Ratings and Reviews by C.E.J. Pacian

Down and Out, as I'll call it here for short, is a promising first work of IF: woefully untested, slightly hodgepodge, but well written and with several nifty features.

I really wanted to have reached the end of this game before posting a review, but after perhaps over an hour of trying everything I could think of, I have to admit that I'm stumped. And as you might expect with an untested first game, I'm not entirely convinced that the place I'm stuck is actually supposed to be a puzzle. On the plus side, in all this poking around I did uncover an ambitious attempt at simulation and - eventually - the game's rather nifty and involved central puzzle.

It's easy to look at this game and see a catalogue of rookie errors: unimplemented scenery, missing synonyms, actions you're prompted to take but which do nothing, weirdly phrased commands - (Spoiler - click to show)'strike match against matchbox' is required to progress, for example, while light match produces a very peculiar response, and no, you can't refer to it simply as a box. On top of that there are a few old-school bogeymen returning from the dark ages. There's a tight inventory limit that's all the more annoying because many commands require that you're holding objects, but don't go so far as to take them implicitly. This is a game about exploring a creepy house, but there's only a tangential hint not to enter the room that triggers the end-game - and a bad ending if you haven't completed that puzzle I mentioned earlier. Perhaps this all seems like a lot of marks against Down and Out, but really I think they just amount to one big one: lack of testing.

While the amnesiac premise may seem clichéd, and the back-story, as it's revealed, may hold up to little scrutiny, the game still manages a fair few imaginative flourishes, with its poison mists and gas-masked slave drivers. And perhaps what makes me most inclined to forgive Down and Out its sins is the writing - the parser speaks as a straightforward and slightly naïve first person narrator, with a few amusing changes to the default messages. Like the rest of the game, it's nothing too special, but it does hint at an author who - with more time and more testing - may well have good things to offer us in the future.

If you're anything like me, I'm sure you've enjoyed finding books and computers in IF games that let you wander through a menu of backstory. The Endling Archive is essentially the same thing, only without the containing game. So, yes, it is pretty much just reading static text from a menu that expands after you've select a couple of options.

The Endling Archive strikes me as a good germ of an idea. I'm surprised that I've never played an IF game before that exclusively treated the parser as a fictional computer system, and it seems to me that there should be a wealth of retro-futuristic (or just pretend unix console) hacking games. There aren't however, so for now we'll just have to enjoy this strange and haunting encyclopaedia of things that the future and present have lost.

When I realised what had happened at the end of this game, I burst out laughing in a way that I'm not sure I ever have with an IF game before. The ending - which I won't spoil, naturally - is a typical example of the kind of brilliant stupidity that made me enjoy this game so much. Stupid Kittens is clearly the work of a capable IF author - capable enough to understand how to bend the structure of a good game back on itself and create a feedback loop of intelligently conceived idiocy.

I'm sure that the poorly spelled opening text of this game has scared off a good few people, who assume that it's one of those self conscious parodies of bad games that blight IF Comp and manage, without fail, to never be the least bit entertaining. Stupid Kittens is more subtle than that, and more in-your-face as well. Simply put, this is a game where stupid things happen. Unexpected stupid things. The game carefully sets up traps for you to walk into, that if you're anything like me, will have you giggling with childish glee as soon as you realise just what (metaphorically speaking) you've stepped in. There are no real puzzles, just a bad acid trip of a game, where the rules change on a whim and the philosophical and moronic are tangled up in one great wet furball.

I guess, when it gets down to it, this is a game where you play a cat that, under instruction from Buddha, finds its soul up its backside. You know whether that's your kind of thing.

Perhaps the best compliment I could give to Nightfall is that playing it never once felt like work. The prose is concise, the puzzles (which are more like semi-realistic obstacles) are simple and straightforward, and there are a number of handy features to keep you on track.

Nightfall is primarily a game of exploration. The nameless main character has remained behind in an evacuated city to try and find his aloof and alluring female friend, and as he proceeds through the eerily deserted streets, bittersweet memories of his (until now, platonic) relationship with her come flooding back. Intriguing things are also afoot in the present, as you follow one step behind this mysterious woman, pondering her possible involvement with or against the strange powers at work in the city - and wondering just how much the PC is right to admire her.

Nightfall flows very easily. For the most part, I think this is simply the result of good decisions at the most basic levels of design and writing. But it helps that the author has also gone above and beyond the call of duty to add advanced features to help players get into the story. The player character can THINK about what he's learned and what options that knowledge points towards - and if you're stuck he can THINK HARDER (a nice phrase to type when you're lost, I feel) and come up with more explicit pointers. As a resident of the city, he can also GO TO locations - something that perhaps is more useful than it should be, given the realistically convoluted depiction of typical urban English geography.

Sometimes I think that IF authors forget that the vast potential for their games to accept varied and subtle commands, even those commands most commonly used by other games, can leave many players throwing up their arms in frustration - can turn away everyone not completely used to (or fond of) the crossword-narrative hybrid that some consider intrinsic to the medium. With Nightfall, I think that we have a nice example of an IF game that makes it easy to take part, while still providing the challenge of exploration and the involvement of decision-making.

The beginning of The Lucubrator is a perfect example of everything that's both great and unfortunate about this game. You start out strapped to a slab in a morgue. Several graphical games have used this gimmick before, probably because it's a sure-fire attention grabber. Straight away, you find yourself in a gripping situation. And straight away, you find yourself having to try and read the author's mind. Because, as I mentioned, you're strapped to a slab in a morgue. So what can you actually do? The restraints aren't described in any detail when you examine them, you can't speak or reach anything... Seriously, what are you supposed to do? The answer is a verb that you probably won't think of unprompted. And sadly, the game doesn't give you any nudges in the right direction.

Lucubrator continues like this: great sequences that are a little rough around the edges but otherwise rather unlike anything you'll have experienced in an IF game before - and which unfortunately can only be solved by doing unusual actions at exactly the right time, not just unprompted, but sometimes in direct contradiction of the game's text. The ideas themselves are brilliant - if gruesome - and I don't want to spoil any of the over-the-top feats of murderous carnage you get up to, but I don't see how anyone could actually come up with them without first resorting to the walkthrough.

Lucubrator reminds me a lot of some of George A. Romero's more obscure films - The Crazies, for example: rough, low-budget, slightly creaky, but also rather inspired and deranged. Whether this kind of B-movie splatterpunk game is your thing is something that only you can know for sure.

A beautifully written, evocative, almost poetic game, The Moonlit Tower is a short tale of strange myth and melancholy longing that, in its final moments, gave me goosebumps in the best possible way. Best of all, though, contrary to what you may expect from a game praised for its writing, The Moonlit Tower is far from florid or long-winded, its tightly written imagery packing a lot of content into a few sentences per action.

My one complaint is that such a stunning story, more than capable of carrying itself entirely on the strength of its surreal and deeply implemented setting, is at heart a puzzle game. The mid-part, where you must figure out how to use the sundry gorgeously described items you find, was for me the weakest, the flow of the prose being constantly interrupted by the need to wonder what on Earth (or elsewhere) I actually had to do to make the story continue, or by trips to the terse and occasionally frustrating hint menu.

But even if you are, like me, puzzle-averse, this is some of the most affecting writing I can call to mind, and the chance to explore this exquisite world should not be turned down.

Although I have great fondness for the IF Arcade submissions, it did take me a while to actually get around to playing this particular one.  The chief barrier was its verbosity. There's a lot of prose in here, fleshing out a non-stop chain-reaction of intense events. As a concept, inspired by a relatively bizarre arcade game, this apocalyptic sci-fi war story hits all the right buttons for me. It's cliched enough to foster the sense of participating in your favourite bug-blasting movie or novel, but tinged with a layer of multicoloured surreality that makes it rather original as well.

There's only one problem, and it's kind of a big one. It's not just that this game is wordy, it's that it's pretty much just a short story with command prompts between the paragraphs. Certainly, there's a little bit of branching in the airborne introduction, with a hearty number of prompted, non-standard actions (you're told that your forehead itches, for example, and attempts to scratch it are thwarted by your space helmet), but exploration of this sequence is made a little frustrating by the tight time limits and the way you can't 'undo' twice in succession. And once you hit the ground, pretty much nothing you do has any effect on the story. Something really bothers me about a game where I can just type 'wait' over and over again and watch my character take exactly the same actions as he would have had I typed anything else.

Still, it's short, it's atmospheric, it's witty, and it has far more character than plenty of similarly themed graphical games with multi-million dollar budgets.

Although Downtown Tokyo, Present Day is most likely to be mentioned for its bipartite player character - you play the parts of both the hero in a monster B-movie and a cinema-goer in the audience - this game must surely be equally notable for demonstrating how a small set of commands can create a game that is diverse, malleable and above all fun.

All you need to do is fly your helicopter in compass directions, go up and down, and push the button that deploys its grabber - and in this fashion you explore the game's city, picking things up and dropping them experimentally, triggering various humorous responses from the parser, and doing all you can to save a nondescript love-interest from the clutches of a giant mutant chicken. There should be more IF games like this.