Reviews by Ron Newcomb

Closely related to the adventure game is the survival game, in which physical puzzles are very appropriate. The writing and tone of this one work well, much as in Snyder's other works. But there are so many holes in the implementation of Distress that it utterly destroys the experience. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)an obvious source of bandages is a dead comrade's uniform, but apparently the dignity of the dead is more important than another's life, or even your own. Other marginal but plausible ideas were disallowed outright, such as (Spoiler - click to show)climbing the arch to attack the monster from safety; a simple re-wording of the "you can't do that" kind of message to a "you try but" kind would have been welcome.

It began to seem to me the author was intentionally trying to lead me astray, describing interesting things at a distance I wasn't allowed to move toward, and stopping me from doing most of anything else. It took the hint system to tell me what should have been obvious: (Spoiler - click to show)the stray spike of metal that gashed my comrade isn't a stray spike of metal, but apparently a still fully-functioning machine.

But when my protagonist attacked a monster with the wrong end of a spike, it completed my loss of respect in this work.

Definitely not recommended for beginners.

(I recommend instead a different work by this author, "Tales of the Traveling Swordsman".)

This was one of my favorite entries in the 2007 I-F Competition, second only to Lord Bellwater's Secret. The writing was the best of all the competition entries I played. The places were described vividly enough to see them, the initial area seemed the kind of place people actually maintain and dwell, and good dialogue is always a gem in I-F. The experience as I begin the game was believable enough that I might like to live here myself. (Fortunately, as an I-F, that isn't necessarily a vain wish.)

The game's opening did a lot of things right. Tone, setting, protagonist, and initial event become known to us before we're asked to make decisions. Being railroaded into leaving the opening scene with the friend is a further gentle introduction to the command prompt and its evil twin, the parser. If the useful commands were mentioned in bold print within the text, then this game would be a great candidate for "intended for I-F beginners".

But I didn't finish the game. There were two reasons for this. One, the more I came to care about the protagonist's problem and her (our) desire to thwart the antagonist, the more disappointed I was to leave this thrumming plot for mundane action with glowglobes or locked cabinets. (I asked the librarian as he should know these things, but he was useless.) The puzzles were both well-implemented and coherent within the gameworld, so I must give the author props for this. But it's just something of a paradox that, in I-F, anything and everything except puzzles are dramatized. So when the author's writing grabs the player, what's the player going to care about? And how is a plot-stopping puzzle then going to be viewed?

Secondly, I get lost easily when walking around. It's another problem only well-written works have: visualizing the map's cardinal connections gets harder as the prose gets better. Workman-like descriptions don't distract from the job at hand, but good writing -- strong imagery, precise details, memorable conversation -- seems to crowd-out my mental map. Perhaps it's rooted in a cognitive dissonance of the left-brain and right-brain trying to dominate at once, or perhaps only us new to the form see it as a problem, I don't know. I just know that the more I enjoyed sightseeing in Varkana, the easier it is to forget how to walk back home.

(Consider the town square: "East leads to the vineyards. The library is to the north. Northwest leads to the town center. The town bazaar is to the west. The school is to the south, and there's a road to an old temple to the southeast." That was just too much information for me, especially as I'm already trying to keep the plot and possible puzzle solutions in my head. A compass rose in the status line would help, but I would prefer a simple GO TO with something like, "Nearby are the vineyards, the library, the town center, the bazaar, the school, and the road to the old temple.". Such a command can always respond with, "You walk northward to the library," if it's important. As it was, I found myself navigating by scrolling back and re-reading my previously-typed compass directions.)

Though I have still not completed this game even after the competition, its locations and events are stuck in my head. I intend to go back and finish it... when I'm feeling patient enough for puzzles and parser nitpickyness. My overall impression of the work is that the author, obviously a writer, was hamstrung by her own tools -- tools which ease supporting I-F conventions, rather than ease what the conventions should be.

Although the original Legend of Zelda seems to be heavily influenced by text adventures and would probably translate well, you'd never know it playing this I-F. Poorly implemented with many spelling errors -- and isn't Impa's name misspelled in the intro? -- it isn't even faithful to the source. A Like-like outdoors? Hyrule without magic? Zelda/Sheik has to use a crossbow? Hyrule with crossbows?

But what truly kills this adventure: Link can't hit a darn thing with that sword.

Much like the board game Clue, this is a simple logic puzzle wherein the player must decide the who, where, and with-what of a murder. The player makes an accusation and the game responds if it's right, wrong, or partially right. There's only three items in each category, which thankfully speeds up the game. While the stipulation that any two accusations in a row must completely differ from each other in all categories adds a little extra challenge, the endgame is longer than need be as one has to rearrange items and people to "cleanse the palette" so one can finally make the accusation one actually wishes to.

A piece of paper to record accusations and their results helps one play the game more efficiently, but the work should keep track of this stuff automatically. Say, a listing within the inventory command.

Charmingly, the supernatural ability that the PC possesses is said again and again to have no explanation whatsoever.

This work is a textbook example of using a particular kind of logic puzzle in I-F.

While I enjoy the lack of puzzles as it ensures a constant amount of forward progress through this short work, the writing needs to be strengthened in order for my choices' weight to be felt. I felt disorientated more than anything by the sudden twists. The choices themselves covered a good variety of options, so I never felt that "my" answer was never listed. And I enjoyed chatting with the gargoyle. I did not, however, replay the game after completing it. I have never been a lawnmower; it's rare that I would return to a point in a game just to see what would've happened if I had chosen differently.

On a side note, this game shows me why characters in literature are not people, and why people make poor characters in literature. Characters tend to be more provocative, to hold slightly more extreme viewpoints than real people do, and so, when the protagonist of the story is a real person making moral choices, he doesn't fall into the same kind of traps a character would. The story loses its punch as a result.

Lord Bellwater's Secret took my first place award in the 2007 Competition. I can say this because, looking back at the notes I wrote during play, they morphed from a paragraph describing the game's competence, to the admission "I'm not big on puzzles, but this is a rock-solid game", to simple proclamations about "best game I've played so far!" And there were no notes or doodling in-between these three -- a sure sign of immersion. This game simply did a lot of simple things right.

First, there's the game's opening: I know who I am, when and where I am, what I'm doing, and a strong suspicion of why it won't be easy. Though no one will cite it as one of the great openings of all time, I'm at least into the game and into my role before turn one. Since I-F has no box art, illustrations, or even a genre section from which to pick a work, I find such introductions an absolute must. Consequently, here I didn't feel those first few turns of aimlessness that much of I-F give me.

Navigation was a breeze, and is probably the single most important reason for the sense of immersion, that sense of the interface melting into the background. Even after completing the game, I'm still a little fuzzy on how the room in this one-room game was laid out, and that's the highest compliment I can give a work regarding its navigation. In Bellwater's room, we don't move from place to place so much as point-of-interest to point-of-interest, which tends to be some sort of prop or furniture. No need to clutter our minds with directions or bland names of areas like "alcove" or "hearth" when puzzles demand all our brainpower. Our imagination will fill in any blanks.

Characters were represented by the usual technique of in-absentia, with a notable end-game exception (though still non-interactive). Caring about the plight of characters is my motivation for playing I-F; countless video games of optimization puzzles and exhaustive searches have thoroughly trod that ground, with the iron-clad boots of pedantry no less. And it's a rare work when you can sympathize with your own PC; down that road lies angst and powerlessness, rather than the can-do, will-try activism of the typical PC. The only mark against this work regarding characterization was I couldn't remember my own PC's name without others present to remind me. Consequently a few things I read confused me.

The game's weakest link was, by far, the parser. The parser... It always comes down to the parser. LOOK AT/IN wasn't synonymous with EXAMINE, which is an important point in such a game where LOOK (around the room) is used so often. (I started using LOOK and its variations everywhere due to sheer habit of typing it.) TURN part-of-thing wasn't synonymous with OPEN thing, and a similar problem of parts vs. the whole emerged in the endgame. Both of these issues caused me to retreat to the hints even though I had actually solved the puzzle, but unknowingly, due to phrasing it for the parser.

One thing that authors should not imitate from this game: if Dear Player has reached your endgame, your last puzzle, your final showdown, it's a safe bet that he's fairly drawn into your world, and will be quite susceptible to danger. This makes a fairly safe bet that, once you've sprung that danger upon him, he won't exactly be thinking clearly. As a matter of fact, it's almost certain he'll be emotional, spastic, and utterly unaware of the fact that he has all the time in the world if he just stops typing. So please, Dear Author, in the end, ease up on the difficulty.

This is the first I-F I have ever played to completion, and the one to make me take notice of the form. In Bronze, you are Beauty, of the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, and after a week-long "vacation" to visit your old family, you return to the castle to find something amiss.

This game is intended for those of us new to interactive fiction. Puzzles have multiple solutions, multiple puzzles are open to the player at once, no time limits, hints are built-in, even the most basic I-F commands can be listed for those completely new to I-F, the writing is solid, the difficulty is on the easier side, and exploration produces a strong sense of place while maintaining the fairy tale's soft lucidness. And, commands new to the form, such as GO TO, remove a lot of the tedium of the old-school games.

I strongly recommend Bronze to those friends and family who may enjoy a textual video game, but whom would have little patience with the intentionally frustrating and pedantic I-Fs of old.

Suzanne Britton's "Worlds Apart" was the first interactive fiction I ever played, and it remains, to date, my favorite work as far as quality of writing goes. Its gameplay is relatively free of annoyances such as hunger puzzles and sudden death syndrome, which is notable considering it dates from 1999. I had some guess-the-word problems playing, though some of them were intentional puzzles.

I recommend this game to any player of at least moderate experience playing I-F.