Ratings and Reviews by Wade Clarke

The Library is too elementary and underdeveloped to be able to interest anyone looking for a complete game to play. It's clear that the author is in the very early learning stages of how to program these games and is still grappling with the basics. The PC is stuck in a library for reasons which aren't clear, leaving the player to try to fiddle with all of the available objects in a handful of rooms. Some objects are gettable or have descriptions, but too many don't. Nearly all of them have the wrong indefinite articles, and the coding omissions are in significant areas. EG You can pick up A Christmas Carol but you can't READ it.

Playing this game online, I did notice that Quest's habit of making any and all interactive objects clickable can prove to be a distraction in a game when most of them are really just unimportant scenery. When I see the glowing blue links, I tend to compulsively check each object, but I realised I should have been relying more on my adventure game instincts and not investigating every chair, table and lounge (of which there are plenty in this game). I suppose this is a mental shift you may need to make when Questing.

I can't verify how large The Library is because I was unable to interact in any way with the code reader securing the door which blocked further progress, but many aspects of it are obviously not up to standards that will satisfy strange players. I wish the author the best in her progress; my one star rating for this game reflects that I can't recommend it to anyone as is. Apart from the wealth of technical problems, players need a motivation to play. The mystery of the situation should be played up. Without that element present in the writing, the player is really just randomly searching a bunch of samey furniture for no apparent reason, which is boring.

Based on the title of this game and its synopsis, I was expecting to play a badass jungle cat in an adventure of comedic nature. It turns out that the PC is actually a rap music braggart named Tiger. This was disappointing, at least in light of my expectations, and I don't think they were insane expectations because it feels kind of clumsy to both suggest that a character called Tiger is also a 'tiger' (metaphorically speaking) and then to dwell on this point in the title of the game.

Anyway, having shifted my existential gearstick from 'great cat' to 'rapper', I got a smile or two out of this game which sees you rising as Tiger after a night of rap star partying. Tiger is a dim, spoiled fool with a Titanic sized ego, and the game was clearly going to be at his expense. I say 'going to be' because it turns out that this is just a one room demo, but it must be said that it definitely feels like the start of an actual game rather than just a mechanical test. Various story points are set up, like the fact that you have a piece of music overdue for delivery and that various family members and girlfriends are angry with you. There are a bunch of stats ready to go, too, like 'Booze Level' and 'Oontz Completion'. But the first room is already underimplemented and there is no second room or continuation. So probably the only reason to try this is if you suspect that you might like the material enough to go and browbeat the author into expanding it. I wasn't as motivated as that.

If it was the author's choice to release this four room programming exercise to the world at large as a game, it was potentially a strange one. All I know about the title's provenance is that it describes itself as "a simple demonstration Mystery/Puzzle game". With its content of four rooms, one locked door puzzle (I hesitate to call it a puzzle when the key is in plain sight) and some other objects which are painted on, it offers no challenge or development. It really is just a skerrick of programming set in an airport in which you move the protagonist through a locked door to win.

Acknowledging The Airport in the odd context in which I find it, it does have a few amusing qualities. The volume of text in the default help menus included with the game outweighs the game content by a ratio of about 20 to 1. The game's introduction, which is more verbose than anything that follows, describes the PC thus: "You’re Priya Kapoor. You’re a 28 year old half South Indian, half Arab Muslim woman who works as a senior accountant at Tully’s Coffee’s heaquarters in Seattle." Ethnicity has no bearing on the game content that's here. The funniest thing is that if you glance at the television in the airport lounge, you learn that in the reality of this game, Bill Gates has become the president of the USA, and that Peter Garrett, former frontman of the band Midnight Oil and currently Australia's Federal Minister for Education, has become the Prime Minister of Australia.

Hauntings is a short and well written supernatural tale about a woman who shows up for work at the old house of a mysterious no-questions-asked employer. As the sole entry into the IF section of the Saugus.net Halloween Contest of 2011, it won in its field. The game keeps its interactions simple, advising the player to stick mostly with the movement commands, GIVE and GET and basic conversation commands like YES/NO. The focus is on the prose and its descriptions of the peaceful but dilapidated location and the thought processes of the PC. I don't think the game's period or geographic setting are specified, but the heroine's situation and the hints of social custom mentioned in Hauntings made me feel like it is probably set in the 1940s at the latest – though it could be as far back as the century before that, or maybe even later than the 1940s if in a remote location.

The atmosphere builds well as you search the house, and the tasks you may later perform for your employer don't involve puzzling so much as basic observation of your surroundings, though it might have been nice if a bit more of the scenery had been implemented. There are multiple endings which let you experiment with the situation you're ultimately presented with, and what I like about them is that they all seem to be equally legitimate choices for the heroine to take in light of her backstory. I don't think they are especially surprising endings, and I might have preferred the more dramatic one to be more dramatic again, but the story is basically satisfying. The heroine is also interestingly sketched. I found myself speculating on her background and what she might be doing before and after the events of this game.

Ecdysis is one of the English language entries making up the HP Lovecraft Commonplace Book project of 2007, and in spite of its brevity – or maybe because of its brevity in league with its quality – it's probably the best of them. It is based on the following jotting from Lovecraft's book, which I wouldn't actually read if you want to approach the game in a pure state: (Spoiler - click to show)Idea #221: “Insects or other entities from space attack and penetrate a man’s head and cause him to remember alien and exotic things–possible displacement of personality.”

The great idiosyncrasy of Lovecraft's writing and subject matter are capable of indirectly prompting degrees of weariness from IF players, who cannot help but wonder why so many IF horror games choose to follow in the footsteps of one writer. Yet there is still a great variety of stances the authors of these games can choose from when adopting an approach to the material. What is strong about Ecdysis is that it manages to draw both extremes of the scale of Lovecraft's material together into a short game; the epic, cosmic end involving interplanetary concepts and great, smiting alien beings older and more powerful than humankind can comprehend, and the claustrophobic, imminent end involving monsters and putrefaction in the here and now.

Ecdysis is linear and uncomplicated, but the PC is driven in his actions, which tends to be the thing that makes linear games work as interactive pieces. When there are few actions you can take but they happen to be the ones you'll really want to take, it can draw attention away from the absence of a range of alternate choices and help keep the game out of "Why wasn't this written as a short story?" territory.

This is one of those games where to say more would be to spoil the effect, so I won't.

The piece of short fiction this eponymous game is based on takes the form of an urban myth-like set of directions for finding a mythical art gallery hidden behind a bar in Paris. The penalty for deviating from the instructions once you've started to follow them is grisly death. The story apparently hails from the often stupid internet thing known as 4chan, where all users are anonymous. It's a good story which I read after playing this game, and which I then decided I should have read instead of playing this game.

The Gallery of Henri Beauchamp, the game, cleaves to the source text, often reproducing large chunks of it verbatim. Given the small size of both game and source, the majority of the prose is identical in both formats. All you can do in the game is type commands which correspond to the successful following of the directions – resulting in you continuing through those directions – or type commands which do not correspond to the successful following of directions, resulting in one of the grisly deaths, also usually reproduced word for word from the story.

Between the content duplication and the absence of any additional interactive possibilities, the game doesn't really justify its existence in its current form. And even within its highly constrained scope, it demonstrates next to no implementation. The first location is a bar containing a bartender who has no description, and beer that responds to DRINK BEER with "There's nothing suitable to drink here." The game continues in this fashion, sometimes only responding to unusual verbs cued by the source, and I would say that it is impossible to score more than one out of seven available points without first reading either the source material or all of the contents of the game's help menu. The latter option is no way to enjoyably play a game and the former, while enjoyable, obviates the need to play the game.

Humourous sci-fi adventure Death of Schlig copped a lot of negative reviews during IFComp 2011. "It's crammed full of extra line breaks!" was the commonest refrain, but there were heaps of other problems that just made for staggery play and fought the game's attempts to get a flow of humour and action on. This was the first IFComp in which entrants were given the opportunity to update their game during the comp period and author Peter Timony availed himself of it. The late-in-the-competition version of the game I tried was in significantly better shape than the one everyone had been yelling at, but frustratingly (in retrospect) it still didn't address all of the non-aesthetic tech problems. This leaves us with a game whose bursts of silly comic book fun keep being stymied by mundane annoyances with its parser and other stuff – door keys which are bad at sorting themselves out, an inventory limit which adds only hassle, proofreading and pagination troubles, no synonyms at all, etc.

If you regard the cute cover image for Death of Schlig (drawn by the author's brother) you'll have a good idea of what's ahead – telescopic eyeballs and green aliens. The latter give you the former in an experiment gone wrong after kidnapping you from your day job at the deli counter, though your real job is Great Private Detective. Your super eyeball powers allow you to EXTEND and RETRACT your eyes, to send them around corners to spot alien guards and even to occasionally use them to wield objects.

The tone of the writing is consistently zany, with lots of non-sequiturs, little pieces of misdirection and exaggeratedly amusing characters. It has the appropriate spirit and personality for the subject matter, and while its uneveness is increased by the game's incomplete proofreading (and the fact that Zaniness is an area subject to even more subjective individual response than its parent category Humour) there are a lot of parts in Schlig which made me laugh, and which I was able to remember almost verbatim even a year after first playing the game. My favourite, still: "You attempt to slice the world's thinnest slice of ham. With atom-splitting precision, you gently push the ham towards the spinning blades."

Unfortunately the timing of a lot of the jokes is thrown off by surrounding bits of writing which remain too sloppy, or by the unpolished gameplay itself. The extend-an-eyeball gimmick should be uniformly cool but proves extremely fiddly to deal with, and is underpowered as a tool to help you outmanoeuvre your enemies in this game. The patrolling guards only seem to move at the moment Schlig or Schlig's eyeball enters their presence. I have tried following them around with Schlig's telescopic eyes, trying to zap them, but they always remain one move out of reach and will ultimately complete a circuit and step into the original room containing Schlig. This "good guy's eyeball chasing the bad guy chasing the good guy" image is an appropriately cartoonish one in this cartoonish game, but the programming of this mechanic wasn't sufficiently massaged by the author.

Death of Schlig's prose has a consistent aesthetic which suits it, and it's one of those adventures that makes me really want to like it. But it's still a game that needs more work in the programming and in the writing to pull it out of that territory where it is often work-work to express or achieve what you want to do in it, and unfortunately it is unlikely to get that work.