Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

The little game Room is supposed to be an exploration of depression. You wake up, have to face the new day, and then make choice like whether you'll get out of bed, whether you'll try to find a job, where to get your food, and so on. It's all very short. Some choices lead to a "you have lost" message, others do not, but it's not clear that the non-losing outcomes are any better. Mostly, you're just going to be facing another day tomorrow.

While the protagonist is clearly unhappy, as a portrayal of depression the game isn't very illuminating. The prose is also plagued by typos and some very unfortunate sentences indeed, such as:

The day ahead of you is something to dread and opening your eyes is the first step towards facing them.

Nerd Quest ended up placing 33rd out of 35 in the 2008 IF Competition, which means that it is least better than The Absolute Worst IF Game in History, though this is, one supposes, a rather low bar to clear. Gabor de Mooij's game is written in a self-developed Java-based interactive fiction system. This means playing the piece is a bit of a hassle, since one must first install java. (I recommend getting the game files from the IF Comp 2008 installer or zip file, since this gives us all the files we need together in the right directory structure.)

Unfortunately, the self-made system is incredibly primitive, failing to recognise most of the common commands and -- what is worse -- failing to give helpful parser errors. Guess the verb issues are very common. Saving is impossible. The story is short and shallow: we need to escape from the server room by solving some brief and not too interesting puzzles. In other words, Nerd Quest has not much to recommend itself. (Although Gabor de Mooij is one of the few fellow Dutch interactive fiction authors that I know of, so there's that!)

I always find it tricky to rate SpeedIF games. They were written under very tight time limits; so should we rate them for what they are, or for how impressive they are given the time limit? In the end, I lean towards the former; here at the IFDB we are no longer in the competition context, and what the review should indicate is whether the game is worth playing.

In this case... well. The Courier Who Missed Me is a very short parser puzzle game in which you need to get some secret plans. There are only three locations, and basically one puzzle to solve. This puzzle doesn't make much sense. It is of the 'use the objects and these people because they happen to be present and then something illogical but useful happens' variety. The game is bug free and competently done, but I can't say I got anything out of it. So that means a single star.

I came across Triune while playing ten random games from the IFDB; and this fact itself is somewhat astonishing. For here we have a game that did fairly well in the IF Comp and is about exactly the kind of themes that I would be exploring just a few years later in games like The Baron and Fate. Why did nobody every draw a link between my work and Papillon's earlier piece, or recommend this game to me? One thing we need to become much, much better at as a community is to keep the conversation going, to keep talking about games beyond the momentary attention they may get in a competition environment. We always need more IF, obviously, but what we need even more is more writing about IF.

As the above indicates, Triune deals with some heavy issues. The game starts when you, a teenage girl, are fleeing into the bathroom to escape the violence of your alcoholic father. Very soon afterwards, you find yourself in a fairy tale country -- no doubt both a representation of your own fantasies and a archetypal map of womanhood -- which offers you several destinies to pursue, all of them linked to a particular image of what the feminine can be like in a world that is dominated by maleness.

In terms of vision, Triune offers us a lot. Some reviewers have called the symbolism heavy-handed, but I don't think that's a totally fair complaint; we are in the realm of the fairy tale, we are incarnating Jungian archetypes, so of course the symbols are in some sense obvious. They have to be. What matters more is the daring of the vision, and this, I think, is where Triune shines. To have us (Spoiler - click to show)literally repeat the sin of Eve, burn down the entire forest, marry a prince who kills unicorns but is totally asexual; that is glorious stuff.

Whether the player will get to enjoy it is another matter. It also seems that most reviewers relied to a large extent on the walkthrough, as did I. There are some real implementation issues that decrease our confidence in the game; a few puzzle solutions are hard to discover; and the heavy use of a keyword-based conversation system leads to many places where the player can get stuck. While I did not encounter any bugs per se, Triune could have benefited immensely from more play-testing aimed at a smoother play experience. In fact the very reliance on puzzles seems a mistake: surely this game is about choices much more than about finding solutions to problems!

As I played the game, I saw three endings corresponding to three different visions of womanhood: (Spoiler - click to show)the Earth mother, dominating the male but totally lost in the world of sensuality; the fairy-tale princess, pampered and sterile; the vengeful witch, craving a revenge that lays waste to everything. None of them were portrayed by the game as particularly satisfying. One assumes that the real message and the canonical ending are (Spoiler - click to show)when we return to the real world after the forest has burned down; and we quit the game and are told that this was just a story; that in reality there is no message announcing that you have won; and that every game, while it can be played and replayed, may also be ended when one has had enough. What does this mean? I don't think it's about suicide. Is it about stepping out of an abusive situation? About refusing to meet the world on its terms and instead dictating your own? Or instead about facing reality rather than escaping into fantasy and dreaming of magic? Surely somehow it must be an indictment of the very way of thinking womanhood that leads to the three archetypes mentioned. But how?

I feel that my uncertainty about the point that the piece is trying to make is indicative of the game's greatest weakness. For while I do not demand a game to have a message, let alone one that is spelled out in detail, I feel that Triune ends up being too diffuse. How do its different narrative threads relate to each other? What do all of them have to do with the piece's insistent meditations on the nature of magic? We can certainly understand all the narrative strands; but can any sense be made of the whole? Still -- the very fact that my criticism is on this level shows that the piece is well worth experiencing.

Celtic Carnage (written by Ian Brown as Traveller in Black) is the fourth and last instalment in the Phoenix series. I haven't played the other games, but I understand they all feature a time travelling Traveller in Black who has to perform heroic deeds at different points in history. Or perhaps I should say mythical history, for that is where Celtic Carnage puts us, right in the middle of Irish mythology -- especially, if I judge this correctly, the tales of the Ulster Cycle.

Setting and story are the strong points of Celtic Carnage. Ian Brown has clearly done his research, and the source myths shape every aspect of the game. Indeed one has to pay close attention to details in order to be able to solve the game, since names mentioned only in passing sometimes turn out to be crucial later on. The story, especially in the second half of the game, is structured in a way reminiscent of RPGs, where NPCs give us quests that tells us where to go and what to do there. This gives the story momentum in a way that is harder to achieve in more exploration-driven games. Sometimes I found it hard to follow what was going on; where much fantasy and sci-fi errs on the side of explaining too much, Celtic Carnage explains perhaps too little. Of course this can and perhaps should be seen as an invitation to delve into the Ulster Cycle ourselves and become better acquainted with them.

Although I ran into a few guess-the-command issues here and there (tips: you can 'search' without a noun, and you have to 'mount' the chariot rather than 'enter' it) the game is actually quite forgiving. There are some instant death moments, but they are clearly sign-posted (and 'ramsave' and 'ramload' are your friends). As far as I know it is impossible to bring the game into an unwinnable state, except maybe by missing an item in the castle early on. I ended up using the walkthrough a couple of times, mostly because I wanted to keep playing at a moderate speed, but the puzzles are fair.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised. (I stumbled on the game during an IFDB Spelunking expedition in which I play ten random games.)

This game sent me to Wikipedia multiple times, researching topics as seemingly disparate as Lífþrasir, Nichiren Buddhism, the Voynich manuscript and Benjamin the last Tasmanian Tiger. This may have easily doubled the time it took me to play the Endling Archive -- which is very short -- but it also shows that the fictional author of that piece of software achieved their goal: making me want to know more about the topics he talked about.

At first, the Endling Archive seems to be a database about the last surviving members of otherwise extinct species. It quickly branches out into other areas, often with the same note of loss and loneliness, though some of the entries are here to explain a science fiction scenario to us. I love the underlying idea, and for a while I thought I would love the piece too. But in the end it is too ephemeral while at the same time trying to tap into something that is not ephemeral at all; its invocations of thousands of years of history (Jesus, Buddha) falling flat compared to the more thematically appropriate invocations of Benjamin and Earhart; and its SF story too trivial and unoriginal.

I still recommend playing it! It's short and there are the elements of something fantastic here.

I wish I had not played this game: this certainly reminds one of the bad old IFComp days when people would enter games with titles like "Worst IF Game Ever". But despite appearances, this particular games is not disparaging itself in its title; for the game it mentions is not the game we play, but the 'game' of living for your work and sacrificing all for wealth.

In fact, I wish I had not played this game is a tidy little morality tale. We follow a poor immigrant as he works his way up a cut-throat corporate ladder until he is very wealthy indeed. Every little scene leads to two choices, one which expresses regret over our actions, one which expresses determination to win the game. Except for some minor variations in the final message, our choices make no difference, for they all lead to this end:
(Spoiler - click to show)

I am in a nice room, with great windows, soft curtains. The sun is shining high. A warm breeze is making me smile.

I am dying alone.

When the game is flawed, there is nothing to win in the end.

If you do not want to sacrifice your life, play another game.

This short CYOA-style piece -- originally published as an 8-page gamebook PDF -- has you wake up in a dark and strangely deserted Bodleian Library in Oxford. You can take a variety of paths through said library, experiencing terrors of suggestion more than any actual horrors, in what is basically a cyclical structure.

The piece seems very dependent on prior knowledge of the Bodleian. Not so much to solve it (there is no solving involved), but to appreciate the places that are evoked, since the writing is heavy on naming specific parts of the building and letting that do the work. Perhaps this is more enjoyable if you know where you are and how things connect to each other. But my knowledge of the library is incredibly meagre (I once walked past it as a kid) and I didn't get much out of this piece.

As Hanon has remarked in his review, this is not a porn game. This is not a game in which you bang. It is a game that wants to bang you. And it has been saddled with all the confusion and uncertainty and obsessive horniness of a teenager, which makes the endlessly looping conversation -- that spirals out towards God and friendship and the emotions but always returns, sooner rather than later, to the idée fixe of banging -- at once funny and a little heart breaking. Have we not all been here? Or have we not wished to be here, where we at least had the courage to ask?

The game -- not the game that you're talking to, but the game itself -- even allows for an amount of role playing. After going along with the idea of banging for a while, I found myself slowly attempting to take on the role of the adult who is definitely not going to bang this teenager but who might help them attain a state of at least comparable emotional rest. I never succeeded; but then, that seems highly appropriate. For how can one find rest from horniness... without banging?

An unfulfillable desire. The madness of Tantalus.

Lime Ergot is a short game, but makes the most of its premise. You are one of only two surviving officers of a colonial military force; the other being the black-hearted and possibly insane general, who orders you to make her a drink. The game's central task is to find the ingredients for this drink. But rather than traversing a physical space through movement, we traverse a partially sensory and at least partially hallucinated space through use of the examine command. Examining things not only leads us from one object to others that were not initially described; rather, by making things present to our mind, it gives them reality and allows us to physically manipulate them. A fascinating mechanic that is combined with beautiful, evocative prose and a great atmosphere. A little gem.