Reviews by Wade Clarke

A Colder Light is set on plains of winter ice under a sky filled with significantly named stars. This world could be an alternate North Pole, or perhaps just the North Pole of another past time, but the game is described as fantasy and the geography is not specified. This is an atmospheric adventure with a very satisfying design, a good puzzle system, an attractive web browser presentation and a haunting feel.

The setup is that you live out in this frozen wilderness with your father, who has been teaching you survival skills and respect for the power of nature. One day he does not come home, and you must draw on your ingenuity and on the spiritual magic of stars and runestones to find out what has happened to him. Determining how and when to call the game's various spirit entities is the primary ongoing puzzle.

A Colder Light is driven by a combination of keyword hyperlinks in the prose and mini-menus of useful actions which pop up at the bottom of the screen, a combination well-suited to this game. The roster of locations is small, though dense with spirit puzzle action, and your runes need to be tested out in permutations, something I imagine could be a bit of a chore to carry out via typing. It's also impossible to waste time trying actions that have no bearing on the proceedings as they simply aren't available in the first place.

The game is designed in such a way that you still have to make some logical imaginative leaps yourself (which to me is the key attraction of parser driven games) based on your observations of which stars are visible in different locations and your ideas about which runes might do what. There is also a sense of bleak urgency which seeps through the modest but poetic-leaning prose of the narrator, and the strength and resolve of the character you're playing come through clearly in that voice.

The aesthetic design of the game screen sets the mood perfectly, with a semitransparent text window floating before a far view of the cold and dark horizon. There are, however, a couple of shortcomings in the delivery system. The first is the slowness of the hybrid Inform 7 / Quixe / hyperlinks game engine; it can take between 1/4 second to 1 second to process each action. This adds up over time and is especially felt on a repeat play. The second shortcoming is mostly a problem because of the first: there is no save capability. While the game can be considered short by most standards, and not too hard, the time it takes to play is longer than such assessments would suggest. So for now, if you want to take a break, it's important not to close the game window. Breaking off completely will necessitate a restart next time.

While the game engine may be an iteration of a work in progress, the game itself is definitely no experiment – A Colder Light is a very fine, compactly designed and enjoyable adventure whose contents play to this new delivery format while also bringing across some of the particular strengths of parser based games.

I had a peek at the original parser-with-keywords version of Starborn when it was released, but I did not complete it – which was a bit silly of me, given the very small size of the game.

Starborn now returns in a high budget Undum+Vorple form that fills your web browser screen with an atmospheric and clickable map graphic and your ears with a couple of spacey pieces of ambient electronic music. The keywords of the original version have become clickable hyperlinks.

The game content remains unaltered, and is a brief evocation of the life of a human born in space in the future who is contemplating what it might be like to return to the old homeworld, gravity and air and all. The writing does a good job of placing you "outside of the Earth" in a short space of time, but short is the defining word for the experience. There's just not that much to do or see or read, and it's all over in a few minutes, making it a tiny mood piece.

Having played both versions of the game, and at the risk of stating the obvious, I found that the new one certainly demonstrates that graphics change the effect of a piece, and so does sound. The aesthetic of the screen colours and sounds was actually quite unlike whatever I had made up in my head the first time I played the game, which was mildly jarring. The more high-tech delivery generated a sense of what might be described as high production values, which the simple text only original did not connote at all. By the same token, the game hasn't gotten any bigger, so the relatively lavish new delivery feels a bit overkilly after the fact.

However, that the game might come across a little weirdly to a person who played the old version first is not really the point. This new version is more effective to me as a demonstration of how a game like Starborn can be implemented by Undum & Vorple, and also shows that this implementation is very appropriate. Given that the game is mostly a CYOA, was originally driven by keywords, has movement around a map and also low interactivity (one gettable item) I found I did prefer playing it in its new format than the old. When the parser is unnecessary and you can click keywords rather than type them, why not do so? I found this design and the attractiveness of the interface appealing, though there was one thing I missed: the ability to undo. Not because of any difficulty in the gameplay, but because more than once I found myself interested in wanting to isolate what performing certain actions would do to different parts of the interface, and there was no way to undo then redo to test such actions.

I think Starborn itself is a little small for the new format, but its basic nature is well suited to the format, and playing it this way got me thinking about the possibilities.

I had a problem during the 2011 Interactive Fiction Competition. I was supposed to be getting a move on and reviewing all of the other entrants' games, but I kept procrastinating by sneaking away to play Kerkerkruip. By the time the competition was over, I had played it at least 50 times in my quest to complete the game on Normal difficulty. This is testimony to Kerkerkruip's addictiveness, which grows out of the stiff but strategically overcomeable challenge it presents and the relatively infinite pool of circumstantial variations it offers to dungeongoers. The latter quality is what makes the game really memorable and anecdote-worthy once a player has got a handle on its mechanics.

A moment's divergence for the consumer guide part of this review: Kerkerkruip is certainly not a traditional IF game or text adventure in which the player solves unchanging puzzles en route to particular goals while possibly becoming involved in a narrative the author has laid out. This is a high-stakes game of Dungeons & Dragons adventuring in randomly generated dungeons. At the same time, it is delivered by text and controlled by a parser, and uses explorative elements in some typical adventure game-like ways. In all of these capacities, it is obviously from the school of text adventures, and not completely unlike a combat MUD or a modern incarnation of Eamon, though a plotless one. Also note that it is essential to at least read the Beginner's Guide before playing (I found this three page guide to be the easiest way into the game, as opposed to traveling through multiple inline HELP menus) or Kerkerkruip will promptly kick you to the pavement.

Your goal is to find and kill the evil wizard Malygris of the dungeon Kerkerkruip. You begin armed with a rapier; more significant weaponry and equipment must be found in the dungeon. Usually there will be about five other groups of monsters lurking around, and it is only by defeating these monsters and absorbing their powers and health in a wisely chosen order (new powers only accumulate if they are weaker than powers you already possess) that you will have a hope of becoming powerful enough to defeat the wizard. The dungeon contents and layout and the roster of monsters change every time you die or restart. You can't save the game except to take a break, and there is no UNDO. These danger-increasing elements are common to another genre of game Kerkerkruip announces that it belongs to: the roguelike, named, unsurprisingly, after a particular game called Rogue.

Movement is handled with the traditional compass commands, augmented by a "go to" command and a handy "remember" command, but the combat makes use of the ATTACK system originated by the author and is divided into Action and Reaction phases. By working with just a handful of well balanced temporal elements, Kerkerkruip ensures each decision you make about what to do next in battle carries significant weight. Should you Attack now, or build up the strength of your next attack by pausing to Concentrate? You can try to build up to three levels of concentration, but if you're struck in the meantime, your concentration will be broken. On the other hand, if you never concentrate, your attacks won't grow strong enough to finish off the bad guys before they finish you.

This core system is simple enough for anyone to understand, but its application in any moment is modified by a huge number of variables, amongst them: the geography of the room you're in (e.g. it doesn't pay to Dodge while fighting on a narrow bridge over lava), the nature and habits of the enemy you're facing (e.g. animated daggers attack ceaselessly and break your concentration as often – the jumping bomb will never break your concentration, but if it gathers enough concentration itself, it will explode and kill you instantly), the Tension in the air (how long has it been since anyone last struck a blow?), your current status and arsenal of powers, and the interference of a further array of supernatural stuff like fickle dungeon gods or weird summoned entities.

The sum effect of the play amongst all these interrelated elements is that Kerkerkruip is capable of generating the exciting sense that with almost every move you make, the whole game is at stake. The circumstances of danger can rearrange themselves into so many different patterns that a lot of your battles will strike you as uniquely memorable, even when you're dealing with the same small roster of monsters over and over again. You can marvel at a seemingly (or actually) brilliant series of moves you make that succeed in resuscitating your prospects when you're down to 1 hp. Similarly you can laugh at the results of a particularly bold, stupid or unlucky move that backfires spectacularly, or at some confluence of events so extraordinary that you'll feel like telling someone else about it. You will certainly die far more often than you will win, but this is a game where experience, exploration and repeat plays really pay off, and the strategic element is always vivid, the prospect of victory always tantalising.

Ultimately, Kerkerkruip is an essential and massively replayable game for dungeon and combat fans, and also demonstrates the kind of novelty and elegant design that is inspiring in general.

The Museum is a short and flippant game in which you play a dude who visits the local Egyptian exhibition one night after the ceaseless leisure time afforded by modern existence causes you to become bored. There's a mummy on display, and if you happen to bring it back to life (it takes a bit of effort) your goal then becomes one of snuffing it out again so that it won't kill people. This premise obviously doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but that's par for the course in The Museum. It's the kind of game where defeating the monster doesn't score you one of the six points on offer, but eating a sloppy banana that you find on the floor does.

The Museum was made for the TIGsource's Commonplace Book Competition of 2008. Entrants had about six weeks to turn out a game based on one of H P Lovecraft's unused ideas as scribbled down in his Commonplace (note)Book. The chosen idea here is #190: "Primal mummy in museum — awakes and changes place with visitor."

There are seven rooms in the resulting game and some prop-based puzzles delivered without leeway. Implementation is basic and people who like apostrophes in their prose will be disappointed. Nevertheless, the game offers some fun and several different endings. The tone waggles back and forth between being flip and smart-arsed, which would have grated on me had the adventure been any larger. I was kind of impressed by how annoying I found the protagonist, given the short amount of time I spent playing him.

The game has a couple of cool features worth mentioning; a neat cover graphic of the mummy and some original Egyptian-themed music which plays in the background. All in all, it's good for a laugh.

All Alone is a very short horror game riffing on those urban myths about what can happen to women who are unfortunate enough to receive a creepy phone call late at night. You play one such woman fielding one such phone call; you're alone in your apartment when the call arrives, a storm's moving in and the TV news is yelling at you about the local serial killer.

The game is effective in evoking the fear people can experience and generate in their own homes at night, and eliciting that fear from a handful of rooms and domestic props. It also uses a couple of sound effects at choice moments. Unfortunately, it's also tremendously short and not really very interactive. Suspense is built up from a sequence of timed steps which mostly proceed no matter what you're doing. Admittedly this is a rather dull and mechanical perspective on how the game works, but if that suspense is the game's sum effect (Spoiler - click to show)(though the final twist is pretty good, too) it's too little for me in an interactive medium.

One more note: Reviews contemporary to All Alone's release (11 years ago at this time of writing) often quote the author's advice on how to play it – that is, with lights out, alone, at night. This advice wasn't anywhere in the game that I could find, so I assume it was on a promotional website which no longer exists or in a readme file which is no longer attached to the game.

The Hours has an intriguing opening which leads into an exciting and consistently unpredictable sci-fi adventure. You don't initially know what/where/why you are, only that you and your frantic NPC friend are being pursued by something. As soon as you think you've got a handle on this state of affairs, the state of affairs changes. And as soon as you think you've got a handle on the next state of affairs, that state of affairs changes as well. Though the game may be more linear than some players would like, it is great at pulling the rug out from under you time and time again, while also building up a complex set of rules about the time-travelling shenanigans that are going on.

This mythology is fascinating but complex, necessitating a lot of exposition; a Philip K Dick kind of premise with some of the black humour of Total Recall. The Hours moves quickly through many different moods, successfully conveying the disorientation of the Hours agents as they step in and out of their time-gating pools of water. The twitchy tonal changes between suspense, danger, mystery and paranoia kept me interested and on my toes through the whole game. The Russian doll-like development of the story's varying realities and the characters' clones is excellent, given the swiftness and smallish size of the adventure.

While the pacing and delivery of the writing is pretty good, the tone of the player's conversational choices sometimes proves elusive. I don't recommend choosing any of the "none of the above" conversation tree options because they can cause your protagonist to behave unpredictably, and The Hours is a game which subtly pays attention to how you treat the other characters.

I only became stuck twice, and in both cases, one use of the "help" command immediately got me unstuck. Both cases occurred during the game's introductory sequence (one involved an exit appearing that I didn't notice - there can be downsides to keyword based movement schemes) so the rest of the game flowed forward very well. Some obvious commands and synonyms don't work, or lead to (harmful to the suspension of disbelief) default-ish responses, but this is no big deal for someone's first Interactive Fiction game.

I imagine some of the import of The Hours's expositional dialogue could be moved into imagery or action, but I'm fine with the game the way it is. The number of complexities that open up as the mythology is described creates a kind of pleasurable tension (can I follow this? what will happen next?) which is then relieved by parcels of explanation. Some of the explanations are lengthy, but I can imagine this game being pretty hard to follow if it became too cryptic. It could in fact become an entirely different kind of game, a far more abstract one where you're left to ponder what the hell just happened. The game that is balances forward movement, action, doses of mystery and doses of explanation. And I think action can be hard to drive without motive. I always had a clear sense of what I was doing in each scene in The Hours, based on my understanding of my particular situation in that particular moment - which was often apt to change during the next moment. These are the surprises of The Hours.

When I came to play this game, I thought, "I see political trouble ahead for Blind from reviewers, based on the title and tagline…" that tagline being: "Who says blindness is a handicap?" As it turns out, Blind isn't about overcoming blindness through medical advancement or political agitation. It is about overcoming blindness by having you play a young blind woman who must escape from the house of a cannibalistic serial killer.

Blind women in peril (or women whose eyeballs are demonically possessed - that one doesn't apply to this game) have a rich history in thriller and horror films. Audrey Hepburn played one in Wait Until Dark (1967), foiling a drug-dealing criminal in her own unlit apartment. In that film it was all about the drugs. In many later blind-woman-in-peril films, and in Blind, the criminal's goal is the blind woman herself, his motives sexual and sadistic. This takes the game into creepy and harrowing terrain, and puts the player in a desperate survival situation.

In technical terms, Blind's sensory schtick is less than perfect. As you cannot see, you are given other verbs to discover information about your environment, such as 'feel' and 'smell'. 'Look' remains implemented, giving general feedback from your other senses on your present location. Being able to use several senses multiplies the amount of feedback you can get from each object in the game, but sometimes it can feel like a simple obligation to have to 'examine' each item in three or more different ways, and more objects could use more describing. Nevertheless, the overall effect works in that you do progress through the game by applying sometimes unexpected senses to the obstacles you encounter in a way that a sighted person wouldn't.

I was surprised to learn that the author is not particularly a fan of the horror genre, as he demonstrates a pretty good understanding of it in Blind. Some of the heroine's realisations about her plight (and the plight of those who went before her) as she stumbles about the killer's house are written with great psychological and physiological realism. Unfortunately, the game is also capable of undercutting such moments with the odd joke at the expense of the fourth wall, or occasionally managing to frame the heroine in a pervy way, even though it's her POV. These weak spots do not detract from the game's overall sincerity of effect, nor from what turns out to be a very elegant and detailed game design.

While Blind's early scenes distressed the adventure gamer in me by presenting me with a huge number of implemented household items which I could pick up (I was having visions of having to construct some incredible escape device from my packrattings, and I feel I am only being kind to future players in saying -- that is not what you have to do… (Spoiler - click to show)At least upstairs. When you get downstairs, some assembly may be required.) Blind demonstrates a lot of interactive possibilities and outcomes in its second act down in the basement. Violence has been used against you; how much and what kind of violence are you prepared to resort to in order to escape? Some possibilities seem to be a stretch when derived from the context sensitive hint system, but other clever and resourceful actions for the heroine to take are well implemented. You might have to face your captor more than once, and the game becomes particularly dangerous and exciting as it approaches its climax.

I also like that when you first complete Blind it presents you with a list of achievement-like extras you might want to try to avail yourself of in a subsequent game. Some of the proffered feats are easy to pull off, others quite difficult. In any case, I found this to be a more strongly motivational approach to inviting replays than those typical 'amusing' lists, which I've never really liked. And the second act gamespace is both small and detailed enough that I think most players who enjoyed the game are likely to be interested in going for the extras.

Version 1.6 of Blind (the final IFComp 2011 version) could use more polish in proofreading and implementation, but its core design is good enough that some roughness is unlikely to be bothersome for any player who is interested in its subject matter. It certainly doesn't betray any sign of its having had no testers beyond the author; I find it to be as least as well implemented as many games which placed above it. Blind is an imperfect but strong horror-thriller puzzle game, with moments of authentic creepiness and gruesomeness.

I find myself reviewing this game as a consequence of a series of somewhat stupid events.

There aren't a lot of horror games in the IFDB, and I had pulled up the meagre list of those that there are by searching for the word "horror". From there, I clicked on the link for the game The House of Horrors, thinking, "This will certainly be a horror game. Why, it even has the word 'horror' in its title." The game's homepage revealed it to be an Apple II Eamon Adventure (number 146) from 1987. I am well au fait with Eamon, so I downloaded the game and fired up my emulator, ready to take horror in the face.

I was bemused to discover that The House of Horrors is not a horror game, but actually a satiric sequel to the crappy but infamous (in Eamon circles) porn adventure called The House of Ill Repute, which was the thirty-second Eamon. Ill Repute was set in a brothel, but as per the majority of Eamon adventures, was otherwise about killing everything in sight and then returning to the Main Hall with the loot. The House of Horrors is not pornographic, and has the player re-entering the House of Ill Repute to recover funds stolen from the K.E.C. (Keep Eamon Clean) committee, clearing assorted bats and rats from the premises en route. In other words, your goal is to kill everything in sight and then return to the Main Hall with the loot.

The House of Horrors has a lot of poor spelling, grammar and punctuation, but is still written with gusto, and is also filled with in-jokes at the expense of dungeoncrawling in general and other Eamon adventures in particular. It even manages to demonstrate the nifty features of the Eamon parser by having a poem which appears to be part of a room description turn out to be a series of monsters, each one with the name of one line of the poem. In turn, the appearance of the four corpses (once you've killed the monsters) creates a new paragraph. There are a couple of neat trap surprises as well, and the overall mood is one of non-complex fun.

The House of Horrors didn't have any of the horror I was after, but playing it did turn out to be a happy accident. Still, I'm certainly not recommending that non-Eamonites contemplating visiting old Eamon for the first time start here. You should go with something more renowned or 'normal' first. And probably without all the weird spelling.

If this short horror adventure had been more tightly programmed, I'd praise it as being very good. As it stands, it manages to be both pretty good and pretty annoying.

The player is determined to apprehend the wonders of the St Cafasso Lighthouse on Buwch Island, and not even a torrential storm is going to put them off. This is a brisk and atmospheric set up with a lot of possibilities, and the game quickly makes good on them, confronting the player with a corpse, violence and secrets.

Where it doesn't make good is in fielding the majority of commands which are slightly off course. Perhaps it is only the fate of good writing to be seriously injured by the unvarying tone of default parser messages. There's nothing more obnoxious than being in the throes of trying to stave off another character's attempt on your life and having to wade through a sea of the old chestnuts like, 'That seems to belong to Mr X', 'That's hardly portable,' or 'That would achieve nothing.' The (quite good) mood of this game was ruined for me on countless occasions by such oversights.

The game has several endings that I could find, and the fact that they are not immediately adjacent to each other, but aren't miles apart from each other, either, is a plus in my book. Yet there is also a a terrible bug along the lines of: characters who are alive shouldn't suddenly be dead, and vice versa.

This is the kind of short piece which, if its holes were plugged, I would probably elevate into my totally underpopulated horror top 10. (There is a sore shortage of non-Lovecraft horror text adventures out there.) But bugs and oversights really work against the Lighthouse's quality content.

It's probably hard for anyone to tell a really convincing story about a small lion pride stalking an innocent man through the suburbs one evening at the behest of a psychopath, but this is the subject matter of Cattus Atrox. Some of Cattus is pulse quickening, much of it is inexplicable, and a lot of it is very funny. Some folks would say that hilarity (either intentional or unintentional) has no place in a horror game, but I think horror and humour are weird emotional cousins, and there is something about this game that I found both intense (sometimes) and hysterical.

For half Cattus's length, I fled cleverly through the foggy night streets while killer lions and 'Karl' harassed me. Then I typed 'wait' about ten times while a beautiful lady conveyed me to safety, or at least to another location. (This is one of those games where you have to type 'wait' an awful lot.) During this gust of confidence, I found myself thinking, "The reviews of this game are wrong. It's totally playable and solveable." Then I found myself dying repeatedly in a drug induced (in the game!) stupor, which seemed inescapable. Then I turned to the walk-through, and then I realised that the other reviews were right. I don't think anyone could divine the series of actions leading to the solution of this game. Some crucial objects aren't mentioned in the room descriptions and tons of objects which would seem to be of help to you are just never implemented. The playing area may be large, but it's also samey and mostly painted-on.

I also discovered I was about 50 moves too late to even be trying to get off my fatal path. I don't mind learning from being killed, in fact sometimes I quite enjoy it, but it was galling in Cattus because of everything about the game that was revealed in one fell swoop when I had to turn to the walk-through -- at which point I just typed in the walk-through.

Still, there are a lot of weird little delights in Cattus. I don't think anyone expects a threatening stranger to suddenly reveal that he has a car full of lions. There's preposterous dialogue, leonine gore, crazy plot twists, and silly episodes of violence which animal-loving players will find completely objectionable. Some of these elements seem to belong in the world of the game, others have been added without care. This makes the whole a bit of a mess, and while Cattus is not a good game by conventional standards, the particular concoction which is Cattus Atrox is certainly that – particular. In terms of its playability, though, I'd say it's guaranteed to aggravate any player cocky enough to persist with it in the belief they can solve it off their own back.