Reviews by Edward Lacey
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Unambitious first effort, April 18, 2013This very short escape-the-prison game incorporates many of the problems common in untested first efforts. There are errors of spelling and grammar, unnecessary rooms containing only underimplemented objects, and NPCs that you can pick up and carry. The plot is undeveloped (the protagonist has been locked up unexpectedly, but we never learn where or why) and puzzles are mostly absent (the most serious obstacle to escape turns out to be the omission of an exit from a room description).
The author has a few interesting ideas that sadly aren't used well. One object is only identified when examined for the second time, but although it's surprising to find (Spoiler - click to show)a key inside the cell it unlocks there's no reason why it should be hard to recognise. More strangely, the author's original text omits capitalisation altogether, but the default parser responses aren't modified, creating an odd patchwork effect. It's possible the author wrote the game only in order to learn Inform 7, and if so, I hope it was a useful exercise. However, I can't recommend the result to potential players.
Amaranthan dream, March 20, 2013In C.E.J. Pacian's Castle of the Red Prince, a student of "the arcane" suffers from nightmares about the land of Amaranth and its tyrannical Red Prince, and sets out to end the Prince's oppression by killing him. It's unclear whether the whole game takes place in a dream, but there is something dreamlike about the setting – broadly fantasy, but with horror-like features common even outside the Prince's territory, and occasional intrusions from modern technology and real-world place names. Dreaming is also something of a theme, especially in an ingenious hint system that allows you to SLEEP and watch "your dream self" carrying out actions you can try after awakening.
The game's main innovation is its novel approach to location modelling. The world is still divided into locations (at least from the player's perspective – I can't comment on the programming), but all characters and objects that the player has discovered is in scope simultaneously. There's no compass, and no need to use movement commands in exploration; ENTER INN is equivalent to EXAMINE INN. Pacian appears to have avoided disambiguation problems by ensuring no two objects share a name, and it's impressive that this never leads to the prose becoming unnatural or obvious synonyms going unrecognised by the parser.
I think the experiment succeeds in at least two ways. First, it suggests that the protagonist's movements are extraneous to the real activity in much parser-based IF. (Several times in Castle I discovered an item and realised it could be used to solve a problem in a location I'd already visited; the fact that I could just use the item without retracing my steps brought my interaction with the program much closer to the process of solving the problem mentally.) Secondly, it demonstrates that making all of game-space available for interaction conflicts with the player's expectations about game-time. The time of day appears in the title bar and advances every two actions, regardless of how much movement those actions would realistically require from the protagonist. The effect works here because it's suggestive of the sudden changes of place we experience in dreams, but a naturalistic game with an internal clock couldn't follow the same approach.
Castle seems to me less successful as a game than as an experiment. It's short (it would probably have 15-20 rooms if implemented conventionally, but most are empty or contain one thing of importance), and the combination of brevity and eccentricity of setting kept me from feeling immersed. Puzzles tend to adhere to well-worn IF tropes ((Spoiler - click to show)lighting a dark area, attacking an enemy with the appropriate weapon), perhaps as a way of suggesting that the game's approach to location-modelling is applicable outside experimental works. I didn't find the Red Prince a dramatically effective antagonist, with his lack of concern at the protagonist's attempts to defeat him. He isn't even responsible for either of the two losing endings that I found.
Despite the monsters I encountered, my journey to Amaranth was more like a brief dream than a nightmare that would haunt me for days. However, a dream can be memorable for one unusual element, and Castle's success in dispensing with the usual IF approach to location is easily enough to make it worth playing.
One-move mathematical puzzle, March 20, 2013Although Fingertips: Something Grabbed Ahold of My Hand takes its title and a minor detail of its plot from a song by They Might Be Giants, it's really an adaptation of a problem in recreational mathematics. (I hadn't seen the problem before, but a Web search implies it may be quite well known.)
As the game opens, the protagonist is confined "in a prison that has 32767 cells" and told that some prisoners will be selected for release by a procedure that depends on the cells' numbering. (Reducing this procedure to a mathematical criterion is half the puzzle, so I won't summarise further.) The character is lucky enough to have a free choice of cells, and the player's single move is to select one.
Given that this plot is transparently a pretext for the puzzle, it would be unreasonable to expect much characterisation. It's therefore to this game's credit that it incorporates the comic figure of "The 'Guv" where the puzzle requires only a faceless guard or official. The writing is amusing and entertaingly self-aware about the absurdity of the situation it describes.
I found the puzzle interesting, but unfortunately I don't think it's well-served by the one-move format that was required for Fingertips games in the Apollo 18 series. Once the player understands the question, finding one cell that will result in the protagonist's release is little challenge. Successful endings differ only in a small randomised detail, so there's little in-game incentive for the player to seek out multiple solutions, still less to find or justify a general rule for which cells are safe.
The game also isn't helped by some technical issues that may have been beyond the author's control. Claiming the nonexistent cell zero receives an appropriate response, but other out-of-range answers aren't understood correctly, presumably due to limits on Z-Machine variables. The parser rarely understands numbers entered as words, and although numerals are always understood they lead to an odd reference to "picking a number at random".
Despite being unambitious and a little buggy, Something Grabbed Ahold of My Hand is suited to the Fingertips role of providing a brief diversion between longer games, and it's worth playing in its own right if you're interested in mathematical puzzles.
Not just fun and games, February 27, 2013Emily Boegheim's It explores the social dynamics among four girls (one of them the protagonist) engaged in a children's game like hide-and-seek. My first impressions were good, largely because the hiding game itself is well implemented. Room descriptions make spatial relations clear and have an appropriate focus on potential hiding places. SEARCH and LOOK IN/UNDER/BEHIND seem to be treated as synonyms, avoiding guess-the-verb problems. The other girls are realistically visible from a distance, and react to the protagonist's actions.
After the first playthrough (which doesn't take long), it's clear that the hiding game really isn't fair (at least not if you play by the rules), and that the characters have a personal and emotional stake in the outcome. Replaying several times is expected, and It is polished enough to make that enjoyable. NPC actions are not randomised or especially complicated, so with knowledge from replays, engineering a desired outcome isn't too difficult. It's also possible to disregard the hiding game, and some of the most memorable endings can be found this way.
It feels genuinely interactive in that the player can try nearly any plausible action, and more often than not be rewarded with a novel outcome or further insight into the characters and their relationships. In my case, the result was that I ended up trying to find as many endings as possible – still treating It as a game even when not trying to win the internal hiding game. Someone less concerned with exhausting the available possibilities might be satisfied by finding a single appropriate response to the unfair situation that It portrays. On either approach, It ought to be rewarding.
>point P-remover at preview, January 7, 2013Emily Short's Counterfeit Monkey is a large and ambitious contribution to several IF genres, but I think the description that best indicates the gameplay experience is "wordplay puzzle game". Short imagines a world in which names are more fundamental than physical properties, and to rename an individual object (subject to given rules) is to transform it to something else. The game's island setting of Anglophone Atlantis is a centre for development of word-altering technology, and the protagonist must make use of this technology in order to smuggle plans for a new device out from under the noses of the island's oppressive government. A tool available from the start of the game can remove any letter of the alphabet from an object's name; to give an example not from the game, a BEARD could become a BEAR and then an EAR. The game allows any appropriately-named object to be modified, often in more complicated ways than this example suggests. The range of options seemed daunting at first, but I found that puzzles were arranged to ensure that new abilities and locations become available only once I had demonstrated proficiency with the resources already available.
A puzzle game founded on such depth of simulation would be noteworthy in itself, but Short combines it with a setting and plot that are engaging in their own right and make the fantastical premise seem almost credible. Over the the course of the game, the player learns about the history of word-altering technology and its likely future development, not to mention its competing uses by criminals and the authorities. By making clear the legal and technological constraints on the transformations, Counterfeit Monkey not only explains how a world in which "animal" and "mineral" are mutable categories escapes incomprehensible chaos, but provides a natural basis for the police-state setting and industrial espionage plot.
Although this review has referred to a "protagonist", the player character Alexandra is actually a verbal and physical "synthesis" of two people, linguist Alex and spy Andra, who have decided that sharing a merged body temporarily will give them the opportunity to leave Anglophone Atlantis unrecognized. The player's input is interpreted as attempts at action from Andra, while Alex takes on the role of the narrator and parser. The contrast between the dominating, problem-focused Andra and the more cautious, locally-knowledgeable Alex provides a perfect fit for the player-parser relationship.
The game's tone is also something of a synthesis. Some excellent humour arises from the bizarre objects the player can create, while the dystopian background is treated quite seriously. The ethical implications of Alexandra's actions receive due attention, but I felt that it was here that the only perceptible tension arose between the plot and puzzles. ((Spoiler - click to show)Concerns are raised in the game about the power of word-manipulation to bring people or animals into existence, and Alexandra's equipment is initally configured to prevent this. However, the puzzles assume that the player will be happy to create "animates" routinely once this ability is acquired.) This criticism is trivial in light of the remarkable achievement that Counterfeit Monkey represents as an adventure game, a simulation, a narrative and an experiment in IF player-parser relations. I hope that any player not allergic to wordplay will download it and enjoy it as much as I did.
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