Reviews by jcompton
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Filling the brain spaces inbetween, January 5, 2021Amazing Quest is an abject failure of interactive fiction, if the definition of interactive fiction involves consequential choices, puzzle-solving, or mapping.
Amazing Quest is a resounding success of interactive fiction, if the definition of interactive fiction involves provoking the player's own creativity as they extrapolate story and context from a necessarily limited set of input and output. (Which I argue most good IF always does.)
Each game session tells a story. It's random, yes, but in a curated way with strong thematic elements, not bargain-basement GPT-2 word salad.
It's quick-play, suitable for the modern player with thousands of choices a click away.
The support materials are spot-on for the aesthetic and, more importantly, promote the player's own creativity.
Good interactive fiction.
Bad game.
Noble intentions, total miss on execution, August 6, 2020This dour slice-of-robot-apocalypse life aims to deliver the tension of a race against death with a narrow high-tech escape. Unfortunately, between some very rough syntax and a surprisingly narrow implementation of the puzzle, it falls well short of its aims.
I would have given a two-star review, squinting through the significant non-native English issues which cloud the story, if I had not needed to decompile the game in order to detect the necessary commands (Spoiler - click to show)throw fish at portal and (Spoiler - click to show)throw figure at portal. I knew what the game wanted me to do, but several other combinations of manipulating the direct and indirect objects together failed. It's also a very old-school conceit to force the player to jump through hoops before taking the obvious only escape route available. Our character is convinced (rightly so) that the fog is death. The machine offers some sort of chance. Why would we need to be convinced of its safety? Why would we need to go through that exercise twice?
Equally troubling is the fact that this single puzzle in two parts is not given much weight in prose and imagery. I should be getting just as much out of examining the figure as I do in (Spoiler - click to show)throwing it, but instead that action is given just a quick emotional name-check and is otherwise very mechanical.
These linear speed-shorts tend to succeed best when they parcel out roughly equal amounts of weighty narrative at each step: starting the game, discovering the problem, getting the tools together to solve the puzzle, solving the puzzle, executing the final move. Teaching her to dance instead splits almost all its story between the intro screen and "The End", and makes it unnecessarily difficult to bridge that gap.
(found while exploring un-reviewed games)
Saved mostly by the voice talent, July 25, 2020This game is a mess. And it was always a mess. It was an awkward and ill-fitting blend of real-time first-person navigation and parser interaction. We'd known since Sierra abandoned AGI that real-time exploration and parsers make poor companions, and Façade's parser wasn't even very good. It had an artificially tiny length limit, a weirdly ugly font more closely associated with dubiously marked and curious-smelling overseas shipping cartons than with the paperdoll aesthetic of the game, and did not deliver the heavily hyped conversational experience. (Notably, the keywording was so broad that it's infamously possible to auto-lose the game with a single innocuous noun.)
The replayability and emotional exploration are supposed to be the point, but the designers stuck us with an unlikable and unsympathetic pair. Why bother when the most satisfying emotional resolution is to simply not go through that depressing apartment door?
Not all milestones represent happy stops on a journey, so this game can be regarded as a milestone without actually recommending it. Where it shines is with the top-notch voicework of the principal players and a nod to the game engine which does a good job stitching together player names and spoken passages on demand. It's such a rich vein of material that a quirky musician has been able to stitch together five (and counting!) full-length dance albums featuring Grace (and to a lesser extent Trip, usually as the target of her musical rants.)
I'd recommend a (NSFW) listen to any of "Grace's" bootleg dance albums (especially the first three) above any struggle to get Façade running on a modern system.
They also serve who only stand and wait to kick, July 25, 2020You are kicker. You kick ball.
It's as though the old Saturday Night Live song about foreign placekickers who seemed like out-of-place afterthoughts was given a wry twist.
It's an outsider-in-a-crowded-room tale. This outsider belongs with the group, but (as portrayed) only barely. An at-first reasonably convincing simulation of a standard American Football contest (complete with authentic scoreboard in the status line) plays out while you wait to do something useful. Your job description is minimal, because your specialty focuses on kickoffs, extra point tries, and field goal attempts.
This game is too thoroughly implemented to dismiss as just another waiting simulator. You can focus your attention on different participants in the game (all of which have a variety of ways to disdain you, aside from the special teams coach who parodies the new-age gurus who were once in vogue at that position), stay limber, chug Gatorade, or just watch the Jumbotron and scoreboard.
We may not know precisely when or where this game is taking place (the presence of a Jumbotron puts it well past the leather-helmet era, at least, but the presence of fullbacks on the field suggests it may not be modern day) but we do know that our coaching staff is not especially good at their jobs, having called three straight runs on first down after a punt return up just 3-0 in the third quarter, and not immediately firing the punt returner whose return "dancing for extra yards" still only got him to his own three yard line. Good thing the opposition is just as badly coached, punting the ball away still down by three with no timeouts remaining in the final two minutes of the game!
The game's play-by-play and scoring are not predetermined, although three-and-outs seem much more common than scoring drives. On my playthrough, my 41-yard field goal was, in fact, the only scoring on the day. The game-ending banner tersely noted the team's victory, but not my unique and indispensible contribution to that outcome. A suitable ending to a game in which there was plenty to watch and plenty of people to (try to) talk to, but not much to learn except that sometimes work is narrow and thankless.
The (Hack) Actor's Nightmare, July 15, 2020It's a wonder IF writers haven't leaned harder into overt soap opera presentation. The stock verbs are so over-the-top and tailor-made, what with all the KISSing and THROWing and KILLing we reflexively do. In this slice of daytime drama / wry workplace comedy, no one in particular is at the controls. Although you are seemingly the least-qualified performer to sort out the issues, only you have the motivation to walk about the set and try to string together the scenes between the commercial breaks. And, of course, you have a secret weapon that lets you weave plot threads twice as fast...
I enjoyed Craverly Heights more than a C-grade. Tight writing, paths to multiple endings feel natural and build the character/actor relationships well. The game is mostly well implemented, although the lurking stack overflow bug is funny in its way.
But I do feel cheated that we never got a scene with more than two characters, never got a solid soapy slap (to receive or give--indeed, SLAP is unimplemented and HIT gives the stdlib response!) and never got a payoff (beyond head canon) for the Pauline(Spoiler - click to show) / Janine conflation.
Two nations, divided by a common language, July 10, 2020Bored of the Rings developers Delta 4 followed up their cult hit with The Big Sleaze, a sendup of hardboiled detective novels in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. Rather than just being an extended gag, however, the game does a good job at actually being a game. Its puzzles are mostly reasonable, and the adventure is long and meaty enough to reward a playthrough.
This game is entirely fine. It manages to squeeze far more plot and narrative into the constraints of the typical tape-loaded 8-bit game by dividing into three parts with reasonable breakpoints.
But it's remembered more fondly in its native country for the same reason it may immediately break the player's immersion: it tries to walk the line between "American potboiler novel" and "British vocabulary" and, at least on the west side of the Atlantic, very quickly shows the seams. It's the digital embodiment of John Cleese's growly American accent: it's obvious what he's doing, but it's also obvious why it's not quite right.
If you're unbothered by "cheque/check" and "kerb/curb" issues in your potboiler tales, you'll find a heavy supply of tongues in cheeks, very tight inventory limits and some guess-the-verb problems with good-for-their-constraints graphics.
A version of this review originally appeared in The Spectrum Games Bible Vol. 3.
Neither this game nor the game it roasts (Malinche's Endgame) are readily available today. So it is a hidden memorial to a specific strain of designer-on-designer criticism extinguished a while ago.
What it does have is a consistent voice that finds every opportunity to portray the protagonist as a powerful, sweaty, and sweatily powerful man, with a side dish of awkward exit descriptions. There is no real goal or end. There are plenty of rooms to visit that repeat the same jokes about naval stereotypes, shareware-preview marketing, and acts of personal violence.
The meta-puzzle for today's player is deciding if the quest to find the story file is worth the reward. It made me blurt-laugh several times, which doesn't make it a good game or art, but does give it the rank of Weirdly Amusing Artifact.
Grading on a curve, July 1, 2020It's a generous two star review for this easily forgotten, heavily flawed treasure hunt. It commits a lot of the usual sins of this period of text/graphics games: disk swapping, difficult mapping (including the old "you're looking in a different direction" gag), opaque puzzles poorly clued by blurry/chunky/unclear graphics, and lots of things which are very unfair. But there's a weird style to the game and some clever lateral thinking puzzles which, in the hands of better designers, could and would (and probably have) gone down a lot better. Difficult to justify tackling in earnest, but worth exploring with a ready dose of nearby hints.
A laboratory of sci-fi endings, June 30, 2020This is a trope-heavy choicer which feels most like an exercise in writing a range of standard-issue conclusions to a stock "isolated farmer alien abduction" scenario. It does have distinct voice and style, occasionally marred by imperfections in formatting and language.
Your first choice is to be either Roger or Ellie. Although both are described (before the choice, that is) as loner, isolated Wyoming cattle farmers, "alone so often these days that sometimes you have to remind yourself of your own name", the choice quickly has more than a cosmetic impact. Roger is terse, gruff, and wholly go-it-alone. Ellie at least is on a first-name basis with a barn cat named Milo and has the option of calling a veterinarian for assistance. And the circumstances that spark their alien encounter relate to their herds but are very different challenges.
The two character branches have multiple distinct limbs with a relatively small number of choices. The situations and the outcomes are strictly mainstream/pulp sci-fi writing.
Where the game distinguishes itself is in the different voice given to the two characters. Not simply Roger's point of view but his plotlines tend to be rougher, more direct, more abrupt, and less florid than Ellie's. Her tales frequently have longer, more elaborate prose even for some of the less-than-ideal outcomes. (Arguably Roger's overall "happiest" ending is probably the most abrupt non-death ending, (Spoiler - click to show)when his indefinite alien confinement is relieved by the arrival of his half-alien son.)
Indeed, the characters seem to get generally better outcomes when they make different types of choices, (Spoiler - click to show)Roger doing best when he plays a confident, strong, but not-reckless brand of masculinity, Ellie doing best when she demonstrates compassion and patience.
The storylines of Stars Above are easily digested because chances are you already know them on some level. But it's a fun diversion.
Cute (if shallow) premise, no meaningful interactivity or story, June 30, 2020It is the bleak allegorical near future. Downtrodden everypeople must sell the only thing they have of value--IP addresses--to moneyed interests, in order to support their vices.
That's a story that could go somewhere! And the format initially suggests that it will, telling you that you have three addresses to sell. However, nothing that qualifies as a "game" actually seems to have been implemented. There is only one path to an abrupt end, and you can see all of the content in a brisk 90 seconds.
The post-game "synopsis" and "extra notes" reveal the author's broader and bolder ambitions (one plot point is labeled (METAPHOR FOR MYSELF, THE AUTHOR)) but something apparently went awry before the decision to publish was made.
Almost unimplemented, June 30, 2020Truly fantastic things can be done, in earnest or in parody, with the voice of Holden Caulfield. This not-remotely-finished game doesn't do them.
You wander into cutscenes from the book with no particular object. No documentation or in-game explanation is provided for parenthetical numbers which look like they might be footnotes, but the FOOTNOTE command is not implemented. Nor is much of anything else, including at least one room which lacks any description whatsoever.
Maybe it escaped.
Ages better than you'd think, June 29, 2020Autocomplete in 1984? Not too shabby.
Swiss Family Robinson is an odd entry in the bookware wave, a parser game clearly aimed at a younger playing audience. (That doesn't mean you don't get 1984-style instadeaths, but they do feel a bit more like learning opportunities.) But the parser works with you, saving you from wasting time on impossible or unparseable commands by basically forcing everything to conform to an autocomplete algorithm.
And out of the shortlist of commercial titles that expressly targeted a younger audience (Seastalker and... a few others, give me a minute) SFR seems to have dialed in on its target much more effectively. You may be at a loss for things to do (or animals to butcher into steaks) but it never feels like the game is abandoning you.
It's possible to be rescued without doing all of the interesting things in the game, making the game replayable. And today it feels ahead of its time by gently putting the player on rails without being too patronizing.
Overlooked younger sibling of Mindshadow, June 23, 2020This is not a great game but it is one of the best of its genre, the split-screen graphics/text adventure of the 1980s. The story unfolds with actual beats and although it's possible to miss the choice you're asked to make, the story does branch in a meaningful way that's unusual for the period.
The graphics, while imperfect, are evocative and have a sense of style to them, and have at least surpassed the extraordinarily low bar set by some of Sierra's worst abuses. Similarly, although the game can be laughably small in scope if you're uncharitable (you hop from planet to planet, but each "planet" is really just a modest-sized map near a spaceport), there isn't a ton of padding masquerading as game content.
Mindshadow is routinely hailed by everyone up to and including Interplay itself as the better game. Interplay always passed this game up in favor of Mindshadow in its retrospectives. I am here to stridently disagree. On a five-star scale I only put one star between them, but it's the difference between "I never need to play Mindshadow again" and "a pleasant afternoon revisiting The Tracer Sanction sounds nice."
Unfortunately, from here Interplay (and others) started making bad and misguided choices, including the totally mistaken idea that what 8-bit text/graphic adventures needed most was a GUI. That was the last thing they needed, and subsequent games like Borrowed Time and Tass Times In Tonetown would have benefited if they had simply stuck with the formula and focused on using more of that precious real estate for art.
Equal parts fascinating and baffling, June 23, 2020Jimmy Maher argues that this adaptation of the first two novels of what is now known as the Chronicles of Amber wants to be a choice-based game. It's a compelling argument.
But there's more going on here than that, because they really committed to a high concept for a sprawling wide-open parser experience. There's an elaborate fencing system in the parser which ends up being entirely unnecessary. There's a clunky-but-engaging life-or-death map-building minigame (used for "walking the Pattern", a rite of passage for Amberites such as your character) which can be entirely avoided with a single clever verb. There are all sorts of twists and turns that make a rote recreation of the novels not-quite-right, or actually just plain boring compared to the game's unique alternate path through Prince Corwin's top priorities ((Spoiler - click to show)recovering his identity, revenge on chief rival Eric, and ruling over Amber.)
Even for the mid-1980s, there's a lot of parser fighting here as you struggle to reconcile your ideas for how to advance the plot, the opaque cues and clues being given by the other characters in the game, and the seeds planted by the original Zelazny text. Even more than I'd enjoy seeing a supercut of the satisfactory paths through the game (and there are at least two "good" endings, plus others which are "complete but less than perfect") I'd like to see a documentary about the process this game's large team went through to put it together.
All of the entries in the pretty-code contest have their strong suits, but it's not just that Caduceus' source has a lovely poetic flow to it. The game it creates has a very different, mostly-prosaic vibe to it, while telling the same story with the same terse descriptions.
As a game Caduceus just looks like a short proof-of-concept with a less-than-obvious final move. As source, even the wasted space (such as the adjectives borrowed for this review title) serves a purpose. Top honors were warranted.
Shockingly clever, June 22, 2020Not for its plot (which isn't bad, but ultimately boils down to "obtain a special item") and certainly not for its parser or descriptions (which are not terribly far above Scott Adams/Brian Howarth standard) but for its implementation.
In Double Agent, you control two characters, the last surviving members of the expeditionary force sent to save this remote world. One is a "finesse" character who speaks the local language, while the other provides muscle. You interact with the agents using a split-screen interface, toggling between them on demand or when one agent becomes temporarily unavailable due to movement from one area to the next. The control of the agents is handled very naturally, with clear color cues.
The two agents start out in different locations, so mapping is initially a challenge as first-time players will not know where the two paths will meet. The different abilities of the agents requires that they be used correctly to solve certain puzzles that need a special skillset. Descriptions are functional and concise without seeming too bare. The parser is not terribly flexible, but most necessary commands are clear.
Although multi-character control in text adventures had been pioneered by titles like Infocom's Suspended, Double Agent puts an interesting spin on a concept that can easily distract a player, and does a nice job staying novel and playable at the same time. Even if you load it up strictly to punch in the walkthrough step-by-step, it's worth the time to see how this elegant little gem was put together.
A version of this review originally appeared in The Spectrum Games Bible Vol. 3.
Its biggest flaw was its price, June 21, 2020The Witness has a reputation for disappointing customers. Having waited for a new Infocom release and plunked down dozens of early-1980s dollars, they expected a bigger and more challenging game. One that would keep them up late at night for days on end, playing and replaying key sequences trying to build up a godlike understanding of a clockwork world, much as Deadline had offered them.
Instead, what they got was something players would stridently demand just a decade or so later: a game that was compact enough, and fair enough, to be solved without feeling like one should have earned college credit while doing so.
Although derivative, the feelies lean in deep and hard to the 1930s detective potboiler and pulp mystery markets. The character roster is indeed shallow but at least it's easy to keep track of who-means-what-to-whom. Galley's tweaks to standard parser responses mostly work to build the illusion. The variations in results for accusing and arresting suspects give enough teases and nudges to encourage playing again if you didn't reach the optimum solution.
So, at commercial release? This game definitely rates one star lower. The criticism from contemporary players and press was totally deserved. Without the big-ticket investment and pressure for this game and this game alone to offer several dozen hours of digital engagement? It's quite good. (The gaming market was tiny compared to the virtually limitless choice of the 21st century.)
Drab, but better than its predecessor, June 21, 2020The good news: This game is better than Star Trek: The Kobayashi Alternative.
The bad news: That's not saying much.
Unlike its predecessor, Promethean Prophecy doesn't try to redefine the genre, sticking with a basic windowed text interface. The game starts before the back-of-box blurb events happen so your Chapter 1 is essentially just working through the linear events necessary to put the main game in motion. This plotline plays off a better episode of the original series but doesn't break much new ground.
Once complete, the main game does its best to justify the relatively small map and constrained environments of the game. There's an interesting story in here, but it's masked behind some unintuitive puzzles and an assortment of items defined so much by color and shape that it feels like Starcross and Suspended had a baby.
The player (and crew of the Enterprise) are meant to be in a situation that looks bleak, but somehow the game also ends up being drab, and there's an important distinction.
This should not have happened, June 21, 2020So many things have to go wrong for a game like this to make it to market. It took Paramount over a decade to start participating in the video game market that had in very significant part sprung up directly around Star Trek. It took several more years for them to sanction a non-arcade game of any quality. That sad track record begins in the deep end with this failure.
In trying to innovate around the traditional (but at least well-understood) limitations of parser games, the Kobayashi Alternative team instead presented something which made the basics of map navigation and inventory management opaque and confusing, while breaking no new ground with the conversation interface. What could have been an engaging story with the tremendous advantage of an established world is instead an unrelenting exercise in frustration.
Upon further reflection..., June 21, 2020I first gave In the End a silent two-star review. I dislike it and consider it Not Good, but it's not hideously broken or otherwise defective. But then I gave a two-star review to a game that, given a choice between "like" or "dislike", I "like." So I'm coming back and saying loud and clear: I must put In the End in the one-star bin along with those Actually Terrible games.
Unfair, perhaps, but I'm not the one who came up with this railroad mood piece.
24 years ago, I rolled my eyes so hard I could hear the straining in my head when I realized what the author was trying to get me to guess.
Revisiting it today, I smile a sad wry smile at the ABOUT screen's wish: "In The End" will be, I hope, the first successful "puzzle-less IF", but its success will not completely close the question.
Looking at what has followed, the author gets a rousing "Mission accomplished."
Today I'm softer on the piece (24 years does that) and perhaps it's the countless choice games in similar veins which make it easier to spell out where I think In the End fails.
In a nominally open-ended parser experience, the author can do a lot to set the tone and give guidance and establish goals. And the author can make me desperately bored enough to want to quit. But if you want me to (Spoiler - click to show)conclude that suicide is the only option, I'm gonna need a lot more, and In the End doesn't come close to delivering it.
Almost-great classic of the commercial period, June 20, 20201986 is an awkward year in commercial adventures. Infocom and a few later entrants are still trying to stick with text-only. Sierra has made the leap from text/graphics to graphics-and-a-bit-of-parsing. And Interplay is leading the charge of developers who decide that what text/graphic adventures most need isn't better story or better graphics, but clunky GUIs that eat up more than one-third of the available pixels on already-limited displays.
No, no... and, again, no.
The wrongheaded interface choices aren't the only thing that keep Tass Times from a five-star rating. After a truly fantastic beginning (the worldbuilding and feelies are among the best from non-Infocom games of the period) the game falls into the trap a lot of straightforward adventures do. It doesn't take long to realize what the endgame is going to consist of and the rough framework of what you'll need to do. What remains is the rote frustration of navigating the precise (and occasionally padded) hurdles that are keeping you away from that climax.
But... yeah, that interface. The actual what-the-character-sees graphics only occupy about 40% of the playfield. That's a terrible compromise, because the worldbuilding is so rich and even with the restrictions some of the art and animations are quite clever! Meanwhile, the clunky clickable interface adds little to the game except for providing a handy way to identify interact-able items.
Had this game been done in the original split-screen ADVENT, or even with a hybrid system that wasn't so wasteful, it would have left an even deeper mark. The faux-hip world of Tonetown was never really an accurate picture of the 80s, but it was put on with enough of a smirk that I think it played well and ages just fine. But the documentation is absolutely essential to jumping in and enjoying it.
Overrated, June 20, 2020This game is routinely ranked higher and remembered more prominently than its sibling The Tracer Sanction--so much so that at press time, Tracer isn't even listed in IFDB. That is a shame. Mindshadow's story is weak and it overall offers little challenge or depth. The Condor gimmick is fun but apart from being competently executed, Mindshadow isn't particularly noteworthy even as an artifact of its time.
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