Reviews by Mike Russo

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forums during this year's ParserComp; due to the similarities between the trilogy of short games that includes this one, I reviewed them together)

The phrase “old-school adventure” conjures up, at this late date, a few modest charms – perhaps an ingenuous treasure hunt, an exuberant narrative voice pleased as punch at the simplest things – and a parade of horrors: awkward parsers, dead-man-walking scenarios, no UNDO, guess-the-verb puzzles, endless empty maps… We look back and where we imagine we came from and we shudder, grateful to have been delivered from such tribulations and newly content to graze the fruit of recent years’ labors.

How accurate this picture is, I’ll leave to others more familiar with the 80s scene; I’ve played a few Infocom titles and a few random entries here and there, but know it much more by reputation and its influence than by direct experience. But I’ll admit that it’s a set of stereotypes that informs my thinking, which has left me in a bit of a hall of mirrors when evaluating this trio of games. They’re loosely-linked series of Italian diskmag games from the 80s, sharing a totally blank protagonist and a vague Western setting, translated and updated into (Puny)Inform. In some ways they’re exactly what I’d have expected based on that description, in other ways they’re not, and while I’ve got some guesses as to what the adaptation changed and what it left lie, they feel like stabs in the dark – because of course the past was more idiosyncratic than the flattened version that’s come down to us.

Let’s start with the difficulty, since that’s probably the place where the mind contemplating a throwback adventure goes first. While there are a few tricky puzzles here and there, mostly they’re – easy? Outside of a maze with a thirst timer, I don’t think it’s possible to die or render the games unwinnable, first of all, and the smallish maps and limited number of red herrings mean I was rarely at a loss for how to progress. Indeed, where the games err, it’s most frequently in overdoing the hand-holding. Here’s the description of some seats in a stage-coach in the first game:

"They are fine-crafted and look very comfy, if you overlook the holes and the stains. It may be worth searching them."

You will be shocked to learn it is! Perhaps this is a modern effort to make the puzzles friendlier, or perhaps it’s a relic of a time when finicky parsers required more direct prompting of the player (the implementation of all three games is smooth throughout, unsurprisingly, with plenty of synonyms available and no disambiguation issues or other hiccups). Either way, it can sometimes be a bit too much, as with this sequence in the third game:

"> x dead

"It’s the corpse of the outlaw you shot from the bell tower. He’s now paid for his sins. You should search him to see if he has anything important on him.

"> search him

"You search the body, but don’t find anything noteworthy. You should now hide him in case the other desperados return. Perhaps you could drag him into one of the villas.

"> x sombrero

"It’s the sombrero the outlaw was wearing. You should put it on as a disguise, in case the others come back."

In other sequences the player does have something to do, though. That aforementioned maze, which comes in Tin Star, actually isn’t bad – it’s not too big, the map connections aren’t too byzantine (there are no diagonal directions), and there’s a fun sense of progression as well as relief once you finally escape. There is a critical item located in there that’s off the beaten path, but the need for something like it is clear once you get to the appropriate point in the game, and once you’ve secured water and your horse it’s much less of a pain to re-scour. And I enjoyed the counterintuitive way to navigate the mines in the same game ((Spoiler - click to show)you can only find the way out once you lose your light source). It’s medium-dry-goods all the way down, and most puzzles are simple lock-and-key or swap-this-for-that affairs, but each of the games has one or two that are at least a little novel and reasonably satisfying to solve, so it all goes down easy enough though there’s little here that will stick to the ribs.

As for the narrative components of the games – well, remember what I said back in paragraph two about how we retrospectively view the past as more monolithic than it actually was? I wasn’t just talking about 1980s video games. Unsurprisingly given the trilogy’s provenance, the setting owes more to spaghetti Westerns than nuanced scholarship. There are bandits, mines, rattlesnakes, noble Indians, and victimized women. It’s a relief that the natives are generally portrayed sympathetically at least, and get a little bit of specificity in their material culture is described – though my eyebrow did rise upon finding some pemmican in the second game, as the game’s set in Arizona, amid the Hopi and Apache, while pemmican is a plains-Indian food.

More eye-rolling is the games’ take on vigilante justice. In Wild West, you’re a rancher whose family has been abducted by bandits; in the second, you’ve decided to take on a career as sheriff, while in the third you give up your badge in order to avoid creating an international incident when you pursue raiders across the Mexican border. Your goal is always to find a group of criminals and gun them down, and there’s not a Miranda warning in sight. Winning the first game requires poisoning a bandit gang’s water; the others climax with gunning down the Black Hats without a word of warning. Maybe I’m too much of a civil libertarian, but the victory message in Tin Star seemed to illustrate how hollow so-called law and order rhetoric can be:

"Hiding behind the broken window, you fire on the bandits and pick them off one by one. The bandits look around in confusion to see where the gunfire is coming from. By the time they realise the source of the ambush, they’re all dead. Justice has been served. No one will mourn for those animals.

"Congratulations, sheriff! Once again, the law triumphs."

Am I reading too much into these simple time-wasters? Almost assuredly so, but that’s the modern condition: these games were originally launched into a world where thematic analysis was not a go-to tool for reviewers, I don’t think, but today the question of what a game *means* often feels more important than what it *does*. For all that the updates make the games eminently playable in modern interpreters and with modern gameplay assumptions, they can’t, nor I suppose should they, allow them to fully meet this modern cultural context: these games weren’t originally meant to do that and it’d be wrong to pretend otherwise. So they stand as an incomplete time capsule, made more pleasant to contemporary eyes and capable of whiling away an idle half hour, but most interesting, perhaps, for what they say about a time we can no longer fully recover.

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forums during ParserComp)

So, generative AI in IF, there’s a topic I’m sure we’re all super excited to get into! Three years on from when ChatGPT was unleashed upon the world – and the same day that Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot went on an antisemitic spree before they hastily pulled it offline – the only thing I find more enervating than the discourse is leaden LLM prose. And yet, here I am talking about it, because the ABOUT text for 13th Quest reveals that the author used ChatGPT “to improve some of the text descriptions and responses” – and those “improvements” mark a noticeable departure from the author’s previously workmanlike oeuvre, while also calling into question what exactly we want to get out of an old-school puzzler.

We can get through the non-LLM stuff pretty quickly, since 13th Quest is of a piece with the author’s other dozen games, at least from the ones I’ve played: it’s written in a robust custom system with one or two quirks that have long since become second nature (you can’t interact with things in containers until you take them, is the big one); there’s a big book you get at the beginning that intersperses some key puzzle clues between a bunch of lore; there’s a magic teleporter that whisks you between self-contained areas; and you have a host of medium dry-goods puzzles of consistently-solid quality that are clearly more the point of the exercise than the MacGuffin quest that provides the notional story.

Speaking of the narrative, this time out there’s a Celtic theme that emerges about a third of the way through – after somewhat-bewildering trip to Damascus – that provides some nice faerie flavor, as well as a well-implemented leprechaun NPC who wants you to perform a half-dozen fetch quests. This makes for an engaging middle of the game with relatively clear goals, and some neat set pieces as you venture through such classic fantasy settings as a brambly forest maze or a sweating-hot volcanic mine. On the down side, despite some stirring words in the ending gesturing towards the quest being more than a simple treasure hunt, the opening dumps you into the game with a shrug, saddling you with amnesia and a letter that mumbles its way through some empty verbiage about pacts and bloodlines and threshold without establishing what you’re meant to be doing and why it matters.

And here’s where the LLM question comes in, because, annoyingly, in 2025 I can’t read vague fantasy nonsense in a game that says it used ChatGPT without wondering whether that vagueness is an intentional choice, or at least an honest mistake of craft, or just a symptom of a bullshit machine trying to run out the clock. Thankfully, the game’s prose isn’t completely affected with AI-speak – as I mentioned, there’s some evocative fairy-tale stuff like the location in the ice-realm labelled as “the Hoarfane” – but every so often I’d come across a phrase that would set my teeth on edge twice over, once for being kinda bad and a second time because now I had to think about whether it was human-bad or not:

"The material [of the letter] is thin and brittle, edges both frayed and curling, like it’s waited years for unfamiliar hands."

"You see no windows but adequate light coming from an unknown source illuminates the location quite adequately."

"The silence is both heavy and profound."

Even the heavy grimoire, which is always a highlight in these games, seems saggier this time out; it tells one of its stories twice over, which could be a way of showing how fairy tales twist in the telling, or could be an LLM losing track of things. And it’s not just the prose – there are some undescribed exits and unimplemented bits scenery that could be an indication of AI use impacting the gameplay.

Again, I don’t like grumping out about this stuff – I’d much rather be spending time talking about the leprechaun, say, whose role in the plot is never explicated but who’s got surprisingly detailed things to say about just about any random inventory item you show him. But since IF is made of words, I tend to pay a lot of attention to them! And beyond that, nostalgia-bait treasure hunts are one of the IF subgenres least robust against the question “wait, is this just filler?” Of course, part of what’s fun about the old school is that a good puzzle can just be a good puzzle, without needing to be part of a clever unified gameplay system, or provide important a thematic counterbalance to the events of the narrative. But a risk of the style is that it all the combination-guessing and keycard-fiddling can feel arbitrary, just there because players expect a certain density of Extruded Adventuring Product before they collect their last plot coupon.

I don’t think 13th Quest does badly on this score, to be clear – there are lots of recognizably human touches, and despite a few overly-obscure clues or slight frustration with the parser, the puzzles are entertaining enough to work through. But this is a bad line of inquiry to put the player onto regardless, all the more so because from my viewpoint the addition of ChatGPT-authored prose feels like a net negative even on its own terms. The game would do fine standing entirely on its own feet, and I hope the 14th and 15th and 16th quests go back to the old way of doing things, so I can too, instead of having to come up with yet more ways of writing “god, I’m tired of writing about LLMs.”