Ratings and Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

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.

You’re a demon and you have to save your mother from an unconventional convent. Luckily, while security is tight, you have the power to possess people, taking over their body. Most of the puzzles in the game revolve around finding the right person to possess in order to get some task done. To get to a certain location, you might need to find someone who is small, or strong, and so on. There are some object puzzles along the way, but nothing terribly difficult.

This is the second Quest game I played during the 2018 IF Competition -– after Space Punk Moon Tour –- and again I ran into a host of parser issues, making me suspect that it’s Quest that is at fault rather than the individual authors. Here was a particularly frustrating sequence:

x crypt
A large stone mausoleum, the door slab flanked by ersatz Greco-Roman columns and moldering marble cherubs. A large crack bisects the slab blocking the entryway to the crypt, deeply enough that a strong enough human could probably pull it down.

enter crypt
I don’t understand your command.

go in crypt
You can’t go there.

in
The door to the crypt is paved over.

pull slab
You can’t pull it.

hit slab
You can’t hit it.

pull door
I can’t see that. (door)

x crack
There’s a large crack across the door to the crypt.

kick door
I don’t understand your command.

x slab
A large stone mausoleum, the door slab flanked by ersatz Greco-Roman columns and moldering marble cherubs. A large crack bisects the slab blocking the entryway to the crypt, deeply enough that a strong enough human could probably pull it down.

pull it down
I can’t see that. (it down)

Time Quest is in many ways an old-school parser game. We explore a relatively large but sparsely described world; solve some puzzles; avoid deaths; and don't worry too much about the story. The parser itself is relatively limited too, something that is especially evident from the lack of helpful error messages. (There's no real distinction between an action that was understood but didn't work, and an action that wasn't understood.)

But there are some ways in which Time Quest is more friendly than one might expect. There is, as far as I know, only one way to make the game unwinnable, and this is relatively clear. (Spoiler - click to show)It's when you get caught by the Gestapo and do not have the rope. The game world is very open, allowing you to explore more or less everything. There is only a small number of items, and the puzzles are generally very simple. And while the existence of different temporal eras to visit opens up the possibility of all kinds of complicated dependencies between them, in fact your progress in one era is (Spoiler - click to show)completely independent of what you do in other eras.

The story is rather limited: you have to search through time for the bad guy who has collected nuclear warheads in an attempt to dominate the pacifistic future from which you both hail. And that's what you do, with only one thing that could be described as a plot twist. It is especially weird that (Spoiler - click to show)the other temporal eras simply have nothing to do with your quest. This does feel like a bit of a lost opportunity.

However, despite the primitive story, Time Quest's handling of its theme of violence and pacifism is actually rather subtle. (Spoiler - click to show)First of all, every era that you visit is emblematic of a certain fictional genre that revels in violence: the fantasy quest with its trolls and dragons; the gladiatorial fight; the World War II story. And in all of them, we are able to engage in violence ourselves using the laser gun we are given at the start. But -- and this is quite wonderful -- it is never necessary to use the gun. The entire game can be played and won without ever picking it up. In this game, despite all the invitations we get, violence is never the answer. Which is a great fit for its story, and an interesting thematic message. (I wonder whether this theme of pacifism is present in more of B. J. Curtis's games.)

This is a very fine example of SpeedIF. Post-Christmas Letdown is very short, but well-implemented, with easy puzzles and a lot of charm. It made me smile and I enjoyed it for the ten minutes or so that it took me to play it. Which is precisely what one may hope from a SpeedIF game.

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.

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.

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.