Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

The Race portrays a puzzle-based race for 50 million dollars through the most scenic locations of Peru. With one friend at your sight, you must defeat eight other teams striving for the prize by interpreting clues, thinking up the fastest ways to get from A to B, and solving puzzles along the way.

In terms of writing and characterisation, The Race is not very memorable, though the Peruvian setting partly makes up for this. However, as a puzzle-rich piece of CYOA, it is fun and of considerable interest. Anyone who would like to think about how puzzle design in a multiple choice medium works, should take a look at this piece. The Race is also to recommend to all those who simply want to play such a game.

(I do think that the piece would have been improved by scenery photographs to accompany the location descriptions.)

There are those who claim that zombies symbolise consumerism and mass culture. Perhaps they do, and perhaps some writers and directors use them to explore such issues. But it seems to me that most zombie fiction receives its appeal from that peculiar combination of nostalgia and distrust that forms the core of "apocalypse survivor" scenarios: nostalgia for the old U.S.A. frontier values (radical self-reliance, man's ability to form small groups that can survive in a hostile environment) and distrust of one's fellow men and especially the government. Add to the that facile good versus evil thinking that zombies encourage more than any other type of monster -- being unconscious, they cannot even be in the right from their own point of view, since they have none -- and you can understand why the genre might be attractive to some, and also what is so dubious about it.

Zombie Exodus is a typical example of the genre. It is focused on survival, and the player is supposed to ransack apartments and loot bodies in order to get food and weapons. A deep paranoia about government runs through the work: police and army are not there to protect people, but only to hinder them. Luckily, the game does have a strong focus on the most interesting part of the zombie theme: issues of trust and loyalty between the survivors. This is its redeeming grace, and what makes the game worth playing. (The more pity that, in the end, my character made a choice in this regard which I strongly disagreed with and tried not to make.)

Jim Dattilo gives us a competently written and designed piece of CYOA. The choices are often a bit generic (take short but dangerous road A or take long but safe road B), and compared to the Choice Of games they are fairly close together and at a fairly low level of detail. In this regard, Zombie Exodus feels close to parser-based IF, and misses something of the wild exuberance and sense of possibility that CYOA can evoke. On the positive side, this does mean that the connection between what we choose and what happens in tighter, and Zombie Exodus does a good job of putting us in situations that we can easily visualise and make decision about based on rational expectations of what will result from different courses of action.

Unfortunately, the game is unfinished, and stops after the second part. One might want to wait until the exodus can be finished.

Beet the Devil is a fine puzzle game, polished, smart, and often funny. We follow a grumpy, god-fearing old man as he descends into the underworld to beat the devil... using vegetables.

Actually, that is not quite accurate. I almost gave up on solving the puzzles at the beginning of the game because I was working from the rather natural assumption that one should use vegetables to make progress. It turns out that not all the puzzles are of this form, so you should expand your expectations a little.

The puzzles themselves are a mixed bunch. Some of them are clever and intuitive, other require leaps of logic that I wasn't prepared to make. However, which puzzles belong to which category will probably differ from person to person, and since I myself had no trouble at all with the demon of lust, I can only hope that this in no way indicates anything about one's personality. In general the puzzles are perhaps a bit too easy to make you feel smart for solving them, but I don't complain; they were good enough, and the quality of the writing kept the game interesting.

Then there is final confrontation with evil. I am a sucker for this type of ending, then type where you suddenly know what to type, and you know that this specific command will win you the game, and you type it, and it wins you the game. Very satisfying.

As a morality tale it doesn't work at all, of course. But I assume that it wasn't meant as a morality tale, so I won't hold that against the game.

An interesting game that takes Lewis Carroll and uses him as the basis for an original story. Mr. Liddell spends the entire game trying to catch up to his baby daughter in an underground Wonderland where he is forced to confronted the many weird people -- mostly, but not exclusively, family members -- who shaped his life and his soul. Much of the time, the game achieves a rare balance of wonder, threat and sadness that is very close to Carroll's originals (which are very dark books); this is certainly its finest accomplishment, and I assume it is what the author wanted to accomplish most.

The storytelling is punctuated by puzzles that are less impressive. You have to do a lot of examining and searching to find items, and you sometimes have to try many conversation topics in order to find the right answer. The author has provided a good hint system, but the game would have been stronger if the player's progress had been smoother and less dependent on finding obscure puzzle solutions. This is especially the case because some of the things you have to during the game are matters of choice, and it becomes confusing to the player whether he is trying to make a choice or trying to solve a puzzle with one single, predetermined solution.

The game also loses some of its charm in the final section, where it is plagued with near-identical rooms and confusing navigation and is not quite up to the standard of the rest of the game, the marvellous introduction in particular. The final word-based mechanic also doesn't quite work as it should.

But these weaknesses are not enough to bring down what is essentially a strong and interesting game, imaginative and full of Carrollian, fully human absurdities. Recommended (and not nearly as "disturbing" as some reviews may have led you to believe).

If there is one constant quality throughout Pacian's games, it is the strengths of the prose: always clear, always doing a lot with few words. This is an excellent match with this world building, which is also geared towards creating a mysterious but coherent image by giving us just a detail here and a phrase there. Pacian will never explain anything that doesn't need to be explained. His prose is lean and mean -- or at least lean and a little sad (I don't consider him to be an especially mean writer). This is as true about Love, Hate and the Mysterious Ocean Tower as it was about his previous games.

Unlike some of his other games, Love, Hate and the Mysterious Ocean Tower is all about choice. Structurally, it divides into two parts. First, as we move to the final scene, we make several choices that will decide what possibilities are open to us at the end. Then, in the final scene, we can choose between them (supposing that we are smart enough to realise all the possibilities). This last scene is a great set piece of love, hate, (Spoiler - click to show)betrayal and fighting, which, even if it doesn't manage to pack an emotional punch, at least interests and surprises us.

I can even imagine Love, Hate and the Mysterious Ocean Tower as the final sequence of a larger game, in which case it could be quite powerful emotionally.

Also, a moment of self-knowledge: I would never have made Nicholas the protagonist, would I?

It surprises me a little that Adam Cadre's first game won the 1997 XYZZY Award for Best Game. While I-0 certainly isn't bad, and may have broken some new ground, it is a bit too immature to be counted among the greats.

The immaturity is clearest, of course, in the game's depiction of sex and sexuality. I-0 is famous for the fact that its protagonist, who is just one day shy of being 18 years old, can undress everywhere and can attempt to perform sexual acts with every NPC (not always successfully). Cadre doesn't take sexuality seriously enough to say something substantial about it; but he doesn't take it lightly enough to turn it into matter-of-course actions either, as Adam Thornton would do in Mentula Macanus. Nor does Cadre go for straight pornography or erotic romance. Rather, it feels as if the narrator (I will not judge the writer) is fascinated by sex while being too ashamed by this fascination to truly admit it. He flirts with being transgressive, but generally pulls back at the last moment.

An obvious example of this can be found in the final scene, where (Spoiler - click to show)the command "rub clit" leads to the following response:

You don’t get very far before Trevor pounds on the wall. “Hey, keep it down!” he shouts. “Some of us are trying to sleep! Can’t you at least go use the tub faucet like usual?”

I know little about golf; in fact, my golf knowledge has increased significantly by playing Textfire Golf. So I cannot comment on the accuracy of the representation of golf that Cadre gives us, but it feels realistic and detailed to a non-golfer.

That is important because Textfire Golf is, first and foremost, a golf game. You get a description of the course you are on, you select a club, and then you type "swing". This will open up a little semi-graphical interface in the title bar in which you have to press a key at the right time to indicate first the strength and then the direction of your shot. The aim is... well, the aim supposedly is to finish the 9-hole course in as few hits as possible. So at the core, here, we have an arcade game. (Don't worry if you're really bad at this, though: you can "undo" whenever you want.)

But there is also real interactive fiction going on. You can type any command you want, and interactions with the environment and with your three fellow golfers (some guys from work who have invited you to join them) are possible and sometimes lead to startling results. Your fellow golfers continually comment on how the game is going, and the final result of the game will depend on their scores as well as yours.

The combination works surprisingly well. The arcade game is entertaining and gives us something to do, while the characters keep us interested in completing the game. It's a weird little set-up, but definitely worth experiencing.

Should that be four stars? In the end, I decided to give the game three stars because the arcade part of the game is just not that interesting in the long run. Replaying the game will give you different endings, but not many people will be replaying this game more than once or twice.

In certain respects, Shrapnel is a lot like Photopia: a distinct lack of freedom for the player, a fragmented narrative. But where Photopia's story is merely told non-chronologically and from different points of view, Shrapnel's story has quite literally been blown apart by a fragmentation grenade.

The strong point of the game is its presentation. Using several fun gimmicks and some surprising twists and turns, Cadre manages to keep us interested in playing the (short) game even when the story doesn't make much sense.

The weak point of the game is that there isn't much of real interest to be found in it. The basic story might have been powerful if it had been expanded upon, but is hardly moving or illuminating it its current fragmented state. And the deus ex machina explanations of the meta-plot that we get at the end do not rise beyond the level of forgettable SF.

Two stars because the story is lazy and the gimmick mostly gimmicky, or three stars because the execution is very good? I'm going with three stars, partly because the game is so streamlined and short that it is worth checking out even if you probably won't be blown away by it. Bad pun very much intended, of course.

This is a tiny game that puts the PC in a situation we have not often seen in interactive fiction. Saying anything more would spoil all.

I suspect the game would have been more interesting if it had taken me more than two turns to understand what was happening. Or, rather, I think the game should have allowed me to express that understanding and should then have skipped to the ending immediately. As it was, my third or fourth command was (Spoiler - click to show)"be born", but that didn't do anything; and that meant I just had to wait it out. Which is realistic, I guess, but not necessarily fun.

Let me finish by saying that the title of the piece is perhaps a tad optimistic. But that, I suppose, will be the subject of Painless Little Stupid Game 9.

By now we have all become familiar with films that give us a narrative that is somehow cut up -- either in space, or in time, or in levels of reality -- and then ask us to sort it all out into a coherent story. Memento is an obvious example, as are Donnie Darko, Inception and eXistenZ. These films are like puzzles, in that we are constantly coming up with theories and testing them against what is happening on the screen.

Jon Ingold's All Roads falls firmly within this genre. It presents us with scenes taking place in an alternate Venice, where the Guard fights against the Resistance. We take the role of an assassin who is about to be hanged, but suddenly manages to escape in what appears to be a supernatural way. The rest of the game consists of weird shifts in place and time, troublesome identities, and the player trying to understand what on Earth is going on.

So, is it any good? On the positive side, the story is complicated and yet coherent enough to excite interest and engage our intellect. We theorise, we adopt and discard theories, and the clear-headed reader will have a pretty good idea of what was going on once he has finished the game. One will certainly have had fun.

On the negative side, however, it must be mentioned that All Roads is a bit too complex for its own good. The central plot could have done with at least one identity less. (Spoiler - click to show)Did we really need to have both the assassin as a disembodied ghost and his brother? A confusion between two identities would have been complicated enough, but now we in fact have three identities. This would have made it easier to solve a story that now appears to be wilfully obscure.

Another negative point is that the game sometimes goes out of its way to hide clues from the player. Not only will some crucial information only be found by players who do non-obvious actions, it is also the case that some clues are actively withheld from you. The "x me" command is particularly bad in this respect. While I can see why the author was hesitant in supplying a more helpful response to such a command, I do not think it was the right decision. It is better to make the central puzzle easier than to tell you players "sure, if I told you this stuff that you should just be able to examine, you could solve the puzzle; but I'm not going to!"

That said, it is still easy to love All Roads. Anyone interested in IF should give it a whirl.