Ratings and Reviews by Wade Clarke

If this short horror adventure had been more tightly programmed, I'd praise it as being very good. As it stands, it manages to be both pretty good and pretty annoying.

The player is determined to apprehend the wonders of the St Cafasso Lighthouse on Buwch Island, and not even a torrential storm is going to put them off. This is a brisk and atmospheric set up with a lot of possibilities, and the game quickly makes good on them, confronting the player with a corpse, violence and secrets.

Where it doesn't make good is in fielding the majority of commands which are slightly off course. Perhaps it is only the fate of good writing to be seriously injured by the unvarying tone of default parser messages. There's nothing more obnoxious than being in the throes of trying to stave off another character's attempt on your life and having to wade through a sea of the old chestnuts like, 'That seems to belong to Mr X', 'That's hardly portable,' or 'That would achieve nothing.' The (quite good) mood of this game was ruined for me on countless occasions by such oversights.

The game has several endings that I could find, and the fact that they are not immediately adjacent to each other, but aren't miles apart from each other, either, is a plus in my book. Yet there is also a a terrible bug along the lines of: characters who are alive shouldn't suddenly be dead, and vice versa.

This is the kind of short piece which, if its holes were plugged, I would probably elevate into my totally underpopulated horror top 10. (There is a sore shortage of non-Lovecraft horror text adventures out there.) But bugs and oversights really work against the Lighthouse's quality content.

It's probably hard for anyone to tell a really convincing story about a small lion pride stalking an innocent man through the suburbs one evening at the behest of a psychopath, but this is the subject matter of Cattus Atrox. Some of Cattus is pulse quickening, much of it is inexplicable, and a lot of it is very funny. Some folks would say that hilarity (either intentional or unintentional) has no place in a horror game, but I think horror and humour are weird emotional cousins, and there is something about this game that I found both intense (sometimes) and hysterical.

For half Cattus's length, I fled cleverly through the foggy night streets while killer lions and 'Karl' harassed me. Then I typed 'wait' about ten times while a beautiful lady conveyed me to safety, or at least to another location. (This is one of those games where you have to type 'wait' an awful lot.) During this gust of confidence, I found myself thinking, "The reviews of this game are wrong. It's totally playable and solveable." Then I found myself dying repeatedly in a drug induced (in the game!) stupor, which seemed inescapable. Then I turned to the walk-through, and then I realised that the other reviews were right. I don't think anyone could divine the series of actions leading to the solution of this game. Some crucial objects aren't mentioned in the room descriptions and tons of objects which would seem to be of help to you are just never implemented. The playing area may be large, but it's also samey and mostly painted-on.

I also discovered I was about 50 moves too late to even be trying to get off my fatal path. I don't mind learning from being killed, in fact sometimes I quite enjoy it, but it was galling in Cattus because of everything about the game that was revealed in one fell swoop when I had to turn to the walk-through -- at which point I just typed in the walk-through.

Still, there are a lot of weird little delights in Cattus. I don't think anyone expects a threatening stranger to suddenly reveal that he has a car full of lions. There's preposterous dialogue, leonine gore, crazy plot twists, and silly episodes of violence which animal-loving players will find completely objectionable. Some of these elements seem to belong in the world of the game, others have been added without care. This makes the whole a bit of a mess, and while Cattus is not a good game by conventional standards, the particular concoction which is Cattus Atrox is certainly that – particular. In terms of its playability, though, I'd say it's guaranteed to aggravate any player cocky enough to persist with it in the belief they can solve it off their own back.

The Zuni Doll is a short horror adventure in which you have to fend off the eponymous and cursed African doll when it starts trying to kill you. Your goal in purchasing the thing was to add it to your collection of curios, but one stupid action by your pet cat has reactivated the doll's evil.

The game is set in the few rooms of your house and doesn't beat around the bush, quickly getting you into the business of finding a succession of methods to stave off the doll's attacks. It has some exciting moments, but the programming is entirely bare bones. The included background information says that The Zuni Doll was written in four days as a programming demonstration, and this shows. There are no synonyms, no alternate ways of doing things, and Undo isn't even mentioned in the game over menu, though it's the most common command you'll need in response to the frequent snuffing out of your life that occurs. There are also random typos, and objects aren't necessarily described through the filter of the life and death events which frame the action.

In spite of these weaknesses, the game is so short and linear that you won't feel like you've wrecked your experience by consulting the equally short walk through, which you'll probably have to do. There's also a bit of humour in the writing (and the whole idea), and some interesting gore. Overall, the game offers brief fun with a good idea, but scattershot delivery. It's certainly a candidate for a tune up which it will probably never get.

Room 206 is a huge mystery-horror game of poetic venereal prose (and poetic overkill), a boggle-leaning story and reality-skewing assaults. Programming and writing this game would be an extreme challenge for even a whole team of superhuman IF veterans to pull off smoothly – and I have to say upfront that the game's author Byron Alexander Campbell has not pulled the programming off in bullet-proof fashion – but he has pulled the game off, and done so using the ALAN development system.

The game kicks off in a chapel where you're considering the aftermath of your wedding to exquisite Erica. The wedding party waits for you out on the lawn as you observe stray paraphernalia like a dropped handkerchief and a wafting ribbon, but once you head outside, you find the party has disappeared. Only an anonymous limousine remains. Thus begins this noir-wedding-horror-hardboiled-nightmare-daymare mystery.

Room 206 doesn't have any trouble integrating its sprawl of content and styles into one story, but does have trouble integrating it into the tone of its prose. Lines which are functional, overripe, poetic, super earnest and bizarre all chase each other's heels, often within the space of a paragraph. Dynamically I found this too erratic, so I didn't always buy the narrator's ability to construct back-to-back vivid metaphors while digging through the garbage in a hotel room, for instance. Scripted conversation, especially by telephone, is also in abundance. If you don't like your IF extra writerly, you're unlikely to be able to come at Room 206, but the more you stick with this game, the more you get into its style.

Unfortunately, the adventure reaches close-to-impossible difficulty levels by the halfway mark due to shortcomings in those most important (though boring to always cite) design areas of implementation and giving the player cues. Most objects are implemented for only one purpose, resulting in a lot of preclusion of action and oblivious feedback. Failing to perform a task such as treating your headache with painkillers can result in the game ceasing to progress without telling you why.

Room 206 also makes extreme use of the 'wait' command to progress the script – the walk-through lists more than 50 waits. I appreciate the game's interest in creating an emotional reality in which the player might pause to process thoughts and feelings, but it's too often impossible to guess when you might need to wait to make something happen. It is also in the nature of the game's ambitious content, which becomes increasingly abstract and complex, to make it tough to work out what you might need to do next in general, especially once your character's grip on reality has started to slide. The game mobilises keyword technology for movement (the opening scene is particularly graceful) but geography is typically the least of your worries.

Eventually I was exhausted by the various kinds of onslaught and had to take completely to the walk-through. Doing so typically destroys my interest in a game, but with Room 206 I found that seeing it through to the end was rewarding. I realised I had persisted through lots of challenges, some frustrations – including out-of-game stuff like numerous crashes in two interpreters and corrupted saved files, resulting in multiple replays (I think the latest version of the ALAN interpreter at this time of writing has some Macintosh problems) – and that I had done so because of Room 206's engrossing story and wildness. Even when the prose was overkilly, I started to side with it. And I found myself thinking about the whole experience afterwards. While I was definitely infuriated a lot on the way through, I was ultimately impressed by the fiery reach of this game.