Reviews by Spike

I might as well state my bias up front: I love puzzle-focused games, and I think Arthur DiBianca is among the most innovative puzzle designers in IF these days. He tends to write parser games where only a few commands are allowed. Some folks in the IF community dislike that approach, but I am not one of them. In fact, I think restricting the verb set for a game heavy on puzzles and intentionally light on story is an excellent design move: It keeps the game focused on the puzzle-solving.

The Temple of Shorgil is another such puzzle-focused, limited-parser game from Arthur. The setting is that you are a scholar studying the ancient Pirothian culture. You've discovered their fabled Temple of Shorgil, and the game consists of you exploring it to uncover its secrets. But the experience of playing the game is mostly of figuring out how to place a set of figurines on pedestals in different ways. This may sound like there's not much to do, but once again (see, for example, The Wand and Inside the Facility) Arthur has taken a simple mechanic and transformed it into a large number of puzzles ranging from easy to much more difficult. The result is a unified game experience that nevertheless provides a varied, complex set of challenges. It's great design.

With the placement of objects being the mechanic, The Temple of Shorgil has some shades of his game Excelsior. It also reminds me of Inside the Facility, in that gaining more figurines unlocks new areas (in Inside the Facility, you collect higher-level keycards).

The Temple of Shorgil also features a collection of illustrations by Corinna Browning, which aren't necessary for solving the puzzles but add some nice atmosphere. The various map settings range from helpful to extremely helpful with respect to orienting yourself and solving some of the challenges.

Highly recommended for puzzle enthusiasts.

Alias 'The Magpie' drew me in quickly, with its very English tone and sense of humor. I found it cleverly-written, well-implemented, and a lot of fun to play.

Like last year's The Wizard Sniffer, as the story in Alias 'The Magpie' unfolds it keeps raising the comedic stakes higher and higher in ways that leave you thinking, "How is this all going to hold together?" But it does. Does it ever: I have rarely laughed so much playing an IF game! J.J. Guest has already demonstrated a fine-tuned ear for comedy in To Hell in a Hamper, but it's clear he's gotten better with time: Alias 'The Magpie' is longer, features several more characters, and has a much more complex plot, but that comedic fine-tuning somehow manages to be even more on pitch.

My one critique is that I think a couple of the puzzles are rather difficult for a light comedy game. But this is a minor critique in what is a truly excellent parser comedy - one of the best IF comedies I've ever played, in fact.

The subtitle of Flowers of Mysteria is "an old-fashioned text adventure," and that is very much the truth. For example, the title page features ASCII graphics, and after each command you are asked "What now?" followed by the prompt. It was also written with what looks like a homebrew parser.

The plot is that you are tasked with finding four mystical flowers in order to brew a remedy for the ill king. Finding the flowers isn't too hard; the puzzles are mostly straightforward and logical, in keeping with the game's old-fashioned text adventure sensibility. I did go to the walkthrough for help once, but that was the only place where I was stuck for a while. (And the solution made sense once I knew what it was.)

One solid design choice in particular helps Flowers of Mysteria avoid some of the problems often found in older text games: It tells you exactly which verbs are understood, so there are no guess-the-verb issues. (I went back to this list several times - it was quite helpful.)

If you like old-fashioned text adventures, I'd recommend this.

This is the kind of work that goes better in a choice-based format than in parser. You play as Jennifer, a woman who is faced with a series of choices over the course of the early part of her life (through her early 30s, I think) as to whether to have children.

Playing A Woman's Choice and exploring Jennifer's options had me repeatedly thinking back to my wife's and my decision to have kids and the decisions I've seen friends make (both yes and no), as well as why we made these decisions. I haven't really done that in a long time. That's the kind of reaction I'd want from a reader if I had written this work, and so I'd call A Woman's Choice a success.

I do have two critiques to offer, though (with the caveat that I did not play multiple times to see different endings).

A Woman's Choice argues that society places expectations on women with respect to children, and, contra those expectations, women should have the freedom to make their own choices. The choice that I made felt abrupt, though: I think it was when (Spoiler - click to show)I had just met Paul at the party and I chose to laugh when he asked me about kids. I picked this option because I had hoped it would let me delay the choice so that I could think about it some more. Instead (I think) it was my final choice: Everything else seemed to play out from that decision. My first critique is that I would have liked the chance to think about this more and maybe even change my mind.

My second critique is harder to explain without giving away too much of the work, but here goes: I think A Woman's Choice would have been strengthened with more exploration of the different consequences to a long-term relationship from having a disagreement as fundamental as having children. A Woman's Choice felt to me to present the choice to be solely Jennifer's, but my observation is that in practice this usually involves more negotiation. Often the relationship is so important to the two parties involved that together they work out between them how they will handle the question of children. (And, yes, sometimes the distance between what the two people want is so far apart that it makes sense for the relationship to end.) At any rate, I would have liked to have seen more of this exploration in A Woman's Choice.

Writing farce is like a figure skater launching into a spin: It’s easy to overdo it or underdo it just a little and spoil the effect. Overdo the comedy in farce, and it’s embarrassingly silly. Underdo the comedy in farce, and it comes across as cruel.

The Wizard Sniffer nails it, though, in a spiraling cascade of zaniness that had me laughing out loud several times. Slapstick antic followed slapstic antic, the stakes getting higher each time, and I found myself saying again and again, “I cannot believe the game just went there!”

Part of what makes this work is that the puzzles and pacing are just right. The puzzles are clever and well-integrated into the game but not too difficult; too much player frustration would kill the effect.

Also, the text plays “straight man”: The writing is strong, but Hudson wisely avoids the temptation to go for laughs within the text itself. Instead, the humor is enhanced by the discrepancy between the crazy action in front of you and the I’m-just-describing-what’s-happening text that’s mediating that craziness.

The Wizard Sniffer is really, truly funny. It reminds me of one of those 1930s screwball comedies - or maybe a classic Looney Tunes cartoon. I’ve never laughed so much playing an IF game.

The Hermit's Secret is an early 1980s Colossal Cave knockoff: find the treasures, put them in the right place, magic words, someone who chases you, someone who steals your treasures... but without the originality and atmosphere of Colossal Cave.

The parser is limited, in keeping with its 1980s release date. Some of the puzzles aren't too bad, but at least one of the better ones is lifted almost directly from Colossal Cave.

It's also buggy, but in a strange way. I've played two versions of it, and each had a different major bug that wasn't present in the other version.

This game holds my personal record for longest time to win an IF game. I first played it in 1985, and after a few weeks I was close to being finished with it. But with no InvisiClues and no Internet, I had no way to find out how to solve those last few puzzles. I played it on and off again over the years but never won it. Finally, in about 2004, I was playing through it again and stumbled across the solution to the one puzzle I hadn't figured out yet. I suspect I'll never top 19 years between starting and finally winning an IF game.

The Hermit's Secret probably wasn't bad for its time, but it's not anywhere near Infocom quality. While I feel some nostalgia for it, I can't recommend it except for historical reasons.

I recently showed this game to my nine-year-old son. He had a lot of fun with it, spending a couple of hours playing it over a few nights. He even went so far as to ask me to print out some maps of the U.S. so that he could practice finding routes from state to state.

Overall, my son really enjoyed the game, and it increased his knowledge of U.S. geography. A win.

I wouldn't really call this "interactive fiction," although it is parser-based. It's more of a text-based mini-game. Thus I don't feel I should give it a star rating.

I was pleasantly surprised by this game. (I wasn't expecting much: a non-Infocom game from the 80s with an educational focus.) Yes, the parser is weak. Yet this was not a source of frustration: The game was clear enough on what you needed to do at each point that I had no "guess-the-verb" problems. It also comes with a player's guide that lists all verbs recognized by the game.

The puzzles are the game's main strength. Several are quite clever, getting into mathematical topics like tessellations, Eulerian paths, and prime numbers. I never felt like the puzzles were unfair - either for adults or for the intended audience of 8-14-year-olds. In fact, I could easily imagine a class of students bunched around a computer, saying "Try this!" and "What about that?", as they work through the game together.