Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

I'm not particularly given to nostalgia for old school adventure games, but ANDROMEDA 1983 gets it right. The graphics and music are fitting and fun, and the minimal descriptions are used to great effect, with 'talk to stranger' in the first room setting the tone brilliantly. If anything, I would have liked to see more of this slightly over-the-top logic.

ANDROMEDA 1983 quickly turns into a small puzzle game. The puzzles are fair and not too difficult. I used a walkthrough twice, but mostly because it was time for me to go to bed and I wanted to finish the piece. The first thing I looked up was something I should have tried myself. The second was for the final command, and that was more or a syntax problem. (More verbs could have been accepted there.)

I didn't play the original game, so I can't make a comparison, but ANDROMEDA 1983 is a nice diversion that is enhanced by its graphics and music.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

You actually won't meet a tall dark strangler (as far as I know), but this is the message you get from the fortune teller in the game, whose sole purpose is to make this joke. That gives you a fine impression of Paradise in Microdot. It is (obviously) an old school adventure game that has you walk around the map, struggle with a limited parser, pick up objects, and use them for puzzles that are usually not too hard, but certainly made more difficult by the parser and one's complete inability to gain extra information through the 'examine' verb. There are also quite a lot of riddles. I used the walkthrough by Dorothy Irene to get past the more difficult points.

The game has good-humoured charm. Some of these older adventure games have a tendency to berate the player and make fun of them. There's a little bit of that here, but mostly the game seems to enjoy your success. It throws pictures of smiling people and animals at you when you've solved a puzzle. And one just feels that the author enjoyed themselves a lot when they came up with the riddles and the weird locations.

You can play the game on your own PC on a ZX Spectrum emulator (though I couldn't get my keyboard input to function) or online. The online emulator wasn't entirely stable, and when the game crashed on me close to the end, I decided to not replay everything. But I suspect that the final parts will not be too different from the earlier ones.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

In Rough Draft we take the role of Denise, an author of children's fiction who is plagued by the combination of an approaching deadline and writer's block. She decides to just start typing whatever comes into her head. Our job, as players, is to make choices about where to take the story. Almost all of these choices lead to dead ends in the writing process, but some of them give Denise an idea that she can then use in another branch of the story. Thus we need to visit the unsuccessful stories in order to be able to construct the successful one.

The story that we are writing is not very inspired, but it does the job. The game gives us a visual representation of all the story lines, which is very helpful indeed. Care has clearly gone into the presentation of the game.

Some things about the game are puzzling. For instance, it's not just ideas from one story branch that pop in another, but so do items -- we can use items that we haven't actually obtained yet. I suppose that we are to understand that Denise will later restore continuity. More importantly, it seems to me that the process presented to us by the game has little to do with the process of writing a story. Denise has only a starting situation, and nothing else -- shouldn't she think about at least some structure, or an ending, or something like that, before just writing? But I suppose just writing is a possible technique. But even then, surely the problem you run into and the solution you need is never going to be 'I don't know how to continue this story here in the forest, let's start again from the beginning but now they go to the mountains'. That's just not the kind of change that could be relevant to getting a plot sorted out.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

When people come across systems for writing choice-based stories, and then start writing a quick first game without much forethought, usually one of two things happen. Either the author focuses fully on exploring the system, neglecting the narrative and creating a game that goes like: 'You're on a street. Do you go left or right?' Or the author becomes somewhat giddy with all the possibilities offered by a branching story, creating a game that goes in all kinds of directions without forming a meaningful whole. Bender Lyfe is very much that second type of game.

Our protagonist is an aspiring football (soccer) player who is almost late for high school. Depending on where we go in the house, and what we do and do not investigate, we usually end up at one improbable death or another. The game is not without some humour in the form of dramatic irony; in one passage, we are given the opportunity to follow a man who tells us that he has candy in the back of his windowless unmarked van, something that doesn't set off any alarms for our protagonist. This unwise course of action in fact leads to a very unexpected (Spoiler - click to show)death by watching too much football.

If one is willing to click through all the choices in this very short game, one can even find a happy ending that involves... football. But there is not much reason to make this effort.

Here’s what I like most: the fact that we’re playing a variant of rock-paper-scissors where you are told in advance what the opponent’s move will be. Of course this makes it utterly trivial to win the fight that’s playing out in this cyborg arena; but that’s precisely how you’re clued in to the fact that winning isn’t the point. Making the audience happy, that’s the point, even though that may involve taking some heavy hits yourself. This is not a real fight; it is a cooperative ballet. And your partner trusts you so much that they never conceal what they’re planning to do. That’s the subtlety. That’s what you have to realise.

All of this is placed in a serviceable framework, but apart from the mechanic described above there’s not much subtlety to be found. The political commentary is simple to the point of being simplistic and so are the emotional strings that get pulled. It works; but it’s no more than a vehicle for delivering this one brilliant idea: combat as trust.

Reason to play this game: it makes us think about the narrative potential of combat mechanics.

I Should Have Been That I Am is a short game, but it has a surprising amount of variability in its text: as the robot protagonist follows one or another line of thought, the card game they are playing plays out differently. (I didn’t fully understand the card game -– it seems to be poker, but it was unclear to me whose cards I was seeing. I don’t think this mattered much, though.) But the card game and who wins it isn’t really the point. No matter how it ends, (Spoiler - click to show)the stranger infects you with a virus that suddenly gives you free will. And at that point, the hyperlink interface turns into an interface where you can type anything you want.

The strong aspect of the game is the atmosphere. Using a minimal amount of prose, it paints a distinctive future society, it shows us the peculiar mindset of the protagonist and it manages to create real tension about the stranger. Well done.

The weak aspect of the game is the story it tells. In theory, it’s a nice idea to (Spoiler - click to show)link the two different interfaces to the notion of free will. But it certainly takes a lot more to actually make it work. There is another game about (Spoiler - click to show)robots developing free will in this very competition, and there I complained that it didn’t really confront the problem –- the solution it presented was just too easy. But I Should Have Been That I Am presents a solution that is even easier. (Spoiler - click to show)A virus, and boom! Type in anything you like! Okay, so we should be aware of the immense space of possibilities available to us. But that’s a statement of the problem, not of the solution. And the current effort is weakened further by the fact that the game cannot actually process what you type, so your ‘free’ choice turns out to be even less consequential than the constrained choices you made earlier.

So: great atmosphere, impressive variability of the text, but it’s disappointing that it all boils down to the message: (Spoiler - click to show)you are free! (Really!) I’d like to see a more ambitious, more sustained effort from this author, since the writing skills are certainly here.

Anno 1700 is clearly a labour of love. It is the story of a guy who really loves pirate stories written by someone who, I suspect, really loves pirate stories. It’s a big game –- too big for the competition, really –- of a very classic variety: you’re let loose in a location and have to follow your innate desire for exploration, solving puzzles that lead to hidden tunnels, caves, coves, and so on, while slowly discovering what has happened. It may not be a fashionable genre in IF today, but it’s a classic for a reason. When done well, this type of game can be very satisfying.

Which leads us to the main question: does Anno 1700 do it well? Yes and no. Yes, as I said, it’s clearly a labour of love; and a piece like this, which simply wants us to enjoy the pirate theme, needs that most of all. It needs to clearly show that it was written by someone who is enjoying the pirate theme. This it does.

But there are two reasons the game in it’s current state doesn’t fully succeed. The vaguer and less easily remedied one is the quality of the prose. It’s not bad, but it’s kind of bland; sometime repetitive; sometimes awkward. The opening text is a case in point. It’s quite long, but it nevertheless fails to characterise the protagonist. It contains awkward sentences like this: “You just know within yourself, that you would never have passed the final exam.” The comma is misplaced; the “you just know” phrase is a bit of a cop-out; and one certainly wonder whether it is also possible to know things outside oneself. The text ends up not having much life in it. And this is true in general; the prose is mostly functional, but it doesn’t exude the same zest that the world building does. It’s hard to be much more specific, and hence hard to give very concrete advice to the author.

I can be much more specific about the second reason that the game doesn’t fully succeed: implementation. The game really needs another round of polishing to make play smoother and give the player more confidence in the author. Polishing a parser game is a lot of work, but it’s not hard, not once you see where things can go wrong. So I’m going to give a list of irritations that I made notes about; the aim being not to criticise the author, but to give pointers about how to improve the game.

[The version of the review that I posted in the authors' forum had a list of specific bugs here, but I'm leaving it out of the IFDB version.]

Certainly the most important thing here is to add more synonyms and recognise more actions. This would also help with some of the more obscure puzzles –- I started using the walkthrough after a while, because I sometimes got stuck because of guess-the-verb issues (as with the floorboards), and I’m pretty sure I would never have thought to try (Spoiler - click to show)“braid threads”. Around the time my two hours were up, I also got stuck in the walkthrough: (Spoiler - click to show)“prime wick” returned an error message, and I didn’t how to proceed any further.

All in all, I think this game needs to be improved. A lot of work has already been poured into it, so it would just be a shame to leave it as it is, with a relatively high number of parser issues and other small problems. Once polished a bit more, this could be a very enjoyable pirate romp. Light, but enjoyable.

This is the third game I played in the 2018 IF Comp in which the protagonist’s not being (strictly) heterosexual is important, making it something of a theme in the competition. That said, Time Passed actually doesn’t make a big deal about it. The story is essentially about an unconfessed teenage love and the protagonist’s desire to find out, years afterwards, what would have happened if he had found the nerve to speak out; the fact that the object of desire was another boy does not heavily impact the narrative.

In terms of structure, the first few pages gives us some links that lead to optional extras; and then we arrive at a single choice moment that determines which ending we get. (Spoiler - click to show)We either never meant anything to the person we had a crush on, or it turns out that they might have responded somewhat favourably.

The writing is quite good, although I felt that the diary entry didn’t really capture the tone of a teenage diary. For instance:

It’s true that I would give anything to feel Billy’s love, but I’d also do anything to avoid the feeling of rejection, and those two desires are in conflict with each other.

Nightmare Adventure comes an an executable file that has to be opened, at least under Linux, in the terminal. A bit weird, but it works. Unfortunately, the home-brew parser seems to have been built in complete ignorance of conveniences that have been standard for, I don’t know, three or four decades? You cannot abbreviate “examine” to “x”, “inventory” to “i” or “go east” to “e” or even “go e”. You cannot refer to the ruby amulet as “amulet”, but have to type out the entire name. I tried to wear or drop the amulet, but was unable to do so. What doesn’t help is that “verbs” gives you a gigantic list of all the synonyms of every verb. (Friendly advice to the developers: players don’t need to know synonyms! They only need to know which base verbs are supported.) Also, there’s no save/restore/undo. So why exactly are we using this system instead of Inform or TADS or Quest or Adrift?

The game itself is rather sparsely implemented, but clued well enough that I proceeded through it without much trouble. I (Spoiler - click to show)walked through the village, collected amulets, entered the towers, visited all the rooms, and ended up in a dream world among the stars. And then: instant death. In a game which does not support save/restore or undo. I’m afraid that equaled instantly losing this player.

In a sense it’s impressive that a home-brew system works this well, but the designers/authors really need to play some modern parser games in order to get a good sense of what are and what are not acceptable standards today.

In Pegasus, we play a commando on a mission gone horribly wrong: you and your team mate are trapped and she will sacrifice herself so you can get out. At that point, the game turns into a series of flashbacks that tell the story of how you got to be in this situation. This is really quite neat: they are tightly choreographed scenes in which you are continually doing non-standard things that move the plot forward at a brisk page. The early scene where your teamwork is tested, for instance, is a great example of how to do something like that in a parser game. Really nice. I seem to recall that The Duel That Spanned the Ages had a bit of a similar feel, although that game was even more about straight action scenes.

The narrative development isn’t quite up to the same standards. The personalities of the two protagonists remain rather vague, as does the nature of the Pegasus organisation. We learn that (Spoiler - click to show)Sarah was pressed into service, but this fact isn’t developed any further. In the end, what it comes down to is that the game is simply too short: I was extremely surprised when the game ended, because it felt like I had just played through the first chapter of what was going to be at least a three chapter story: disaster, investigation, revenge. Instead, we have a sort of moral choice, but we’re not invested enough to give this a real punch.

Should have been significantly longer. That’s a complaint, but also a compliment.