Reviews by Wade Clarke
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The Sisters is a mystery-horror adventure set in an apparently deserted mansion in the wilds of Sussex. If you're into ghostly horror tales, you will have a lot of fun recalling all of the different stories and styles the game draws on or evokes; in books, Stephen King and James Herbert. In films, there's plenty from the "scary little girls" subgenre and even a touch of Don't Look Now. In gaming, the opening recalls Silent Hill, and The Sisters's method of revealing backstory through written materials like diaries and letters is typical of survival horror.
The game's story is considered, but the dynamic of how much you learn and when (Spoiler - click to show)(50% of the information is revealed as you explore 90% of the game, then everything else leaps out in the last five minutes) makes the outcome a little unsatisfying. The journey is what is important, because the mansion is big and absolutely crammed with examinable decor and objects, all of them contributing to the atmosphere, many of them filling in pieces of story. This is a great example of story being gleaned from the environment.
There is a catch: The repetitive nature of the locations makes it hard to stay vigilant in your searchings. You're in a multi-storey mansion of similarly laid out floors. There are many bedrooms, many tables, many desks, many wardrobes. Descriptions of even sparse locations can be 70 words long on average, and the average non-corridor room will have at least five things you can examine. This adds up to a tremendous amount of detail, but only a handful of objects you will find during your rummagings are needed to complete the game.
If you reach the end and discover that your score seems relatively poor – and you care about this kind of thing – you will need to do a reconnaissance replay in which you doublecheck every furnishing in the house, because particular objects lead into particular point-generating puzzles. But after your fourth bed, fifth table or sixth desk, you will realise how you managed to miss so many things in the first place.
The Sisters is at its best as a spooky and suspenseful exploration game. The mansion is a terrific setting, an integral part of the unfolding mystery and elaborate with atmospheric detail. But the score system and denouement are inevitably a bit disappointing. Too many of the points are attached to optional puzzles which are easy to miss, and the outcome is like a jack in the box opening in your face after the slow piecing together of the past that made up the bulk of the game. The parser has its bumpy moments and the fourth wall is broken unnecessarily a few times with jokes. The mansion is the star, though, and it is definitely worth visiting.
Varkana is a tale of arty diplomacy set in an earthy yet glamorous fantasy kingdom which feels like it is populated mostly by women – though empirically speaking there are probably as many male characters as female. The city of the game breathes with interesting life and detail, but it's hard to stay immersed in a story as alternately widespread and wandery as Varkana's when the game doesn't do enough to direct the player towards the ends that are really useful in its conversation system.
In the rawest terms, your progress in this game is heavily dependent on your ability to TELL and ASK the right people about the right things at the right times. If, like me, you don't even like the TELL/ASK system, I would not recommend Varkana to you. And even if you do like lots of conversation, there is a significant bug in Varkana resulting in NPCs ignoring important topics unless you make a nonsense query of them first. This bug is documented by the author in her README, and the game will always be of lesser quality than it could be so long as the bug is there.
In spite of these troubles, I found myself significantly immersed in Varkana's attractive world for about half of the game's duration. The opening backstory tells of ambassadors from another kingdom visiting your native Varkana, and of the political wiggling which ensues. There is a lot to take in, and I had to re-read the intro a few times to make sure I had got it. Then I found myself in the position demonstrated by the game's lush cover art by author Maryam Gousheh-Forgeot: That of being a glamourous bookcrafter woman named Farahnaaz, giving a boost to my equally glamourous friend Nivanen so that she can peek through a window.
We were spying on the new arrivals in town, but I immediately had trouble conversing with Nivanen, not sure what I should be asking her about, or whether I had asked her enough questions before I put her down, and whether I was interacting with a bug at times or whether she just didn't know what I was talking about. I had thought we were on a mission, but pretty quickly after our attempt at spying, all the main characters relaxed, and could be found chilling in the local bathhouse and having their hair done.
So much information had been presented initially that I had the sensation at this point that I might be doing something wrong, or just not know what I was doing… but it turns out that this part of the game is meant to be observational and meandery. There are citizens and a spunky cat wandering around, and exotic props and buildings to check out. The physical environment has its own logic which makes it feel real.
Unfortunately it takes a while to work your way back into the intrigue plot, and the further you get into it, the more you have to ASK and TELL judiciously. Sometimes you have to repeat conversation commands several times in a row just to extract all the information from individual characters. Bumping against the interface and trying to follow the sense of all the politics was arduous for me, and I eventually lost interest. Unfortunately the walk-through did not work transparently for me, so I was unable to complete the game.
Varkana presents the details of a world vividly, but its direction as a game is vague. Whether a player can become involved in its politics or not will depend on how much they like this kind of conversation-based progress in IF and whether they can persist with a less than ideal implementation of such conversation. Also, the backstory is very full before the player even starts the game. This fact could be mitigated for folks whom it might stress out by the hook of the initial spying-over-the-wall scene… but potentially immediately unmitigated if the first command typed in the game produces the first of many failures to communicate, as it did for me.
Dracula is an exciting, garish and highly confounding 95% text adventure which was released for the Commodore 64 by CRL in 1986. It was the first of a series of similarly themed horror adventures by Rod Pike (and later, other authors) including Frankenstein and The Wolfman. Dracula broadly follows the events of Bram Stoker's novel and remains highly regarded in C64 circles to this day for a multitude of reasons, sensationalism amongst them. The non-text 5% of the game consists of gory digitised images which are displayed when the player meets one of the game's many violent ends. The game deliberately courted the attention of the British Board of Film Censors, and got it; it was the first game in the UK to receive a 15 certificate. The game's producers admitted they had wanted an 18 rating.
"Their claws bury into my flesh! They beat their wings on my body while their beaks tear into me! They are tearing me to pieces!The above passage is typical of the game's thrilling tone of demise, and after each death the player is treated to a SID chip rendition of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor.
ARRGH!! MY EYES!! NO! THE PAIN.. I CAN'T STAND THE PAIN! I CANNOT SEE!!"
While all of these flourishes are inseparable from the game's intense atmosphere, they aren't the primary elements of what, it must be remembered, is an adaptation of a classic novel. The game puts the player into the shoes of two of the novel's heroes, Jonathan Harker and Doctor Edward Seward, and presents puzzles across a wide range of contexts: Good old-fashioned obstacle removal by useful object, observation and exploration, warding off Dracula and his minions and, perhaps bizarrely, the testing of social and domestic common sense.
The game is frequently unfair, with an inconsistent approach towards what the player knows versus what his/her character knows, lengthy and attractive room descriptions which are nevertheless quite misdirective, plenty of unheralded and undoable deaths, and countless incidences of time-based sequences in which you have to start typing WAIT repeatedly to achieve crucial aims. Considering all these difficulties, I was surprised by how enjoyable I found Dracula, and I realised that the game's mitigating circumstance is that for two thirds of its length, it is almost entirely linear and episodic.
If you've been dropped off by coach at Dracula's Castle, and you're standing in front of a locked door and there are no other exits, what else is there to do but assault your current location with every verb and noun you can think of? I discovered in playing Dracula that I don't mind brute forcing a game so long as the story is exciting and the process isn't querulous. Many stretches of this game involve just getting through one or two rooms at a time using only observational skills or objects that are immediately at hand (okay, and at times, desperate illogic). What you don't have to worry about at such times is whether you failed to pick up some important item twenty rooms earlier. On the other hand, what you do have to worry about are the game's assumptions about your character's knowledge, abilities and inventory, as these change without warning throughout the adventure.
A tiny first room (Spoiler - click to show)spoiler: In the game's first location, your path into the inn is blocked by a drunk coachman. Checking your inventory shows that you are carrying nothing, not even money, but the solution you must dredge up is PAY COACHMAN. You might say to yourself, 'Fair enough, I can now assume I carry money around with me,' and the assumption holds true for awhile as you lavish various Transylvanian yokels with your Earth dollars. But in a later chapter of the game, your money starts off in a coat which you aren't wearing, and you won't be able to pay people until you have noticed this, taken your coat from your chair and rummaged through it.
A less nitpicky observation is that despite the fact that you get to play two very intelligent men in this game – or at least one very intelligent man plus Jonathan Harker – there will be times when both men are capable of acting like imbeciles if they do not receive your explicit directions to the contrary. The game's wavering treatment of the entity that is 'me' certainly caused me to reflect on what what actions I expect should be automatically taken for me during a text adventure, based on the qualities of my character in such games where I am playing a character with a pre-existing background and disposition (like Dracula) as opposed to games where my character is entirely a cipher for action (like Zork.)
The silliest incident along these lines in Dracula occurs when you are playing Doctor Seward and need to catch a train to Stratford. (Spoiler - click to show)Having purchased a ticket, you then step south onto the platform. As often happens in this game, the room description does not mention any of the exits. Most of the time you can only find these by trying to move in every direction in turn. So you dutifully wait for a train to arrive, then board it. To paraphrase what happens next…
"You caught the train to Folkstone. You lose."Apparently the doctor is so klutzy as to be unable to board the correct one of two trains from his hometown station without player input, though he oversees the running of an entire mental asylum for his day job without the same. What the player must do here is bump into every 'wall' in the original platform location, find that there is a path to another platform and go and wait there, despite the fact that neither platform is labelled. It pays to save often in Dracula because you never know when another strange game-ender like this will crop up.
The game's prose is often uncharacteristically rich and lengthy for a text adventure from this period, even if the author misuses apostrophes. His punctuation mistakes don't matter because the perilous tone and content are well delivered, and the compelling writing places you thoroughly in the shoes of each character. The prose is also delivered in a gothic red font which definitely helps to create the game's particular atmosphere, at least for those whose eyes can stand it. Even in the game's heyday, hackers released patches which allowed players to use a more basic font. Different kinds of text are colour-coded, marking out objective description, your own thoughts, other characters' dialogue, etc., and this feature provides visual interest and clarification. The game's parser comes across as fairly opaque, simply because the game is so episodic that all the vocab you might struggle to guess is only relevant for a screen or three at a time.
It's hard for me to think of any other text adventure which trespasses so often against sense, logic and fairness, but which has remained engrossing to me. Dracula benefits from the qualities of Bram Stoker's novel, maintains the book's fearful tone in its prose and recreates some of its most memorable sequences, such as Harker's imprisonment and escape. The game presents mostly as sequences rather than as an open environment, and this seems to be the key to making its often inscrutable puzzles work. The player must doggedly persist with minimal cues to claw his/her way from one dangerous scene to the next, bashing against the walls to find the exits and turning to features in the environment which even the game itself suggests are useless, like a cupboard described as 'totally empty' which, predictably for Dracula, isn't.
Dracula demonstrates that there can be unexpected benefits to having a linear structure in a text adventure, and its decided confusion towards the ideas of character and agency is at least thought-provoking. It knows scary and is reverent to its source material. It is also highly irrational, probably impossible for any modern player to complete without the walk-through, and not a place a newcomer to older adventure games should start, fans of Stoker's book excepted. I believe, however, that anyone who does play Dracula today will be able to perceive why the game is well remembered.
* In 2003-2004 some Inform users remade Dracula using this modern Interactive Fiction system, an impressive feat. In the way of fidelity, the remake offers a choice of Commodore 64 or Amstrad colour schemes, and in the way of niceties it offers cleaned up text formatting and the inclusion of features like UNDO. Strikes against the remake are the absence of the original music (replaced by an extremely dodgy Bach MOD) and the replacement of all the original graphics, except for the title pages, with uninteresting 3-D renderings. The new version is undoubtedly easier to play but it loses the specific aesthetic effects of the Commodore 64 hardware.
In this fantasy adventure you must recover the eponymous sword which will save the world from oppression. The intro story is overly long for such a typical plot, but does set the scene for an atmospheric opening in which you are dropped off atop a cathedral by sky ship.
Unfortunately, the initial thrill of going on something like a thieving spy mission in enemy territory quickly gives way to some pretty aggravating puzzles. The precautions you must use to spirit the sword to safety without being detected are not unsophisticated in design or programming (you would hope not from a 2003 Eamon, as this is very much post-heyday) but they are well irritating, because you can wreck your game if you don't do the right things in the first few rooms, but you won't be told about your mistakes until you make it all the way to the end, at which point the game really rubs it in.
Other problems in this adventure are the stacked nature of some locations (in a handful of rooms, you need to examine almost every noun mentioned in the description to unveil a heap of embedded items - most other rooms contain nothing) and the vagueness of what you're trying to do once you get out of the cathedral. Some side puzzles have a lot of programming devoted to them but deliver unimportant payoffs which don't help you to complete the game. I spent ages trying to string together the right series of commands to achieve something in the blacksmith's shop.
In spite of its moments of undoubted sophistication, I found Sword Of Inari to be pretty hard going, even with its relatively small map - because of how easy it is to wreck your game without knowing about it, and how spread out and unpickable the most important puzzles are, and how hard it can be to dredge up the right command to interact with those puzzles.
Eamon#65 comes with a general thumbs up from the EAG, but I found it kind of tiresome. It's a bunch of straightforward combats set in a contemporary school, written from the point of view of a ye olde warrior (you) who has travelled through time to reach it.
The descriptions are arguably clever and consistent, but somehow I just found the overall effect monotonous. The school's boring, the combat verges on being sparse, and continuing to map the school required an effort of will on my part.
This early Eamon adventure kicks off by dumping you in a dungeon in Hades. The place isn't as diabolical as you might expect given its location in the universe, but it does feel threatening due to decently atmospheric room descriptions, which often suggest something terrible is just around the corner. What's usually around the next corner is more dungeon and the occasional battle.
There are, by modern gaming standards, a handful of aggro puzzle moments here. The way to deal with the Iron Door in the first room doesn't make any kind of sense. (For puzzle advice, read Tom Zuchowski's review at the Eamon Adventurer's Guild). I'd throw in one more kind piece of advice which will prevent you from tearing your hair out - (Spoiler - click to show)in The Devil's Temple - make sure to note which wall the door is in before you open it. You can't read its description again afterwards.
Extremely sparse Eamon loot'n'kill from system creator Donald Brown, featuring a maze with some monsters and, fortunately, a minotaur. A pleasant easy map, but all the empty corridors you have to traipse through would be tedious if this adventure was any bigger. 'Lair' has one horrible instant death, thus starting a great(?) Eamon tradition. But for the second Eamon ever, this is decidedly alright.
This is the one of the best of the very early Eamons. A king hires you to rescue his daughter Rowina (sic.) so off you go to Hogarth's castle where she's being held.
The principal schtick of this game is that you should be loyal to your allies. Don't rip off your pals and don't rip off the king if you want to win... but of course in Eamon it's fun to see what happens if you muck everything up, as well.
Frequently saying the codeword 'HOWDY' elicits neat advice from your pals, which proves variously helpful or essential for the castle section. The castle itself is possibly over-elaborate, given that careful mapping can get you to your goal quickly and obviate the need to explore the whole thing.
Dracula's Chateau comes late in Eamon numbering, but apparently was written a lot earlier than that would indicate. In spite of having a few too many empty rooms in the castle, this is a fun and attractive Eamon romp with a basic 'fight monsters, grab treasure and escape' goal. It's got neato combat, the odd trick and an equally neat map layout.
The only thing you shouldn't waste time with is trying the 'DIG' command. It works in one room in the whole game, and there to lame effect.
The program did crash on me once, dropping me into BASIC.
A few glitches aside, Dracula's Chateau is a quality destination - albeit a simple one - for an Eamon vacation.
Keen followers of The Forest House saga would have been pretty happy with the ending of part two, and probably at least mildly curious to see what would happen in part three. The answer is: you get half a game which is potentially the best in the series, followed by half a game which is easily the worst.
Basically the third episode seems too ambitious for anyone to be able to bring off properly in just three hours of programming, the competition limitation which defines all three games. So the further you play, the worse the programming gets, until the building is practically falling down around you.
The kid from episode one is now grown and married, "With a gorgeous wife to your left and beautiful son to your right" as the game says. But this is a Forest House game, so it's not long before people need to start getting on down to The Forest House to progress the plot.
This game features an animated NPC, a first for the series. It's your wife, and she dutifully follows you around, guides you in the right direction and offers some advice. This is a very cool start to the game, and the conversations actually clear up some of the family relations that have popped up in the earlier games.
Unfortunately things go downhill once you get into the supernatural half of the adventure. First, a bunch of room descriptions vanish. This is clearly a bug, even though there are other weird room shenanigans going on, including is a semi-endless stairway, again inspired by Silent Hill. Second: (Spoiler - click to show)The fight with The Beast demonstrates more new programming, but feels silly. And finally the game just crumbles into programming hell. Its responses become erratic and inconsistent, things disappear or don't disappear which shouldn't or should respectively. (Spoiler - click to show)The end is supposed to present a few choices but I could only interact with one of them; the others seemed broken or bizarre. If you can make it to the finale, it offers a bunch of fairly crazy exposition.
Over the course of three Forest House games, the author demonstrated a growing range of abilities. It's probably time for him to string them all together in a game not ensmallened or bugged-up by a three-hour programming time limit. That limit hurt this third game in the series the most.
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