Risorgimento Represso' proudly proclaims that it is a classic text adventure, through and through. If you don't like those, you can't say you weren't warned. If you do like them, you're in for a treat.
This game emulates the archetypal Infocom aesthetic: a blend of witty writing, solid puzzles, and fun (if stereotypical) NPCs. It eschews the modern "cruelty vs. kindness" debate and reminds you why the save and restore commands were implemented in the first place.
What most impressed me about this game was the way that it managed to retain its own voice while being so obviously inspired by the best of what came before. Sure, it has magic. It has monsters. It has heroes and villains. But it also has great flair for memorable moments -- like your grudge match with a very determined bird and your introduction to tyromancy. If the fantasy adventure genre is a choir, 'Risorgimento Represso' clearly adds its own notes instead of simply following along with the tune.
My congratulations to Mr. Coyne for introducing us to a compelling new universe. I understand he's working on a sequel, and I can't wait to play it.
A true classic from the Golden Age, February 27, 2008"Planetfall" is undoubtedly one of the finest games in the history of interactive fiction; it may be my favorite Infocom game, to boot.
If you ask someone who played "Planetfall" back in the 80s, it is certainly Floyd, the player's bubbly omnipresent robot sidekick, that will be mentioned first. Floyd was, quite simply, a quantum leap in the category of NPCs, presenting an unforgettable comic personality that played perfect counterpoint to the otherwise dark and foreboding tone.
Beyond Floyd, the game is built on a well-constructed story, having taken enough care in the creation of the game universe to be solidly convincing, and offering as its premise a steadily mounting series of challenges that intertwine the player's fate with that of a seemingly-abandoned planet in a natural and game-appropriate way. As the plot moves from survival to exploration to the intense climax, the reader can't help but be impressed every step of the way.
As a side note, this is the only work of IF I've ever played where eating, drinking, and sleeping are implemented in a manner that not only avoids being annoying, but which is ultimately essential to driving the plot. You must reach the end before your supplies run out, and some of your dreams are hints for solving the tougher puzzles.
If "Planetfall" lacks anything, it is the literary quality that marks the finest works from the new school of IF-writing. I can't hold that against it, since nothing like that existed when this game was released. Indeed, this game may be among the first steps in that direction -- if the prose was a little more flowery, there would be no doubt.
"Planetfall" remains a landmark achievement that is in many ways unequaled today. If you can find a copy, don't give in to the impulse to look at hints. This one should be savored over days or weeks as the rare treat it is.
Solid game that strikes the right balance., February 27, 2008(I should preface this review with a note that a three-star rating from me means it is a good game; I reserve four stars for something special, and five stars for something truly amazing.)
Light-hearted in tone, traditional in style, "Uncle Zebulon's Will" finds that elusive balance between implied scope and actual delivery that many winning Comp entries miss. In short, it doesn't bite off more than it can chew in two hours of playtime, so it doesn't leave you disappointed when you reach the end.
I particularly admire the way in which the author provided descriptions and responses that are just enough to convince you of the reality of the game world. At no point was I disappointed by the lack of a particular programmed response: Even the game's bored and disinterested NPC was believably (and appropriately) bored and disinterested.
This economy of writing is one of the hallmarks of classic IF, and so perhaps it should not be a surprise that Activision included this entry in a 1996 re-release of classic Infocom titles. Other than the abbreviated length and the copyright date, you might never realize it isn't from the "Golden Age" of IF.
Good, but overrated., February 27, 2008This game made a huge splash in the IF community when it was released, handily taking first place in the 2003 IF Comp and performing the equivalent of an Oscar sweep in that year's XYZZY awards. Why, then, do I give it a mere three stars?
First, the positives: The introduction is a superb piece of writing. The reader is immediately gripped by the mystery presented, and that mystery is fully explored in the multiple possible endings. The premise is unique; the atmosphere is memorable. Overall, "Slouching Towards Bedlam" practically shines with the kind of originality that is so highly-prized in the IF community, and this probably is the best explanation for its record-breaking high score in the Comp.
But, then, there are the negatives: The world implementation is a little spare. The NPCs are a little flat. Certain promising points of interest turn out to be either red herrings or truncated plot elements. To be honest, this game strikes me as half-finished in some ways -- the overall tone of the implementation has an unevenness that can be surprising.
Once again, I have to point to the IF Comp guidelines that say an entry should be designed to be solvable within two hours of gameplay. The authors clearly had more to give here, and the half-finished feel to some parts of the game could be nothing more than the result of their having reached the target play time and calling it quits. My suspicion is that they may have run a bit short on development time, however; some improvements in editing would have easily scored an extra star from me.
"Slouching Towards Bedlam" is a decent game made from a terrific story. My slight dissatisfaction stems from my sense that, with more work, it could be an excellent game made from a terrific story. It is definitely worth your time to explore, even if I don't count it among the greats.
Well-Executed First Try, February 27, 2008"Splashdown" is the first completed work of IF made by a veteran of the video game industry. According to Wikipedia, Paul Furio currently works for Microsoft, and that may explain why this game ended up with only 3 stars in my book. The story premise is interesting, the code is solid, but, like a lot of Microsoft software, it seems to be derivative of something better without bringing anything new to the table.
Strongly reminiscent of the Infocom titles "Planetfall" and "Suspended", "Splashdown" left me feeling vaguely unsatisfied at its end, perhaps because the evocation of those classics set my expectations too high.
Then again, maybe it's just because, as an IF Comp entry, this game is designed to be solved in about two hours. This piece is definitely in the "text adventure" category, and there's a limit to how much a puzzle game can achieve in the framework of an IF Comp entry's proscribed length. "Splashdown" hits that limit and leaves me wanting more.
Overall, this game was enjoyable, with many moments of discovery and interest. If it were expanded to a "feature-length" game, I would definitely revisit it.
Paradoxically enjoyable..., February 27, 2008As seen in Baf's guide, "Stupid, but in a good way." is probably the best way to describe this unexpectedly fun mini-game. What should be a 1-star bad joke in IF form turns into a 3-star good joke in IF form as you find yourself actually putting some effort into figuring out how to get Conan to kill everything.
At least one line involving the spider made me laugh out loud. I look forward to trying more serious efforts from this author.
Exceptionally memorable..., February 27, 2008There are competing schools of thought in IF. Many in the new school believe the story is paramount, and that puzzles and other game-like qualities are sometimes nothing more than unwanted throwbacks to the primitive days of mere "text adventures". "All Roads" is the first piece I encountered that made me think the new-schoolers might be on to something.
It's been a couple of years since I played this piece, and I don't really recall any puzzles at all. They were there, but they seemed so easily solved that it was clear their main purpose was to keep the reader involved, and not to delay completion of the story. What I do recall is the very intriguing plot, which, like a dense film along the lines of "Memento", kept me both enthralled and slightly disoriented until the very end. As with "Memento", I still can't say I fully understand "All Roads", but I don't hesitate to recommend it.
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