Ratings and Reviews by Dan Fabulich

Last time, I gave Uninteractive Fiction 4 stars. It was a joke game, funny, worth the ten seconds it took to play.

Jokes have to be surprising but inevitable in hindsight to be funny. Last time, UF pleasantly surprised me (especially the sound track).

This time, it wasn't surprising. I don't think it'll be funny at all if there's a next time.

You and an appointed "dark-skinned" English crew member are appointed to explore the Island of Rhynin. (Spoiler - click to show)At the end, you get to decide whether to kill him or not.

It's pretty easy to get to the ending. Despite the blurb's claim, none of the choices I made seemed to have any effect on the plot. My choices just increased/decreased my stats, which had no effect on the game.

And then, the ending, which is where the colonialism really kicks in.

What was the point of this story? None of my earlier choices had any effect. The ending choice means nothing to me. The plot is nothing but a regurgitation of colonialist propaganda.

I think this would be a two-star game if it weren't for the dehumanizing colonialism. Instead, I'm giving it one star.

As the description explains, this is a game about a growing addiction to asking AI for assistance. The horror begins as you (Spoiler - click to show)try to delete the AI, but it refuses to allow you to delete it.

But, just as soon as that conflict arises, the game ends. It left me wanting more, but, in a bad way.

The #1 guideline on IFComp's Guidelines for IFComp authors is to playtest your game and credit your testers. This game credits no testers; it seems pretty clear that it didn't have any.

Here's what would have been my beta feedback:

• The space is divided up into four locations, "middle of the bed," "Top of bed," "Bottom of the bed" and "out of the bed". But the game provides approximately no affordances to discover how to get there, nothing except the "HELP" command that suggests "There are four directions, move with the GO (north, south, east or west) command."

  Instead, I suggest describing location exits in every room description. "The top of the bed is south. The bottom of the bed is north. You can get out of the bed to the east."

• In "middle of the bed," it says "You can see a basket here." By convention, "here" implies that the basket is in the current location with you, in the middle of the bed. But if you try to "get basket" from "middle of the bed," it says, "You can’t possibly reach that basket from the middle of the bed." Because the basket isn't here, it's in the "out of the bed" location to the east.

  Ideally you'd write some code that would tell the player where the basket and/or baby is, wherever they may be. "The baby is in the basket outside the bed to the east." "The baby is at the top of the bed. The basket is at the bottom of the bed."

  Barring that, you could just not mention the basket at all in the "middle of the bed." Inform will describe it automatically when the player gets out of the bed.

• (Spoiler - click to show)`READ BOOK` didn't make it clear enough that I was reading the book silently, that I wasn't reading the book _aloud_. The winning move is to `READ BOOK TO BABY`, which I couldn't figure out on my own; I had to decompile the game with mrifk https://github.com/wertercatt/mrifk/ to figure it out.
• The room description for "Top of the bed" says, "You look at your phone, but no new messages. You take a sip of water from your glass." But if you pick up your phone and water and drop them elsewhere, it still says that. Instead, I think it should say that your "nightstand" is here. It should tell you that there are no new messages if you look at your phone, wherever you are.
• DRINK WATER says "there's nothing suitable to drink here," even if you're at the top of the bed with the water.
• "out of the bed" says "An empty basket lies on the floor next to your bed." But, by default, the baby is in the basket, so that's not true.
• (Spoiler - click to show)`READ BOOK TO BABY` prints out a parenthetical "(the end)", but instead it should end the game saying "The End."
• FEED BABY assumes you mean "(to yourself)" and says "You can't feed the baby to yourself. That is obviously not what I meant! Instead, it should print a message that it's not feeding time yet.
• All of the plot comes across in the last move, as you (Spoiler - click to show)READ BOOK TO BABY. But I think it would make sense to move some of that information to any of the various COMFORT BABY, KISS BABY, etc. commands so it's not such a huge wall of text at the end.

The game's premise is charming. The game is pretty short, and there are only a few choices in it. I think I would have enjoyed more choices, especially near the end game, when (Spoiler - click to show)interacting with the unfrozen human.

(It also strains belief that this alien would know the difference between Cash Assistance and SNAP, which is to say that the alien knows what "cash" is, but doesn't know anything about why these programs are administered so poorly. Maybe give me a choice about why I think the HRA is run like this?)

The game is a parody of a personality test that a corporation would administer to potential employees. They're widely reviled, and so it's a pretty easy target. In addition, the author has imagined the test to be administered by AI, another easy target.

But, as a result, the game never gets all that funny. It starts off with a surreal question, and remains surreal and random throughout. In my opinion, to get to be actually funny, you have to be surprising, but inevitable in hindsight. Starting surreal and staying surreal doesn't give the game enough room to make the player expect something, so I could never really be surprised by anything.

EDIT: Replayed today at the SF Bay Area IF Meetup and we discovered the (Spoiler - click to show)dating simulator endings. Now that's what I call surprising but inevitable in hindsight. I've changed my review from 3 stars to 4.

To get to those endings: (Spoiler - click to show)Play along with the survey enough to receive a job offer, then choose "Not Awesome" and refuse to work there. When asked why, say that the survey isn't even really an AI.

I think I would have given this game 5 stars if all of the endings had been that good.