Ratings and Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

Cacophony puts the reviewer in a difficult situation: I am certain that this game is worth reading, but I'm not sure that it is worth playing. Reading without playing, is that possible? Certainly--just type in the walkthrough. But read the rest of my review before you decide to do so.

Owen Parish gives us a game that is strikingly non-linear. This is true for the locations, between which you switch almost instantly and as often as you wish. It is true for the endings, of which there are at least three, all of them wildly different. And it is also true for the plot: you can progress towards different endings in completely different ways, and relatively few of the objects and locations in the game are needed for any given ending.

The non-linearity makes for a strange gaming experience that is strengthened by the fact that there is very little hand holding here. There is no list of goals; there is hardly even the suggestion of goals. Even if you have goals, it is rarely apparent which actions will lead to those goals--no ends-means rationality here. Rather, this game is about exploration, and the directions you explore will lead you to one ending or another, to one set of insights or another. We have non-linearity, but we do not have choice.

This may not be the kind of gaming experience we are after regularly, but it is certainly interesting to have it once in a while. However, and this is were the dichotomy between "reading" and "playing" becomes important, Cacophony involves so little hand holding that the player is bound to get stuck very often, and for potentially long times. This game is hard not so much because it has hard puzzles, but because it requires a lot of non-obvious actions. Isn't that the same? No, because a puzzle is an obvious obstacle that the player can circumvent by careful thought and experimentation. But Cacophony is full of points where you have to do something without knowing that you have to do it, without knowing why you would want to do it, without even being able to guess what the result will be. This makes the game very disorienting, which is good, but also incredibly hard to finish, which is not good.

So whether you are willing to take the time and experiment as much as you will have to in order to progress, is very much up to you. I did not persevere, but that is merely my choice. For those who follow me, the author has provided three excellent walkthroughs for three different endings. For those who have a stronger will... well, good luck!

(A previous version of this review appeared during the Spring Thing 2009 on my blog, The Gaming Philosopher.)


The Milk of Paradise is too small and short, unituitive, and underimplemented. This is a shame, because the game is actualy trying to do something interesting: there is a narrator who is a character in the story and has a complicated relationship with the player character, and the game is about revealing this relationship and using it to make a point about... about what exactly? Adventure? Identity? Dreams? I don't know, because the game was over so quickly and told me so little that it didn't in the end really say anything.

In a sense, The Milk of Paradise is the opposite of its fellow contestant Realm of Obsidian. The latter is large and carefully implemented (just think of the work that went into the sounds), but suffers from extreme retro gameplay. The former, on the other hand, is puzzleless and focused on story, but it small and sloppily implemented. I have more sympathy for Realm of Obsidian, because if you do something, do it well--even if it's something that other people might not think worth doing.

On the other hand, I'd rather see Josh Graboff make a new version of The Milk of Paradise than see Amy Kerns make a new version of Realm of Obsidian (because she'd do better starting with something fresh and more player friendly). A new version of this game ought to be:

* Extremely polished. The shorter your game is, the more polished it must be. Implement lots of nouns. Lots of synonyms. Lots of conversation topics. In order to make this happen, have a lot of beta testers play your game, and then implement (almost) everything they tried to do.

* More explorable. Make sure that the player can do more stuff. Also, try to reveal the situation slowly through the players actions, rather than simply telling him what is the case in big chunks of conversation that do not really seem to follow from my actions.

* More tightly focused. What is the game about? The political consequences of hero worship? The impossibility of being yourself when you play a major role on the historical stage? Especially in a game of this size, everything should have the single purpose of reinforcing the theme. (Or undercutting it, displacing it, taking a well-known theme and putting it slightly askew so as to reveal another... but then this other is the theme which everything must reinforce.)

(A previous version of this review appeared during the Spring Thing 2009 on my blog, The Gaming Philosopher.)

Richard Otter has written a truly weird game. It apparently consists of rooms taken from all Otter's other games. You have to find items with the name of a Richard Otter game on them, then give those items to people in the location that was taken from that game. Interspersed with this are puzzles of the "give the cloak to the shivering beggar" variety.

I only played one Richard Otter game before (Unauthorised Termination), but you don't need to be familiar with his work in order to play Vague: all locations contain clear hints about what game they are from.

However, walking through a game world that consists of totally different rooms which mean nothing to you, conversing with characters who say little more than "Identify this game!", and hunting down pieces of paper with titles written on them is not fun. There is no story. The puzzles aren't clever. The pieces of the diverse games are not united into a coherent and surprising whole. (At least not as far as I can see, though those who have read more Otter games may find meanings I have missed.)

Vague plays a lot like a failed commercial for the author's other games. It is not itself an interesting game experience.

On top of that, the implementation is far from perfect. Please never write something like this, that takes all agency away from the player:

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> wear coat

"For some reason you are unable to do that. It isn't that the coat does not fit, you do not want to wear it."
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There are strange parser errors:

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> get dart
You pull the dart from the board.

> throw dart at colin
You are not carrying the knife.
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There is careless implementation of objects:

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> open wallet
You can't open the wallet!
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My recommendation is that you first play other Richard Otter games, and tackle this one only if you want more. Unauthorised Termination would not be a bad place to start.

The Bryant Collection claims to be a set of "story worlds" written by Laura Bryant, which were then found in an old chest and implemented in Inform by Gregory Weir. This conceit adds little to the piece: it remains a collection of five seperate works that are not unified in any interesting way by the person of Laura Bryant. Luckily, the metafiction hardly intrudes on the experience, since you have to type no more than one command to arrive at what is essentially a menu where you can choose between the five stories.

All of the five pieces are competently implemented, but some are more successful than others. Interestingly, though, my ranking of the pieces is almost the opposite of that of fellow reviewer C.E.J. Pacian. Pacian liked "Morning in the Garden" best, "Going Home again" and "Undelivered Love Letter" somewhat less, and "The End of the World" least. He did not rank "The Tower of Hanoi", since he judged himself not to be the target audience.

For me, the puzzle game "The Tower of Hanoi" is certainly the highlight of the collection. Of the four vignettes, I enjoyed "The End of the World" most, "Morning in the Garden" less, and the two contemporary pieces least. As you can see, there is little consensus between us, and the reader must perhaps judge for herself.

So, let's talk about the pieces in turn, from what I found the least to what I found the most enjoyable.

"Going Home Again" sees the player character returning to the home of his parents after a prolonged absence. We get to walk through the house, notice that some things have changed and others have stayed the same, and then we leave again. Not a bad premise, but neither the protagonist nor the parents are well-characterised, the memories remain vague and unspecific, and in general there is not enough to do and explore. It doesn't even evoke nostalgia. More could have been done with this.

"Undelivered Love Letter" is again a good premise: you took the plane for a weekend with your far-away girlfriend, and then she ended the relationship. Now you are on the airport, waiting for your flight, and you have a few last moments with her. The problem here is that the player never really knows what she can do or say--the interaction remains shallow, and little emotional engagement is created.

"Morning in the Garden" is more successful: it is a slightly humorous take on the Eve & serpent story. However, the arguments put forward by the serpent are far from original, and one cannot help but feel that the time would have been better spent rereading a few choice paragraphs of Paradise Lost. Still, the flow is smooth, and the discussion not without its funny moments.

I found "The End of the World" remarkably effective. You are sitting enjoying your lunch as the world is about to end. There's nothing you can really do, and the story unfolds around you, but the piece really manages to evoke a feeling of Gelassenheit. (This German word could perhaps be translated as "serenity", but the connection to "lassen", "let" in the sense of "let be", "let go" would be lost.) This is a difficult feeling to put into your interactive fiction, but this story succeeds well.

Finally, "The Tower of Hanoi" is a puzzle game of the kind I enjoy. There are clear rules, which you can find out through thought and experimentation, and once the rules are clear, the puzzle can be solved by logical thinking. (What I generally do not enjoy are puzzles of the "use chicken with staple remover in order to get a feather which can then be used to tickle the sleeping drunk so a coin rolls out of his pocket which you can then use to do whatever unconnected action the author has implemented next"-type. Think Zork or Curses.) The idea is original: you get to explore a set of rooms which can be rearranged like the disks of the towers of Hanoi (though you can pick up all the disks at a time, so there is no actual Hanoi puzzle involved). The arrangement of the rooms makes a difference to their accessibility, to the paths of beams of light, and so on. It is a good puzzle of medium difficulty.

All in all, The Bryant Collection is certainly worth playing, since even the least successful sections will not take a lot of your time to complete. If you truly hate logical puzzles, you might want to skip "The Tower of Hanoi", but it is otherwise highly recommended.

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.