Ratings and Reviews by Wade Clarke

(I originally published this review on 11 October 2012 as part of my blog of IFComp 2012. This was the 15th of 26 games I reviewed.)

Based on its opening scene, I thought The Test is Now READY was going to be a zombie game, but this scene turned out to be on its own. Test drops you into a series of unconnected but difficult situations. Your choice of action in each scenario will inevitably have extreme (usually fatal) consequences for one or more of the parties involved, including yourself. Quick to play and undeniably galvanising, this game is well suited to the context of this competition, but not all of its scenarios are equally strong, varying in logical sturdiness, plausibility and implementation. They are all equally easy to spoil, however, and player freshness is important for the premise, hence the remainder of my review is solid spoiler:

(Spoiler - click to show)The torture-a-suspect-to-save-millions scenario is very discomfort-making, and probably the strongest in terms of goading agonised thinking. The grisly prose in this section is vivid, the important actions all implemented. When I compare the quality of this scenario to the one in which your son's foot is trapped in the train tracks as a train approaches, the latter's problem is that it is not vividly portrayed, nor are the responses to obvious actions convincing. I didn't have a sense of how far away the train really was at different times, or of the physical arrangement of the space or of the positions of the important players in relation to each other. This probably compounded my annoyance at too basic responses like, "You can't help your son," when I tried to free him. But what I did particularly like about this scenario were its epilogues, which quickly summarise how the mother's life goes as a consequence of the actions she takes by the train tracks. They demonstrate that some situations really are impossible to negotiate successfully.

The hysterical quality of some of the scenarios is justified in retrospect by the fact that they have been designed to deliberately test the ability of an artificial intelligence (which is us) to make difficult decisions. I still didn't feel this made the blood donor scenario more credible, though. There's something about waking in hospital and being told in one fell swoop that you have the only blood in the world that can save this woman, and that that's why there's a tube coming out of you and going into her. That's why this was the easiest scenario for me. I ripped the tube out of my arm immediately and walked out.

The trouble with the you-can-choose-to-be-high-forever scenario is that unlike with the others, I did not find the nature of the choice to be clear. I didn't press the drug-releasing button once and think, "Oh okay, my choice is between getting high or being responsible." I was just trying to understand what kind of situation I was even in. Once I knew that the button delivered drugs, I walked out of the room.

The assessment of player personality and disposition at the end of the game is kind of fun, even if I suspect there will be a camp of players who won't like the AI revelation. Not all of the scenarios needed to be as painful as the torture one, obviously, but more of them could have benefited from a greater sense of immediate urgency of situation, achieved through more focused writing and implementation.

(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 8 October 2012 as part of my blog of IFComp 2012. This was the 11th of 26 games I reviewed.)

Thou shouldst save and save often in Castle Adventure! for thou art without UNDO capability and opportunities for thine stuckening abound. This is a solidly executed rescue-the-princess toughy delivered in a simple 1980s style. None of Castle's puzzles are too tricky individually, but the overall difficulty is multiplied by the combination of the game's large map (I would estimate 100 rooms) and the fact that you can wreck your game in various ways. If Castle Adventure hadn't shipped with its Invisiclue hints, I imagine I would have been in danger of giving up on several occasions, and to make use of the clues still requires a good familiarity with the gameworld. However, I think anyone who gets into this game will enjoy acquiring that familiarity, as the map design is really excellent. Even with so many rooms, and so many of them being empty, they have a distinct style of logical arrangement and clear description that makes them easy to navigate. The empty rooms also add a sense of scale which helps give the game its atmosphere. By the time I completed Castle Adventure, I had its whole world in my head.

This is a game about the good old joys of unfettered fantasy adventuring. Forests, castles, secret passages, creatures to help and hinder, bare bones descriptions and anachronistic jokes when you look at things. Your goal of rescuing the princess isn't accompanied by a bunch of mythology, it's just self-evidently what the hero does in a world like this. And Castle Adventure is very polished. I don't recall seeing any typos or encountering any bugs I could guarantee were bugs. That is to say that there were some slightly cumbersome command moments, but the game has the spirit of a two word parser game, even if it isn't one literally, and it's possible that moments of inflexibility are just a part of the style.

A handful of puzzles seem to slyly comment on the great anti-intuitive difficulty which sometimes accompanies old school games. (Spoiler - click to show)I especially liked the part where I had to keep typing GET TORCH in a darkened room until I did manage to find the thing. Once I had it, I wondered how I was going to light it, and spent several turns trying to do so until I examined it and discovered it was an electric torch, the only such modern appliance in this otherwise ye olde game. Another potentially daunting moment was when the Princess, whom I was escorting home, fled upon seeing the ghost. If I'd been more rational at the time, I would have thought the situation through and realised that the minor maze of an area into which she'd fled was closed in. This suggests the entirely logical solution to the puzzle: You just go up into that area and check each room until you find her. But I was briefly having visions of having to explore all of the game's 100ish rooms again looking for her.

The condition for getting the game's super happy ending is probably its sneakiest feature, pretty much guaranteeing nobody will achieve it without replaying the whole thing from the start. (Spoiler - click to show)That condition is that the player must give the gold key back to the thieving magpie before entering the castle. Just reading this information in the hints brought a smile to my minor failure face. Overall, Castle Adventure was very happy-making for me. It may feel too standard for some players and its old school spirit will deter others (in fact it plainly repelled many, based on reviews I read) but in its chosen field of uncomplicated two-wordish princess rescue it is finely designed, technically polished and subtly idiosyncratic.

The Forgotten Girls drops the player into the bare feet of an Indian girl sexually enslaved in a brothel. Considering the potentially confronting, bleak and dour qualities of the subject material – and it is the game's stated aim to raise awareness of the problem – The Forgotten Girls surprised me by turning out to be thoroughly action packed. As the heroine strives to rescue her friend and effect an escape, we see a range of the brothel's residents' behaviours through her eyes, ranging from the workaday to the cruel. The game's practical and non-exploitative approach keeps it from being didactic. For players who are concerned about encountering any explicit sexual abuse in the game, there is none on camera: it is only implied and out of game time. There are violent scenes, though.

The game's puzzles actually turn out to be fairly classic adventure game stuff: escapes, dealing with locked things, avoiding enemies. A central scene involving one character who is being tortured achieves the strange and novel feat of also managing to be a bit cute at the same time, as your character(Spoiler - click to show) takes this opportunity to create a series of amusing distractions to get rid of the guards. I found this scene to be particularly well executed because it extrapolates some interesting outcomes from simple commands. Had the same scene demanded the player spell out every element of his or her intentions in microscopic detail, it would likely have been a nightmare of worst-of-Infocom pedantry.

The game does have a few weaknesses in basic areas. You have to specify with which key you want to open what door, it's pretty strict on synonyms in general, and its effect is at times undermined by Inform's default delivery style, which remains unadorned here. EG 'You can see a can of beans (in which are some brown beans), a table (on which are Pari, some ropes, an iron rod, and a purse (closed))'. Considering the cleanliness and cleverness of the action overall, these aren't big problems. The game also has good built in hints in the typical style and offers helpful advice during its opening turns in a fashion inviting to newcomers.

The Forgotten Girls finds an engaging way into harsh subject matter. It's practically minded, uncomplicated and clear-eyed. It certainly bends reality a little to adventure game conceits, but does so in a way that's good for playability.

The excellent Andromeda Dreaming shares a universe with and is set immediately prior to the events depicted in Marco Innocenti's sci-fi adventure Andromeda Awakening (The Final Cut). Awakening saw the player take on the role of a scientist exploring an alien underground in the wake of a planetary disaster. In Dreaming, a new character, Aliss, wakes to find herself quarantined to a bunk in cylindrical space pod 19-Q, bound for somewhere. As Aliss, you're unsure of where you came from or where you're going, and so you begin to engage the other bunk dwellers in one cryptic-seeming conversation after another, sliding in and out of a sleep in which dreams reveal fragments of unsettling memories.

Dreaming has a wonderful structure, a nervous-making and palpable trajectory, its own very funny slang language (sported by the loquacious NPC Kadro) and extra frisson for people who have played Andromeda Awakening, though doing so is not a prerequisite. Extra frisson can also be derived retrospectively by playing Awakening after Dreaming.

Dreaming uses the quarantine pod as a hub location, a necessarily sparse and isolated one. Even if there was something in here to fiddle with, you couldn't reach it as you are strapped down in your bunk. All you can do initially is talk to the other pod inhabitants or go to sleep, yet these are the only actions needed in this location to drive the story forward, as it is your conversations and dreams which fill in the blanks of your predicament. Through just a handful of changeable features in the pod – different bunks being open or closed at different times, different characters being awake or asleep, a TV screen being on or off – the author is able to convey that groggy sense of time passing in a hermetically sealed space that anyone who has flown will recognise.

The conversations are managed by the same menu-based quips system Joey Jones has used effectively since his sci-fi adventure Calm. Aliss mostly has hesitant queries at her disposal, and they're mostly hesitant queries that are similar to each other because they all have the same goal of trying to elicit any and all information from the other party. Thus the interest is carried by the other characters' responses. My only technical quibble with the game is that it's possible to lose your bearings a bit if you UNDO during a menu conversation.

The various dream locations Aliss finds herself in demonstrate different levels of vividness, with temporary restrictions on the parser working perfectly to deliver an aesthetic of the intangible or incomplete; dreams with holes in them, or in which forgotten details are replaced by familiar ones. Another good trick on display is the technique of describing specific details before the broader ones, as if the memories are like close-ups that are stuck on certain things. In purely mechanical terms, the dreams are simple and linear, but their effect is entirely involving. The transitions from dreams back to the now are also well executed. Crucially, the returns to consciousness aren't announced. All the game has to do to achieve this is not reprint the room description, resulting in the player inevitably bumping back into the present with a command that doesn't work because the location has changed. It's a simple but totally effective aesthetic trick achieved with the parser alone.

To speak on the game's revelations about the situation it presents would be spoilerage. Instead, I'll just say I think Andromeda Dreaming is one of 2012's best IF games. It makes a virtue of its strong linearity by expressing its meaning through its structure. Trickiness is conveyed simply. Limitations turn out to be assets. The game is funny, unsettling and affecting.

If you complete it once, you may then wish to read the following: (Spoiler - click to show)There are many endings. Not several – at least twice that.

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.

David Whyld's The Cellar was part of the H.P. Lovecraft-themed Commonplace Book Project of 2007 organised by Peter Nepstad. This was a remarkable project whose IF angle I knew nothing about prior to researching it in relation to The Cellar. I had known what Lovecraft's Commonplace Book was: the place where the author used to jot down unused story ideas. While the Book's contents have been used as a launching point for IF games or IF competitions on more than one occasion, what was neat about the 2007 project was that the six games which participated were set up for play as part of an exhibition in Switzerland's Maison d'Ailleurs, aka The Museum of Science Fiction and Utopias. Further details are available in Peter Nepstad's article about the project in SPAG#50.

Concerning The Cellar, it is no spoiler to reveal which idea from the Commonplace Book the game is based on, as it is displayed on startup:

“Man’s body dies - but corpse retains life. Stalks about - tries to conceal odour of decay - detained somewhere - hideous climax.”

The game is written from the point of view of a character initially standing outside of its unsettling events: the boy Nevare, whose father made him promise not to go into the cellar after returning from a trip to Africa. When the game begins, you (Nevare) find yourself alone in the house one day, consumed by curiosity and with an opportunity to at last search for the key to the forbidden room.

The prose of The Cellar is quite good, and the game's revelations fall comfortably (or should that be uncomfortably?) into the Lovecraft mould, as do its methods of writing, perhaps. One character emerges to tell the game's backstory at great expositional length. It is the quality of this story that is the soul and effect of this game, but the linearity of the whole piece and its broad sidelining of interactivity are very apparent. The choice moment of being a child in a room and having to look around for an object from the world of adults is repeated a few times, and it's well done, but these are the only moments in which you get to really do something other than listen to another's story. Of course, it isn't literally "another's"; being a tale of family, this story involves Nevare indirectly, which turns out to be a salient point for the denouement of The Cellar. However, I imagine many regular IF players would simply wish they could do more in this game. I wished that, but I still enjoyed the story. I can also imagine a game depicting some of the told material in interactive fashion, though this isn't a case where speculating on a significantly different game that isn't will pay dividends. The Cellar's linearity might also have made it more accessible to random passers by in an exhibition. Either way, its story is a good realisation of Lovecraft's jotted idea.