Ratings and 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.

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 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.