Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

David Welbourn's 69,105 keys is not so much a game as it is a parsing excercise presented as a short and well-polished puzzle. You have to find the one unique key in the room, using commands such as "count green round bronze unscratched Acme keys". Tedious rather than fun, but technically impressive. The source code is also provided, so that you can learn from it.

In one memorable scene (though the associated puzzle is somewhat irritating) of The King of Shreds and Patches, the protagonist is rowing on the Thames, attempting to make headway against the stream. Playing Maher's game is nothing like that. It is, in fact, the exact opposite, a smooth ride along with the flow.

Maher has a satisfying tale of Lovecraftian horror to tell, and tell it he does. The player is along for the ride, although she encounters enough (generally easy) puzzles and has enough influence over the order in which the story unfolds to keep her from feeling powerless. The result is an enjoyable game that is the interactive fiction equivalent of a page turner: it may not always be of the highest literary qualities, but you want to keep on reading nonetheless.

Apart from the often excellent puzzle design, the main reasons that you can keep on turning the pages are the helpful map and "go to..." commands, and the self-updating list of goals. These together ensure that the player cannot get lost, either in space or in story-space.

In other words: this game is not incredible, it does not "advance the art of interactive storytelling", but it is very enjoyable and one can learn a lot of craft from it. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets one or more XYZZYs.

For a game as short as this, quite clever. However, you might not understand the point of the game on your first play-through: the game's gimmick becomes clear only after certain input.

See Emily Short's and my posts for more discussion: http://playthisthing.com/nemean-lion , http://gamingphilosopher.blogspot.com/2009/09/nemean-lion.html .

The protagonist of To Hell in a Hamper has a problem: he's taken an IF adventurer on board. That, at least, is my explanation of why his fellow passenger Hubert Booby has collected such a load of junk, and is extremely unwilling to part with it. But part with it he must, or the two of you will fly against an erupting volcano and die!

The rest of the game is a satisfying sequence of puzzles where you have to discover all the stuff that Booby is carrying, and then somehow get rid of it. In some cases this is as simple as throwing it overboard (a Rembrandt painting, for instance), in others it is quite a bit more involved (the boomerang gives an obvious problem, and so does the cursed mummy).

One reviewer complained that you can get rid of some items too early, thus leaving the puzzles unsolvable. This has not been my experience; as far as I could tell, there was always an alternate solution. I cannot absolutely guarantee this, though.

My single complaint is that the game doesn't actually contain that many jokes. It has a good comic setup, and some of the stuff you discover inside Booby's coat is hilarious; but there are few events or descriptions in the rest of the game that make one laugh or smile. This game would have benefited from having Admiral Jota as a co-author; his gift for stuffing a game full of funny remarks would have been very effective here.

Aaron A. Reed's Gourmet puts you in the shoes, or rather the hat, of a very good chef. You have just opened a new restaurant, and its succes, indeed its survival, depends on getting a favourable review from culinary critic Mrs. Davenport, who is coming tonight.

There are a few problems, though. First, your entire staff has called in sick. Second, almost no food has been delivered. Third, the only lobster you have left stares at you with really evil eyes...

Gourmet is a comic game which leans towards slapstick. In the first half of the game, you are faced with mishap after mishap; think of stumbling over a lobster and spilling three bowls of soup over your most important client's new suit, and you'll have the right idea. (Though this doesn't actually happen in the game.) Because the pace is right and the descriptions are well written, this is a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, the game stalls somewhat in the second half. The puzzles becomes much more elaborate and involve timed sequences, so that you'll be struggling more to get the story to move on. Sometimes you'll even be doing the same acion two or three times because you weren't quick enough in doing something else; and of course, repeating jokes is fatal to enjoyment. So the second half, although it has a great premise, isn't quite as much fun as the first.

Also, there seem to be some bugs. I, for one, couldn't get the game to end. The final command in the walkthru gave me "I don't suppose the lobster would care for that.", which is strange, given the circumstances.

Had the pacing been better and the bugs been squashed, this would be a must-play comic piece. As it is, it is still recommended.

You are a Chef! is solidly within the "look, I have written a really bad game!" school of comedy. We can see this from the very first line: "HELLO CHEF!!!!!1". The string of exclamation marks ends with a '1' because the fictional 'n00b' author put his finger off of the Shift-key a little too early.

The main problem with this approach to comedy is that an intentionally bad game is still a bad game. To take badness and elevate it to another level is possible, but very hard; and I doubt that taking a straightforward approach to it is the way to go. See Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents "Detective" for a non-straightforward, and much more successful, example. There, a separate "commentary" track is used to make fun of the source material. In You are a Chef!, we are just playing the very bad game.

Nor is the sheer absurdity of the events enough to make the player chuckle. Absurdity is only funny if there is some method behind it. Random objects falling from the sky simply do not qualify as a good joke.

Perhaps the dreariness of the game is best demonstrated by this exchange:

Iron safe falls from the sky!
It lands on top of clown and breaks open!

>x safe
In the iron safe you see a MYSTERY INGREDIENT.

>take ingredient
Taken.

>x it
I cannot tell you! It is a mystery!!

If you thought that was funny, please play this game.

Imagine a puzzle game making strong use of a set of simulationist rules about materials and sizes. Imagine a game set in the only partly material laboratory of a Renaissance magus. And imagine a game where the player character attempts to escape from bondage through spiritual purification.

If you can imagine all of those together, you have imagined Metamorphoses.

It is not just a strange game, it is also a very good game. The writing is impeccable and Short effectively weaves together the PCs current exploits with a more emotionally gripping backstory. The puzzles mostly aren't too hard, and all seem to have multiple solutions. The atmosphere is simply great. And there is also true progression in the story, as the PC purifies herself and finally chooses her own fate.

It is also a short game, and you'll probably play through it in two hours. That does mean that the backstory remains very sketchy, and the story doesn't get the emotional resonance that it might have gotten in a longer game. (I would have liked to see the Master in-game, for instance.) The multiple endings don't really work, since you choose between in your last move and that means that everyone is going to Undo and try out the other ones immediately (right?). And there were one or two details in the setting which I felt didn't really fit into the Universe of Renaissance Platonism.

But all in all, these are insignificant complaints compared to the virtues of the game. If you like puzzles, Plato and purification, you should not give this piece a miss.

(This game was part of BoucherComp. The premise if the Comp was: "No one has ever escaped from Lowell Prison. Why? Because there's only two ways out of here. One is dead in a pine box, and the other is that big wide-open gate over there, which I ask you seriously to please, please stay away from.")

Okay, so this is a SpeedIF game that is based on the infamous Pick up the Phone Booth and Die. It is, therefore, a very short and very sparsely implemented joke. But it is a joke without a twist. It is just PuTPBad plus the premise of the Comp. As far as I could ascertain, nothing else has been done with it.

This game didn't make me laugh, and that is pretty fatal for a one-joke game.

This game makes a point about interactive fiction design. It makes it well and quickly (one you have figured out the solution, probably by reading the source or the walkthrough). So, although this game is not enjoyable as such, it does the one thing that it attempts to do quite well.

What is the point that it makes? According to Karl Muckenhoupt, the point is that "it is possible for a puzzle to have a completely logical solution, and yet be nearly impossible to solve except by randomly guessing commands". Without disagreeing with that, I would say that the point of +=3 is that "conventions of play are there for a reason". Either way, it's a good point, and +=3 is a name that you might want to drop in a discussion now and then.

Your phone rings. You pick it up, and a voice tells you that "they" are coming to get you, and you'd better leave your apartment if you wish to stay alive. At that point the game starts. You type "look" and get a room description which mentions a "small table with phone". You type "x phone", and the game tells you "You see no such thing.". After examining a couple of more things (some not implemented), the bad guys enter you room and instantly kill you. Need I say more?

What follows--and I had only enough motivation to follow the walk-through--is a convoluted quest that makes little sense, involves mazes, and has you moving from one sparsely implemented location to another in a city that is far too big for the content it contains. I didn't play it to completion because of a guess-the-verb problem that the walkthrough did not solve for me.

Not recommended. It does come with a map, though, which is good. On a numerical scale, this game would get a 3 or 4.