Ratings and Reviews by Wade Clarke

Homo Sapiens is a BDB adventure in which the PC is one of the earliest members of our species. The player's goal is to survive and find a mate.

HS worked better for me than the previous BDB game I tried, The Wrath of Anubis, because HS's lore and goals and elemental qualities are all in alignment. Playing an unsophisticated character in a raw world of physical dangers is the kind of thing that suits a two-word parser well. Not that this is strictly two-word; the BDB adventures are built in Inform, but of course the source material is a 1980s two-worder.

Being close to pre-tools, the PC must mostly make good use of nature. Breaking things will involve scaling heights. Zapping things will involve exploiting bad weather. Animals can interact with each other to player advantage, and weather can change the environment.

HS is a short game but it has a good density of environmental variation in both the map and mechanics. It also has some of the less kind logic of early 1980s games. For instance, you can't just exploit any height, only the ones especially set up by the game, even though there are other high-seeming places. With a map of this size, that's not a big problem. And the HINTs don't go too deep but at least they're there.

The scientific opinion as I write this is that women probably were involved in hunting and stuff, too, contrary to most popular depictions of prehistoric people. This game is a retake of a 1980s game which was one of those popular depictions, but there's really no social scope here, not even an apparatus for one. HS's action is about solving environmental puzzles in a prehistoric world. Its focus on natural solutions is a point of interest. The moment the social level is broached, the game is over. I'm not going to hold that against forty-year-old source material about some poor prehistoric bastard seeking to scramble up a rung or two on the hierarchy of needs.

This is the first of Garry Francis's BDB parser games I've played, though I have played the related (and excellent) A Taste Of Terror.

The Wrath of Anubis treads some of the wellest-worn of adventure game turf, the exploration of an Egyptian tomb. It's solid, but perhaps felt a little short to me, especially in light of the length of the blurb and introduction. The backstory involving Anubis, ancient history, curses and village traditions is (relatively) elaborate, but doesn't really inform the action, or add anything to the goal of finding a single important treasure, except that it casts the quest in a positive light - not one of those bad old lights! The original game is from 1987, a lot closer to the time of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982) whose tomb-raiding influence on some of the situations is obvious.

The Wrath of Anubis can definitely be commended for delivering accessible versions of traditionally 'Argh!' challenges found in old (read: past forty years as I type this) Egypt-set adventures. Its desert maze is samey and semi-illogical, but still designed to be a doddle compared to the incarnation of this kind of thing found in, say, The Sands of Egypt (1982), or even a non-Egyptian game like Wizard and the Princess (1980). There are oases, a thirst timer, and a checklist demanding you find food, but each of these things is paid off in the least inconvenient way possible. This speaks to one of the BDB Project's stated goals of updating the games for modern players, while obviously retaining that core style of pretty pure text adventuring.

So the game has most of the major features of the tradition, executed well, but perhaps unspectacularly and not at length. I probably expect a lot when it comes to the Egyptian aesthetic nowadays, and Wrath didn't raise my excitement levels enough. It's still a good piece of work.

(This is an edited version of a review originally published in my blog during IFComp 2025.)

Temptation in the Village is Anssi Räisänen's parser game adaptation of the eponymous unfinished short story by Franz Kafka. That story is dated 1914. Räisänen explains in the game's ABOUT that Temptation begins as a faithful adaptation of the story, then develops via his own expansions on it in the style and spirit of Kafka. The result is the experience of a Kafka tale manoeuvred to suit the parser format. Psychologically focused within the PC, it is atmospheric and works very well. The methods for the adaptation are interesting but uncomplicated, and they drew my attention back to some fundamental qualities of the parser format and their effects. The story is certainly as existential as one expects from Kafka, but it doesn't have the unrelenting heaviness of something like The Trial. Its feet are in naturalism and it's set on a village farm.

The opening paragraph of the game acts as a kind of benchmark. It depicts the PC experiencing what psychologist Abraham Maslow termed "the peak experience", the feeling that life is infinitely interesting and exciting, and potential-filled:

"One summer, as evening falls, you arrive in a village you’ve never been to before. You’re struck by how broad and open the roads are. Tall, old trees stand in front of the farmhouses. It has been raining recently, the air is fresh, everything delights you."

This experience will soon be defused by the PC's dealings with a roster of unhelpful and sometimes unintentionally sinister village characters. In my reading of the game, the elaboration of the move to or away from this psychological high point is the frame for what happens in the story.

I need to preface the rest of this review by saying that at the time I wrote it, I hadn't read any Kafka in full. Being a literary type, I know a lot about Kafka from secondhand reading, the zeitgeist, and the overused adjective "Kafka-esque". My experience of Temptation meshed with specific qualities I expect from Kafka. The game features absurdity and an uncertain prosecutorial atmosphere, and though there are no real bureaucracies in it to confound the PC, the minor hierarchy of the farm's running amounts to a version of one.

The story begins with the PC wandering in the countryside when they come across a farm. Looking for shelter and work, they start to enquire about both, and are soon running afoul of ambiguously helpful/unhelpful locals. A village man suggests the inn might suit, but also points out it's been turned over to a cripple the local community was obliged to provide for. The cripple and his wife can hardly manage the inn, so the inn stinks and ends up providing for nobody. The villager and his wife hang about the dithering PC, following at a distance for no good reason and seeming both menacing and foolish in doing so.

The main way such events are managed in the game is just by allowing or blocking directional movements at different times. The player is forced to twitch and dawdle about the first location, being invited in one direction, finding that way blocked by NPCs or their ideas, invited in another, finding it now blocked too for new narrative reasons. For the most part, these methods get around the need for any conversation mechanic, though there is some ASK SUCH-AND-SUCH ABOUTing required.

The divisions created by parser game turns and locations suit Kafka's and Räisänen's unhelpful NPCs. The prose of Temptation conveys an inner psychological process, not just a series of standalone vignettes about place. The PC enters a room, is often prohibited from performing actions by implied social customs or just the silence of others (how strange it would be to ask an old couple for a room for the night, and find they're prepared to sit at their porridge dinner in the half-dark just ignoring you) and must work out what to do to unstick the situation. The prose indicates a normalcy, or at least non-rudeness, in the PC, which is tested by others who seem to be unthinkingly rude or just not thinking.

Even children have an air of menace in this story. They awaken and encircle the PC in unison when they hear the sound of a dog barking at night:

"It is too late; suddenly, all around you, you see the children rising up in their white nightshirts as though by agreement, as though on command, and eye you closely."

There is a sense of conspiracy amongst others, never verified or verifiable. It just emphasises that the PC is the PC and cannot know others' thoughts, yet he keeps trying to balance what he guesses those thoughts might be against his own standards.

Where Kafka's story ended in the night, Räisänen continues to the morning with the PC's enquiries regarding work. A young man seen earlier on a wall, where he was inviting the PC onto the farm in what modern folk would describe as a passive-aggressive manner, now submits the PC to a pre-work test:

"It would make a great impression on the master if you mowed the tall grass south of the house. There is a scythe in the old barn... Another thing you could do is move the big trunk from the old barn to the new barn."

The PC thinks this man seems like a foreman, and speculates he might even be the son of the old farmer, but chooses not to ask about either of these things. The player's more traditional adventuring skills are now drawn on to bring the farming tasks to a close, at which point the man asks one more thing:

"... remember seeing those fallen cherry blossoms in the garden? You could go and glue them back onto the tree branches. I am sure the master would appreciate that very much."

The PC's realisation that the man has been pranking him and wasting his time is accompanied by another; that the PC himself has been behaving in a blindly obedient manner while on this farm.

Similar incidents sprinkled throughout the game have led to this point. As a player, I recalled my own following of all the suggestions made by those initial villagers outside the farm, in spite of them not actually being helpful. I still didn't realise that the old couple I'd found eating porridge on the first evening had never actually offered me a room until I reviewed my transcript of play. I'd just felt that they had, then gone off and lain down on a pile of straw to sleep. The so-called foreman never indicated who he was, or why he might have had any real authority over me, yet the PC had behaved in a manner as if he had.

Given that this is the conclusion to the fully original portion of the game, and that it weaves together the prior contents of Kafka's short story so well, I think the integration is excellent, and the story has a thematically and psychologically powerful conclusion.

The man's prank isn't the final word, though. Recalling the peak experience of the protagonist in the first scene, that hard-to-share delight he experienced at everything, I'm aware of the distance travelled from that moment to his humiliation at the hands of the foreman. The game has shown that the PC got here by careless small steps in the face of uncertainties, and certainly lost his way after that first moment. Peak experiences can feel like accidents. Abraham Maslow ended up assuming they were. Writer-philosopher Colin Wilson later explored the phenomenon in literature and in reality as something one could try to bring about. Temptation ends with a turn back towards the potential of the opening high point:

"But even in this desolate moment, you know that one day you will find a place that truly belongs to you, no matter what it takes - and it will be somewhere entirely different from here."

For the evolution of the PC, this is obviously the right move. The game casts most of its situations in Kafka's socially adversarial light, so there are practical implications we can take from the story, or be reminded of, about how more assertiveness may be needed in dealing with such situations, and with self-proclaimed authorities, if we aren't to be given the runaround like the PC is in Temptation.

Given my lack of Kafka-reading, I don't know if Kafka ever ended stories with what you might call a positive vector. By his reputation, I doubt it. On the other hand, if he'd trafficked down in Samuel-Beckett-like levels of wilfully stupid pessimism, I'm sure I'd have heard about that.

Temptation in the Village is interactive, but not in the sense that the player could have warded off all those unhelpful people. There's a journey to go on here and the interactions highlight opportunities to think about it. The player is subjected to the old "You can't go that way" message a lot – in situation-specific prose, of course – but that message is existential, not just physical. The PC chooses not to go that way, now. Why? Probably because they're being too careful to try not to offend any of the uncaring NPCs.

What is the Temptation of the title? I have no idea. Some googling suggests there aren't solid ideas out there regarding Kafka's original piece. It was an unfinished fragment, after all. I think some mystery is always a good thing.

The Clock Tower is a short and amusing parser game with dynamic audio, created in eleven days for a Lisp (programming language family) game jam. A point of interest is that the parser itself was written from scratch in this time. It's a bare bones one by modern standards, and with a strange advice message for unrecognised nouns which usually quotes only a first letter, but these things don't matter because this is a small adventure which doesn't need an advanced parser.

The PC lives in a clock tower and finds themselves standing beneath a locked trap door when the game begins. Their downstairs neighbour, who also lives in the tower(?!) appears to be out. The game doesn't state the PC's goals leading to the win condition but that locked trapdoor is right there, and there's also a small outdoor area to explore.

The highlight is the dynamic audio. There are ticking clocks, the sounds of nature, and the bongs from the clock tower every now and then, all of which fade in and out appropriately or on a location by location basis. This isn't complex but it is a reminder most parser games don't experiment with it. The star of the audio is a tuneable three-station radio, complete with original audio loops and fake ads. The radio features in a puzzle which is also solvable if you don't use the audio.

The game implies a strange sort of world where folks live in clock towers and chill out listening to old school radio while taking care of their cats. No questions, no explanations, that's just how it is. It all fits together comfortably for a game written from the ground up within a time limit.

(This is an edited version of a review originally published in my blog during IFComp 2025.)

Not so Happy Easter 2025 (NSHE) is a humourous, light horror adventure written by Petr Kain in the Czech language for the ZX Spectrum. The author's translation of it to English debuted in IFComp 2025 and I found it to be compelling, well designed and a lot of fun.

I dig retro-platformed IF that is set in the present day, and NSHE offers the anachronistic delights of cell phones, Teslas and QR codes rendered via technology which predates their existence. It also has some contemporary design sensibilities such as an absence of random deaths or "walking dead" situations. As an Australian, the game was culturally interesting to me with its local slang, Czech currency and other European touches.

• Play Tip: In this engine, L is not short for LOOK but for LOAD, which will fastload a fastsaved game! To LOOK, either type LOOK in full, or R (for REDESCRIBE).

The blurb is a good one:

"You invented a simple adventure game for the kids in the town, where they had to solve simple puzzles and look for chocolate eggs. They solved nothing, they found nothing, and three of them got lost somewhere."

I like that second line conveying the mildly exasperated cynicism of the PC voice. The good thing is that that voice doesn't become overly cynical during play. 8-bit games of the day could be snarky at the expense of the game's narrative or atmosphere, and still can be if they emulate that tone, but I found NSHE to be sitting in a good spot. My own feeling of achievement in solving its seventy-five points worth of puzzles was not undermined by cheap one-liners. Those puzzles involve the PC's search for the missing kids with the goal of avoiding being drubbed by angry parents. There are a handful of F-bombs dropped and some described violence, but contextually there's not much of it and no gratuitousness.

The game starts in a town, and with this section being more open than what comes later, it's potentially a little more difficult, or at least less aimed. I found the key to success is to continue to make your rounds. The environment is mildly dynamic (e.g. there's a bus stop, and a bus that doesn't come immediately, and NPCs who come or go in response to events) but this is a game where repeat visits to locations and the retrying of actions over time can pay off. Once you've clocked this, the fact that the roster of locations isn't too big works for you, as does the limited verb set. The game gives a complete list of verbs if you ask for VOCAB, anything that can't be expressed with a more specific verb can be effected with USE A, or USE A ON B. There's lots of technical help, too, in the form of colour-coded feedback and the marking of interactive props with inverse text. Such features help prevent the wasting commands on things that aren't implemented.

The post-town adventure which takes place in spookier wilderness is where the game gets denser. This is well-performed classic adventure gaming with lots to do in a small number of locations, some back-and-forthing and the potential for new ideas and uses for such diverse items as an electric bike or a rubber duck to pop into the player's head. I finished with a score of 71/75, interpreting a few actions I performed as gaining bonus points, so there must have been some more that I missed. You can check your SCORE at any time en route.

Overall, Not so Happy Easter 2025 is a solid and solidly 8-bit adventure touching with humour on the tropes of modern life, still managing to exercise a bit of a PC voice and attitude through terse-leaning writing, and which does what it can technically to smooth play.