Ratings and Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

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.

Written for the 1999 Art show, The Possibility of Life's Destruction is of course not a standard IF game. Instead, we have a piece of interactive poetry. The game starts with the lines

Metamorphosis
The black ant goes to the river;
what it sees there makes it shiver.

Annoyed Undead is a short game written for I-Comp, a competition in which the game was not allowed to use an inventory. It would be interesting to see how far you can push the standard IF puzzle without requiring the PC to pick up any objects; but Annoyed Undead is altogether too short to really explore the possibilities.

You play a vampire who has awakened after 500 years, only to find that somebody has built a church right on top of his crypt. How dare they! The aim, then, is to escape from the church, and find some humans to kill in the process. This setting allows Roger Ostrander to implement the competition limitation in a neat way: there are portable objects in the game, but they are all too holy for you, a vampire, to pick up. You'll have to find some other way of transporting them.

Annoyed Undead is a simple puzzle game, which may serve as a short diversion. A walkthrough can be found here.

Sam Kabo Ashwell has written many short games, and Dithyrambic Bastards is one the earliest. Like the much more recent The Cavity of Time, it greatly enjoys being fiction, being about other fiction, and in fact shamelessly borrowing from other fiction; but unlike Cavity, Bastards is ruined by a lack of self-control. We have everything: a weird writing style that mixes high poetry with low slang; an insane fictional world where people die and kill for poetry; sudden and unexplained plot twists; the author punching the player in the face with a big glove saying "metafictionality!"; quotations from English poetry; puzzles that can only be solved by looking up and reading English poetry -- and all that in the space of maybe five minutes. It is too much, too uncontrolled, with far too little coherence. In other words, this game is a mess.

That doesn't mean it's all bad. For instance, the "private detective who interprets everything as having something to do with Paradise Lost"-joke could have been successful if it had been sustained for longer. There is, after all, nothing inherently wrong with text like this:

She sat down on the desk. Hell, those legs were longer than Paradise Lost, and just as tautly constructed; gave you the feeling that if you went looking for it you’d be headed for a Fall.

“Got a light?”

You size up the flame-shrouded torso. To serve in Heaven doesn’t seem so bad all of a sudden.

I can see how that could work. Or take the puzzles in the end, especially the second (and final) puzzle involving William Blake's The Book of Thel, which you can only solve by looking up the motto of the poem:

(Spoiler - click to show) Does the Eagle know what is in the pit,
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod,
Or Love in a golden bowl?

I think there could be a great and educational game with exactly this idea: in order to progress, you must read famous poems and use the knowledge encoded in them to progress. But Dithyrambic Bastards doesn't do much with the idea (except for telling us that a second part will be coming along).

So I would suggest skipping this game, and playing one of Sam Kabo Ashwell's better short-form IFs instead, like Ugly Chapter or The Cavity of Time.

Affrontotron should be allowed to explain itself:

Mike Roberts wrote: "This actually has practical applicability to IF, too. You could imagine a game where the winning conclusion is reached by typing GO NORTH 1,000,001 times in a row, and every time but the 1,000,001st, the response to GO NORTH is "You can't go that way." (It wouldn't be a very fun game, but it's still a possible game.) If an automated winnability evaluator were given a limit of a million turns, it would incorrectly call the state unwinnable."

*** Annoyotron IV: Affrontotron ***

has just been uploaded to the incomig directory of an IF-Archive mirror near you! Either I've implemented the game Mike describes above... or I haven't! Is it winable? You decide!

And when we start the game, the only text we get is "You are in a small room with no visible exits. You must escape." As is to be expected, there is apparently nothing we can do. Can we escape by typing "n" a million times, or not?

There are two approaches to this problem:

1) Brute force. It was easy for me to create a string of one million "n."s, but unfortunately, I think Inform 6 or my interpreter has a maximum input buffer far smaller than 2 million signs. So brute-forcing by hand is impractical. Someone more knowledgeable about computers than I am might be able to hook an input generator onto an IF interpreter, but I have no idea how to do this. Anyway, you can only use brute force to show that the program can be won, not to show that it cannot be won.

2) Decompiling the game and seeing whether it can or cannot be won. The author writes that "(No fair decompiling it - that's cheating!)", but really, who is he to judge? I'll play whatever game I want, and in my game, decompiling is not cheating.

The game does contain the following text: "The wall finally falls down from the beating you've been giving it, and sunlight shines through! You've escaped!" (Message S109.) So that would seem to indicate that it can be won. However, S109 is only displayed by routine R0250, which is never called. Now I am not an expert in decompiled Z-code, so perhaps this doesn't mean anything; but on the face of it, I would say that it is suspicious. There are other routines that do not get called, though, and I'm not sure if TXD generates full game information or not. If it doesn't, there might be some part of the game that calls R0250 which I just didn't see.

So in the end, my guess would be that the game cannot be solved, but I am far from sure. May others come and do better. As a puzzle, I actually kind of liked it, which is why I give it two stars.

Edge of the Cliff claims to satirise the "non-interactive movement in IF". I do not know which games that author is thinking of, though one would suppose Photopia to be one of the prime targets. The work Edge of the Cliff overtly mimics is Blue Lacuna, which is very interactive -- except for the way you are shepherded into accepting your destiny in the prologue, and perhaps that is the object of satire here.

Poster gives us a very small scenario which always ends the same way no matter what you do. This is none too subtle, but the fact that you can only reach the ending through actions that would not seem to lead towards it is a deft touch. You cannot actively jump to your death, because that would be too much player agency.

As a member of the class of "I'm making a small point with a small game"-games, Edge of the Cliff gets two stars. (The author might want to fix two bugs I found: during the first two questions, random input does not give the desired answer; and one of the endings does not end the game.)

Like its predecessor, A Simple Theft 2 is a short, easy puzzle game that is evidently meant as a snack rather than as a serious meal. Well-written, well-implemented, and perfect if you want to while away fifteen or twenty minutes, but with little lasting appeal.

Your master Apaman has once again sent you to recover an important artefact from a castle, and this time you don't have to enter through the coal chute. Instead, you have a grappling hook which can use to get to places that would not otherwise be accessible to you. There is a nice plot twist halfway through the game, which is perhaps a hint for things to come in a third instalment. Otherwise the game is unremarkable -- although it does have a 'last lousy point' that I was not able to collect.

In my rating system, a two star rating can either mean that there is something wrong with a game, or that it is competent but without ambition. A Simple Theft falls squarely within the second category: it is a fine little diversion of the common IF-with-puzzles kind. There is nothing wrong with it, but there is also nothing to make the heart beat faster.

You get to play the apprentice of a wizard who is attempting to restore magic to the world, and who tasks you with the retrieval of a MacGuffin from a castle. The game consists of you puzzling your way through this theft. The world is small and implementation is rather sparse, though not uncommonly so for a game written in 2000. The puzzles are run-of-the-mill, involving locked doors and guards, but the implementation is solid and the inquisitive player will be rewarded with funny responses. The entire game can be played in perhaps fifteen minutes.

In the design notes revealed at the end of the game, Paul O'Brian tells us that one of his goals was to experiment with a more natural scoring system. On the one hand, he says, having a numerical score breaks the fourth wall; on the other hand, without a score players may feel lost, since they do not know whether they are on the right way. How to resolve this tension? The problem was discussed in the newsgroup, and Wearing the Claw presents a possible solution.

This scoring mechanism is only a tiny aspect of the game, but I bring it up to show how big the gulf is between 1996 and 2011. The tension outlined in the previous paragraph will strike nobody as a serious problem, because nobody expects to have a numerical score anymore. Progression through the game can be shown in so many ways -- most simply by just having the story continue -- that implementing a magical claw that changes as the player succeeds or fails seems like an attempt to solve a problem that doesn't exist. So much has changed: when Galatea came out in 2000, people complained that it wasn't clear how you could "win" it. Such a complaint would now be unimaginable.

Wearing the Claw is a short, solid game, but one that would not do well in a competition in 2011. It is a string of more or less random puzzles, most of which require at least some experimentation. The NPCs are schematic. The locations are sparse. The story is -- well, there, but that's the most you can say of it.

On top of that, you can easily get the game into an unwinnable state. This makes the game seem very cruel to a modern player, even though the author probably did not design it that way: in 1996, the message that one of your objects was destroyed was a big warning that you had done something wrong, whereas in 2011 it sounds like it is part of the story. What was once obvious is now obscure.

This game, then, would have scored quite well fifteen years ago; but it has aged badly.

(If this is how we look back on games from 2011 in 2026, I will be one happy critic!)

I'm not a big horror fan. I especially do not like the kind of B-movie horror where piling on the gruesomely killed corpses seems to be the main point. And yet, within a single week I enjoyed both Leadlight and One Eye Open.

This is a bad game, but it has so much fun being bad that it is hard not to laugh along with it. Another creatively eviscerated corpse? Sure! Another hallway with teeth that eats people? Keep 'em coming! But I'm glad that this was IF, not a movie, because reading about gruesome scenes is a lot better than watching them.

What is weird about One Eye Open is that it combines splatter horror with a far more serious storyline about a psychic research facility, the tensions between the researchers, and the horrible results of their experiments. Fictionally, the two aspects of the game merge seamlessly; but it is perhaps impossible for the reader to both laugh about the horror and take the underlying story seriously. Every gallon of blood and every cubic foot of pulsating flesh distances us more from the characters. I doubt this was the intended effect, but it certainly is the effect.

Nevertheless, One Eye Open is remarkably ambitious and mostly succeeds. The game is very large (and should have been submitted to the Spring Thing rather than the IF Comp). The story is complicated, interesting, and well thought-out. The puzzles are good, and the best ending can only be reached once the player has thoroughly understood what happened in the past and what will happen in the future. Care and attention have been lavished onto the environment. I wouldn't quite call it a must-play game, but it is certainly enjoyable and well worth perusing. I personally prefer it to Babel, which is the game that obviously inspired One Eye Open.

My main complaint, apart from the weird mix of genres, is that the story is mostly told through journal entries and other documents. Journals are the disease of interactive fiction. Using journal entries is almost always the easy way out, and almost never a compelling way of telling a story. In addition, it obviously makes no sense that all these secretive protagonists are writing down their most inward thoughts. People don't act that way. Please, IF writers across the world, stop using notes and journals and sundry scraps of paper as the means by which you deliver your story to me?

But hey, cleaning the suit? The solution to that puzzle was so over-the-top and yet so sensible that I laughed out loud.