Reviews by Wade Clarke

Presumably a time will come when the author base of Quest format adventures ripens, but at this time of writing, it remains that the majority of these games (almost all of which are published online) are of the quality of learning exercises. Such is the case with The Intruder. This teeny CYOA of binary choices see the player waking one morning to the sounds of someone or something else in the house. Doing the wrong thing at any point leads you to a scary picture and sound which act as the Game Over message. In these circumstances, maybe it is scarier to convey Game Over without the use of any text, and without including any means of undoing or even restarting the game from within the main window. The trouble is that The Intruder has almost no content; the prose is ultra spare, the results of the handful of choices available are either predictable or boring – though in a broad sense you can probably intuit which choice is the wiser one to make of the two presented to you each time – and the whole thing is far too short.

In spite of all this, the "urban myth explained" win screen is curiously effective, though also likely to provoke head-scratching or laughter, since it says that (Spoiler - click to show)a man, an escaped lunatic, was the person who menaced you, but the scary graphic seems to be of a female and/or non-human monster.

Storm Cellar opens with the player driving through fields towards a sunset storm. A truck abandoned on the road blocks the way, forcing you out of your vehicle in some desolate terrain. The rustic Cicada Creek Motel is the only dwelling in sight, but is anybody home? From this traditional horror setup, Storm Cellar quickly develops an atmosphere of charged suspense and creepiness. Lit but inaccessible windows beckon mysteriously. Something is glimpsed slithering around the building. The deserted wooden decks of the motel prompt strong fears about what could be out there in all that open space. Cramped and dingy room interiors generate a different kind of insecurity.

As other reviewers have said, this game is of such high quality that it's a shame it was never expanded from this solid introductory chapter into a complete adventure. I had a feeling it might be good as early as the content warning screen, which seems to channel the introductory warnings of console-based survival horror games. In turn, I felt the positive influence of the Playstation's Silent Hill strongly throughout.

The prose is clear, measured out perfectly to breed suspense and sprinkled with dynamic atmospheric elaborations. The transitional lines of text describing your passage from one location to another are a neat touch. The puzzles are mostly about portals and blockades, doors and keys, and the yearning to find a way into each room is a strong motivator. My guess is that had more chapters of the game been created, the puzzles would have become more novel. This first chapter is about establishing access to the motel and setting the scene. It also demonstrates a smart and comprehensive parser.

Storm Cellar gave me real chills more than once and its horror elements are expertly wrangled. Usually I'm not interested in incomplete games, but as Storm Cellar is a veteran of Introcomp 2008, what exists of it is entirely functional. It also ends at a dramatically satisfying point (I.E. not just while you're walking down a hallway or something.) The game was ambitiously touted by its author as chapter zero of a pending eight, but it ended up being the only one. You should definitely play it if you like suspenseful horror.

P.S. There's no mention of the title Chapter Zero: Welcome to Cicada Creek in the game itself, only of Storm Cellar, but the author used the former title when he created the game's entry on IFDB.

The relative explosion of H.P. Lovecraftian text adventures occurred in the non-commercial period of IF dating from the 1990s and onwards. It might have happened irrespective of all external factors, but because Infocom released The Lurking Horror in 1987, that game is an obvious landmark. I was therefore a little surprised to find an earlier example in the form of 1984 Eamon adventure The Tomb of Y'Golonac. This game exhibits most of the qualities of the later Lovecraft games – reverence towards the subject matter, wide-ranging knowledge of the author's made-up mythologies and a competent or better pastiche of Lovecraft's writing style, liberally sprinkled with words like 'loathsome' and 'unwholesome'.

Being Eamon, this is Lovecraft done as a kill-em-all-before-they-kill-you explorathon, but Tomb's writing is decidedly above average for an Eamon. It creates an underground world of dank corridors and weird landscapes, and is capable of generating suspense about what dangers may lie ahead. A plethora of weird stains, evil smells and inexplicably dreadful feelings mark the corridors. While this atmosphere is likely to impress a new player, numerous harsh gameplay difficulties become apparent as one spends more time with this game and, unfortunately, they stop it from being fun in the end. Y'Golonac does have cause to be hard. As Pat Hurst pointed out in his review of the game back in the day, it reproduces the core aesthetic of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, itself a logical extension of the implications of Lovecraft's stories. That aesthetic consists of players having an incredibly low survival rate due to them being frequently smitten by the powerful and unknowable horrors from other universes encountered during play.

It's easy to make an Eamon hard in a thoughtless kind of way: Just give the monsters massive stats and pack the map with unheralded instant death rooms. In Eamon's time there was a degree of competition to make 'the hardest Eamon ever', and I don't blame people for trying to achieve this using the relatively limited toolset which was available. Eamon evolved pretty quickly during the 1980s, and later versions of the engine (6 and 7 especially) gave authors the ability to do more sophisticated stuff. Y'Golonac is a version 4 Eamon which mostly hacks the player down using a combination of big-statted regular monsters, super monsters which can kill with one blow and hard-to-avoid instant deaths. The SAVE command is locked and a cave-in prevents players from escaping back to the Main Hall if they want out early. The kicker, once all of these features are in place, is that 90% of the game's secret doors aren't clued at all, and can thus only be found by walking into every wall in every room. The map of 90+ rooms has been slyly arranged to maximise the difficulty of making real progress and the player who discovers the nature of the secret doors after a long spell of vigilant mapping is likely to feel as great a deflation of their spirits as I did.

For its atmosphere and quality of writing alone, The Tomb of Y'Golonac is a remarkable Eamon. It's also significant for being one of the earlier Lovecraft-themed text adventures around. However, the standard of unreasonably difficult play the game adheres to is most definitely of its time. I enjoy the challenge of discerning and hacking out the path through some of these harsh old combat adventures, but Y'Golonac is meaner than even I can stomach. I lost count of the number of times I died, restarted, missed exits or cheated without success (cheating with BASIC hackery is an easy and common tactic in Apple II Eamoning). Eventually I broke out the Eamon Utilities disk and used the Dungeon Mapper program to look at the parts of the game I hadn't been able to reach or find on foot. So while I don't regard Y'Golonac as worth completing for bragging rights, it is worth sampling for those interested in Cthulhu mythos text adventures, especially those interested in actually fighting Lovecraft's grotesque monsters rather than just imagining that they might be slithering about nearby. Y'Golonac doesn't become insanely difficult immediately, but those things which are good about it are present immediately.

This entertaining and incidentally educational Eamon sees your character plucked from his or her usual fantasy setting and transported to the present day (of 1983) to explore the Tower of London from the perspective of a tourist. The tone is a bit whimsical; your unusual dress and armour don't draw too much attention because the tower is already heavily populated with guards wearing funny traditional costumes and brandishing funny ornamental weapons. Just before you're hurtled through time, a couple of big suggestions are offered as to how you might play:

BECAUSE YOU'VE HEARD RUMOURS OF AN IMPENDING ATTEMPT TO STEAL THE CROWN JEWELS FROM THE TOWER OF LONDON, YOU DECIDE TO GO THERE... TO PREVENT THE THEFT?? OR TO STEAL THEM FOR YOURSELF!!

The only disappointment, then, is that the game doesn't follow up on actions you might have taken towards or away from either of these ends when it reaches its own end. It just finishes with the default "You ride off into the sunset" message and the pawning of your (likely enormous) haul of bounty. It's easy to play either protector or thief, though it's easiest to play both roles at the same time: To both kill all the thieving bad guys you will encounter on the premises, ranging from the pickpocket to the American tourist, and to also grab every treasure that isn't nailed down, including the Crown Jewels.

Tower sports a large and interesting roster of NPCs. It begins with the Friendly Woman who starts tagging along with you on the underground before you even get to the tower. On the grounds you'll meet numerous historical ghosts, everyone from Guy Fawkes to Sir Walter Raleigh. There are a bunch of beefy guards and yeomen stationed about the place, some friendly and some hostile, and lots of amusing and poorly disguised thieves. The Japanese tourist attacks you with his camera, while the weapon of the American tourist is his sharp credit card, that of the French tourist his loaf of bread. Fictional celebrities "Dr Hoo" and "Professor Moriarity" show up as well, the spelling of their names presumably tweaked to avoid any copyright issues.

I appreciate the authors' feat of converting the layout of the real Tower of London tourist site into a satisfyingly arranged game map, something that is fun to explore, a little bit tricky and consistently interesting. The prose in this game is very clean and vivid by Eamon standards, and there's also humour in your adventurer negotiating mundane features of the modern world like the gift shop, or having to buy tickets to enter certain areas of the grounds. A sign declares that weapons are prohibited inside the tower, and the programming enforces this – at least in the moment in which you try to step through the front gate. This gesture is probably intended to stop you from bringing in any superweapons from your previous adventures, and will cause you to instead arm yourself with something found on the grounds which is balanced for the toughness of the local monsters. I gave in to the sign's demand on my first play, but was later pleased to discover that there is a way to get around the sign built into the game. That's a pretty neat piece of design.

There's not much custom programming in this Eamon and there are no in-game payoffs for your play style vis-a-vis stealing the crown jewels or protecting them, but the recreation of the tower and the various characters encountered on its grounds are charming, and the humour of time travel and anachronisms is well used. The game may also be of historical value through what I suspect is its fairly accurate recording of the state of the Tower of London as a tourist destination in 1983.

One of the strange things about the mind is how seemingly long-forgotten information can be revived by the apprehension of brand new but similar information. Watching the floridly entertaining 1960s thriller Brides of Fu Manchu recently reminded me that an Eamon game called Superfortress of Lin Wang existed, and made me want to play it. So I did.

Superfortress is an out-and-out hack, slash and loot Eamon consisting entirely of exploration and combat. There are no secret doors or examinable room features, nor is there any custom programming. Bad guy Lin Wang has enslaved Japan and taken up residence in his henchmen-filled castle. Your job is to eliminate him, hewing through numerous ninjas, dragons and karate champions in the process and grabbing all weapons and treasures you see en route.

There are countless Eamon games in this vein, but Superfortress at least distinguishes itself with its clear aesthetic of martial arts bad guys and a sense of escalation of threat and variety. The author knows how to lay out a castle and to make the encounters heavier and more interesting as you progress. And the game's monsters don't just exhibit arbitrary stats. When you walk into a room with a dragon, both the prose and the nature of the preceding bad guys will have correctly cued you to expect that this will be a rougher fight.

With no puzzles or custom mechanics to test the player in other ways, this game is ultimately about how good your stats are versus those of the bad guys. Freshly minted characters who have completed nought more than Beginners Cave will get torn apart here. Even though I used the relatively tough Sam character from the Eamon Utilities disk, I died about five times before I won. (Proceedings weren't helped by the fact that there's a friendly NPC also called 'Sam' in Superfortress, meaning that reports on the status of his health were indistinguishable from reports on the status of mine.) There's always a chance that the worst monsters will take you out in two hits if you're simply unlucky, but if you save up all the hit points you can by learning the whereabouts of unnecessary fights earlier in the castle, you will optimise your chances of surviving on any playthrough.

Superfortress wasn't rated highly by the Eamon Adventurers Guild back in the day ("Once you've killed one Ninja, you killed them all" - Tom Zuchowski) but as an example of an unadulterated combat Eamon, it's decently designed and coherent. That counts for something, given the number of nothing-but-fighting Eamons in the library which aren't.

ADRIFT veteran Heal Butcher gets all weird on us in Worship the Pig, winner of the inaugural Questcomp held in 2013. Worship is essentially a hypertext click, look and walk journey through some strange and ornate scenery. The clickable keywords make for a clean and smooth delivery of the experience, with the most commonly appearing contextual menu action being "Look At". The imagery and feel reminded me of one of the David Lynch films not grounded in reality (EG Inland Empire) or of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle. There is no plot to speak of, but there are anonymous figures, a garbed pig-man and crowds who say strange things. It all feels somewhat threatening, like you might be the only sane person wandering in a world of creatures who are freakish or alien to you – though these creatures also have a slavish civility about them, and seem to be following a set of rules that you don't understand. It is unsettling to be amongst them.

In the tradition of some other games with imperative titles, "Worship The Pig" turns out to be an action you can take one point, and in the context of this no-puzzle game, it's a significant decision. In terms of interactivity, the fact that you're still choosing when to move around and what to look at in general gives you a traditional IF trope to hang onto, one which, even on its own, can add a purposive feel to a game that's essentially linear bur not interested in revealing a clear narrative purpose.

I found the prose a tiny bit ripe, but it's undoubtedly vivid and has been well crafted to deliver the experience it wants to deliver. And that experience is bit freaky.

Pest, in which you play a rat in Black Plague era London, has the makings of a thorough puzzler, but is hampered by a fair few technical and writing oversights. The former manifest as bugs, the latter make the puzzles unnecessarily tough. There are no hints in or out of the game; my observation is that the Quest community hasn't worked up any culture of creating help to go with its games at this time of writing. I gave up on Pest after becoming stuck during its second major scene.

An introductory sequence in which the player flees from an unseen pursuer teaches the use of the various sense commands the rat can use (smell, listen, feel). The teaching works, but the rat's constant ruminations on his fate while this is going on are mostly at odds with the move to build suspense. There's too much repetition of material, or perhaps the repetition would work better if the player wasn't required to press a key to advance through every line of dialogue, which is pace-sluggening.

Pest needs to go for detail in its physical model of the world because it's about a small rat adequately positioning himself in relation to various people and objects, and interacting with them in clever mechanical ways. The scene in the stone dwelling shows the promise of this kind of thing, with different pieces of furniture at different heights which can be used to access each other, move around the room or draw the attention of its inhabitant, the broom-wielding Matlid.

What's missing from this scene is more exacting programming and prose. The physical relationships between the objects aren't adequately described, and these details are often crucial for visualising / conceptualising where things are and which courses of action may be fruitful. For instance, since the bag was on top of the cupboard, I didn't expect to be able to do anything with it, given that I was on the floor. But FEELing the bag turned out to be a big step forward. Paradoxically, the table is described in a manner suggesting you can get onto it. I never was able to do so, and its description only emphasised the fact that I was on the floor. Other bugs interacted with each other here; I was able to pick up things I shouldn't have been able to (EG the ladle - a bug fixed in the version 1.1 update) and perform one-shot actions more than once. I suspect the latter issue might have screwed up my game state.

I still enjoyed what little I played of Pest, and from what I've seen it promises more interesting design if you like solving physical puzzles when you're really small, but it definitely needs more work on its implementation to reach a level of stability and trustworthiness that will compel more players to persevere. And ideally to not even be thinking in terms of 'Should I perservere?' in the first place.

KING OF BEES IN FANTASY LAND is a brisk fantasy/sci-fi CYOA which, in common with the same author's terrific You Will Select a Decision, is presented as an artefact from the recent past written in less than ideal English. Starting up King feels like starting up an '80s coin-op or Nintendo game, albeit one without pictures. The lettering is an all caps 8-bit font and the copyright notice says 1989. The style of the writing is that of mildly enthusiastic Japlish.

The player, addressed as Space Knight during the patriotic opening spiel, is charged with the mission of taking down the "evil King of Bees from Bee Fort" so that humans, who have wrecked their own planet, can colonise the bee planet Garaxas, aka Fantasy Land. The outward silliness of this plot and the game's presentation both put you in in a frame of mind in which you're immediately hungry for fun and success.

The fun is easy to come by. Whatever decisions you make once you hit the planet's surface, the game rolls with them. Even when you face seemingly important binary choices, like whether or not to trust the boardwalk which crosses the alligator swamp, you'll find that all roads tend to lead to ultimate success by their own methods, or that a blocked path will produce a discouraging loop which quickly pushes you onto an unblocked one. Messages will appear proclaiming exciting bonuses you've acquired for non-existent (mechanically speaking) skills, and whatever you do, the occasional exclamation mark is there to suggest that you're doing good, or The Right Thing.

The planet is busy with its bee inhabitants, and they're mostly friendly, chatty folk who offer no opposition to your march across their territory, or even an impression of being aware that opposing you is relevant or necessary. So even though the excitable 8-bit plot and tone of the game will have primed most players savvy to 8-bit conventions for combative action, most players will also find themselves pretty uninterested in vaporising friendly unarmed folk, except in the also 8-bit manner whereby they might just want to see what happens if they act like a jerk. The text gets prejudicial when the bees show up, with terse but aggressive options appearing like ERADICATE, but the delivery remains paradoxically light and encouraging, whether you're acting like Rambo or not.

The first time I played King, the contrary signals being sent simultaneously by different levels of the game about what I was doing as Space Knight started to put me in a nervous and suspicious mood. I was wondering if the game was going to suddenly turn around and tell me (or at least strongly imply) that I was a harmfully suggestible dumb-dumb of the kind who can easily be made to follow any orders. That might sound like a strong reaction to an ostensibly light game, but there seem to be an increasing number of IF games around which impart this lesson through degrees of player deception. It's not that I oppose games deceiving players per se; in fact IF is particularly good at doing this in lots of different ways, and to different ends. But sometimes in the case of games which offered the lesson, "You should have resisted the game's path for moral reasons", I had felt, when I reached the outcome, that I had simply been tricked.

I'm definitely not saying that this lesson or this schtick are the upshots of King, only that these issues do come into play. And I have deliberately not addressed a lot of King's content to avoid spoiling anything. There are some interesting, entertaining and surprising little turns of events tucked into this quite short game, and it's frequently cute, even while it's being serious. To understand all the aspects of what might be going on will take at least a couple of plays, and there's some new fun to be had on the way through each time. The voice of the prose is very authentic in reproducing the earnest and focused tone of Japanese 8-bit games, and the arrangement of the screen, fonts and colours are all attractive. The game is a fine example of how cute and simple aesthetics should not be underestimated in terms of their ability to deliver clever or thoughtful outcomes. Probably the biggest cleverness of King is that the expectations and aesthetics of the 8-bit are used both sincerely and for commentative purposes at the same time. My final advice on this game comes from the attract mode of 1980 coin-op Moon Cresta: "Try it now!! You can get a lot of fun and thrill"

The intent behind this game is clear - to teach some IF basics through a simple scenario involving you getting the newspaper from your mailbox, finding yourself locked out of your house and having to find an alternate way back in. The game fails because it barely works. It doesn't even demonstrate consistent behaviour within the nuances of the Quest interface.

The geography is confusing. The illustrations, while cute, only enhance that confusion. It was a poor choice to create those illustrations in black and white when the text consistently emphasises how sunny the world is. There are no synonyms for anything; "paper" will not do for newspaper. "OPEN MAILBOX" doesn't work; you must "search" or "look inside". The game fails to acknowledge that you have acquired the newspaper until a thunderstorm event happens. Some important and obvious objects do not appear in the "Places and Objects" menu. There is a silly instant death-by-car if you try to cross the road in front of your house, in spite of the game having previously suggested that "the grass is greener on the other side of the road". You can't undo from the instant death if you're using the online Quest player.

I don't think the game is completeable, which is to say that I couldn't complete it, and I made several serious attempts to do so. Amongst the buginess, inconsistent approaches and the general newbie-unfriendliness, the game certainly would not be good for newbies, and isn't suitable for anyone else, yet.

In 1981, you play a man stalking a woman. If "play" sounds light, perhaps it's more accurate to say you are almost chained to the actions of a man in the grip of erotomania (a deluded and obsessive romantic fixation). Due to the shortness of the experience, I will omit further description of either of the main characters, as I can imagine how some players may prefer not to know certain fundamental details of the setup going in. What is certain is the strength of the writing, which thoroughly sinks you into the headspace of the obsessed protagonist, and into his vivid fantasy life.

At the rawest level of game mechanics, 1981 caters to very few player actions; it is what is typically called linear. The obsessed PC imparts clear thoughts in the prose about the next important course of action, and it's generally a waste of time trying anything else. What's interesting is the extent to which this approach could be considered to work well with the subject matter of this game. The psychological disorder at work here is characterised by the subject's complete resistance to all attempts to convince them that the situation is other than they believe it to be. Perhaps this is the best "excuse" for linearity that there can be.

This raises the question of what the player's role is here. "Creepy" and "uncomfortable" have been common review descriptions of the experience of playing 1981. Players tend not to like playing "bad" characters in realistic situations, or even facilitating their actions. I think this remains a difficult or weak point for the prospects of certain kinds of storytelling being done with IF. 1981 may again supply its own solution with its subject matter. With the PC's character being presented so monomaniacally, the player is likely to feel a degree of separation from the PC's actions. If you try to break off the path, the PC either doesn't want to do your thing because it's irrelevant to his plans, or your thing isn't implemented, or both.

It would be difficult and tedious for me to try and describe how 1981 could work as easily as a short story as IF. I think it could, and in that form it would be clear of the "playing a villain" hurdle. But it works in this form with the caveats that you must play the villain and accept mechanical linearity, positions which are unpopular and still querulous to many, respectively. What you will get for this is the sensation that you are shackled to the PC's ruinous path and that there's no getting off. This kind of story trajectory fascinates me because being privy to the amount of effort that a human can devote to going entirely the wrong way in life is strangely illuminating about our capabilities as a species. 1981 is a psychologically strong excursion into this territory – though with little extra implementation – and also an interesting demonstration of one way to traverse a lot of difficult IF terrain to do with unlikeable protagonists and realism.

Spoiling background on the game: (Spoiler - click to show)This is an imagined recreation of the real case of John Hinckley Jr. and his obsession with actress Jodie Foster, resulting in his assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. I knew about the case before playing the game, but the game doesn't reveal who the parties are until halfway through. I experienced a minor letdown at the moment of revelation, to an extent, only because I then felt I knew what was going to happen. But inevitability is such a strong part of this game anyway - this was really just my idiosyncratic reaction and no reflection on the game.