Ratings and Reviews by Wade Clarke

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.

Intake is a very short hypertext piece about being a mental health patient and unsatisfactorily answering some initial questions from a patronising doctor. It's okay as a brief emotional sketch, and it has a poetic rhythm about it that's felt if you play a few times. But as an interactive piece representing this situation, it's too simple to make an impact. The main effect comes from the good idea of putting the player in a seat of powerlessness to emphasise that powerlessness (only the doctor gets to speak). Intake fares best if considered only for that effect. Thinking about a few answers you can make to the doctor's questions, and ones you specifically can't make, which I sometimes didn't understand, led me into a state of protracted querulousness. Am I supposed to be playing a marginalised character, or a not-marginalised character being treated as if I was marginalised? Am I specific or not? Besides, can anyone actually quantify how marginalised I am or should be, especially if I am fronting up with mental health problems?

I think troubles are hard to avoid in general in short IFs with frontmost political content. The moment such expressions take interactive form, they need to be able to stand up to a fair bit of scrutiny in the same way that rooms in IF games need to be able to stand up to sufficient player interaction. Intake will not stand up to scrutiny beyond its basic expression that it sucks to be in this position if your system is crummy and the particular doctor you are seeing is appalling. In which case, you obviously need to find a different doctor, preferably a good or great one, and/or persist – my words, not the game's. Also, if Intake's outro did mean to badmouth Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (a badmouthing I would dismiss) I think it undercut itself, since it's obvious that any doctor who would prescribe the same treatment for every problem is a fool.

The Dead is a pint sized CYOA Quest game which drops you in a graveyard and immediately has you fleeing a killer skeleton. The prose is brief and adornment-free. The game also hasn't reached a basic level of proofreading, so there are typos and grammar errors in every line. At least the stakes are high; most choices tend to be life or death, but not in a completely blind 'Will you go through door A or door B?' kind of way. A typical choice might be to decide whether you should glance over your shoulder to identify the unidentified thing that's chasing you, or grab a key off the ground and hope it unlocks the gate in front of you.

As unbaked as The Dead is, it quickly moves into some weird mythology involving glowing green energy and a skeleton army, which feels like a guest power up animation from a videogame. Perhaps the whole thing is the author's first CYOA. The Dead has a dash of suspense, but not much sense and no writing craft. It is complete – there are a good number of losing ends and one winning end. But it's definitely not up to a standard where strangers outside of its home context would be interested in it.

The Binary is a browser based text'n'click game involving looping time travel. To describe it as a CYOA doesn't feel right, as the game keeps track of what you've done and also allows you to revisit locations, though the circumstances of the revisitings are unusual. In common with Operation Extraction, also from IFComp 2011, the timing of your actions is important in this timey game. I found the whole thing somewhat baffling to begin with, with a barrier to play in the form of potential initial uninterest. I think I'd rather The Binary had just told me what my goal was instead of making me work it out myself. Constant forward movement, albeit in a loop, can be mildly aggravating when you don't know what's going on yet and have no hook of intentionality to arouse your interest.

Once you do know what the story is about, it turns out to be as exciting as other stories of its kind often are - that kind being (Spoiler - click to show)stories about people trying to stop an assassination by locating snipers at the last minute. In the role of one of the guys I'm going to call Time Cops, you loop through the same few moments repeatedly, trying to string together the circumstances to bring about change. This scenario also brings about an eagerness to quickly return to the spot where you think you might next be able to best change things up, which is why the cutaway scenes which occur every time the repeating sequence ends are a distraction. They open a window onto a broader mythology, but not one that's too useful for the workings of this small game space. Once you've done some things over and over, it's frustrating to have to pass through the cutscene again, or just to have to wait before you're able to access certain links anew.

Ultimately The Binary is clever and becomes fun, and it's a smoother ride than its cousin (of sorts) Operation Extraction, but it could stand to be sharper.

Captain Lighthouse is a Nova Scotian superhero who fights pollution and tells Nova Scotian kids about the virtues of reading local newspapers. He is a multimedia figure for our times, appearing variously in his own comic book, in the form of a huge inflatable doll, and in this adventure game, Captain Lighthouse's Museum Mystery. The interview I read with the captain on his website painted a portrait of a well-meaning but verbose and kind of dull guy, which, excepting the verbosity, is also how I would describe this game.

Playing the good captain, you are called to the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenberg, where some villain has stolen the plans for the Bluenose, a historic fishing schooner. Handily, all five suspects are standing around in the next room. Your job is to identify the guilty party – not by such exciting means as using ESP or asking questions about the crime itself, but by submitting the suspects to a comprehension test. And in truth, the party being subjected to the comprehension test is yourself, because you have to read the fact sheet about the Bluefin before you can grill the bad guys to find out which one of them knows the least about this jewel of history. For surely that ignoramus is the committer of the crime!

The bad guys have cute names like Kaiser von Thefz, and the game's atmosphere, buoyed by the presence of photoshopped portraits of characters and a few simple pieces of music, is generally one of endearment. But in the end, you're a superhero who displays no evidence of having superpowers, does not get to use any superpowers, and instead administers a comprehension test. I confess I wanted more from the character who earned local rag SouthshoreNow the Best In-house Promotion Award from the Canadian Community Newspapers Association.

(Also, the villain's identity does not change from one game to the next.)

This is a one-way trip through an eventually male student's day at what seems to be a parodic version of the author's high school. That is to say, Klein Collins High School attended by Hugh Jass (heh) in Texas. The game displays an accompanying photo or picture with most of its locations and objects, making it visually busy, and is controlled by a mixture of the parser and hyperlinks. In each class there tends to be a notable object or student that you can try to interact with, but these actions don't have any mechanical game value and the objects are pretty dull, so you'll want to click on the 'out' button to leave each class sooner rather than later.

The purpose of the game is to share the author's witty observations of school life. I didn't find the written material all that funny, though some of the juxtapositions of text and picture are amusing. The implementation of the parser is so basic that straying away from the point-and-click controls tends to be a mistake. On the whole, the game gives the impression of being an experiment for the purposes of learning Quest, using an environment familiar to the author. I admit I was disturbed by its vision of students slyly watching Avengers on their laptops during class. Oh well, better that than Iron Man 2.

The author shows a viable hypertext style in this game, which may lead to something in the future, but for strangers, this one isn't worth playing.

A couple of folks at textadventures.co.uk made some neat observations about Klein Collins High School than I've decided to reproduce here, since I failed to make them. The first happens to tell you how to win, which isn't much of a spoiler in a game with no puzzles, but I've still hidden it to avoid outrage:

(Spoiler - click to show)"You can win the game if you keep saying "out"... lol." - Gabe Lance

"Another thing that kind of irritates me but I don't know if others care about it: In some games you're told in the beginning who you are, but in games like this you're supposed to be yourself, since there is no character in it. I don't really like it when a game has me be myself in it, then about halfway through tell me I'm a guy. But that's just me." - Azura Davis

Murder!

The author's name is :3 so I wasn't expecting this game to be the last word on the subject, though it may be one of the first few.

In this teeny CYOA, you're a girl who goes to school one day and hears that another girl has been murdered, and that no one knows whodunnit or why. This situation is all the talk amongst the kids, especially the few you might interact with in the course of Murder. These kids have a good way with the breathlessness and exclamation marks, and are the kind who will start screaming out "I DIDN'T DO IT!" with little prompting. The feel of the dialogue and character behaviour reminds me of that of the hot and cold bobble-headed folk in the MySims console games.

Unfortunately, I have probably already given the false impression that there is way more content in Murder than there is. Its choice structure for the duration of its handful of scenes consist entirely of: "Will you A or B?" You can play the whole game to its bizarrely abrupt finale in two minutes or less, then click through all the choices you missed the first time for a second play of about one minute in length.

Murder (the game) is cute and actually got me involved in spite of its tiny size, but it's also typo-filled and super simple, and its story stops just when it was getting started.

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.

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.