Ratings and Reviews by Rymbeld

Tapestry. You've died, and now are confronted by the tapestry of your life, woven by Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos: the fates of Greek myth. The three of them, along with Lucifer, confront you for judgment, but also to give you another chance to revisit three key moments in your life. Will you make a change, or not? You are filled with regret and shame, but is it because of what you've done, or have you simply looked at things from the wrong perspective? Perhaps your life was good after all.

Fate, judgment and the meaning of life are the key themes in Daniel Ravpinto's first IF game, which won the Xyzzy award for Best Story in 1996 (and came in second place in the IF Competition that same year). The game begins in death and hackneyed writing: although it was nominated for Best Writing, I found it to be cheap and pulpy, especially the long, opening prologue.

"Fleeting glimpses of faces half-remembered in the gloom," the game begins. Then this seemingly endless fragment: "Screams, the sound of squealing tires, a sudden thump, a sickening crunch and a violent jolt followed by a sense of weightlessness and disassociation." Already the text of the game feels heavy handed. But it gets worse, when we appear in a room called Nothing: "Concepts like time and place have no meaning here. Your mind attempts to impose something, some order, some structure, upon the space in which you exist, and fails." Oh, come on. Is this a lecture? The opening prologue reads like pretentious pseudo-philosophy. I had a hard time pushing myself to read on.

Especially when you are teleported to a tower and an interview with Satan, who is here to judge you. I felt like I was in a Chick tract, to be honest. Maybe it's my religious upbringing, but I've seen this story before: you've done horrible things, you have to relive them and account for them or maybe change them. And the writing in the Prologue section was so incredibly stilted and overblown that I had a hard time taking the game seriously. Which is actually a shame, because once you get into the game proper, it's not that bad. Tapestry actually has some good ideas, marred only by a hokey premise.

In some games, I suppose you could let bad writing slide. But not in Tapestry, because there's a lot of it. You often are given large dumps of text to read. In fact, one reviewer mentioned that Tapestry might have been more effective as a short story, given how much you have to read at any given time anyway. But I think that such a story would still require a re-write. Of course, I should back off a little here with the recognition that some of this is taste. I'm sure plenty of people found the writing satisfying.

Once you get into the game itself, you get to relive some pretty horrible events. Even though I didn't care for the structuring premise of the gameplay, I thought that the way Ravpinto structured the progress of the game within each section was very nice. Basically, Ravpinto tried to create puzzles which were consistent with the gameworld and seemed like natural actions for the protagonist to take. In some ways, they aren't actually puzzles at all, but actions the player takes to advance the plot further. The emphasis isn't on "solving" the game, but progressing through it, making choices to determine the outcome. In this way, the game is very interesting, and does something very well. Abstract puzzles and off-kilter world logic are absent from this game, allowing players to "inhabit" the protagonist and try thinking like a real person.

I hope I find more games that try this sort of thing, because this is exactly what interactive fiction needs to be legitimate. Don't get me wrong, So Far is a very fun game, and I liked it much more than Tapestry, but Tapestry is moving in the right direction for those who are craving interactive stories rather than mere puzzles. As such, Tapestry seems like an important step in the development of IF, even though framing narrative is too heavy-handed and derivative for me. In spite of its blemishes, you should try it out. The game is very short, playable in an hour.

Well, I don’t know how to start writing about this game. Really I don’t. I know that I liked it, so I’ll start there. I liked it far more than Plotkin’s previous game, A Change in the Weather, by a wide margin. It was immediately engrossing: the writing was luxurious and invited me to read the game as text in a way that the previous games I’d encountered had not. The game opens with the protagonist at a play, worried about Aessa, presumably your girlfriend. She’s stood you up. And the game strongly implies (by way of the play which you’re watching, and the hints near the end of the game) that she is actually having an affair.

So Far seems like a representation of one man’s internal coming to grips with this awareness of betrayal, loss, and loneliness. Sure, one could read the various worlds you traverse as literal—that the game is a fantastic world-hopping adventure—but Plotkin put too much detail and care for us to legitimately come to that conclusion. For instance, each world is keyed to some environmental markers: “autumn, cool, smoky” or “bright, bitter wind.” The game opens in “hot, sticky,” which mirrors the protagonist’s mood: “Damn the crowd, in truth: your mood was hot, foul, and dark when you came in.” The pathetic fallacy runs rampant in So Far, to such an extent that it is hard for me to believe that the various worlds you end up exploring exist “out there” at all. Then environments become increasingly bleak, dark, and shapeless, mirroring various stages of acceptance. And the end of the game--oh, the end.

Cracks show up a lot, too. Keep an eye out for them. Cracks in walls, in the earth, etc. Seems like a blatant symbol of the rupture in the protagonist’s relationship. The cracks are often associated with water (yonic?). There’s even a puzzle that involves (Spoiler - click to show)trying to rupture a crack in order to cause a glacier landslide, revealing a chill tunnel leading to a cave of light, where “ripples of gold light fall through milky blue veils.” The game begs for a Freudian reading.

Shadows are important in this game, too, another thing hinted at right at the game’s outset. The game opens with the final act of a play, and Plotkin deftly wove in all the major themes of the game into this scene, which you watch play out before you really can do anything. “Rito has finally found out about Imita's affair, and he stalks the stage, whipping voice and hands about himself. A footfall behind him; he turns, and sees Imita,” the game begins. Rito turns to Imita and berates her: “How come you, harlot? Dare you come this way, / your skin yet dark with Tato's shadow's stain?” “Shadow” here is obviously a marker, since the action of the game involves finding odd shadows and stepping into them.

In fact, this game kept reminding me of Myst. Traveling to different worlds and solving puzzles. However, unlike in Myst, many of the worlds in So Far are populated. On the other hand, the people in those worlds are either hostile to you or indifferent. You typically don’t feel connected to anyone, except the lost boy perhaps—and that boy might even be you, a homunculus trapped in a maze of rusted metal. The puzzle here(Spoiler - click to show)--clanging metal pipes to move around—suggested to me a prelinguistic stage of psychological development, and the boy simply that innocent, bruised self hiding in all of us.

The writing and the way some of these worlds were structured suggested Myst to me, too. The first world you encounter involves a castle and a radioactive power generator. Here’s a sample of the room where you first appear:
(Spoiler - click to show)
Abandoned Road
The sky is almost violet, infinitely distant -- you've never seen such a sky, and without the haze of metallic heat that summer should have. But the wind is sharp and chilly, and the trees nearby are a quilt of orange, red, and gold.

Beneath you the road is old, filled with weeds and ragged moss; dirt shows only in patches. To the south, the track is choked with trees, as it runs into the fringes of an autumn forest. It continues the other way, though, towards an immense stone wall that hems the northern horizon.

The puzzles are generally not too hard, but not too easy, either. There is some trial and error to go through, of course; and the logic of the worlds doesn’t always make sense, especially as you progress through the game and the worlds become more abstract and strange: in one, you wander a desolated landscape, manipulating platonic solids. And then there is the darkness and the shadows and the shades of the happy couple you and Aessa once were. This protagonist is an awfully cerebral individual who works out his issues by plumbing deep into his psyche.

Is there anything wrong with this game? It’s puzzle-heavy, which isn’t to my taste, but on the other hand, they are mostly woven into the theme pretty well, though Plotkin’s writing. There are a few that are fairly silly and don’t fit, though. And some of the more tedious ones take you out of the world completely, in terms of player immersion. That is, you’re reminded that you’re just playing a game and you forget all about this cool world you’re in.

But I think the major failure of the game is that it is written in the second person. I know that’s a convention of text adventures, but in this case the prose would be more compelling, I think, if Plotkin had experimented with the first person. Especially in a game like this, which could easily be read as taking place within the protagonist’s head in a surrealist psychological drama. The standard game engine response of “I don’t understand that verb” when the player fails to guess the right verb, or makes a typo, felt particularly jarring after I began to understand the game in this way. Granted, the second person is the standard convention in IF, but I look forward to playing some games which break this rule.

Taken together with A Change in the Weather, it seems that one consistent theme between the two Plotkin games I’ve played so far is isolation or loneliness. In the previous game, the protagonist wandered away from his friends in search of some solitude; in So Far the protagonist is dealing with a breakup, or perhaps infidelity. Text adventure games are typically solitary affairs by their very nature, so it’s nice to see Plotkin incorporating this into the plot of the game.

(re-posted from my blog, gentle hart desire)

...which makes me reticent to call it "interactive fiction" at all. What I liked: the writing, the exploration, the fox. What I didn't like: the fact that it really is nothing but a puzzle, one whose logic doesn't necessarily conform to the real world. I like thinking about real-world experience to help me solve puzzles. Example: (Spoiler - click to show) the very first bit about getting the shovel. It doesn't make sense to me that you would need to soften the mud to pull it out...we're talking dirt, not stone. Also, the fox. If you break the shaft accidentally from pulling the shovel from the hard mud, then the fox won't play fetch. He will look at the shaft with interest, but not fetch it if you throw it. But when you break it from prying the boulder, suddenly he wants to play. I see how that makes sense in the logic of the game, but it reduces the real-world plausibility of the game, which I dislike. . I agree with the other reviewers when it comes to a lack of any sense of goal. The game starts off just feeling like an exploratory quest, but you are supposed to do something to win and have no idea what that is. This game rewards tedious screwing around.

To be fair, this thing is over 15 years old. I'm sure it was really cool for its time. It taught me, though, that I'm not a puzzle freak.

The Meteor, the Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet, Graham Nelson's 1996 IF Comp winning game, was in my opinion a pretty bad example of having to play "find-the-verb." There were many instances in which I reasoned out the solution to a puzzle, but couldn't easily solve it because I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to type. Here's an example:

(Spoiler - click to show)
>put rope on hook
The hook's too high for you to touch, even on tiptoe.

>throw rope on hook
The hook's too high for you to touch, even on tiptoe.

>throw rope at hook
You throw the rope up. Its two ends are now hanging from the hook.

[Your score has just gone up by one point.]


I mean, come on! Of course, playing the game the first time I didn't type things out this quickly, and if you take a look at the Club Floyd transcript, you see that they, too try to "put rope on hook," and when that fails, they experiment with other alternatives for fourteen moves. Granted, this isn't THAT bad, but it isn't the worst example of "guess the verb" in the game. It's just the first one that really felt annoying. And I'm not the only one who has played the game and had issues with this aspect of the game, apparently.

But enough criticism for now. Overall I did enjoy the game, even though it isn't exactly to my tastes: it's another puzzle-heavy game, a tribute to Zork (which, to be honest, I did not particularly enjoy either). The setting, small as it was, really captured my imagination: the upside-down tree inside a cave was really neat. The puzzles are generally not THAT hard to figure out, but it really helps to have played or at least dabbled in older Infocom games (not just Zork but also Enchanter); in fact, I'd say that the game assumes prior knowledge.

Some other reviewers have complained about the way the game opens. You're riding atop an elephant with an annoying woman who loves to gossip, sipping a long glass of sherbet ("chilled in a wooden cask of ice...an effervescent fruit syrup, much prized in these lands"), and you can't do much at first, other than WAIT. I didn't mind this at all, because it set a tone of reading. However, after you disrupt the procession of elephants, the game turns into a simple dungeon crawl. While there's more of a framing context for your dungeon crawling than in Zork, the frame narrative is weirdly joined to the rest of the game. There may as well have not been any procession of elephants at all. There could have just been in info-dump text prologue telling the player why they've decided to search the dungeon in the first place.

I feel like I'm being a bit harsh on this game, and I suppose I am. The primary issue is that it isn't to my taste, but it was a fine game. Since it was small, there wasn't much opportunity for exploration really. This game is suited for players interested in solving a series of puzzles for their own sake, but not uncovering a plot. Because the plot is pretty thin, it was hard for me to care about forging on.

(taken from my blog, gentle hart desire