Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

Accuse is recognisable as an implementation of the well-known board game Clue, albeit with some important differences:

1. There are fewer people, weapons and locations.
2. The player character is not one of the suspects.
3. After making an accusation, you do not get to see one card used in your accusation, but you hear whether none or some of the elements of your accusation were correct.
4. Two successive accusation may not have any element in common.
5. You need to carry around the weapons and direct the people to the rooms you want to make an accusation about.
6. You're playing against a turn counter, rather than against someone else; you can only do better or worse by taking more or less time.

Most of these changes don't make a real difference, although they do somewhat change the logic of the deduction. The important differences are 4 and 6: 6 reduces the tension of the game, while 4 introduces somewhat needless tedium. As you can see, I'm not exactly under the impression that the changes make the game better.

The main problem here is that the game combines a certain amount of tedium (having to direct people to locations, having to make "in-between" accusations because of rule 4) with very little pay-off: the logic problem is exceedingly easy, and solving it does not give one a sense of success. For your quick logic fix, you're better off playing some Loopy (or "apt-get install sgt-puzzles").

The Djinni chronicles is a story, or rather a series of linked stories, about humans summoning djinni in order to gain their heart's desires -- beauty, happiness for a loved one, victory over one's enemies, that kind of thing. The player is not put in charge of the humans, but in charge of the djinni.

This premise carries with it all the risk of being used simply to string a couple of not too logical puzzles together without having to worry about narrative continuity, but let there be rejoicing, for J. D. Berry has given us a far more interesting design. First, there is narrative continuity: the different fragments are sometimes strongly connected (when you play with the same character), and sometimes a bit more loosely, but they're all evidently part of the same narrative. Second, being a djinn comes with an interesting set of limitations and powers, the most important of which is the fact that you are confined to a rather small action radius, the size of which is based on the strength of your bond with the human you serve. And third, far from being will-less slaves to their summoners, the djinni actually have agendas of their own, which they must attempt to realise within the limitations set by their respective masters.

All this adds up to an odd and fascinating little game that is definitely worth playing.

One can always complain: once you have solved the puzzle of finding out what on earth is going on, the other puzzles aren't very good; the one long passage of poetry contained in the game is quite bad; and in the end, the larger narrative fell short of my expectations, or indeed any real memorability. That's a shame, because with a better narrative, this game could have been a small jewel. As it is, it's still a very fine imitation.

One of the best tricks an IF author can pull off is to make the narrator of the game a central NPC; we saw this, for instance, with Violet, and we see it again with Ugly Chapter. Here, the narrator is utterly filled with resentment against the player character, which leads to --

-- really, saying any more would be spoiling this short piece.

Ugly Chapter is a piece of Speed-IF, and it shows: implementation is sparse, the highly linear path through the game is slightly underclued (but see this walkthrough), and the story and setting, though good, are more hinted at than developed. Still, given the small scale, this is an impressive work.

And it makes me itch to see more pieces where the narrator has a strong emotional investment in what is going on in the game.

Currently, only 3 out of 8 people found Jeremy Freese's review helpful, but really, he did about the best you can do. This is an exceedingly small game set in a bakery. It will allow you to... oh, let's say... make custard with your computer? Have your computer make custard for you? Pie yourself? Whatever. Giving this game a numerical rating would be beside the point, especially since I can only choose among (a subset of) the integers.

Custard crashed Gargoyle for me, and didn't work 100% perfectly in Nitfol either, but well enough to be played.

Fusillade is not exactly a standard interactive fiction work. It is a string of twenty vignettes very loosely tied together by a meta-narrative that only becomes somewhat clear at the very end. In each vignette, you play a completely different person in a different setting at a different time, and sometimes even in a different fictional universe. According to the author, these scene together constitute a "battle in my unconscious".

Which immediately shows us the biggest weakness of the piece: I am certain these scenes mean something to the author, but they mean little to the reader, or at the very least they will mean little to the average reader. While a few of them are taken from fiction written by Mike Duncan himself, and are thus presumably hard to follow and devoid of associations for almost everyone, others are drawn from history and popular culture. If one already knows the relevant episodes or works, one will perhaps get a jolt of recognition, and one's own conscious and unconscious associations will be activated. But if, like me, you have to look almost all of them up to even understand what is going on, this will not happen. If you are well-acquainted with SF television series, persons from American history that are popular within but not exactly well-known without the US (Molly Pitcher, Helen Keller, Francis Scott Key), and the exploits of the great British explorers, you are probably better able than I was to enjoy this piece.

The vignettes are mostly written very well, and with different prose styles corresponding to their different moods and settings. Unfortunately, they are barely interactive -- the player is only along for the ride, really. The idea is probably that one "flows" along with them, in the sense that "flow" has become a popular-psychological term. We're on a ride planned out by the unconscious. This doesn't quite work when one does not immediately connect to the events, as described above.

One aspect of the game that cannot be ignored is the music. Each scene comes with its own piece of MIDI-music: an interpreter which can play these is highly recommended. The music helps to set the atmosphere, and is quite listenable. However, if, as I did, you spend a lot of time looking up all these historical situations, you'll be listening to each (looping) short piece for quite a bit longer than the author intended, and this is not an unmixed pleasure.

In conclusion, then, this game cannot be called a success; but it does try a couple of things that we have not often seen before, and if these attempts are not entirely successful, they are not entirely unsuccessful either. As such, Fusillade is worth studying by authors, more than worth playing by players.

In Aayela, you play a young and expendable knight off to find the magical stone that will cure the queen's illness. This story is mostly an excuse to get you into a cave, where the game's main gimmick quickly becomes apparent: your lamp goes out, and most of the game is spent in darkness.

Exploring a cave in the dark could be very interesting, but Aayela fails to do its premise justice: not only is the cave exceedingly small, but there is in fact little difference between this game and a game where you explore a cave with light. You do not have to guess the identity of objects from their form, smell, taste or sound -- feeling something will always identify it for you. From the point of view of the player, typing "examine" and typing "feel" is not much of a difference. You do have to discover some things by feeling around, but these quasi-puzzles are familiar from other games where you have to feel under or in things.

What remains is an enjoyable little tale with different endings depending on a choice the character can make at the end. Olsson writes good, if perhaps somewhat overblown, prose, and the final scene is much more memorable than the cave itself. So, as a snack sized diversion, Aayela is certainly worth playing; but much more could have been done with it.

After finishing Moonmist and Seastalker, I felt the time had come to tackle one of Infocom's normal difficulty games. Since everyone seems to enjoy Enchanter, that seemed to be as good a place to start as any.

From a modern perspective, Enchanter has a number of features that do not immediately create enthusiasm: you are subjected to hunger, thirst and fatigue; your inventory space is limited; there are many ways to die; and the game can be put in an unwinnable state. Still, Enchanter isn't quite as foreboding as that list may make it sound. There is an unlimited supply of drink and, uh, sleep; a limited but large supply of food; the number of objects you need to carry around is small; you'll generally know when you're about to do something dangerous; and it's almost always clear which actions are irreversible. The result of this is that Enchanter feels quite friendly, even though you'll be seeing that Restore-menu a lot more than is strictly speaking desirable.

Enchanter is slightly different from Adventure and Zork in that you'll need to use spells rather than objects to solve most problems. This difference is of course mostly cosmetic -- it doesn't really matter whether you light up the darkness by saying "frotz" or by wielding a lantern -- but it reduces guess the verb problems and allows the designers to implement some effects that would have been hard to visualise using material objects. Also, learning spells from scrolls is simply cool.

The puzzles are generally good and well-clued. I hardly used hints, and never for the interesting parts of the puzzles. Most of them ask for pretty straightforward application of spells or objects found, but there a few more complicated puzzles which are also more memorable: especially the puzzle with the hammer and the puzzle in the translucent rooms.

In terms of story and atmosphere, Enchanter is functional and no more. You are a young enchanter, you must defeat the evil warlock, his castle is east of here -- that kind of stuff. Still, having a story and a sensible (if fantastic) set of locations is a major step up from Zork. The writing is short and to the point, serious with the occasional joke. Most of the jokes work, too, although the effects of a certain useless scroll were rather juvenile.

So, should you play Enchanter? You should if you would like to explore a sizeable game world, collecting special abilities along the way, and then solve a number of fine puzzles. That is the experience the game seeks to deliver, and it succeeds. If you are looking for story, characters, thematic writing -- look elsewhere.

Like Seastalker, which I reviewed earlier this week, Moonmist is an Infocom game aimed at younger interactors. However, Moonmist is far more successful. Rather than writing down to children, or assuming that for a kid being given responsibility is enough of a thrill, we are treated to a solid combination of gothic horror and detective stories that is quite enjoyable for readers of any age.

This is not to say that Moonmist's plot and characterisation are deep: this is standard stuff. We are in an old castle. The previous lover of the young local lord has died or been killed; his new lover, a female friend of ours, has been threatened. In addition, a ghost haunts the castle. And finally, the previous lord has hidden a fabled treasure somewhere on the premises and uses hidden clues and audio-taped messages to direct us towards it. The eight guests, all of whom might be somehow implicated in the plot, are quite stereotypical: the older female artist, the grumpy doctor, the young débutante, and so on. Nevertheless: stuff is going on, the characterisations are miles beyond those of Seastalker, the British setting is British, there is atmosphere, the descriptions are almost lush, and we even get Edgar Allen Poe quotes.

After an introductory sequence, gameplay mostly consists of searching the castle for clues. There are of course secret passages, cryptic clues (including wordplay and riddles), and lots of hidden objects. You will be spending a lot of your time walking through the castle, which is large, and although you will unfortunately need to read some of the room descriptions from the feelies (hello, copy protection scheme!) this is generally enjoyable. Plus, you can instantly go to any room, person or object you have previously seen. With several different tasks to perform (follow the clues to the treasure, find out who the ghost is, find out what really happened to the dead woman) you won't quickly run out of ideas, especially since the difficulty isn't high. One tip: if you successfully "search" something, do it again, because there can be more than one object hidden.

At the beginning of the game, you are asked to state your favourite colour. This seems an innocuous question, but it is actually very important: choosing red, blue, green or yellow starts one of four completely different scenarios. (Choosing another colour will randomly select one.) The treasure will be different, hidden in a different place, and different clues will lead to it. The ghost will be someone else, and the real story behind the death will be different too. Thus, Moonmist is really four games in one; and although solving one will help you solve the others, it will far from make it automatic.

All in all, then, very enjoyable. It's not in the end truly memorable, but as a relaxed gothic detective romp, there is nothing wrong with it either. Three-and-a-half stars.

Once again the urge to play the Infocom games came over me. In the past, this mostly led to me being frustrated, so I decided to play the easiest Infocom game this time. How much trouble could I have with a game explicitly aimed at young people?

Well, still some, because there is a time limit, which can surprise the unwary interactor. But in general the puzzles will not be much trouble for the veteran IF player, and most of them are clearly hinted by either the game or the documentation. Additionally, I hit a show stopping bug once; but it turned out that I was playing version 86, which is apparently a beta version. (What is that doing in the wild?) I will assume for this review that the real game is bug free.

The plot of the game is functional: you are a young inventor who is into submarines, and you have to save an underwater research station from a huge fish. There are some twists, and the story does manage to keep one's attention and put one into perilous situations of different kinds. Unfortunately, the characterisation and writing are very bland. I would have preferred even the cruel humour of Zork to this nondescriptness.

In terms of gameplay, some good things are done here: the submarine scenes are novel and fun (though probably long enough); the freedom in the Aquadome is also refreshing. On the bad side, some of the "puzzles" are so obviously hinted, with characters simply telling you what to do, that you don't feel in charge. This would seem to underestimate the children for whom the game is meant: surely one should design appropriate puzzles, rather than design puzzles that are too difficult and then remove the puzzle-element?

But the worst thing about the game, apart from the bland writing, is its use of feelies. In a design choice that is either incredibly stupid or a copy-protection scheme gone horribly wrong, you constantly have to read descriptions, commands, and maps from the feelies. This is very irritating. It works for the map of Frobton Bay, where having to consult a map is diegetic and even fun, but it doesn't work in the rest of the game. Examining a person and then having to read the description in the manual is simply stupid.

So -- not really recommended. Unless you wish to finish your first Infocom game, in which case I can tell you that with this game, it is possible!

About half-way through playing Sand-dancer (as I was following the rabbit) it occurred to me that this game might well be Aaron Reed's homage to Andrew Plotkin's Shade, centring as it does on a combination of fighting hostile elements and surreal/supernatural occurrences. This idea that was then dramatically vindicated by later events in the story, as one of Shade's central events suddenly turned up in this story as well.

The resemblance is nevertheless relatively superficial: where Plotkin's main interest lies in playing with knowledge and narration, Reed is far more interested in the motivations and choices of characters. In Sand-dancer, the fight for survival quickly turns into a meditation on the protagonist's past and future. Compared to the length of the game, the characterisation is deep, although it must be said that almost all of it is done through non-interactive text dumps. This means that the story is engaging, but perhaps not ideally suited to explore the possibilities of interactive storytelling. There are some choices that have an effect on gameplay, but they lack dramatic import. (Spoiler - click to show)The important choices in the game are, of course, which characteristics you wish to get from the animals. Although it is a need idea that (for instance) a courageous character now dares to do things he would dare before, the actual effects are a little underwhelming. I mean... I'm in danger of dying here, but I am afraid of spiders? I can now smell gasoline? These sequences are fun, but it's hard to take them seriously as important character developments.

The entire work is suffused with elements of U.S. culture, mixing popular entertainment, lower-class life in the nation's more desert-like regions, and native American culture. This makes it somewhat hard for people not from the U.S. to follow what exactly is going on. (It took me very long, for instance, to understand that "the res" referred to an Indian reservation. Which is apparently a place where they have high schools? My ignorance here is enormous, so accept nothing I tell you about the story as true!) Lest this be read as criticism, I actually applaud this move towards more culturally embedded works: it makes the reader learn more, or at least realise his/her own ignorance, and the real world is after all an interesting place.

Finally, a few words about the gameplay. As we can expect, the game is smooth and well-implemented (although attempting to open the rusty tin can with the can opener could have done with a description), we have a helpful in-game hint feature, and the puzzles are always logical. There were, unfortunately, certain points in the game where I had to retry random actions that used to fail, because it was not clear to me where my new-found powers would come in handy. (Spoiler - click to show)That courage would help me with the spiders: yes. That it would help me reach the control room: no. That scent would help me with the control room: no. However, this is a relatively minor quibble, since the game is not large.

Sand-dancer has a good story, an interesting gloomy American atmosphere, and adequate puzzles; it is a recommended read/play for all.