Reviews by Wade Clarke

(I originally published this review on 22 October 2012 as part of my blog of IFComp 2012. This was the last of the 26 games I reviewed.)

I would have preferred the last competition game I play to not be about sport, let alone Gridiron. But now that I have played – nay, won! – Kicker, I'm glad it was my last game because it managed to surprise me. This is a game in which you play the placekicker on a Gridiron team, but it's an easy game to play for the sporty and the unsporty alike. It is also, after a fashion, not what either camp would expect from the premise. Or perhaps exactly what they'd expect.

The game's thorough message is that the role of placekicker is tedious and thankless, and close to being a joke in the eyes of one's teammates. You RUN ONTO THE FIELD, GIVE THE SIGNAL, KICK THE BALL and then RUN OFF THE FIELD. Then you mill about on the sidelines for twenty turns or so before the coach urges you to repeat the kicking process. In the style of a conceptual art piece, the player has to ride out an entire interminable game of football in this manner, boringly entering the same commands again and again to reinforce the idea as lived practice, with the extra joke that any and all attempts to find stimulation on the sidelines, whether through conversation or action, are doomed to failure. Other players shun you, a film crew ignores you, cheerleaders ignore you and there's basically nothing else to do.

Driven to the boredom the game seeks to muster, I tried to bring down my team by disobeying the coach in various situations. For instance, by not running onto the field when he asked me to run onto the field, or by not running off the field when he asked me to run off the field. My stratagems didn't ruin my team's prospects but I was fired twice. Happy to find that the game was not completely unyielding, I undid my tomfoolery and pressed on with entering "Z" or "WATCH THE GAME" a zillion times to see if anything wacky would eventually happen. I had grown quite weary by the time my team won, and our winning was the thing that happened.

The programming of the football game's progress is good and the prose is clean. A few commands I tried weren't recognised, but otherwise this is technically a solid game which is explicit about the commands you need to type if you want the match to keep going, but also relaxed enough to assure you, with good cause, that "You'll figure it out."

I've always thought of Gridiron as that ridiculous game where the players' physical attributes and skills are completely ghettoised. The kind of sport where one guy might have a massive right arm that he spends all his life pumping, except when he's on the field doing nothing but standing on a prearranged spot and waiting for a chance to clothesline some passer-by with that arm. Playing Kicker certainly did nothing to change my prejudices, but what it did do was let me win a sports IF game without understanding or caring about the featured sport at all, and it took a swing at at least one element of that sport while it was at it. For these things I am grateful, even if the game worked its magic by daring me to give up in the face of intense boredom.

(I originally published this review on 4 October 2012 as part of my blog of IFComp 2012. This was the 4th of 26 games I reviewed.)

You can't fob off the postmodern today, not even if you jab violently at the area directly in front of you with a pointed stick. Last Minute is a hyperlink CYOA about cobbling together a last minute entry for IFComp, and presented with its first screen, I didn't like the look of it. The protagonist thinks in exclamation marks and is equally and constantly excited by every turn of his thoughts as they alight upon different objects in his bedroom. In the long run, I believe that people should be skeptical in general of responses to creative challenges which consist of saying, "Well, I was having trouble thinking of something, so I made my piece about the trouble I was having thinking of something." Which wouldn't be to say that this game is definitely a response of that kind itself – except that the author revealed during the competition that it is. In the end, each object must still rise or fall by its own qualities. The primary quality of Last Minute is silliness, and even if you don't like it, it's over pretty fast.

The game has two halves. The first half is a the part where you scan your room with your eyes looking for inspiration for your IFComp entry. Choices include your games, your DVDs or what's on your desk... The combination of a "my apartment" game with the protagonist's hyper manner began to make my eyes water. But I persisted and reached the second half of the game, where my earlier choices were strung together into a gamey fiction. This section is extraordinarily silly and hyperbolic (EG a blistered blob forces everyone in the world to cannibalism by only letting them eat beetroot otherwise, and you have to stop him) but it's got more messy wit, writing cutesiness and variation than the first half, and might start to bring the sniggers if your defences are sufficiently weakened by now. I played this section a few times and found some different stories, and if you want that explosion of sloppy zaniness that you can usually expect from something in the competition, this could be one of the games to deliver that fix.

(I originally published this review on 21 October 2012 as part of my blog of IFComp 2012. This was the 23rd of 26 games I reviewed.)

I don't claim to have played many wordplay focused IF games before, but I loved this one. In a Manor of Speaking is an adventure beyond the Bermuda Triangle through a world ruled by puns. Lord Dashney is the evil figurehead who needs to be overthrown and you are the person who needs to do it, using only colloquial expressions and a bit of lateral thinking as your weapons.

The game's implementation in Release 3, the one I played, is very strong. Its puzzles are numerous, amusing and served by an excellent contextual hints system. The game's humourous tone and aesthetic are entirely coherent and the prose is hiccup free. In short, this level of quality is what I ideally want from every adventure in the comp. The immersion which results when every part of a game is working smoothly and the flow of words and actions is unbroken is hard to beat, and with only a few games left for me to review now, I can say that In a Manor of Speaking is the only game to have achieved such frictionless immersion for me in this competition. Therefore unless you hate wordplay (and this is a pretty user friendly version of it) I advise you, and all and sundry, to try In a Manor of Speaking.

Paradoxically, I find that this game's accessible comedy style makes it hard to discuss at length. Its meanings are consistently transparent, whether they are silly sight gags (metalheads whose heads are made out of metal), riffs on timeworn sayings (Spoiler - click to show)(the pudding which contains the proof) or misdirections (the game is full of bars, but only the first one is a metal rod). To write about the game's jokes like this makes them sound only groany, but puns are fascinating because while they do often prompt groaning or cries of "I hate puns," almost nobody genuinely hates a pun, except for people whose souls are broken and ugly as pitch. You know, people who are to be pitied. In fact most people enjoy being the opportunistic revealers of puns in conversation once in awhile. In a Manor of Speaking takes you into a world and mode of writing where the puns are so numerous that they are the source of all the meaning. This pushes them beyond the context of goofy pleasure and shame which often accompanies isolated real-life punning into a place where anyone is likely to enjoy them more freely.

I only encountered a couple of tiny bugs in the game and both were related to the object "a piece of your mind" and the kangarude. The solidity of implementation also extends to the majority of the parser's blocking messages, with idiosyncratic jokes on hand for most kinds of command rejection. The numerous instant deaths (which you can instantly back out of, as well) become something that you can easily anticipate, as a good number are attached to invitingly stupid actions, but you're likely to find that you still enjoy trying each one.

In a Manor of Speaking is a funny and engaging adventure with a lot of personality and a near seamless delivery. That last point is a clincher for me, whether a game is light, profound, transparent or opaque.

My experience of these Pirate Kart games is that they're short, easy and busy. I find that to be a good combo compared to short, hard and anything else, since the flakey implementation of tiny games is what can make me so annoyed when I fiddle with them.

Anger is not relevant for Delicious Breakfast, a game about a person (or perhaps some manner of living man-insect, if 'x me' isn't joking) who wakes up in the morning and sees the world largely through a prism of exclamation marks. A being for whom the phrase 'Delicious Breakfast' is always thought of in Title Case.

As you fiddle with assorted foodstuffs in your kitchen trying to assemble and eat a Delicious Breakfast, you learn that the character you're playing is a rather stupid manic whose existence is framed only in terms of Delicious Breakfast, and that the term 'Delicious Breakfast' represents an idealised concept for this character rather that an accurate description of what's eaten and how it's et. (I don't know why I'm always eating gross stuff off the floor in adventure games, but I did it again here.) My score was soon to explode, and pretty soon I'd won the game.

I can relate to idealising breakfast. I eat Weet-Bix every day and they bring me into the land of the living. Delicious Breakfast is amusing and easy, though it is not a Weet Bick.

I hadn't played a one-move game before I played I'm Having a Heart Attack and it turned out to be an excellent introduction to this mini-genre. The game puts you in the shoes of an actor starring in some kind of pro-health commercial, one in which your character might be about to have a heart attack in the wake of a poorly lived life. The director's nearby, the camera's rolling and there are a few domestic props and food items within reach. With your single move, you determine how the scene will be performed. The viability of any one performance is determined by the director, whose enthusiastic interpretations of your actions are highly amusing. Each viable performance scores you another point out of a possible 41, plus there are an unknown number of bonus points up for grabs for trying out more meta or 'guess the verb' type actions. The scene loops, which makes a lot of sense in the context, giving you the opportunity to stumble around the set, fiddling with the props in a creative manner and trying on gratuitous emotions as the director eggs you on.

The game is addictive and progress tends to come in waves. One successful action will often cause a rash of similar actions to pop into your head. The director's feedback is also helpful. The more of it that you read, the more you may connect with the game's mindset and work out what other angles might lead to performances. I scored more than half the available known points plus a bunch of unknown points in my first session with the game, and I intend to revisit it to try to find more.

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.

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.

In Heated you play a messy guy with a messy life who needs to get to work early, and in a more than presentable state, to secure a raise from the boss. This is a small adventure with a handful of domestic problems for you to solve in a finite number of moves. Things will go wrong frequently, and when they do, your heat-o-meter climbs in response to the aggravations. Get back on track and you will cool off a bit, hence the game's title.

The production is not polished (there are typos and incidences of inconsistent programming) but the important thing is that it works as a whole, however modest, and thus is fun if you enjoy figuring out how to optimise your path through a game's obstacles in the fewest number of moves. There are some Babel Fish-like moments à la Hitchhiker's Guide and some cute jokes like (Spoiler - click to show)the move-eater that your backyard turns out to be.

The game is too small for its inconsistencies to really mess you up, and its size is a plus in terms of the gameplay style -- as soon as you learn a better way of doing things, you can replay through an optimal path in a matter of seconds or minutes. This doesn't mean you can't save the game, but UNDO gets you further het up.

One problem with Heated only becomes apparent once you've completed it - (Spoiler - click to show)that the game's small scale mitigates against your heat level really having much of an effect. But the idea that life might work to sabotage us in little ways when we have a deadline comes through clearly.

(Review of the original IF Comp 2010 release)

Rogue of the Multiverse is a humorous sci-fi adventure with some wacky/peculiar dynamics which guarantee that its story maintains unpredictability for its short to moderate duration. Whenever you start to feel you might be getting a handle on your situation, the space carpet is likely to be pulled from underneath you in a slightly Hitchhiker's Guide fashion. The result is a mixture of pleasant surprises and disorienting turns which will cause each player to identify different bits that they enjoyed the most, and disagree with others about which bits made them go, 'Huh?'

(Spoiler - click to show)The game will also prompt arguments about whether one should make kissy faces at alien lizard doctors or try to sock them between their stupid beady eyes as soon as one gets the chance.

In this game you play the eponymous rogue, and while "Rogue of the Multiverse" sounds like a real badass title, the kind to be bestowed upon a Han Solo, the segment of your life portrayed here happens to be one of the mushier ones. In the space prison where the game begins, none of the other inmates react to you as if you have any street credibility at all, and pretty soon you're the lab monkey in the rather unimpressive experiments of one Doctor Sliss, a condescending lady lizard who is convinced that bananas are your god. I did feel a little annoyed at my own confusion at having to move about the science complex with the commands 'forwards' and 'backwards', but this ultimately wasn't a huge issue.

Thus a rogue's lot in life appears to be that of playing second fiddle to a reptilian scientist, searching randomised grids of alien turf for interesting people and things to tag at her behest. The descriptions of the alien inhabitants and their behaviours are pretty cute, and each bout of exploration feels not entirely unlike a game of Hunt The Wumpus. Once you work out what you're doing, this section is fun but pretty easy, so it's good that it doesn't outstay its welcome. I was disappointed, however, that I was not able to butter up some of the aliens with goodies procured from the Doctor's complex to convince them not to remove their tags.

Just when you think you've got this grid searching thing nailed, a helpful space agent shows up in a space toilet and assures you he can bust you out of captivity if you just buy him the stuff that will allow him to cobble the escape thingy together... Eww, but he's in the space toilet! Moving toward your escape is arguably the most tense part of Rogue, but afterwards, proceedings get - relatively speaking - even weirder.

My own sense of aggro towards Doctor Sliss, my former jailer, after the tables were turned (or at least shuffled around) never did find release. At first I thought the game was strongly signalling that I could not avoid casting my lot in with her, to the extent that when I had an opportunity to do something contrary to her wishes, I missed it. Plus I was probably distracted by the recent excitement of a chase on jet bikes, another sequence which arrived with the game's customary surprising-ness. What's obvious though is Sliss's presence as a well-written, if inscrutable, character, whether you feel amorous or murderous towards her.

The game's last scenes on another planet (assuming you go that route) feel like the unheralded ending of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, the one where you forget about the adventure you were having for the last 80 pages and suddenly travel to another time, meet new people and assume an entirely new role, all within the space of one page and one illustration. Of course this isn't literally what happens in Rogue, but it generates a similar sensation. And this is not an inappropriate final sensation for a game whose story structure and interests have hardly been traditional beginning, middle and end. The game feels more like a window onto the amusing and chaotic adventures of a rather put-upon individual, adventures which were probably just as strange before the game began and will continue to be as strange after the game ends. The title could almost be a joke, or at least ironic. Or it could be the po-faced earnest assessment of the main character's view of him or herself.

The game's peculiar turns felt weird while I was playing it, but they evoked a small portion of universe held together by wonky chance rather than sense. It was the vision of that wonky universe which stayed with me after I completed this well written and executed adventure.