Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

I wanted to like this game. I have a soft spot for games that combine interactive fiction with RPGs, and also a soft spot for traditional dungeon crawls. Furthermore, although the game’s premise seems tired and cliched – rescue miners from a mine filled with goblins and orcs – the author nevertheless manages to make it feel fresh. The scene in the storage room, for instance, where you remember your training days? That’s great! Nothing fancy, but enough to turn a standard scenario into something more memorable.

Unfortunately, the game suffers from two big problems: an annoying combat system and a severe lack of testing. To take the latter first, (Spoiler - click to show)if you try to crack open the safe, you get stuck on a page with a dead link. In some circumstances – I do not know which ones – the spade cannot be found in the storage room even though you have seen the cave-in. When you arrive at the magical barrier, the page displays an error message and some code. It seems to me that even some mild beta testing would have caught these problems.

I would nevertheless have persisted if it had not been for the fact that the combat system becomes annoying rather quickly. There’s only one action you should ever take: parry. Parrying leads to a sort of mini-game where you have to answer a question of arithmetic in order to succeed. It reminded me a little bit of Typing of the Dead, in which you must practice blind typing to kill zombies. Here you must practice calculation to defeat goblins and orcs. That might be fun... if it were not for the following:

1. You have to do far too much of it. A single fight can easily consist of four to five parries, and there are many, many fights. Not so much the main story ones – they are limited. But the random encounters just pile up, and it happens regularly that you finish a random encounter only to immediately begin another one and then yet another one afterwards.

2. The questions seem to come from a rather short pre-made list. This in itself is mysterious: it seems easy to have a computer come up with random arithmetic questions. Instead, you will get the same questions again and again, so the game quickly turns into memorising the answers and typing them in when needed. This removes any feeling of skill or satisfaction.

3. The difficulty of the questions varies immensely. You might be asked what 2+2 is, but you might also be asked for the derivative of x cos(2x). Who is the target audience here? Anyone who can so much as understand what the second question means, will be insulted by the ease of the first question. (It would make some sense to have easy questions for easy opponents and hard questions for hard ones, but I don’t think it works that way.)

4. And then there’s the impossible question: “-13 x - 7 is 46, so what is x?” Well, it is -53/13, the decimal expansion of which is infinite. As far as I could figure out, getting this question is an instant loss, because you cannot give a correct answer. (Typing in the fraction doesn’t work.)

After a while I noticed that my enjoyment of the game had vanished and had been replaced a feeling of exhausted annoyance whenever another random encounter appeared on my screen. So I decided to quit. (I did not, by the way, find a way to restore saves, even though you can supposedly save the game.) There is something fine here, but changes need to be made before it can actually be enjoyed.

The Addicott Manor is a choice-based horror game in which you search for treasures in a haunted house. The author put in every standard element of the horror story: you’re breaking into an old, abandoned, isolated, vast building that was built by a merchant who got rich off of selling weapons; the neighbourhood has been troubled by mysterious strangers and missing locals; an incredible storm is about to engulf the area; and when you arrive, the supernatural starts intruding very quickly. Obviously, the game is more interested in revelling in the traditions of the genre than in breaking new ground, but that’s fine. Most of us can enjoy a good genre tale.

Unfortunately, the game’s prose is marred by a large number of spelling and other language errors. Here is a short, more or less random sample:

The feeling of dread is already wearing you down like a mantle. A long lonely howl pierce through the encroaching night.

Musically, the most famous moment in Puccini's opera Turandot is the aria Nessun dorma, 'nobody sleeps', in which prince Calaf explains in jubilant tones that in the morning he will conquer the heart of princess Turandot. One reason for the aria's great dramatic power is the contrast of the prince's exuberance with the despair of the choir, which sings: "No one will know his name and we must, alas, die." For Calaf has made a deal with the princess. He has answered all three of her riddles correctly, and therefore she must marry him. But, he has told her, if she manages to find out his name by dawn, he will gladly die. And thus the princess is searching for his name and she has threatened everyone with death unless they help her succeed. But only one person knows his name: the slave girl Liú, who loves Calaf and would rather die than reveal it...

The Fourth Riddle takes place during this aria, but instead of seeing the world from Calaf's perspective, we step into the skins of the two female protagonists, Liú and Turandot. This is a brilliant take on the opera. We know that Calaf is somewhere out there pontificating about his impending victory, but in fact, in this particular rendition of the story, his fate will be decided when he is off-stage, by the interactions of the two women in his life -- the one whom he loves even though she does not seem to deserve it, and the one whom he does not love even though she most certainly does deserve it. It is Liú especially, poor Liú, who is treated with condescension by almost everyone in the opera including, arguably, the librettist, who finally takes the reigns of he own fate and becomes more than a splendid self-sacrifice. Even if she does end up sacrificing herself, at least we know that she had more paths to choose from and that she seriously considered them. For that's the kind of game we have here: a relatively linear main part, but with a wild branching of endings based on choices at the end.

As a game, it's all enjoyable enough. There are some mild puzzles here that will not stump a moderately seasoned player of IF. We get a chance to experience the palace and see something of the emotional state of the two women. In the end, they are not truly drawn as characters, in part perhaps to leave open all these different endings. But that's fine. The Fourth Riddle is not a deep psychological reinterpretation of the opera. Rather, it is a pleasant exploration of some alternate possibilities, a variation on the original theme, some relatively good-natured fun with a classic work. Recommended if you know the opera; probably too baffling if you don't. (In which case: go watch it.)

Korenvliet was the first piece of interactive fiction I ever played. Not, to be sure, this 2016 English remake in TADS; but the original Dutch version, written in BASIC and included in an MS-DOS game menu that was, for many years, my main source of computer entertainment. Had I lived in a country like the US or the UK, where games by companies like Infocom or Magnetic Scrolls were widely distributed, I would have certainly fallen in love with IF at a young age. As it was, all I had was Korenvliet. This game still managed to capture my imagination, and indeed it was almost single-handedly responsible for my writing a short text adventure when I had developed some BASIC skills of my own at age, say, 13.

But Korenvliet was bad. It was awful. I'm not just talking about the fact that it was utterly generic, that the descriptions were sparse, or that the implementation was even sparser. No, what primarily frustrated me -- and my maternal grandmother, who spent some time sitting beside me behind the computer in what I think was her only serious engagement with such a machine ever* -- were the terrible guess the verb issues. To give you an example, at one point in the game you have acquired running shoes and need to go for a run. I was never able to do this. Many years later I reverse engineered the BASIC source and found out that the single command accepted by the game was "ga joggen", in English, "go jogging". So we were just stuck and in the absence on any sources of help, I remained stuck. For me, interactive fiction retained the mysterious aura of something that was clearly potentially great, but not actually available in any form worth playing.

I'm glad that Alexander van Oostenrijk has turned Korenvliet into a playable game. He has translated it into English, transposed it to TADS and removed the guess the verb issues. If memory serves me, he has also added much in the way of description, although he also seems to have removed some aspects of the original game, especially the randomly moving but utterly useless NPCs. As I said, I'm glad, that he has taken the trouble to do so. Being able to play and finish Korenvliet is both sentimental -- it reminds me of my youth and of my grandmother -- and provides me with just a little bit of closure.

Of course, Korenvliet is still a weak game, very old-school, with illogical puzzles and an utterly generic setting. It is this genericness that now strikes me as the most surprising. The game is based on a now obscure but once popular series of Dutch books by Leonard Huizinga, the first of which is called "Adriaan en Olivier". I loved them as a youth, since they were funny, bawdy and just a little absurd. I reread one recently, and was now less impressed by the often puerile jokes... but still, they have an unmistakable character and style. Somehow, none of that appears in the game. You are not the naïve, romantic, alcoholic, sex-obsessed, but deep down decent Olivier; you're just a nameless person. You don't start the game by drunkenly crashing your car into the Rittenburg town hall, even though all of the books start that way. Why would you choose to base a game on a fictional work, and then use nothing from that work, not even the tone? It's just weird.

Anyway, you're not really missing out if you don't play this; but if you want a little taste of early Dutch IF, Van Oostenrijk has made it available for you.


* My maternal grandfather, on the other hand, was one of the two people in charge of the building the first Dutch computers: the ARRA I and II and the ARMAC. Unfortunately, he died three years before I was born.

Extremely spare prose and implementation; no plot to speak of; and, as far as I can see, you quickly end up getting stuck in a room with no exits and a single item that doesn't respond to any commands. Oh well, at least the game is true to its title.

From a misogynist adolescent to a fun-loving Roman to the victim of a self-important sex-hater, Stiffy Makane is surely the IF character to appear in the most different guises. Here, he appears as a knight whose repertoire of actions consists of exactly two things: Slay and Lay. When Sir Makane slays, he brutally murders; when he lays, he is often engaged in rape or something very close to it. (The game never explicitly mentions consent, though it sometimes stops short of telling us that the laying was non-consensual.)

The game reminded me of a sequence early in Ludovico Ariosto's magnificent (and feminist) 16th century epic Orlando Furioso. In that sequence, a knight has rescued a naked princess chained to a rock by defeating the monster that was planning to eat her. The princess expresses her gratitude. And then the knight tells her that he knows just the way for her to really show her gratitude, and he proceeds to undress -- he does not even consider the possibility that she might not want him sexually. But taking off his armour is such a laborious process that the princess has fled far away before he finishes it.

Ariosto and Groover are both trying to expose the violence inherent in stories of chivalry and the culture that generates them. (For Groover, of course, these stories stand in for many other kinds of narrative we find in contemporary works, all of which work in fundamentally the same ways.) But there is a distinct difference in tone. Ariosto is always generous and humane, while Groover's satire is bitter. Ariosto doesn't express his disapproval of the knight, but by making him the butt of a joke, he ensures that we cannot mistake the author's intent. Groover, on the other hand, makes his narrator express constant approval of the actions of Sir Makane -- an approval that is obviously ludicrous and often supported by bizarre non sequiturs, but which makes reading the piece a constant struggle against the narrator. Ariosto believes that if one presents the real, people will be able to see and embrace the truth. Groover, living in the age of Trump and looking at U.S. responses to police violence, believes that powerful authorities are giving false interpretations of the real and often succeeding in getting people to embrace those interpretations. His strategy is to make the tension between reality and interpretation so strong that something must give.

Perhaps that is necessarily a weakness. A piece like Rape, Pillage, Makane can hardly open anyone's eyes, since one either already believes that X is an egregious example of violence and false ideology, or one does not believe that the events in this game and X have anything to do with each other. Let X be police violence; would anyone not already sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement believe that Sir Makane and the U.S. police are like each other? Probably not. Here, a more detailed piece about the topic under consideration might be more effective.

Rape, Pillage, Makane thus remains somewhat abstract; but its bitter satire is a new way of taking up the Makane character and an interesting addition to the IF corpus.

I'm not, in general, a fan of superheroes; but I can be persuaded to like them. I really enjoyed the Lego Batman Movie, for instance, and I thoroughly enjoyed the one superhero comic I've ever read, Watchmen. What those two works have in common is a good story. The Lego Batman Movie's story is of course to some extent silly, but it is about something real -- Batman's solipsistic arrogance -- and it explores that idea in a very coherent way. A story can be funny, even zany, and still make sense.

The story of Earth and Sky makes no sense at all. Little is lost by spoiling it, but I'll put it between spoiler tags nonetheless: (Spoiler - click to show)your aunt comes into contact with an ancient bacteria, which turns her into a gigantic evil monster until you give her antibiotics, after which she not only returns to her normal state but is also freed of some kind of mind control that will probably be explained in the sequel. This is hardly a story at all; it's just a sequence of events between which the authors posits causal links even though none of the usual laws of causation apply. Several other reviewers have likened the plot to that of a B-movie. Perhaps this is accurate; but of course the problem with B-movies is that most of them are bad. ("But they're so bad they're good!" Uh, no.)

Alright, so maybe you're not playing this game for the story; you're playing it for the chance to use some super powers! Nothing wrong with that, actually, and the game certainly provides you some opportunities to do so. But -- and this is my most important complaint about the game -- the time spent doing fun stuff with superpowers is a very small portion of playing the game. You have to slog through too much information and two rather unexciting sequences, and then you're rewarded with exactly one fight, which itself turns out be rather repetitive. There's just not enough fun stuff!

I've heard that the second game delivers much more in this respect, and if so, playing this first game might still be worthwhile. Just don't expect too much of it.

(I replayed this game recently as a preparation for tackling part two, and wasn't happy with the review I penned eight years or so ago. So while my star rating remains unchanged, the above is the new review to go with it.)

In Superluminal Vagrant Twin, you explore the galaxy as you attempt to collect enough cash to rescue your twin. The game's main selling point is the sheer size of the galaxy: by the end of the game, I had visited no fewer than 44 planets, and I think I may have missed out on a few, since I didn't seem to have the necessary objects to complete absolutely every side quest. In order to make this size manageable, the planets are implemented very lightly: there's just a few things you can interact with, and those interactions are mostly restricted to "talk", "take", "buy", and "sell". Even the "examine" verb has been disabled. This gives the game its strange feel of being both extremely limited (at any location you can just do a few things) and extremely expansive (from each planet, you can jump to every single planet you have discovered, and you keep discovering more).

We have, then, a game that is sharply focused on a few activities, but gives us a lot of freedom in when and whether we engage in them. First, we explore. Exploration is simple -- you just "jump" to a planet, although you'll have to learn the name of the planet first. Or you have to guess the name, something that is by no means impossible and got me to quite a number of planets I would not otherwise have encountered. (A nice reward for out-of-the-box thinking that the game's restricted verb list otherwise cannot provide for. Unfortunately, you cannot "jump to Conclusion", although the game does acknowledge the command.) At those planets, you buy or sell exotic goods, upgrade yourself and your ship, restock on fuel, arrest some criminals, deliver some packages, and perhaps learn about one or two other planets. As you proceed, you get a good understanding of the universe around you, although the complicated social and political arrangements never become entirely clear. Great fun; and I suspect the game has the exact right length to maintain a sense of wonder without becoming tedious.

The game this reminded me of most is Sunless Sea, which also features journeys from port to port and very limited, text-based interactions when you arrive. But Superluminal Vagrant Twin is smaller, faster, less impenetrable, and a lot friendlier. Highly recommended.

You are Gun Mute, and your friend Elias is about to be hanged by the evil sheriff. So what's a man to do? You grab your trusty six-shooter, enter the post-apocalyptic Western town, and shoot anyone who tries to stop you.

Gun Mute is an almost pure combat game, where you move through a completely linear series of encounters most of which end with either you dying to your enemy's bullet or your enemy dying to yours. The fights are not based on a numerical combat system à la Treasures of Slaver's Kingdom or Kerkerkruip; instead, each encounter is a puzzle in which you have to identify your enemy's weaknesses and use them to prevail. Failure means death, but you can always undo. Some of the puzzles are better clued than others, but for the most part, they are enjoyable. Along the way, there is some room for non-combat discoveries; and the ending is particularly satisfying.

Essential playing for anyone who wants to design a puzzle-based combat game; recommended playing for all others.

Murder Simulator is a link-based game -- if that's the right word -- in which you have just stabbed someone to death and now have to hide the crime. The basic idea is that you choose a place to hide the body, a way to clean the knife, and so on. Unfortunately, the game doesn't use any form of state tracking (it doesn't remember which choices have been made). You can first hide the knife in the woods, then, back in the house, proceed to clean it with your shirt, and so on. Not knowing which choices you have made, the game also can't tell you whether you got away with murder. Instead, it discusses all the options you had.

The game's core message seems to be this: "There's only so much you can hide, even with an alibi. And with forensic technology getting better by the day, it's becoming harder and harder to cover up crime-- as it should be. The only real way to get away with a crime is to not do something you have to get away from in the first place."

Is this what the game was supposed to convince me of? Sure, if you stab someone to death in your own house with no premeditated idea of how to get rid of the body, then the probability of getting away with murder is low. But in the U.S.A., only 64% of homicides lead to arrests, which suggests that if you are smart about murder the chance of being convicted is relatively low. Anyway, surely the important point about murder is not that it's hard to cover up, but that it's wrong?

One positive point: in this game, you can ask Siri what the best place to hide a dead body is. That was pretty awesome. If I could give half stars, that would make it 1.5.