Reviews by Ron Newcomb

Seriously, I've made it to the end of the game, and didn't understand a blessed thing other than the parser is supposed to be someone writing a letter to you. I think. The title leads me to believe that the game is in-jokey, that you have to be familiar with particular other works of interactive fiction to even approach this one.

At least the walkthrough is in-game, so you needn't feel guilty about using it. A lot.

It's a testament to the quality of the writing (and that walkthrough) I made it to the end. The game has a definite voice, almost conversational in its informality, which is refreshing. And it doesn't expect you to inspect the setting a great deal.

I just wish I got an ending that made sense.

Normally I'm a fan of fairy tales and conversational games both. Games like Alabaster are my bread and butter. Alabaster itself incorporates a handful of technical features which are worth exploring by anybody. But I experienced a kind of dissonance between those welcome features and certain aspects of the story, so my five-star rating is subject to personal tastes both for and against.

On the conversation side, the parser seems to encourage inserting more than a simple keyword after ASK ABOUT. Though that is not in fact true -- the "keyword" now comprises multiple words resembling a dependent clause -- the illusion improves the immersiveness of the experience a surprising amount. Moreover, my immersion-breaking "what would the parser understand" analytics have turned off again by the time I finish typing the command. The effect is a little like snowboarding down a tree-infested slope: I'm generally enjoying the ride and playing around with little thought to consequence, but I must periodically make clear and distinct decisions about what route to take to avoid disaster. I believe the reason the brief parser analyses don't mar Alabaster's ride is because I've already returned to the ride before I've finished typing in my response. Bizarre but true.

This doesn't mean I endorse the near-constant need for prefixing ASK HER to my input. I found this distancing. Apparently S&W's maxim of "omit needless words" applies to inputted commands as well. Paradoxically, while I'm aware that I can abbreviate the afore-mentioned dependent clauses a great deal, doing so decreased my enjoyment. Apparently parsers love needless words, and the words the parser does not need -- all those IFs, ISes, and WHATs -- are very important to me, the player, and my sense of immersion. So which words are "needless" greatly depends on whose point of view you're considering, human or computer. (Of course if Alabaster were more action-oriented, I don't know if any of this would still hold true.)

The illustrations work better than I imagined. I'm something of a purist when it comes to inserting multimedia elements into interactive fiction. I prefer the prose handle all jobs. But though the depicted character doesn't match my own idea of Snow White, it still worked for me. More instructively, the procedurally-collated image informed me of emotional tones in the work that interactive text struggles with. My only addition would be to grey-out or fade the image when I use a out-of-world command.

Usage of the THINK command is inspired: an "inventory" of events and plot points so far. But I can't seem to THINK ABOUT any one of them in particular, not even as a memory aid, which is distressing. If taken together, this is the kind of thing that should be automatically included in all works, rather than nitpicky details about whether one is sitting or standing. Likewise the ENDINGS command: since it's saved to an external file, it can reify any take-home value of the story. Alabaster only uses it as a checklist of sorts for completionists, but I feel that there's untapped artistic potential there.

The one thing I found unpalatable is the general what's-going-on tone the story uses. Interactive fiction is opaque enough as-is, and especially so when the work is in any way progressive. The player isn't sure of the commands or the way the game works. The player already asks himself "what's going on" just with the interface, parser issues, and keeping track of everything important -- which usually means everything until he knows enough of the boundaries and intent of the work to guess at what is and isn't worth remembering. How can I choose my own destiny and thwart my opponents if I'm the most clueless person in the room? Alabaster has an agency problem.

Still, it isn't empty calories. Play Alabaster. It's chicken soup for your experimental soul.

Puzzles that use the fantasy tropes of time travel and teleportation are nearly as common as games set in one's apartment, and any game that blends the two is just begging to be painted as a train-wreck of clichés. So I believe it's something of a small miracle that The Primrose Path is both well-written and quite engrossing, despite all these brain-breaking puzzles. We play the role of Matilda, a nevermind-how-old-I-am woman who is woken up at the crack of dawn by her rather frantic next-door neighbor, Leo. Leo's a painter, and seems to have gotten himself shot this morning. He needs Matilda's help to fix a few things in his life, such as its ending. Matilda, like any other sensible woman in her nightie, immediately embarks on an adventure through their duplex.

Primrose is a difficult game. Were it not for the collective mind-bending powers of the members of ClubFloyd, I certainly would never have finished it. Partly this was due to an under-clued bit: it will help to know that Matilda takes a bit of convincing to see or do what she is reluctant to, so player be prepared to argue a little with your own PC. On the other partly, this is due to it being a puzzle-laden work at heart.

Rest assured, there's no Soup Cans in this one. Nor any lazy writing. The locales and props and even world-states lend themselves well to imagery, and the characters, while not exactly three-dimensional in the conventional fiction sense, sustain belief primarily through action: they will move between locations, and will even move to foil the player should they need to.

The author's attention to detail continues through to the end of the work. The final puzzle or puzzles, depending on how you define your boundaries, decide how the story ends. There are at least eight endings that I know of, all of which say that somebody or something has won even if it be the antagonist. This is a refreshingly positive spin on sub-optimal endings and is much appreciated. Add to that that none of the endings felt contrived or tacked on for the sake of merely having them. Programming bugs aside, if you get an ending you don't like, chances are you know you deserved it. Completionists will appreciate the final AMUSING command, which hints at the many easter eggs and subplots tucked into the game's nooks and crannies.

The Primrose Path is a fine example of how a difficult game can be worth several hours of investment. Just bring a friend or twelve.

It's a good thing it has a built-in hint system, else I wouldn't be able to finish it. Focused on one puzzle doing somersaults in your 'ool (notice there is no Stink in it; please keep it that way) the game introduces itself then leaves you bereft. Be sure to examine everything.

It can be a dog-eat-dog world out there. All Hardy dreams of is a dog-eat-sandwich world. But alas, his pet human is asleep on the couch again!

Snack Time! is a light-hearted little work where we play as Hardy the Bulldog and his epic, ten-minute, house-spanning quest to get something good to eat. Of course, lacking opposable thumbs makes things a little less straightforward than they should be. And so begin the puzzles, all of which are pretty easy.

No frustrations here save for the tummy grumbling, Snack Time! is a recipe for pure giggles.

(And Dino wins my Best Prop Of 2008 award!)

The most unique thing about Jeremy Freese's _Violet_ is its wholeness. The author uses an unusual technique of casting the titular NPC as a voice intentionally willed to exist inside the male* protagonist's own head. Not only does his constantly keeping in mind "what would Violet say?" show his feelings for Violet and his current motivation, but the technique allows an in-game character to comment on both action-based gameplay and out-of-world game messages without breaking mimesis. Even the about-the-game portions of the work called up by the CREDITS or ABOUT commands are cast as a letter from an ostensibly real-world Violet to the author's friends, we the player. The pervasive use of this technique lends the work a visceral force usually reserved for true stories.

A secondary effect of the same technique suckers puzzle-adverse players into playing a puzzle-based game to completion. Myself spent over 15 minutes with _Violet_ before realizing it is not, in fact, a conversation-based work. Conversation through NPC commentary is merely a veneer. The initial tasks in the game are so easy they would rightly be called a basic I-F tutorial rather than a puzzle. By the time the player recognizes the true nature of the gameplay, a desire to see how it all ends has taken over. Besides, surely just getting settled enough to begin writing a dissertation couldn't take much longer, could it?

Well as it turns out, our protagonist is unfortunately very good at sabotaging himself, and the lengths to which he must go become increasingly outlandish and embarrassing. It's something of a trick that, even when Violet herself finally comes on stage to laugh a little at us, the author has avoided making the player feel like a buffoon even as he (and we) makes one of the player-character. The player-character isn't properly named, or even solidly gendered, and the work is in second person, all of which invites conflation of the player with the player-character. But it doesn't matter. Perhaps it's because the work itself reinforces the bemused absurdity of it all (such as the scenes outside the window), or perhaps it's because we believe enough in the protagonist's mission by then so that, by hook or by crook, we'll accomplish our goals and worry about our dignity later. However it's done, it's done well.

Narrative techniques for the problems specific to interaction fiction still inhabit a realm of rumor and black magic, passed between individuals who may never meet. Because the novelty of computer games is front-loaded and cooly intellectual, they can be acceptably reviewed unfinished. Because a story reveals its heart near the end, it must light a fire in the player after basic mastery settles in but before repetition does the same. And because so frequently a video game's first on-stage character teaches gameplay throughout, such a character cannot play a significant part in the story precisely because of that world-straddling status -- thus breaking a rule of static fiction about characters introduced early. But Violet, true to her status as a sufficiently awesome girlfriend, does exactly this. Even as her imagined voice ostensibly encourages her boyfriend to complete his task for the warm rewards, she encourages us to complete ours for the same. It is this solution that raises Freese's magic out of the blackness of grues, and into a spectrum a little more colorful.



* Or female, as the player may change, only, the player-character's gender.

A Stop For The Night won Best Of Landscape in the 2003 IF Art Show. Presented as a small horror exploration, it experiments with alternate navigation methods as a way to heighten tension. The piece uses three methods: relative directions (left and right), door-oriented travel, and direct navigation (such as "KITCHEN").

The first presents the environment as the character sees it, and reinforces the knowledge of exactly where he stands: at a very specific point in space. As a description, it works; I'm made to feel as if I'm just a small person, a mere dot, entering this sinister place. But as a navigation aid, it fails. Like all IF before it, winding one's way through a map using left and right is disorientating, even if the map is a perfect grid. (The cardinal directions are relegated to the outside world of stars and sun.)

The second attempts to preserve a staple of the horror genre -- the moment of uncertainty just as you open a door leading to the unknown. It does that somewhat well, as you are quite focused on the door and any distinguishing characteristics it possesses to glean what might lay beyond. Unfortunately, given the shape and size of the map, this first presents the player with multiple rooms of twisted little doors, all alike. The suspense of such choices are quickly diluted by repetition. Later, after the map is explored, navigation is too focused on the doors rather than the rooms to which they lead.

The game's direct navigation system kicks in to compensate. You may enter the adjacent previously-visited room merely by stating its name. It's an improvement over Bronze as you needn't preface it with GO TO, but it lacks Bronze's ability to skip through multiple rooms at once. This tends to make puzzles more tedious as you flit from room to room searching for that one item that might be useful in that one place.

This particular work's implementation of the three navigation systems isn't perfect; even a fully-explored map needs an occasional Left or Right. But it certainly fulfills its purpose as an experiment. I learned a few things. I can conceive of navigating a new world by constellations whose location in the night sky change by time and season, but know the navigation-as-puzzle limits the remainder of the work to conversation and psychology. Single-word direct navigation allows one to concentrate on the puzzle or task at hand, rather than the minutiae of getting from point B back to A again. And a little disorientation from self-centric navigation among injured and individualized doors can tell a story in itself, but once you discover that the ominous, mystical wooden door with the crescent moon engraving leads not to the spellchamber, but to the privy, it's time then to concentrate on the higher reasons for all the walking around.

Book and Volume is something of a throwback. The writing will please modern audiences; subtle humor that pokes fun at real-world institutions, stereotypes, and cultural flotsam abound. But the gameplay is something out of Zork. Overlapping timed puzzles are used as a blunt pacing device, on the order of "do your things in a timely manner or start over." Many required actions aren't clued at all, so satisfying those timers is near impossible on the first playthrough or three. And while the geography is a perfect city grid well-presented with the game's subtle humor, most of it is a distraction. The plot seems pretty minimal. Perhaps further into the work things improve, but I have not the patience or prescience to get there. That's a shame, because it is otherwise worth playing.

When thirteen year old Rosalind tires of her mother's angst, she sets off to grandmother's house for good food and better company. But upon arriving, she finds an empty house, a half-twisted quilt, and a full-on mystery. Thus begins her quest through space, memory and a closet full of skeletons.

Moon-Shaped is a typical puzzle-based interactive fiction, save that it favors fuller prose over fuller geography. Puzzles are of moderate difficulty and clued fairly well, and a menu interface offers progressive hints. A wonderful annotated walkthrough is also available separately, though experienced players will likely not need it. The overall result is a work that favors readers over game players and thoroughness over lateral thinking.

Two things kept me from granting Moon-Shaped a full five stars. One, a compass rose and/or a GO TO command would be greatly appreciated by us beginners who disorient easily. But more importantly, I never really felt close to anyone in the work despite the time I spent with it and the spacious in absentia flashbacks. I felt that each such scene was afraid of giving away too much, and the reticency caused me to rely on my knowledge of fantasy instead of the knowledge of the particulars of the work. Consequently, I saw where the work was headed far too soon.

Regardless these idiosyncratic nitpicks, Moon-Shaped is a good work, and I especially recommend it to those who enjoyed Emily Short's Bronze.

(This review is for release 2 of Moon-Shaped.)

Much of IF begins with a problem, and we happen to be the lucky schmo charged with solving it; perhaps that's why much of IF tends to be frustrating, obtuse, or just plain negative in tone. This then is what sets apart "The Chasing". It's a very positive and neighborly work, as if "Ultima: Quest of the Avatar" were set in your local neighborhood, sans monsters and pointy objects. Your white horses escaped your stables last night, and you must wander around the valley looking for them, quizzing your neighbors on their whereabouts. In doing so, you discover your neighbors have little problems of their own, such as treed kites and runaway lawnmowers. But shortly after helping someone out, you discover you are starring in an allegory.

But golly gee Wally, it sure is a pleasant little allegory to be in.

"The Chasing" avoids the preachy tone that virtue-chasing games often have, and still keeps its gameplay varied enough to avoid boredom. NPCs tend to be one-trick ponies, but there's always a friendly one nearby, partly mitigating the loneliness that usually dogs IF. And while the pleasantness of the work sometimes runs pretty close to self-parody, there's something to be said here for balance in the body of IF works; perhaps the work purposefully overcompensates.

There's nothing here that will challenge puzzle-goers, but their children -- and IF beginners -- will only require a list of verbs common to all IF in order to chase down all those slippery, adventurous virtu-- er, horses.

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.