Ratings and Reviews by The Year Is Yesterday

Death Off The Cuff offers an intriguing premise: a famous detective, you've gathered all the suspects for that all-important scene in which you will reveal the true identity of the murderer. The only problem is that you haven't the first clue who that might be. In order to attempt to trick the culprit into a confession, you begin to spout off about whatever's at hand, using the command "talk about" for the majority of interactions, although examine and a few other verbs play a role. You can only talk about things that are visible in the room around you, a clever method of conflating the player with the PC, who is of course casting around desperately for any topic that might yield a confession. Nor is that the only way in which the player and the PC think alike: since neither of you know what you're doing, you'll spend most of the game suggesting random or arbitrary topics of conversation in the hopes that something sticks. The result is impressive in terms of putting you in the shoes of the detective; however, it's too arbitrary to be consistently enjoyable. The limitations on action, and the one-room nature of the game, keep things simple enough for the story to unfold tightly, and there are more than a few twists and turns. Typing "help" at any point will provide a hint on what to do next, and if you get fed up you can always accuse the wrong person. In all, a brief, linear diversion that's slightly more clever than it is fun.

I died more times than I can count playing Hunter, in Darkness, but I loved every second of it. In a masochistic sort of way, perhaps. This is one of the most claustrophobic, terror-inducing titles I've encountered - an achievement, considering it's based on (Spoiler - click to show)Hunt The Wumpus. The puzzles all come logically, and even better, the various deaths arrive with a brutal, no-nonsense finality that encourages you to try a different tack, rather than frustrating you with that feeling of being so close and so far. This is a serious story, not of adventure, but of survival, unsympathetic and unadulterated.

In Works of Fiction, you play as a shady publisher who drinks a drug cocktail he probably shouldn't have and begins experiencing multiple realities simultaneously. The way this plays out on-screen is certainly innovative: the text begins branching into more and more columns; performing actions in "reality" will have corresponding effects in every other universe open to you. This opens the way for some clever puzzles, and it's worth a play just to see this device in action.

Unfortunately, the rest of the game doesn't live up to its premise. Much of it can be explained away by the fact that English isn't the author's first language: phrasing and spelling range from awkward to nearly incomprehensible. This in itself spoils a lot of the game's one-liners and makes a few puzzles needlessly difficult. However, there's more than just a language gap here. Navigation is difficult, as most rooms descriptions don't list exits. There's also at least one non-standard verb; (Spoiler - click to show)although the game teaches it to you when you'll first need it, it crops up several more times, with just enough space in between that you may have forgotten about its existence. There are also times when something seems like a puzzle, but in fact is simply window dressing; later in the game you'll move the story forward by increasingly arbitrary actions, while meaningful ones are ignored. In all, this results in a hideously unbalanced experience: some puzzles are laughably easy, whereas others seem to require psychic abilities. And interacting with items is always a mixed bag: half of the things described in the text don't actually exist in play.

And then there's the overall tone of the game. The split-worlds thing was cool, but about halfway through it degenerates into a meaningless series of pop-culture references, pointless jokes about Orson Welles and David Lynch, and music and images that seem to exist for no reason other than to increase the size of the download. Reading in another review that the author is one of the stars of the French IF scene, and waiting upwards of fifteen minutes for the download to complete, I expected, at worst, a flawed masterpiece. What I got instead was a smart premise that falls apart halfway through in favor of poorly-designed puzzles and a series of unfunny in-jokes. I can only conclude that JB's IF is best savored not in translation.

As the description says, Dual Transform takes place in one room and in many. There is only one carryable object, and there are legion. Without moving from place to place, you shift the room around you by invoking certain archetypes, such as "pressure" or "heat." The strength of the writing, then, rests less on the story than on the degree to which every element of the room encapsulates the archetype from which it was derived. This is pulled off, to my mind, to varying degrees of success. What's more successful is the vitality and dynamism present within the various spaces invoked: some crackle with energy, others suggest oppression or dread, others are harder to pin down. The writing, however, is secondary here to the puzzles, which hinge on taking advantage of the symmetry between the room in its various forms: what changes, and what stays the same. They are mostly simple, but pleasing to the brain. The one flaw here is that pesky "To Be Continued" message at the end...

Spider and Web is all about trial and error. Yet it somehow manages to make those trials and errors fun, intriguing, and occasionally illuminating. A too heavy-handed description of the story, or even the gameplay, would ruin the several "a-ha!" moments that Plotkin has set up for you. Play for a few minutes and you'll see the first. The second is nested much deeper.... While the game provides enough hints to keep things moving along, I was occasionally overwhelmed by the multitude of items in my possession, and the occasionally maze-like layout of the setting. However, there's a cognitively dissonant moment near the end - you'll know it when you see it - that could only be pulled off in IF, and only by somebody like Plotkin. It's when - no, I'll never tell.

The value of 9:05 is in its perfectly spare prose.

This is an exceedingly difficult game to review. The writing is wryly Victorian and often amusing, the mechanics are quite transgressive, and the "story" is ambiguous enough to allow for several satisfying interpretations. You can't die, but it's fiendishly difficult at times, while at others it's ethereally simple. Despite the fact that I despise the first half of it, the second is brilliant enough that I can't bear to rate it below four stars.

One of the conceits of Wallpaper is that the setting reacts to your presence: passageways will open or close depending on your movements. This is not very friendly for somebody like me, who can barely keep track of the relative position of moderately complex rooms when everything's standing still. And, for reasons that will hopefully become clear as you play, nearly all non-movement verbs other than examine have been disabled, so if you don't like mazes you ought to go home now. Or you could, like me, take advantage of the walkthrough to get through this obnoxious section: after spending a frustrating half-hour trying to solve it on my own, I eventually followed the walkthrough to the letter, barely paying attention to room descriptions.

If you do manage to make it to Wallpaper's second half, you'll be rewarded by one of the most fantastically innovative chunks of gameplay IF has produced. I won't spoil anything, but you'll be dealing with potentialities and motivations rather than physical objects, and the puzzles are simultaneously mind-bending and logical, sadistic and satisfying. If you get stuck in either section, the command "read notes" will help; here, it provides some rather illuminating hints, both to the puzzles at hand and the larger story. Helping everything fall into place is an unrivaled joy.

While I can't support the migraine-inducing maze, I can say this: Delightful Wallpaper is the most paradigm-shifting half of an IF I've yet encountered.