Ratings and Reviews by Blake

The contest continues in Temple of Vran. The first Ket game mixed reasonable, tidy puzzles with a few impossible actions, intent on making sure sales could peak before people started achieving 100% solutions and assembling the final code. The second game dispenses with this; I'd argue that this game is solvable, front to back, without a hint or a walkthrough. I only needed a few prods here and there to keep moving.

Now it's still not easy, mind you. There is death, items you can waste, mistakes you can make that will render your game unwinnable. But they're fewer and farther between now, and we have no more stalling tactics. Instead, we have a slight upgrade in combat - we can now switch weapons to deal more handily with certain foes. There's far less retreading of the same ground - the game is a bit shorter but covers more area than the cramped dungeon of the first game. More locations, more items, more surprises. These are not always simple interactions, either. We get spatial relationships, one plausible location, some color-matching, and a few Scott Adams pure-logic stumpers. All of them are doable.

The amount of text and the quality of the writing are also improved, and quite funny, as well, both in description and interaction. This is an oldie worth taking another look at. The only real problem is that the follow-up, The Final Mission, is horrible, a truly abysmal game. I say play this one, and imagine how you would like the story to end. You'll save time and tears.

I've recently started playing the classic Scott Adams games, titles that are referenced often but rarely played anymore. Starting with Adventureland, the first commercial text adventure and building quickly from there, Mr. Adams became a legend in early home computing scene, and his games, originally compressed into grammatical crayon drawings due to space limitations, and then remaining as such for the sake of tradition, became a large influence on those that would follow. His skill at squeezing personality and challenge into just a few kilobytes of data is on full display here, in what is only the second game of the series. It's a marked improvement on the first game in every way.

I'd messed about with these games before, but had never sat down, cracked my knuckles and genuinely tried solving one. So I booted up the proprietary Scott Adam’s Adventure Interpreter 3.4 and got down to business. I planned on playing sequentially, and never using a walkthrough. Adventureland stopped me at the gate though, as I found myself making zero progress. Its throw-everything-at-the-wall locations were also a bit annoying. (The big BOOOMING voice is still super funny though.) I decided that skipping it and coming back later was nobler than caving to the hint book right away, and so off I went on a Pirate Adventure instead. Three hours and no hints later, I was grinning with satisfaction at a 100% score and feeling quite satisfied. I was also left with some musings on puzzle design.

Scott Adams is in an interesting position as a designer here. He can't put clues in room descriptions as he doesn’t have the space. He can’t hide clues in examinations either, at least not often, as there’s not room to add a description to every single item or bit of scenery. (Still be sure to examine though. A few objects do respond, and with crucial hints when they do.) There really is that little space with which to work. Imagine trying to make a series of consistently challenging, fun, and unique puzzles when you have this little flexibility. Every piece has to be out in the open, and you only have a few locations were you can put stuff. It really is a testament to Adams' coding and design skills that he pulls this off consistently the whole game.

The majority of the puzzles are pure logic; as in, you have to deduce from your real-world experience and general knowledge how they might be tackled. As demonstrated in the famous (and infamous) +=3, a pure logic puzzle isn’t necessarily easy; in fact, it can be nefarious and impossible while still remaining within the parameters of logic. There's a sweet spot you have to find. The beauty to this sort of puzzle is that when you solve it, it’s a great feeling. A Eureka moment. Adams picks just the right items and just the right scenarios so that the logical answer can always be deduced. At least, in this particular game and for me personally. As my playtime shows, I was able to move through the game very quickly, never really getting stuck.

The writing also manages to do a lot economically. It’s kind of hard to quantify exactly why the prose in these games is as charming as it is. It’s definitely there though. All of the throwback Scott Adams-style games that have cropped up over the years, often in competitions, that have failed to provide that same feeling, illustrate why Scott himself does it best. Some great moments from this game, paraphrased slightly: (Spoiler - click to show)The pirate’s reaction when you try to sail while holding the book, “Arr, I'll not have that ACCURSED thing on my ship!”; the game telling you to type Weigh Anchor to sail, then just telling you the anchor's weight before giving you the actual command; the eternally squawking, cracker-chasing parrot; and of course the classic misidentification of the mongoose.

Is this worth playing still? Yeah! It’s a fun, light-hearted little treasure hunt, and an interesting look into text adventuring’s early form. Older games often get a bad rap, regularly written off as relics of an era best learned from then forgotten. I play a lot of older games and I've found this reputation to be unearned and unfair. Is this just nostalgia talking? The grumbling of a curmudgeon? Nope. I’m in my early twenties, and my first text adventure was The Things That Go Bump in the Night on Quest. This really does hold up as fun, even today. I'm looking forward to the next game, and my eventual return to the first.

This little classic is just as charming today as it was in 1997. There's a simple joy to this game, the way it remains sentimental without ever once dipping into the saccharine or the patronizingly childish. You could truly play this at any age and have a wonderful time. After all, who hasn't had a teddy bear or other stuffie that meant the world to them? Though I can't find the clip online, I remember even the rugged Jeremy Clarkson confessing to still having his childhood bear at home, saying that he wouldn't trade it for anything. This game, through its simple, kindly nature, taps into that attachment perfectly.

Several brilliant references here, and they're not only far more clever than just using some phrase, they're part of the puzzles! That's a bit risky on paper, as a total newcomer will not be familiar, but fortunately familiarity proves not to be necessary. You'll just smile a bit wider. This also has one of my favorite default responses for >d - "You tumble down, but being a soft bear, that's ok."

I will confess that one puzzle left me a bit baffled, the one leading to the dark place. Fortunately the game has a perfect in-game hint system, so I wasn't stuck. The only real complaint I have is that we never got something like this again from David Dyte.

WARNING: Some very mild spoilers throughout.

This one didn’t do it for me. It has some great imagery, and the authors clearly loved making the game. I liked the psychic slant, though it felt more like an extra examine command or hint system in practice. The background story has some promise as well. As a full package, however, it’s not as much fun as it should be.

First off, the authors give themselves a pat on the back as they inform us that the game is full of “stuff". I don’t mind a bit of glib smugness, but it has to be earned. If you’re going to make a claim like that, your game ought to be filled to the brim with items, locations, people to talk to. It better not be an empty medical facility with a large number of one-note rooms, a small number of items, and a story told almost entirely via notes and flashbacks. The implementation is standard too. I was expecting tons of things to examine and sub-examine (and sub-examine). But there’s just a few things per room and very rarely do you get an interesting reaction. Very little show, a ton of tell. The Dreamhold this is not.

The writing is very good, though a bit dry in the less exciting sections. I love the vibe here, a mix of Carpenter and Cronenberg, with a little bit of Verhoven sprinkled on top. Body horror and gore, presented with a wink and a nudge (the washing machine in the basement functioning as a large intestine is ingenious). The descriptions of your psychic abilities are also handled nicely, and the flashbacks are remarkably effective in their design. We have some scary scenes, some entertaining descriptions, and some fun ways to die. Though it is odd how there are a few instances where the PC refuses to kill themself, when most of the time they happily traipse into death with a simple >w. I would have preferred a bit more proofreading. Twice are rooms with a flickering light described as “cinematic". What a mimesis-shattering adjective, one that also doubles, again, as telling in the face of perfectly good showing. Never again, please. Even worse, an exit is left out of one the room descriptions. Being forced to open the walkthrough to see that glaring error made me very unhappy.

There are multiple endings, nine in total, and extra puzzles to solve to obtain them. This may count as “stuff" but it doesn’t do much to entice me, as I’ve never like having to replay a game, or even just parts of a game, just to see a different ending. Usually, there’s only one good one, and its tedious to have to try the others while searching for it. I don’t mind extra endings as a bonus, like in the aforementioned Dreamhold, or as a few simple forks right at the end that I can save and retry. But in general, I prefer one ending, one challenge. The tedium, the sense of running in place that I get when going back after seeing The End on my screen… it’s so unpleasant. This is very much a personal preference, so I don’t hold it against the authors or let it factor much into my rating.

The puzzles are mostly perfunctory, though the optional ones require a bit more brainpower. Overall I was just bored. Waiting in the elevator, going through obvious action after obvious action, going to the next obvious point. The beauty of the text adventure is its ability to engage the player by allowing them to become someone else, to think and act and feel in a strange environment, or in a stranger’s shoes. When what you’re doing is this straightforward, you lose engagement. Again, the extra puzzles mitigated this, but having to veer off the beaten path just to have something interesting to do is a problem. I recently reviewed an older game that also had fairly simple tasks; Noah, for the Spectrum. That difference is that in that game, you had a more compact area, open-ended design (no locked doors or items you have to wait to get), and less tedium. I also consider the standards of the time. In 2010, you can make puzzles that are far more sophisticated, with more moving parts and NPCs. This isn’t a CYOA game. It’s you wandering around a big, empty facility, discovering fragments of a story. Take a page from Silent Hill, not Slender. You’ve created a surreal hellscape, give me some hard puzzles, a way to interact with it that's more complex than pushing one button or collecting a page. Give me some psychic skills, some psychokinesis maybe. Put a real stumper in, make me work for that good ending. I just want a bit more.

I know I’ve been harsh, but I don’t want to hurt anyone's feelings here. This game did have stuff I liked, mostly the writing, which is a very important part of interactive fiction. The game design is just bland when compared to the prose. I’m sure that this game would be great for a novice player. As a more experienced adventurer, I just found it kind of dull. A 2.5 that I'll round up to a 3.

The first two Ket games were uneven but fun adventures, full of creative puzzles and charming imagery, two parts of a zany quest, leavened with a bit of Grimm macabre. This game has none of that. It is a soulless, clearly rushed, completely unsolvable bit of cynicism designed to stand between the aspiring contest winner and their prize. One might have hoped that after the tough but fair design of the second game, the third would be even better. Nope. All pretense of fun is thrown out the window as you stare blankly at the text-based companion to Hareraiser.

The problems are numerous. I will try my best to cover all of them. Hmm, let's see, where to begin...

Well, we have a new parser. It sucks. It's very slow and no longer lists exits, for no good reason. It's lacking in color as well. Were they trying to save space? This game doesn't appear to be much larger than the last. Who can tell?

The puzzles are atrocious. Not at first, actually. I got about a quarter of the way through, but after (Spoiler - click to show)zig-zagging to get the giant to break the trapdoor, it all goes to hell in a handbasket. You can only rarely examine anything and get a response. That was true of the last two games, and many other older titles, as well. But you could intuit and deduce item function in those; they took place in an actual world, and the items were used in ways that were plausible, at least most of the time. Here, every item has to be used in some completely illogical, non-intuitive, improbable, and highly-specific context. There are riddles to solve: you will never solve them. Even if you do, figuring out how to communicate the solutions is impossible.

It's absurd, honestly. Some of these could work in a modern game, with more opportunities to examine and experiment. Here, in this limited parser, you're expected to just look at the pieces and see how they would logically fit. That's fine in a game with a internally consistent world. That's how the Scott Adams puzzles worked. It's how they had to work, due to limited space. Here, though, we're doomed, because the author has also sacrificed the writing.

Yes indeed, the writing here is awful. This is a nightmare, and not just in the gameplay sense. It also has the messy, incoherent nature of a bad dream. None of the chunks of world you progress through fit together. This isn't supposed to be Alice in Wonderland, it's meant to be fairy tale fantasy. I've seen this surreal, looking-glass style done well, of course, but here, not only does it fail to match the style of the previous games, it's also written with no punch, no imagination. It's so rote, and the series of key punches you make to slog through it have no connection. The game fails to mention exits so often that you're forced to map a blind maze everywhere you go. It'll say you're in a passage going north and south, but then you go west and boom, there's a room. Vital information is just missing. This is not a finished, tested product.

Trying to get a perfect score is futile. There's so many ways to cheat yourself out of points, one of which is saving. Yup. The game will add further sabotage when you save. And in what is already a buggy game full of instant deaths, cheap hits, (speaking of hits, the combat is all but gone too) and unwinnable situations, that's the cherry on top. It shows you exactly how contemptuous (and contemptible) this whole project is. Why put in the work for the first two entries if for the third, the eponymous final mission, you plan on just throwing together an unsolvable middle finger of a program? What is the point? To avoid giving away the prize? I wonder who won. They earned it, that's for sure.

Even from an historical perspective, this is a truly wretched game, and a squandering of what could have been. I like hard games; that's why I play a lot of older titles. But they have to be fair, be solvable. What I don't like are unfair games, games full of impossible tasks. This all this tape has to offer, and it doesn't even have decent prose to offer as compensation. This is the worst commercial adventure game, of any era, that I've ever seen.

Despite its status as a contest game, and its age, this is a perfectly playable game. You're robbed of an examine command for all but your items, but most of what you have to do can be deduced. The key word being most. There are a few completely impossible puzzles in here, thrown in purely to slow progress on the contest. Whether some dedicated geek got through without waiting for a magazine hint is anyone's guess. Fortunately, the other puzzles are easy to intuit and fun to play around with. You'll know when you've run into a brick wall. Peek at a walkthrough and continue on your way.

Of course, you can die left and right, or end up in an unwinnable situation. Combat, step and die traps, missing items, missed information... it's all here in its early 80's glory. But you likely know what you're getting into. This game packs personality into its small bites (or should I say bytes?) of text, and can be fun for those who don't mind a game that hits the hard end of the Cruel ranking. A fun bonus: you can carry over your stats into the second game in the trilogy, which is a marked improvement over this one.