Reviews by C.E.J. Pacian
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Engrossing, but Flawed, November 24, 2008The 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.
Haunting and Unique, August 12, 2008A 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.
Game Over, Man!, August 12, 2008Although 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.
The Chicken Must Die, July 2, 2008Although 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.
Apocalypse a Few Centuries Ago, July 2, 2008As a hypochondriac, I stopped playing Vespers as soon as I read the word 'plague'. And then, a few days later, I started playing it again. Something about its atmospheric depiction of an abbey barricaded against the Black Death drew me back, not because it was pleasant, but because it was quite thoroughly sinister.
Another thing that quickly had me hooked me was the way Vespers starts out as a medieval detective story. Alongside the plague, murder has come to the abbey, not to mention a mysterious waif and stray, and the monks are all acting strangely - among them the player character. As things progress, Vespers only becomes darker and more sinister, something that I would normally expect to repel me - but this carefully constructed rendition of apocalyptic Dark Age sentiments kept me hooked until, naturally enough, the detective portion gives way to a set of uncomfortable decisions - some of which you will have already made before you realise their portent.
This kind of IF game, where you must explore a world and form a moral reaction, has obviously been done before, most notably in Slouching Towards Bedlam. But whereas in that game I found myself having to refer to the hints to get the least thing done, my experience with Vespers flowed quite nicely towards its dramatic and nihilistic conclusion.
Missed Opportunity, May 18, 2008I don't normally play games based on a title alone, and I typically avoid fan-games, fan-fiction and fan-anything-else like the plague, but... I also happen to think that there's potential for IF games in the Metroidvania style, so I decided to give this one a go. For the uninitiated, 'Metroidvania' games, named for their progenitors, Metroid and Castlevania, are action-platformers involving exploration, character-progression and, to a lesser extent, storyline. The main character will typically have to explore a sprawling environment, such as an alien planet or ancient castle, find items to improve their abilities, and then use those abilities to access new areas or defeat more powerful foes.
None of which is evident in this IF game. Instead we find a constant stream of entirely random battles that happen to name-check a few characters and locations from the original Metroid (each with what I suspect is supposed to be a humorous (TM) after them). Type SHOOT METROID and USE HEALTHPACK (not actually something present in any Metroid title) about a hundred times and the game ends. That's it.
I sometimes see this grouped in with the IF Arcade submissions. But while most of those games seem to involve a reasonable adaptation or deconstruction of the originals, this sparse title takes nothing from its supposed inspiration, and gives nothing unique from itself.
Tough Choices, May 18, 2008Something strange happened when I first played Masquerade. I found that I didn't know what to type. And I liked it. Of course, I knew what I could type to advance the story - 'yes' or 'no' - but which choice would work out better for our beleaguered heroine?
A lot is made of whether IF games should have puzzles or simply be about following bread crumbs through a linear story, so I think it's important to remember the games that break free of this dichotomy. There are few, if any intentional puzzles in Masquerade - but it still challenges players by confronting them with typical, but well-constructed romance-genre decisions - do you marry for money? If so, how quickly do you try to pursue true love unfaithfully? And is your 'true love' really all he's cracked up to be anyway?
On repeat plays, Masquerade turns out to actually be a very linear game. The choices you make have only a small effect on the path you take. And yet, the game wouldn't be the same without them. Somehow, I found an unhappy proposition of marriage to be as much of a challenge as a locked door - with the added bonus that when I'd dwelled on it long enough, I could immediately move forward through the story.
Of course, I did say that there were no intentional puzzles. Masquerade falls at the very last hurdle. In what is probably, for many players, the scene before the 'expected' ending, the game requires you to type something relatively obscure to perform what is surely the most obvious thing for the player to do in this situation - a problem exacerbated by the way the scene makes the opposite choice for you if you take too long. For the record, the phrase to type is: (Spoiler - click to show)TAKE TICKETS. There are a few instances like this, where the game seems to push you a little roughly to do things that could be better clued, but otherwise I think that Masquerade demonstrates how players can still feel challenged by an IF game with no puzzles.
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