Reviews by Mike Russo

While at 43 I often find myself feeling like a bit of a graybeard, my contemporary experience with vintage-era IF is actually fairly limited – I played a few Infocom games that I was a bit too young for, and outside of a few low-rent BASIC adventures that was pretty much it until Photopia got me into the amateur scene. I’ve managed to go back and patch up several of my biggest lacunae, but I’ve never felt especially tempted to check out the Scott Adams two-word parser games; I understand their historical relevance in cramming an adventure game experience onto the earliest microcomputers, but by reputation and upon first inspection they seem to have bare prose, a primitive parser, and obtuse puzzles, which aren’t exactly a cocktail that gets me excited.

Thus, I groaned when I saw that Sunburst Contamination was a Scott Adams homage from 1988, then given an update into Inform in 2007. And indeed at first blush it mostly lived down to my preconceptions: there’s the simple moon-logic plot overcomplicated with dream logic, for one thing, in which you’ve taken your employer’s spaceship on an unauthorized joyride to visit your girlfriend and now need to get back to base, except there are hungry toads who’ve gotten loose, and you need to run around the ship finding inexplicably-hidden ration packets to prevent the toads from eating them while in transit. There are the frequent typos, the unimplemented scenery (one of the first locations is named “Fountain,” with a description that spotlights the eponymous water feature – guess what response X FOUNTAIN gives?), the inevitable inventory limit, a nonsensical title, and then there’s the stuff that’s really baroquely terrible, like the “insignificant button” that can only be interacted with by calling it INSIGNIFICANT, rather than BUTTON, or the switched-off flashlight I spent a solid ten minutes guess-the-verb-ing in an ultimately futile attempt to activate.

I managed to struggle through the first half hour or so, by sheer force of will solving the initial couple of puzzles that gated access to the ship and collecting one or two of the seven ration packs, but pretty quickly hit a wall. There’s no included walkthrough, so I scoured the IFDB page and saw that the BASIC source code was available. I was bent on finishing the game – let it never be said that you don’t get value for money in a Mike Russo review-a-thon – but I figured I’d glance at the other reviews while I girded my loins to start back-tracing GOTO statements to discover what I was missing. And lo and behold, what did I see but a SPAG review from 2008 crowing about what a funny parody of Scott Adams style games the authors had pulled off.

Reader, the light dawned, and my good mood was further strengthened by the realization that CASA had a full walkthrough available and I didn’t need to go source diving after all.

Having played the game to completion, I can say I now kinda get the joke and see how it could be enjoyable? The flashlight bit is legit pretty funny, I have to say, and it is notable that the game is mostly merciful (I hit an issue where fumbling around with the cargo-crane controls got me in an unwinnable position, but I think that was due to a bug rather than intentional design); likewise careful trial and error, paying close attention to the verbs the ABOUT text tells you are implemented, will get you through most of the puzzles, even though the game’s humor extends to messing with the verb list. I think this is an attempt to make a game that sends up the extreme difficulty of those Scott Adams games, while still providing enough modern conveniences to be player-friendly.

Except, well, this is a game from 1988, so player-friendly by those standards still winds up feeling pretty forbidding today; meanwhile, the tropes being parodied have sufficiently receded that I suspect it’d be hard for most modern players to tell the difference between a sincere and a satirical implementation. The overall effect is like one of those jokes in Chaucer you need the footnotes to understand; now that I get what Sunburst Contamination is up to I appreciate what it’s doing, but I’m too far away from the target audience for the gag to truly land.

One cool thing about the review-a-thon is that it seems like a lot of the games were entries in jams or events that passed me by, so it functions as an anthology of sorts, providing a little taste of a wide range of flavors. Your World is from 2023’s Bare Bones Jam, whose operating constraint was that entries had to stick to their system of choice’s default visual styling. This is obviously far more interesting for choice games than parser ones, so fortunately that’s what we’ve got here, a Twine game in that glorious black-background-white-text-blue-links palette we all know and love.

I’m not sure whether many other entries in the jam justified their minimalist presentation diegetically, but Your World does, and with a doozy of a concept: the game presents itself as written by a sentient word, who swapped places with the author for a month, in order to communicate its experiences and reflections after leaving its text-based world for our own. With the clock ticking on its sojourn, and after an abortive attempt to learn Inform, it makes sense that the word wouldn’t be wasting time with fripperies.

There’s a certain irony to that choice, however. You see, one of the central things the word wants to share is exactly how much better rich sensory experiences are than mere text. The early section of the game, where the word explores the author’s apartment, is dominated by an overwhelming intensity of sensation:

"The noise from the AC was blaring, the brown light coming from the bulbs in the room hurt me, and the smell of the carpet – god, it must smell normal to you, but I could smell the mustiness. I tried to breathe for the first time and the dust in the air choked me."

The word is eager for all of this: there’s an entertaining bit where it opens the author’s dresser and lists each and every garment there, focusing on the color and texture of every one (there’s also a fun running joke where it keeps expecting green things to smell like grass – capped off by a heck of a punchline when the word eventually does make it outside). But despite the clear pleasure it takes in all this, the word is no mere sybarite; no, it has philosophical and ideological reasons for rejecting its textual origins, riffing on Wittgenstein to critique the naïve idea that words have distinct meanings, and continually arguing that mere text is too imprecise and too abstract to full communicate the quiddity of experience. Images, especially moving images and moving images with sound, are the word’s beau ideal:

"I want to be free from words. I want to be the gestalt that captures all the sights and sounds of everything around me. I want to live up to my ideals, not just be a word association game."

I mentioned that the choice to present this ode to splendor in the ugliest imaginable format is an ironic choice, but to an extent the whole game undercuts itself. Look at its structure: it opens with an incredibly zoomed-in look at a single room, with hyper-realized, fractal detail, then skips over a whole romantic relationship in only a few sentences. And almost every single sequence features description that foregrounds smell, taste, and a subjectivity around color and sound that would be near-impossible to communicate in film, at least without near-constant, plodding narration. The bit where the word stumbles across the IF Top Fifty and is horrified is just the cherry on top – what better way to prompt an IF audience to view the word as an unreliable narrator?

It’d be easy to dismiss Your World as a self-satisfied joke about the superiority of text-only IF, in other words – all the more so because there really are some great bits here that only work in text, like the word feeling “like serifs [are] coming out of me” when it starts sweating from a fever, or accuses the color gray of being “like a half-assed word… something like ‘implicative’.” The final reveal of what the word actually is also earned a guffaw. But I think there’s more going on here. For one thing, the word is self-aware enough to anticipate the most obvious objections to its position:

"I know what you’re thinking: I’m just some word that’s in love with anything that isn’t text; anything that is reminds me of my own weaknesses."

And is capable of acknowledging the ways that words alone can be effective:

"I think there’s something to be gained by trying to communicate – even within this broken and flawed system.

"At the very least, it’s easy to write something in text."

This combination of sincerity and irony is very contemporary, of course, but I think it’s also apposite to what the game seems to me to be getting at: all the different media at our fingertips have their limitations and their glories, and though the specifics of our experience may make one more appealing than another – indeed, just as the word rejects the markers of the textstream where it came from, by negative inference perhaps many of us are so drawn to text precisely because we live in a culture so saturated with audiovisual noise! – the possibility of connection, however achieved, is the important thing. And a rejection of artifice can ultimately wind up being just as artificial as what it purports to oppose, if it departs from that goal.

There’s a story I remember hearing about O Brother Where Art Thou?, the Coen Brothers’ The-Odyssey-by-way-of-Appalachia musical, which is that as they translated each of the famous elements from the source material into the 1930s context – the cyclops, the suitors, some dude named Menelaus – they intentionally did not refer back to Homer or reread the poem, the better to lock in on the pieces of the story that are archetypal and have fully entered the cultural zeitgeist.

(No, I haven’t gone back to verify whether or not this is true; that would go against the point of the anecdote, wouldn’t it?)

Anyway, if the Coen Brothers can make a movie about the Odyssey without reading the Odyssey, hopefully I can get away with reviewing a game about City of Secrets without playing City of Secrets. Tribute, you see, was an entry in 2020’s Emily Short Anniversary Contest (said anniversary being Galatea hitting the 20 year mark), and it directly riffs on CoS by borrowing its map and many of its scenery descriptions and then plopping a scavenger hunt on top of the geography. My dim sense of the original game is that it’s got a lot of conversation with a bunch of different characters, with an espionage kind of vibe, but little of that carries over into Tribute: there’s one character who contacts you via a telepathy-enabling pendant to say deeply un-Shortian things like “we really need your help. Evil is once again threatening our city. This time the enemy is in the form of dark magic.” I also suspect that the gameplay for CoS is more involved than just finding ten haphazardly-hidden gems in a nearly-empty map.

So yeah, playing Tribute doesn’t seem like it much resembles playing CoS, despite the fact that it seems like a large majority of the words here come from the original game. But writing prose as good as Emily Short’s is a high bar, to say nothing of designing challenges as tightly as she does, so I think there’s limited value in comparing the games directly. Really what the author is doing here is akin to doodling on a bunch of Caravaggios to create a hidden object game; the cartoons aren’t going to display quite the same mastery of chiaroscuro, but hey, you get to enjoy some great art while playing find-the-widget, what’s not to like?

Viewed in those terms, Tribute is… okay. I like Short’s descriptions as much as the next IF veteran, and there are some solid ones here that do entice me to play the full game so I can see what they look like in their intended context:

"The bottom of the hill, outside the train station, with its trolley tracks and the dulled statue of an ancient queen, hemmed on the east by the hotel and on the west by the health office."

But I couldn’t help notice that the map, denuded of characters and stripped of plot-relevant objects, is a bit sparse. Short often does the thing where you carefully mention as few nouns as possible in your area descriptions in order to convey the idea of a place without having to spend days implementing scenery; it’s is a canny technique to effectively create a backdrop, but it works less well when you take away the foreground. It also seems like the author hasn’t translated over everything that was in the original game, since I ran into far more unimplemented objects than I’d expect to see in a game from the same person who wrote Metamorphoses.

This art-appreciation side of Tribute is also undercut by the Where’s-Waldo side’s choice not to engage much with the original setting. In a map of 30ish locations, only ten feature a hidden gem, and only a handful more are involved with any of the puzzles. The pendant the player character starts with gives a warning when you’re in one of the rooms with a gem, as well as when you’ve found one of the plot-critical objects. This does avoid the tedium of aimlessly fiddling about with every unpromising bit of impedimenta, but unavoidably does make it easy to play on autopilot when you don’t get a bolded alert telling you to pay attention. It also means that I was stymied for a while when I hit the one or two puzzles that didn’t announce themselves (these largely had to do with unlocking exits that are mentioned in the text but don’t show up on the convenient automap – it makes sense that only currently-valid connections are shown, but I didn’t realize that was the rule so once again a helpful feature wound up being an obstacle).

The puzzles themselves are generally fine; they’re nothing to write home about, but I found it pleasing to poke and prod around until I found each gem. Many of them do involve that very Shortesque dynamic of fractally unveiling more and more details of an object by looking at successive pieces in turn, and a bit of messing around with the standard verb set is enough to solve nearly all (though I thought (Spoiler - click to show)SHAKE TREE was a bit underclued). Unfortunately I did run into a couple of bugs that rendered the game harder than it should be: there’s one object that should reveal a gem once you take it, but I was able to tote it around and pick it up and down a couple of times before the appropriate trigger fired, and I had to replay because the game didn’t register the first gem I found (they’re supposed to vanish once you touch them, but this one stuck around in my inventory after I grabbed it).

This is a lot of caviling, though, since I think Tribute did succeed in its most important goal: it made me want to play City of Secrets. Viewed through this imperfect reflection, CoS seems elusive yet enticing, filled with sweetshop robots, a surprisingly-large academic district, and a nightclub where I’m sure there’s at least one or two people I’d enjoy chatting up. If Tribute doesn’t stand on its own two feet as well as something like O Brother Where Art Thou, perhaps that’s partially because it doesn’t do enough to carve out its own identity – but then, this is a tribute, not a reinterpretation.