Reviews by Wade Clarke

Voodoo Castle (1979) was the fourth game from Adventure International (AI). It was written by Scott Adams's then wife, Alexis, who had previously assisted on Pirate Adventure, and its opening enthusiastically proclaims that it is "DEDICATED TO MOMS EVERYWHERE!".

The goal of Voodoo Castle is to lift the curse that afflicts Count Cristo, a goal established after the player has opened the coffin in the game's first location and examined the man therein. In the context of the Adams game engine, this is a fairly abstract goal; recall that all of the prose must be extremely minimal (room descriptions generally come in at under 40 characters in length), the parser only accepts two words, and the whole affair has to fit into 16KB of RAM. Doing something like finding treasures and dropping them in a target room, ala Adventureland, is an easy-to-grasp concept in the context of these limitations, but accomplishing a goal as broad as lifting a curse is harder to think about in a vacuum, and potentially a little more intimidating to contemplate when you first fire up this game.

The game's castle isn't actually called "Voodoo Castle", but it is the castle where the action takes place, and Voodoo is clearly afoot. Fascinating paraphernalia can be found lying around in its corridors, including a voodoo doll, a Ju-Ju bag, a witch's brew and a room full of exploding chemicals. With no more to go on than the game's initial exhortation that the player lift a curse, he or she must experiment with these interesting props and advance through the solving of a succession of puzzles, and ultimately of the game. The experience is a lot of fun, and while Voodoo Castle's official difficulty label is Moderate, I find it to be one of the easier AI games. However, I should point out that this was not one of the AI games I had the opportunity to play back in the day. By the time I came to it in the 2000s, I was (a) way older and wiser, (b) had solved a lot of adventure games in general, and (c) had solved a decent number of AI games and acquired a strong sense of their workings.

What is interesting about Voodoo Castle is that there are no antagonists in it. While there are still lots of ways to die or wreck your game, including inescapable rooms and destructible crucial items, there are no people, monsters or other entities that are out to get you. In fact, a theme of Voodoo Castle (if 'theme' isn't too lofty a word in the circumstances) is that people who might seem scary at first are probably not threats, but sources of potential help. Except for the maid, who chases you downstairs if you happen to track soot through the castle. Back in the realm of objects, the cause and effect relationships between a lot of the game's artifacts and things that might happen to you during play are often unintuitive (E.G. "I've recently stopped being blown up by exploding test tubes. Why?") and require much trial and error and game saving to discern.

It would be a struggle to qualify any observations I might be tempted to make about the nature of games Alexis authored or influenced in this series versus the ones her husband authored, but it's certainly fun to speculate. My sense is that when Alexis was involved, the games were a little kinder in tone, though not necessarily in content. The absence of antagonistic characters in Voodoo Castle speaks to this idea, as does its altruistic goal for the player, and the very positive image with which the game ends. Scott of course gave us several games featuring instant death by bear mauling, and he gave us Savage Island Parts I and II, two of the most difficult and masochistic jaunts to ever grace adventuredom. But Adams also opposed the idea of the player having to commit any acts of violence against other creatures to advance in his games. The attitude of the AI games is that violent acts may be visited upon you, usually by nature, if you are stupid or unlucky enough - and we have to take the AI concept of player stupidity with a grain of salt.

Voodoo Castle features a couple of AI's most loveable/hateable guess-the-action and guess-the-verb moments (you won't believe what you have to do with the Ju-Ju bag, and I mean that in a banal way) but fortunately the AI clue sheet cyphers make getting help fun in these games. And I always particularly liked Voodoo Castle's clue sheet. It was the first AI clue sheet I ever encountered, and I encountered it as a kid well before I played the game, back in the Adventurers Corner column of a 1986 issue of Australian Apple Review.

If you haven't tried an AI game before, I wouldn't recommend this one to start with due to the abstract nature of its goal. It's probably best to familiarise yourself with the nature of these very early adventures by first playing a straightforward treasure hunt like Adventureland. But in the scheme of the AI series, Voodoo Castle sports some distinctive features, a castle stocked with lots of interesting objects, and a good dose of that elemental, imminent style of puzzle-solving which is the hallmark of the AI games.

Our Island appears at first, and mostly, to be a lyrical holiday game set in an idyllic seaside community. You can wander along Wharf Street, buy an ice cream from the pretty ice cream girl, look for flotsam and jetsam, observe local wildlife and feel sparkly about life as you note the presence of the local community centre. Admittedly the majority of these things are only implemented at a very rudimentary level, and some only exist in the location description text, but there's still no denying the game's coherent and romantic sense of place. The map is big and demands real mapping with pen and paper, at least if the player isn't to miss anything. This is also assuming the player makes it past the painful intro, which is basically a My Apartment game set in a holiday house where you have to fight with an inventory limit.

The trick with Our Island is that there's a whole other level of play in it, one involving puzzles and unexpected zaniness, but it's so obscurely integrated into an outwardly goal-less holiday game that it's a huge ask of players to (a) even identify that it's there and (b) negotiate it and solve it – especially with Our Island being in as rough a state as it is. Presenting a rich environment and then slowly allowing the player to become aware of some upheaval within it can make for a great dramatic design, but it demands strong execution to be successful. The biggest problem for Our Island is its erratic implementation. If the player starts to sense that more than half the interesting-looking content in the game is just painted on, they're going to stop checking the content. And in the cases where the content is relevant to the puzzles, the game doesn't signal it. There's also just tons of plain old bugs, typos, failures to describe exits, scenes that play at the wrong times, and even the odd location with no description. So for now, the game's island-sized ambitions considerably outstrip its quality of delivery. The groundwork for something great is here, and I already enjoyed exploring the environment, but the whole thing needs lots more work.

Strange Odyssey, released in 1979, was the sixth of Scott Adams's games in the series today referred to as the Scott Adams Classic Adventures. This game was a childhood favourite of mine and remains a favourite in adulthood. In plain mechanical terms, it's a treasure hunt in space, but its use of multiple alien settings gives it a sense of exploratory danger which feels unique in the series. This isn't to say that the perils in the likes of Adventureland or Pyramid of Doom aren't exciting – it is to say that those games are about exploring one dangerous world, while Strange Odyssey involves visiting a series of unrelated dangerous worlds, never knowing what to expect as you step into each one.

This is a dense game even for Adams, whose Classic series entries each had to fit into 16kb of RAM. Many objects have multiple uses and need to be carted back and forth between different worlds. Time pressure comes in the form of the finite air supply in your spacesuit, and working out how and where you can refill it is a significant puzzle. Odyssey also has more locations than most of its siblings, but the reason it feels more expansive than them is because of its intergalactic nature. Its little text strings have to act as seeds to help the player imagine whole environments at a time, rather than just one room or a corridor.

The fundamental puzzle in Strange Odyssey, the one which is most likely to cause players to stand around for awhile going "Hm," is the one involving working out how to move between worlds. It is quite an abstract puzzle (dare I say Zorkian) in a game canon that rarely supported abstract puzzles due to the simplicity of the game engine and the necessary briefness of all the prose. Another interesting element of this puzzle is the way it mobilises split-second glimpses of text. Unfortunately, this special effect only exists in the original Apple II, Atari and TRS-80 versions of the game. I recommend against playing versions of the game which are missing it (C64, Inform, Spectrum) since the game's quality and sense are hurt by its absence.

Dying and dead-ending are frequent occurrences in Odyssey, so it's wise to save frequently. Just stepping through a door can kill you if the gravity or air happen to be unfavourable on the other side. Several objects can run out of gas or power, it's possible to destroy crucial items with your phaser and most of the wildlife is aggressive. When I was a kid, I loved all of this unheralded danger because I always liked stories in which you never knew what bizarre thing might be on the other side of a door or teleporter. This quality of the game still speaks to me today, and while Adams's games have come in for a lot of criticism over the years, Strange Odyssey's alien dangerousness seems to coincide perfectly with the relatively hostile nature of adventure games from this era. A major reason that a lot of old school adventures are disliked today is that players find it too aggravating that they can mess up by taking actions they might reasonably expect to have inoffensive consequences within the world of a particular game – if that game had much logic about itself. In Strange Odyssey, all of the hardships make sense and thus does the form of the whole. Space is dangerous, the worlds you visit aren't explained and alien hardware doesn't come with instructions. In retrospect, I think Strange Odyssey was one of the designs which best fit Adams's minimalist game system.

The Surprising Case of Brian Timmons is a Lovecraftian adventure based on a scenario for the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG, a scenario in turn based on H.P. Lovecraft's short story 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward'. In spite of its convoluted sounding provenance, this game is actually one of the most accessible Lovecraft IF games out there. A player doesn't need any prior knowledge of the source material or of Lovecraft's work to be able to get into it, and while it's of moderate size, it's more about linear action than the kind of painstaking puzzling folks often associate with Lovecraftian games ala Anchorhead. A word of caution; it's also a game which gets shootier and bloodier as it goes on.

While Lovecraft's protagonists usually have some kind of personal involvement in the supernatural goings-on they face, the PC in Brian Timmons doesn't. He's a detective from the hardboiled school who gets mixed up in a stranger's supernatural goings-on only because they stand between him and his next paycheck. The novelty of adopting an outsider's viewpoint is a welcome one in this busy IF subgenre, and the detective brings humour, attitude and action to the table – three things you normally don't much associate with Lovecraft. The resulting game is straightforward, episodic in a good way and becomes quite gripping as you move towards its climax, though some elements of the delivery could be improved.

Brian Timmons is divided up into scenes set in different locations. Each car trip you take from one location to the next acts like a chapter break, and you don't have to worry about deciding where to go. The hero chooses the next relevant stop as soon as he's got enough fresh leads from the current one. While the game itself suggests you should use ASK and TELL to communicate with its characters – and at times it's essential to use these methods – the majority of communication actually consists of the NPCs telling you their stories one line at a time. While a lot of games use this method and it gets the job done, the game could be richer if it would allow the player to interject with some relevant ASKing and TELLing (as is, the characters only respond on the most vital of topics), though I acknowledge this is never an easy area to program. The characters do a lot of neat fidgeting of their own accord when not speaking, and the game is also generally strong in the area of random atmospheric detail, throwing in lots of little snippets about passers-by, the weather and other environmental changes.

Where the game has some trouble is in getting all of its content to live in the same place tonally, at least at once. When the hardboiled shtick and language are in evidence, they really dominate. But they vanish too easily when the detective isn't delivering his Chandler-esque wisecracks, allowing the game to be overtaken by more utilitarian descriptive text. The sexy dame character is a bit cringy in this light – she triggers the "poured into her dress" remarks in extremis, but in isolation, and thus comes across more as a reminder of the game's tonal wobbling than an authentic seeming femme fatale character justified by the genre and context.

I have a few other nitpicks. The game suffers a bit from empty porch syndrome. It needs a little more proofreading. The inventory limit can aggravate, though this last point is mitigated by the coolness of having a trench coat with pockets of seemingly infinite depth. And it's just fun to wear a trench coat and Fedora in general. I enjoyed The Surprising Case of Brian Timmons a lot. It's also a game which comes without hints, and I was pleased to be made to solve it off my own back, pausing occasionally to scratch my head.

The Next Day is a low stress and soporific (in a good way) slice'o'life piece in which you play a young person returning home from your first soulful all-night long outing with a friend. You wandered the town, talked about this and that and got very existential, and now you're feeling all reminiscent, but pining for bed.

The game captures the mood of early morning peace quite well, embellishing it with a sleep-inducing synth music loop. Your actions as a player really just consist of choosing which paths you will take home, triggering different small memories from your night out as you go. As sleep encroaches, Zs start to descend from the top of the screen, and different locations trigger different colour schemes, if you'll let them. There's a low-key charm to all of this, but I don't think the choice to make the characters (and thus a lot of memories) basically generic was a good one. What are memories without specificity? The game seeks to evoke some commonly shared experiences of growing up, but just offering a broad reminder of this fact isn't evocative enough. I know that I would rather have played a particular character with particular memories related to the world of this game, and that that in turn would have caused me to reflect more on my own memories of similar experiences. It's also strange, then, that the game's different endings, while presented in an abstract way, are opposite in nature to the game's content; they are ultra-specific to some relatively geeky online phenomena.

The author mentions the issue of specificity in his substantial About text, where he also acknowledges that the game may still be at the stage where it's more an experiment than a resolved piece. I think the game has got the mood right, but I would like it to be more specific.

Magic Travels is a program which dumps the short transcript of a fantasy text adventure game to your screen, kills you, then asks you if you are okay with that. The author's self-proclaimed goal is to have the game play itself, but there's no model inside ala Progress Quest. The implication is that the joke is at the expense of Interactive Fiction that's not very interactive. This subject is viable comedy fodder, but as per Mister Nose's Big Red Button, the execution is not good, resulting in a flat joke and lack of insight. The problem is the fake transcript itself. It's a hodgepodge of aimless non-sequiturs and Enchanter jokes. Some of the latter I recognised, and in the case of others, I'll take the author's word for it that they are indeed Enchanter jokes. This is all the content there is, and it doesn't change from one play to the next.

At a stretch, I could interpret the game's final question to the reader as representing the disdain of uppity authors for players who don't like their non-interactive interactive works. At least that idea is funnier than the transcript itself. I'll admit that the outro phrase raised a smile, though: "The game has completely and utterly stopped."

It's probably hard to write a deep game about doing naught more than repeatedly clicking a big red button you have been instructed not to click, but it shouldn't be impossible to write a funny one. Big Red Button's problem is that it's just not witty. The game speaks to you in a harassed tone each time you click the button in defiance of the instruction at the top of the screen, and what it says is sloppy and inconsistent, and hasn't been proofread. It's like the first draft of a comedy sketch that doesn't have a direction or any quality yet, just a basic idea. As such, it's unable to say anything about the one-move games it's probably trying to mock. Worse crimes are that it didn't make me laugh and it doesn't even understand PRESS in place of CLICK.

The game comes in two flavours. The everlasting one loops its messages forever in response to your clicking of the button. The non-everlasting one ends. Both games contain the same messages, and it's unlikely anyone would want to read them more than once, so the difference makes little difference.

Technically, Housekey, Part I is not an incomplete game, but it is certainly one in spirit. It's a skerrick of a my apartment game which has three locations and no housekey. The PC has left this item outside and is theoretically trapped in the very house in which they live. How ironic!

The house contains a handful of unsurprising and useless items which are consistently described as being beneath the PC's attention. Should it occur to you to try and leave your house via the front door in the manner of a normal person, an event of great unexpectedness will send you hurtling towards the non-existent Housekey, Part II, your mind racing with questions like, "Where did I put my housekey?" and "What?!"

The shtick of You Will Select A Decision is that the English translations of a pair of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) knockoff books originally written by Russian computer scientists in the 80s have just now become widely available. The real author of this work is Brendan Patrick Hennessy, and he has created one of the funniest and best written absurd text games I have ever played. The two self-contained adventures demonstrate a deep understanding of all the methods of the original CYOA books, and so are able to mobilise and make fun of the lot of them over their course. Perhaps the most faithful feature is the way every passage of text in the games is tied to a real page number, allowing for the classic CYOA 'turn to' parlance to be in place.

"If you take on a fisty attitude and confront the witch head on, turn to page 53"

The humour of You Will Select A Decision is fuelled both by the strange outlook of the books' faux Russian authors and by the superb contortions of the translated text. The first story, Small Child in Woods, is about a peasant girl who sneaks out of her village one night in defiance of parental strictures. This story gives the authors a chance to expound on life in the context of their home turf. The second story is a lot more fanciful and has the reader playing a cowboy in Wyoming in the 1800s, a tale obviously begging to be mishandled by its Soviet Union authors.

We live in times when even a clueless person can prise the occasional linguistic gem out of the back and forth of Google Translate, but it takes a writer's skill and understanding of language to consistently craft and squish faux-translated words into a form that is funny for showing up all our assumptions about the workings of English. This is what has been achieved at length in You Will Select A Decision. Weird choices of tense, verbs and nouns are exploited to produce a constant stream of misdirections, surprises and absurdities. The fake authors try for a stern narrator's voice, but most of the time they succeed only in being capricious. The usual set of morals in CYOA books is usurped by advocations of Communist pride and anecdotes about obscure Soviet heroes. The main joke is that when the fake authors aren't waxing ideology, they're just clueless about how to satisfy a reader or tell a tale competently. The stories swerve towards or away from exciting moments in just the wrong fashion, and in a manner you can imagine would be guaranteed to irritate a sincere child reader. A great set piece may be followed by an unavoidable stupid death involving rocks falling on the reader's head. A climax may be steadfastly worked towards and then not delivered.

You Will Select A Decision remains vigilant in delivering this fantasy of a specific kind of hilariously bad, translated storycraft from its two starts to all of its numerous finishes. With more than 200 pages of content across both stories, the game also satisfies as legitimately designed CYOA, with just as many major and minor branches of possibility as you would expect from one of the real books. I laugh a lot in life, but I don't think I've ever laughed along with a computer game as much or for as long as I did with this one.

To me, Tenebrae Semper was the horrible disappointment of Ectocomp 2010. This may seem like an outrageously unkind statement with which to open a review, but it comes from a place of love. The reason I was so disappointed is because I liked Seciden Mencarde's Forest House games, all of which were made in similarly constrained speed IF competition circumstances, and which managed to punch above those circumstances at least 70% of the time. However, it was obvious that the third Forest House game was starting to get too ambitious, and it came out buggy, holey and underimplemented. Tenebrae Semper falls further into the same pit by aiming far beyond what anyone could achieve in several hours of programming. The result is an incomplete and particularly frustrating demo for what obviously needs to be a much bigger game. It barely brings the promised horror, either.

The PC is a college student who wakes from a dream (?) of a girl screaming when the game begins. Now it's time to get out of bed and off to class. The player's room is jampacked with furniture, books, a bookshelf, a desk, an alarm clock etc. Anything that can have a drawer in it does, and there's stuff in the drawers as well. But every third item is painted on and every second item is improperly implemented. Try and go out the north door and you'll be informed, "You don’t have all your stuff yet, and you’d better not go to class unprepared." So your goal, should you choose to accept it, is to divine which items constitute all your stuff, locate them amongst the mess and then be holding them all when you try to go through the door. Plus you've got an inventory limit which fights you as soon as you start picking up heavy textbooks. This scene was probably intended to be a breezy, realistic start to the adventure, but comes on more like an agonising puzzle from Hitchhiker's Guide. Suffice to say, it is extremely difficult to leave the room.

If escape is achieved, further problems come thick and fast. It's usually unclear what you're meant to be doing. Characters don't express surprise at surprising stuff, like supernatural shenanigans or teleporting books. The exit lister is broken. Room descriptions don't seem to print automatically.

Ultimately the game doesn't go anywhere, and it has, for the time being, squandered the truly awesome title of Tenebrae Semper.