Ratings and Reviews by Tristano

Come da descrizione, questa AT è intesa come "un esercizio in Inform" dal suo autore, si tratta quindi di un'avventura molto breve, giocabile come «spuntino» in una decina di minuti. Singola stanza, pochissimi oggetti ... ma non per questo meno piacevole da giocare.

Roberto Grassi è riuscito a condensare in un'avventura brevissima una storia che (nel suo piccolo e nella sua brevità) è compiuta. Il tuo personaggio ha una chiara missione di fronte a sé, e tutti gli attributi per completarla — e, detto per inciso, se non fosse per un incidente di percorso, il personaggio non avrebbe bisogno del tuo aiuto.

La vera domanda è se tu, in veste di giocatore, sarai all'altezza di metterti nei panni del maestro dei ladri di diamanti, e rubare dai gioelli della corona nientemeno che il Koh-i-Noor, il più grande diamante bianco al mondo!

I truely enjoyed this game (about three hours play, using hints now and then).

Denfinitely, an unsual work of IF. The atmosphere is dark and feverish, the plot explores the dark side of Kabbalah. Thrown into the main character's shoes, you'll be playing this adventure through the eyes of Jack Pudlo, a young jewish boy whose precarious health turned him into a cynical misanthrope. It's very well written, every part of the text reinforces the main character's mental state and his (sick) relation to the surrounding world.

The map is not huge, but in order to explore it in full you'll need to unravel many puzzles. The game is claustrophobic, crude and profane; reality is constantly blurred by a mixture of Jack's paranoia and hallucinations, on the one hand, and occult manifestations and magic, on the other. This is as much as I can say without spoiling gameplay.

The implementation is smooth, and I've only stumbled in a single disambiguation problem during the whole game. There are no "guess the verb" situations and commands parsing is implemented rather mercifully; smart implicit actions replace tedious commands sequences, sparing the player endless typing when it's obvious what he has in mind. The commands set in not huge, and non standard commands are either obvious or hinted at in the text. I advise you try out any action that comes to your mind, for the atmosphere of the game will push you in directions that are worthy to explore (especially the dark side of Jack), even when these actions might not have a direct impact on the story course.

Jack Pudlo reminded me of Francis Orme, the main character of Edward Carey's Observatory Mansions, who's own narrative (like Jack's) is distorted by his own personality and selfishness, and chronic disease becomes an excuse to moral superiority and misanthropy.

The story ending is quite unexpected, and I still can't decide what to make of it. The ABOUT text is very strange indeed, and I'm left with the impression that it contains clues to decode further layers of narrative meanings — for example, the theme of "war" is mentioned in the ABOUT, and constantly leaks into the story background, from the distant sounds of the outside world, growing in intensity as the story approaches its end, but it's never explored or directly connected to the plot. Kabbalah being a central theme (and device) to the story, I suspect that there is more to the plot than meets the eye at first sight.

PataNoir is an unusual type of IF game. I can't really say more without spoiling the game experience. So ... just open it's story file, turn off the tutorial mode and enjoy it as it comes. Within a short time you'll realize what makes it different from other works of IF.
It can be solved in a couple of hours, and there is a good (and cleverly devised) hint system if you run out of ideas.

I've given up on this game before completing it, so my review might be impartial. What prevented me from finishing it was the general sensation of fragmentation I got from playing it so far: switching from one point of view to another didn't really provide an enhanced view of the story, as some other multiple-viewpoint IF works did.

Interactivity is rather limited in this game, it's more on the story side of IF than the traditional game-puzzle sort. Therefore, all expectations shift from mechanics to storytelling.

Somehow the story didn't hook me in enough to stay in the game and play along with the author. I think there is a lack of background story, the player is just thrown into stage without much to work on, which gave me a sense of disorientation. Changes in viewpoint occur too often, without much really happening between each switch. Also, I would have expected POV changes to bring about some good cliff-hanging, leaving you wondering about the fate of the character you just jumped out of his shoes; but this doesn't happen simply because there isn't enough at stake in the story to care about any of the characters your playing in turn --nothing to make you either like them or hate them, they are just so flat and unfleshed that the only thing differentiating them is their names.

Maybe it's me who missed out some of the core points, but so far the overall sensation was that the most (and best) I could do was just playing along with the story plot as it comes. I didn't feel much choices and freedom of exploration, the world geography is rather claustrophobic and interaction with the environment very limited--and, surely, not encouraged by descriptions.

Maybe if I bore patient I might have discovered that the story changes and opens up later on, but so far I got bored and with all my effort I just couldn't feel a solid narrative grip that could keep me going along with the plot — even though the theme is of my liking and I had good expectations.

Possibly, the failure I experienced could be attributed to the attempt of conveying suspence through mystery: but where the plot should "thicken" it actually slims down, leaving an already rather clueless player even more clueless about the true motives that keep him going wherever he's meant to be going.

"Inside Woman" has really caught my attention for its originality. I've found it different from many IF works, in subtle ways. It's a rather long game, the map is not huge and the author devised it in a way that moving around is quite simple.

First, I want to point out that the game can be really tough to get through, and I don't think I'd have managed to get on with it without resorting to hints. Unfortunately, the hints file is not mentioned here, so I'll add a link to it:

http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/solutions/WomanHints.txt

I think the author should have put a hint system into the game because some puzzles can get quite frustrating, forcing the player to quit playing. Even after peeping the solution in the hint file I've realized that some puzzles I simply wouldn't have solved them.

Yet, it was worth playing it (even with frequent hints lookup). The story opening is quite unusual: movement in space is strictly linked to puzzles and plot, meaning that to move forward you have to solve some puzzles, and since they relate to plot the experience is that of moving rapidly into the story one-step-at-the-time. This is something that I liked quite a lot because it forced me to focus a lot on every description from the inset, and it gave me a good story immersion experience.

Then, at at certain point the game takes on a more classical approach: you can move and explore and are faced with multiple puzzles that need to be solved in order to carry on with the story. Overall, the story is quite linear in that most of the puzzles must be solved in a specific order--although, I have to admit that guessing their order is not always easy, and as the story goes on it's easy to lose track of the objectives.

A strong advice: have a notebook of some sort to jot down notes from the beginning because backward references are a recurrent issue in this game. Also, writing down objective is a good way of keeping focused on the various missions and achievements.

Mechanics aside, I liked the futuristic setting and I appreciated the author's prose -- not only it's very polished, but it's also well balanced. There aren't many superfluous descriptions, and the author has managed to be concise but rich, and overall the story emerges quite powerfully. Some puzzles are really hard, but there is enough encouragement to go on because each solution adds some beats to the story and prevents the pace from dying out.

Also, this is a game in which words are carefully weighed and crafted, and they carry more meaning than one might think at first glance--indeed, you soon learn that every sentence contains important clues and is hinting toward the solution of the puzzle it refers to. I can't recall another work in which the text was so masterfully woven so as to embed in each sentence clues to playing, while at the same time establishing setting, plot, and pace all at once and in such a concise manner. Andy Philips is a good writer, beside being a good coder and game designer.

So, extreme attention has to payed to the game's text--but this has a downside also: you'll soon realize that previous description are crucial to solving some puzzles. So it's strongly advisable to use the transcript function in order to be able to read and sift-through past texts. This annoyed me a bit because in the midst of the game I couldn't recover some text from the buffer since I had saved and restored the game across sessions. The author should have put a warning regarding the need of transcripts or, even better, he could have implemented some sort of note-book or other way of recording important texts and events. Or, as mentioned above, just take notes on paper.

Some mechanics here and there could have been polished a bit more, but it's definitely an IF work of high quality--I don't recall stumbling in many typos.

I hope the author might one day take this work on once more and add to it a hint and note-taking system and refine some puzzles that, being too hard to solve, might prevent many from completing it. Also, there are some places where the player has to repeat a sequence of actions over and over again ... those parts should be revised with an implicit-actions system (else it's just cumbersome).

I really enjoyed this short work of IF. The story is set in a very small world, yet the narrative manages to build-up into the player's mind as he explores the environment. Usually I find frustrating IF games horrible to play, but in this specific case frustration and challenge go hand in hand.
After a few moves you realize that you've explored all there is to explore in the story game, and you realize that there are few items to interact with. At all times you know that the solution is right in front of you, but you just can't work out how to unravel the puzzle.
There is a beauty to its prose, it manages to be simple but evocative, and the player straight away realizes that clues are hidden in plain sight as far as descriptions go.
It'a a kind of all-or-nothing situation--you either solved the puzzle or you are still stuck with it. The solution naturally builds in the player's mind as he keeps attempting various actions and starts to tune-in with the story and it's peculiar use of language.
Well worth playing it, and not giving up to it! Avarage player should solve it within half an hour. Keep re-reading descriptions and weigh every word in the text. Nothing is marginal.

«Taco Fiction» is a well implemented adventure that can be won in about an hour. The setting has strong emphasis on suburban poverty, desperation, crime and corruption. And there is plot to it, with interesting twists.
The player starts with a clear objective presented by the game itself, but as the game procedes you come to realize that things are not quite like you were lead to belief. Choices are to be made, and the plot takes sudden and unexpected twists that ... well, let's say you'll be taken into a shadowy world of power conspirancy.
There are multiple endings, worth trying them all. Gameplay is fun, prose is good and balanced, game mechanics are well implemented and not frustrating at all. Puzzles are good and intriguing.

Surely it is a speedy IF — took about 3 minutes (40 odd turns) to complete.

But fun? Not at all. There is no story, just a bunch of poorly described rooms of abstract nature. Can't even say there are puzzles in the game: you just move around, examine the very few items you stumble upon and then, by chance (ie: if you carry out in the right place one of the very few actions you can actually accomplish) the solution presents itself to you — out of the blue.

It isn't clear to me what was the intention behind this game — all I can think of is a mere exercise in code. And even now, after having «won» I'm left asking myself: what have I won? There was no challenge in the game, nor was the prose stimulating in any way.