Ratings and Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

I’m not a fan of superheroes. Perhaps you need to be at least a little bit sympathetic to the American libertarian/frontier mentality to enjoy fictions about this one guy who can go and solve problems that society as a whole can’t fix! Or maybe it’s just that I didn’t grow up with superhero comics. My childhood was defined by the Flemish comic Suske & Wiske, in which one of the good guys, Jerom, is as preternaturally strong as any superhero. But the writer ends up devising ever more complicated ways of getting Jerom out of the story, because his entrance solves every possible problem immediately. Boring. That’s why superheroes need supervillains, I guess, but then why bother going to the level of super?

Also: why bother with this introduction? Well, only to point out that it is entirely irrelevant to my appreciation of The Origin of Madame Time, since MathBrush’s effort is not in fact a superheroes game. Of course, it looks like one. It’s chock full of superheroes! But they’re all frozen in time, so they’re not doing anything; and you yourself do not have any special powers that you can use to solve the problems you are confronted with. Admittedly, you have the power to unfreeze time, which is spectacular enough. But you can only use it after solving the problems, not in order to solve them. So we end up with a very human puzzle game, even if it is set in colourful surroundings and uses a plethora of what are, for all means and purposes, magic items. There is not a single action sequence – we are light years removed from the Earth and Sky series.

The Origin of Madame Time ends up being a game that I find very easy to like. The puzzles aren’t trivial, but they won’t stump a seasoned adventurer. The setting and the set of characters are memorable. The implementation is top notch, and the humour is light but effective. It doesn’t break new ground, but it makes me smile. Since I assume that that is precisely its main purpose, I would declare it a clear success.

A detective story that is very traditional indeed, being set in an English manor and going as far as to incorporate some of the basics of the Cluedo board game. Its main selling point is the protagonist-narrator, whose arrogant and extravagantly clichéd demeanour is indeed quite funny. The writing is good and the mystery at least adequate. (Spoiler - click to show)There are clues pointing to everyone, but there’s an early one that breaks the symmetry and points to one person as the most likely perpetrator.

(Because of the arrogance of the narrator, I originally thought he could only be right by dumb luck; and I ended up assuming that whoever you accused, that person would turn out to be the guilty party. Nope, it’s just a classic mystery with one criminal. (Spoiler - click to show)But I did make the correct choice on my first try, since I tried the person against whom I had most evidence – and that turned out to be the right way of thinking.)

It is less clear that this story is well-served by being an interactive fiction. Indeed, there are no real choices before it is your turn to accuse someone; just large pieces of text and then some ‘choices’ that obviously only change the order in which the pieces are presented to you. The entire thing would have been just as effective if it had been printed as a short story, ending with the message: “Who do you think is the killer? Turn to page 120 to see whether you are correct!” One could argue that nothing is lost either by presenting it as an interactive piece. But the reader has other expectations when sitting down to play interactive fiction, and those expectations here turn out to be disappointed. And it wouldn’t have been that hard to make the piece more interactive. So overall: enjoyable, certainly, but also a bit of a missed opportunity.

In a sense, I am not the ideal player for a game that is filled with as many palindromes as the author could device. First, I am not myself an ailiphilist, I mean, a tsiliphilist, nor do I suffer from the darker and more kinky cousin of ailihphilia, ailihparaphilia. Second, and more to the point, English is not my first language. For a game based on wordplay, and especially a kind of wordplay with constraints so severe that it necessitates the use of many obscure and slang terms, this is decidedly a negative. I remember banging my head against Goose, Egg, Badger because my English language skills were just not good enough to realise the nature of its main wordplay puzzle. This could certainly also have happened with Ailihphilia.

But it didn't, and that is because the author has taken great care to ensure that his game is accessible and free from frustration. He has indeed expended immense efforts to achieve this, giving us an almost -- but not quite -- bewildering amount of ways to get reminders, hints and solutions. The player who wishes to solve all the puzzles herself can do so, while the player who is mostly along to revel in the author's inventiveness can relax and enjoy the trip. (I myself fell somewhere in between, taking pride in solving most of the first half of the game by myself, and then using the hint systems to speed up my play in the second half.)

Revelling in the author's inventiveness is indeed the main draw of the game. Christopher Huang complains that there aren't enough puzzles in which the player has to come up with palindromes, but I don't think the aim of the game is to challenge the player to be as smart a wordsmith as the author. Rather, I imagine Andrew gleefully making up and combining palindromes into a (somewhat) coherent fiction, managing to cram in more and more as he continued to refine and expand the game -- and I, the player, am invited to laugh along with him while at the same time being in awe of what he's doing. Playing Ailihphilia is like watching a juggler: it's amazing that somebody manages to do this, and being amazed is where the fun of the experience lies. Or perhaps an even better comparison is this: playing Ailihphilia is like reading a rendition of Poe's poem The Raven that contains not a single 'e'. Fun and awesome, because it is both difficult and done well. Of necessity, it is not the greatest of literature; but it doesn't have to be to be really enjoyable.

My first impressions of Shackles of Control were negative. There are frequent spelling and other language errors, such as “appressing” for “oppressing”, “baren” for “barren”, and such phrases as “Where could everyone gone?” and “magnitudes of CDs”. Together with the your-school-is-suddenly-abandoned plot and the fact that pressing “Credits” seems to end your game prematurely, this made me feel that Shackles of Control was just a lazy game, badly put together.

And then I arrived at an ending that involved a suddenly abusive narrator, a countdown timer to my death, over-the-top music and a fake button puzzle to give me false hope. This made me laugh out loud. Turns out the entire game is built around the conceit of having the player stray from the story in weird ways and having this strain their relationship with the narrator. The ending with the timer and buttons was perhaps the funniest, but there are some other amusing paths to discover as well.

I understand that the game might be more than a little inspired by The Stanley Parable, but since I’m unfamiliar with that piece, I can’t comment on the extent of the similarities or dissimilarities.

The complaints from my first paragraph still stand, of course. But I ended up having fun, and that counts for more than a little.

When I read this game's competition blurb, I thought: it makes it sound as if the game is a mix of trolley-style ethical problems and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5. To my not inconsiderable surprise, that is exactly what Dilemma is. You are faced with a terrible accident about to happen, and you have either one or, depending on what you do, just a few moves to come up with a solution. Shades of Rematch, certainly, but instead of trying to find the right solution, you are exploring an extremely wide possibility space, so it ends up feeling more like Aisle.

Let me stress that the possibility space is really wide. You start out by thinking of clever ways to save an old man from being run over by a bus, but you can easily end up deciding whether living people should be used as life support for important artists, or whether to hand over the Earth to a race of benevolent aliens. The central enjoyment offered by the game is the exploration of this zany universe, where everything weird seems to be happening at once.

But this very zaniness sits somewhat uneasily with the game’s claim of serving up moral dilemmas – a claim that even determines the title of the piece. Most of the piece is just not about dilemmas. Sometimes this is because you know nothing about the consequences: the question of whether or not to shoot the front left tire of the bus is not a moral dilemma, since you don’t know what will happen. But often it is because of how bizarre the choices are. Should I surrender the world to paternalistic aliens, or should I embrace an anti-communist quote by C. S. Lewis? Of course, it’s a great and important moral principle to never embrace anything by Lewis, but... let’s just say that this choice is a bit too ‘out there’ to really count as a thought experiment in moral philosophy. It doesn’t help that the game regularly gives ethical interpretations of your choices that have nothing to do with what you were thinking when you made the choice, nor that the game actively encourages you to find every ending, which means that you end up not making choices, but just exploring all the possibilities.

All in all, it was enjoyable for a while, and made me laugh at some of its weirder twists. But there wasn’t enough substance to keep me motivated to find all the endings. I experienced about a third and then called it quits.

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.)