Reviews by Felix Larsson

It all starts with the PC sitting on a tour tram through Everglades National Park, Florida. Except for a few obscure references in the introduction to the game and a mysterious item in your inventory, you have no clue at all to what you‘re supposed to do in the game, and until the first puzzle is solved, the PC’s motivations and identity, too, will remain perfectly concealed to the player (though, presumably, well known to the PC).

The first part of the game is all one puzzle. It’s quite possible to put the game in an unwinnable state here: to work the puzzle you need to know a few things about the game world and you also must take precautions against certain (predictable) future complications. The puzzle is not too bad, if you feel for a bit of old schoolish puzzle-working, but it does involve a lot of extremely tedious wandering about in the (labyrinthine) wetlands of the Park.

Then, all of a sudden, the game changes character totally and in almost all relevant respects. It is revealed that the PC is … well, since the author obvisouly thinks the player should not be aware of it, I guess this calls for a (Spoiler - click to show). It seems that you’re really a pilot in a giant robotic alligator fleet called Gator-On dedicated to environmental protection cheap animated cartoon super-hero style. Specifically, the evil Pyth-Nor Real Estate Development Consortium has constructed a giant robotic python, which you and the rest of Gator-On have to engage in combat...

From there on the game is just as weird as that. This concluding part of the game depends heavily on non-standard commands. However, the text of the story generally (though perhaps not invariably) gives you sufficient clues to them.

Why! There was another kind of maze to be had after all!

Here you play the role of an art student gone burglar, eyes set on that gem-studded Byzantine chalice in the museum. The main puzzle of this clever little game consists in figuring out how the maze is constructed (and how to familiarize yourself with the things you carry); after that, gameplay is very straightforward and the mission soon completed.

It’s definitely not a game to try unless you are reasonably familiar with IF conventions, though.

(If you want to prolong the fun or just more of a challenge, I suggest you try make do WITHOUT the map feelie provided by the author.)

There’s a really original idea behind this puzzle piece: you go around transforming things by taking a letter away from its name or by adding one to it. As soon as its name is changed, the thing itself is transformed accordingly: for (non-spoiler) example, if from the hillside you see the imperial fleet approaching, you can take the ‘l’ from it, and instead you will see the imperial feet approaching; you now have an ‘l’, which you can add to the man eating grue that you’re faced with inside the cave, and all of a sudden it’s a man eating gruel you’re faced with in that cave. The puzzles in the game are all of this kind.

The idea, I think, is really great; regrettably, the game doesn’t quite match it. Not that it lacks ‘good-making characteristics’ even apart from the fresh puzzle mechanics: at the bottom of the screen is a nice running commentary to the events of the game in the form of the PC’s silent thoughts (often funny, sometimes helpfully giving hints); it starts with an excellent interactive in-game training sessions that accustoms the player both to its novel kind of puzzles and to the continuing need to talk to NPC:s (when you’re not transforming things, you’re talking to NPC:s. You should do a lot of talking to most anything and keep talking to it till you don’t get any new answers); also, the author manages to make all of these many and extended (linear) dialogues with NPC:s entertaining. However, I still didn’t find the game as a whole as appealing as many of its details.

Obviously, a game built around this kind of puzzles will only work in a very fantastical setting. The problem is that Earl Grey often passes the border from the fantastical into the arbitrary. And this is true in regard to puzzles as well as storyline.

All too often the solutions to puzzles are arbitrary: there simply exists no reason whatsoever to expect certain transformations to solve the problem at hand. Still you perform those transformations—merely because they are possible but without the slightest clue as to why they should be of any help at all—and POOF! you’re told that the transformed objects work some magic that happens to take care of the PC’s present problems.

The story, too, takes a lot of arbitrary turns and unmotivated twists that, as player, you can’t avoid, try as you might. Indeed, in the linear parts of the game even the PC takes actions that not only appears arbitrary and unmotivated at the time but also seem at odds with what he does, thinks, and feels at other times. (Spoiler - click to show)To begin with you’re very flattered to have been invited to a certain monk’s tea garden party and he gives you your magic powers of transformation in order for you to collect varieties of tea down in the village. Then for no reason at all the PC uses these powers to ruin the monk’s precious garden. The monk gets mad and wreaks havoc upon the poor village, then disappears. Now the PC decides to save the village, but, after quite a halfhearted attempt at that, you set off after the monk instead. Before you catch up with the monk, you happen upon an impoverished prince whom you promise to restore to his throne; and when you do find the monk, all wrongs are forgotten and the two of you are readily reconciled. Now, all you have to do is put the rightful king on his throne, then go save the villagers … perhaps.

To me at least the virtues of the game didn’t quite make up for the lack of direction in the story and the lack of foreseeability in the solution of puzzles.

This piece is an almost purely literary IF short story, to be read mainly for the mood it evokes.

It’s set in a wintry czarist Russia, in the kind of aristocratic milieu you find in Tolstoy’s novels.
The PC is a gentle soul—one of those nice guys that really weren’t made for duels at dawn, at all—who has lost everything that made his life worth living. The main NPC is his much more cheerful good friend, both of them fairly convincingly portrayed, short as the work is.

There are no actual puzzles in the work, though it can end happy or unhappy. However, the unhappy ending is certainly the most satisfying one (artistically speaking),giving the whole work a suitable and very nice closure, while the happy ending leaves things pretty much hanging in the air.

Nevertheless, the piece is worth some replay (or re-reading), even if you’re not hunting for the happy end. After you finish the game, the author suggests some amusing things to try on replay. Actually, though, replay offers more than just a little extra amusement, since the small IF world of this work proved richer than at least I first thought. Also, poking around a little in it can reveal aspects of the plot that may not have been obvious on the first reading.

Since I called the work “literary”, it may be as well to stress that it achieves its artistic effects by means specific to interactive fiction: a transcript of a play-through of the work would not have the same literary qualities as the work has in (inter)action.)
The author tries to tell a very definite story without puzzles, but with full interactivity preserved—even in the flashback scene! Since there are no puzzles to lead you on through the plot, you can, if you wish, obstruct and prevent the story from proceeding for as long as you wish.
In this particular piece I didn’t find this possibility a problem. Why should the player/reader of a (good) work of IF want to be deliberately un-cooperative? Perhaps an IF-author has a right to assume som edegree of “willing suspension of disobligingness” on the part of players, just as an author of non-interactive fiction can assume suspension of disbelief on the part of readers?

So you thought you were in for a cave crawl? Actually, it is more like a quiz show, only set in a Steve Jacksonesque fantasy dungeon and presented by a mysterious Guardian of the Goblet.

You wander through a series of rooms, each containing a puzzle. By solving the current puzzle you gain entrance to the next room. In the last room looms the Goblet of your dreams.

The puzzles are varied in character, difficulty, and fairness, but none strikes me as really ingenious; and presented ‘raw’ like this, out of any particular narrative context and without any other in-game motivation, they fail to hold my interest.

The world, sparsely furnished as it is, is only minimally implemented: if, say, the heavy treasure chest in the middle of the room is not needed to solve the puzzle of that room, then, try as you might to open it, “you can’t see any such thing”.

This is most certainly not a game to put in the hands or computers of anyone new to IF.

(And the ending! Is that the sound of the author laughing at me?)

An “old-school romp” the author calls it—and one that wisely avoids any flaws of its old sources of inspirations. You (or your mind or soul or consciousness or whatever) happens to be trapped inside a small robot, and you must figure out how to reclaim your body.

The puzzles are fairly easy; the game is polite (in the Zarfian sense—you can’t put it in an unwinnable state, and if you die, simply undo your last move) with a few in-game hints and even a non-spoiler map; writing is straightfoward in style and quite decent in quality, and there are no major bugs (one bad typo in the Competition version, though—the player can only refer to a bunch of property tags as “tage” rather than as “tags”); it’s probably finished in no more than two hours.

There were some nice details in it, too: the way you have to accustom yourself to your robotic body e.g., and (for once!) a perfectly acceptable in-game reason for a four items inventory limit.

All in all I’d say it’s presumably a good game for beginners, also—or even especially—for kids.

This SF piece is definitely worth reading and playing. The PC is a young boy sent on a mining mission on a spaceship under “punishment regime” by his father to make a man of him. (Settlers are much the same, it would seem, whether in 24th century Space or in 19th century Old West.)

Apparently, Wigdahl is a professional programmer and a veteran Infocom beta-tester, though this is his first work as IF-author. And it’s a very well-told and well-coded story, indeed; actually, the telling and coding is rather better than the story itself—which makes the reading/playing experience a curious mixture of satisfaction and (relative) disappointment.

In particular, I found the central puzzle somewhat disappointing, partly because it sins again the degree of realism already established in the narrative—it’s simply unbelievable that the engine of 24th century spaceships would employ a mechanism anything like this—, partly because (Spoiler - click to show)the puzzle is a quite hard and quite old one that many players will have learned from logic and lateral thinking puzzle books already as kids, probably making it virtually insoluble to some and really trivial to others.

At his web site, Wigdahl states that the whole piece was conceived and realized in three months (in time for the IF Competition), so there simply can’t have been very much time left for story and puzzle design. I do hope he got hooked on writing IF, for I would love a long series of works of his with puzzles and stories to match the execution.

By the way, Grounded in Space also has an interesting formal structure: its level of interactivity increases as the story progresses. The transition between these levels never feel contrived or unmotivated; on the contrary, they correspond well to what might reasonably be required from the PC at different stages of the story (so much so that I suspect this formal structure was not intended by the author but dictated by his material).

The story thus begins in ‘linear’ mode: it will unfold very much the same whatever you do. This linear opening serves as an introduction to the rest of the story, just as the first chapter of a book or the opening scenes of a play or a film normally does. In the case at hand, it introduces the player to the personality of the PC and explains what an inexperienced kid like him is doing all alone aboard a spaceship a long way from home.

The linear section is followed by one in ‘hypertext’ mode: i.e. you choose freely what to read and in what order. This hypertext section allows you (and the PC) to become familiar with the environment (the spaceship Marryat) and with your supposed task aboard.

To my mind, these first sequences very successfully sets the mood and premises of the work. (Perhaps, to a die-hard IF gamer as opposed to a willing IF reader, the may seem too long or irreleant or boring or whatever. I really wouldn’t know, since I am the willing reader. and I enjoyed these sections.)

Then finally you enter the properly ‘interactive’ mode in a section that leads up to the peripety of the story and the central puzzle. And after that there are several ways to bring the story to several distinct, more or less happy conclusions

‘Objectively’ the game is nothing but a series of easy puzzles set in a silly nonsense environment: you play a beta tester of a virtual reality world called “the Toybox”.

The whole thing lives solely (and well) off it sense of humour and its central gimmick, viz. the long—sometimes very long—and funny descriptions of items and certain actions (spoon)fed to you by your hitting any key after having read so far. This allows a kind of timing of jokes and punchlines that the author uses to very good effect.

However—there’s a first and a second part to this game. The first part is great fun (if you like silly fun) thanks to the witty writing. After solving the 1st puzzle though, things become more buggy and less implemented. Actually, the game seems simply unfinished—at least in the version entered in IF Comp ’09. Suffice it to say that I really do look forward to a final version where Game Dame Hellaine and her Fun&Games-room is anything like implemented and where I can’t put Jorry the famous stand-up comedian in my backpack.

This is IF in a surreal setting, as such it exploits the lack of logical and natural constraints typical of dreams: the geography of the fictional world does not respect natural laws; NPCs act irreducibly strange etc.

At his website Barker tells us that «Chaos was meant to be a descriptive and unsettling work». And at times he does succeed in being unsettling in just the surreal way intended, especially, I think, if you happen up in “the Infinite”, which soon becomes full of surreally sinister things.

The characterization of the piece as a ‘descriptive work’ is correct (and the writing, by the way, is quite able) and this, I think, puts the finger on it’s weak spot, viz. the lack of plot. The work is descriptive rather than narrative; actually it’s a nearly plotless puzzle piece. The problem is that the PC never is presented with much in the way of motive for acting at all: no treasure hunt, no monsters to defeat, no mystery to solve. You’re sent out to find food for a starving vulture; but I’m not sure if you do it out of pity or out of fear of being eaten by the bird. In the end, I felt I was doing it simply because there seemed to be very little else to do in that game world.

Barker, at the web site, tells us his piece was influenced by filmmakers working in a surreal vein. Perhaps the kind of surreal sequences of events that work well on the screen simply won’t work in interactive fiction. As a reader of IF it’s (of course) simply not possible to sit back and observe the series of events as they unfold; you have to take active part in it and influence it, or nothing will happen at all. But to do that in any interesting way, you’re pretty much bound both to have an in-fiction purpose to guide you—the kind of purpose that can, perhaps, not be had without a storyline. Again, I think, it’s the lack of plot that seriously marrs Chaos as interactive fiction.

The surrealism of it all even means that you can’t be perfectly sure that things that seem to be puzzles really are. And at the same time the plotlessness makes it hard to know whether you are making any real progress through the game or not. The scoring system didn’t help me much either. What does a negative score mean in this game’s context? That the game is now in an unwinnable state? Or that I am farther from completing it now than when I began?

Besides, the work has its fair share of bugs, underimplementations, inconsistent descriptions and technical flaws that could surely have been avoided with some beta-testing. That said, however, there were also some nice, unexpected details here and there.

This very short piece sketches an excentric way of making narrative sense of Pac-Man: (Spoiler - click to show)Pac-Man is a junkie, haunted by ghostly apparitions; he needs a ”power pill” to save his day, drive his ghosts away, and go to junkie heaven. I’m sure the author could have made more of this particular idea; but, as it stands, it’s no more than a mere sketch, with no real choices for Pac-Man to make along the brief way to the ending: you go one way you win, you go another you die. The writing is as good as it comes, though.