Reviews by Wade Clarke

(I originally published this review on 15 October 2012 as part of my blog of IFComp 2012. This was the 19th of 26 games I reviewed. The game had been updated once during the competition before I played it.)

A Killer Headache casts the player as a zombie in a posthuman world with the immediate goal of ridding oneself of one's blinding headache by finding and eating more brains. It's truly a sad time to be a zombie when you have to live off the grey matter of animals and other zombies, but what saddened and maddened me was how excruciatingly difficult I found this game to be. In common with Changes, also from the 2012 IFComp, A Killer Headache has a world model of great sophistication, but it's even harder than Changes, and its nested hint menus almost induced apoplexy in me.

A Killer Headache was apparently inspired by a long and existentially discussion about zombies on the intfiction.org forums. I sped read the discussion after playing the game and can say that cumulatively, the participants knew their zombie stuff, as I claim to myself. Author Mike Ciul has considered the gamut of post Night of the Living Dead ideas and come up with his own version of the zombie mythology. The zombies range in sentience from below average to above, but they are all still possessed by their hunger, which can blind them to almost everything else. They specifically want brains, a schtick begun by the film Return of the Living Dead in 1985, and some of the humour of this game is also in keeping with that film's supposedly funnier aesthetic. (That's to say that RoTLD marked the arrival of "funny" zombies in zombie movies, but that I didn't find that film very funny myself; no slur on this game's humour intended.) An example would be the pathetic, moaning conversation you can have with the severed head of your friend Jim in the game's first location, your trailer.

The practicalities of being undead are foremost amongst this game's interests. The first puzzle is just getting out of your trailer. Your lack of coordination makes fiddling with the doorknob annoying and your lack of strength means that using brute force tends to destroy parts of your own body. Various enemies can tear your hands and feet off, hampering your future hazard-negotiating abilities. Falling down a ravine on your stupid zombie legs could result in an eternity of being pecked at by vultures. The game's commitment to the hopeless grisliness of zombie existence – assuming zombies have feelings of a kind, which is this game's atypical premise – is unwavering.

The difficulty which ensues is also unwavering. You're constantly being interrupted or killed by enemies while in the process of trying to solve difficult and fiddly puzzles, often under time pressure or with the added complication of your concentration being dragged away into pre-zombiedom flashbacks. This is clearly a point of the game, to convey that zombie "life" is indeed arduous. The point is effectively made and felt, but I don't think the experience should be quite so impractical to move through as a game. When you die, it tends to be several moves deep into a losing streak of actions, and to verify your suspicions about your situation often requires exploring several branches of the nested hint menus, paging in and out, going deeper and shallower and reading the lists of topics which are so convoluted that they cross reference each other.

A lot of the difficulties of play are also a consequence of what is exceptional about this game: its highly involved world model. The different groups of enemies interact with each other in complex ways, roving the desert, staking out objects and locations, fighting each other and fighting over you. The behaviour of the hated mob of zombie children is especially impressive. However, the author has not missed an opportunity to turn any particular permutation of circumstances into another hazard for the player, and the hint topics reflect this, reading like a troubleshooting manual for a day in hell. Did the dogs tear your hand off? Did they tear your foot off? Have they trapped you in the diner? Have the children trapped you in the diner?

My player wherewithal was gradually eroded over time as I kept trying and failing to solve my zombie problems. Some solutions were quite abstract ((Spoiler - click to show)put the other head on your shoulder), some relied on the kind of small-scale fiddling that has proved eternally difficult to implement to everyone's satisfaction ((Spoiler - click to show)I had terrible problems trying to find the commands to express what I wanted to do with the pump and gas tank), some were solutions I was too late to try ((Spoiler - click to show)try to keep your limbs in this game; it's better that way) and some were just very demanding. Dealing with the (Spoiler - click to show)mob of zombie kids occupying the diner near the end saw me dying on almost every move. I was spending about four times as much time moving in and out of the hint menus as I was playing. I had also been trying to play using speech-to-text, and being constantly driven back to the keyboard to fiddle with the menus was intolerable in my trammeled state, so this was where I gave up, unfortunately missing out on some existential ending, according to other reviews of this game.

A Killer Headache is dense, cleverly constructed and well written, and its savage entitites show a wide range of behaviours. The whole thing is harrowing. I just wish I hadn't found it so agonising to play. Perhaps the context that IFComp creates wasn't right for this game. Without the desire to try to finish this in two hours and the knowledge I still had a pile of other games to get through, I expect I would have been more receptive to the challenges it posed. What I don't have any kind words for are its nested hint menus. Nested hint menus drive me nuts in any game – it's about the only extreme prejudice I have in text adventuring – and the complex nature of A Killer Headache managed to show this particular method of dispensing information in its worst light.

(I originally published this review on 5 October 2012 as part of my blog of IFComp 2012. This was the 6th of 26 games I reviewed.)

Unfortunately The Lift is not a game based on either 1983 Dutch horror film The Lift or its silly but likeable 2001 remake The Shaft.

"The cover art for The Lift looks like it might be good," I had thought to myself as I'd squinted at the postage stamp sized icon dispensed by the IFComp site. The same automated process which deleted all of the large sized cover artworks from the comp games and replaced them with shrinkies in 2011 did the same thing again in 2012. After playing through this hyperlink CYOA game which involves choosing one of four weapons and then either being killed or not being killed by some zombies and dire rats, I think its cover image (even in shrunken form) is the only part of it I can compliment.

The PC is an amnesiac who wakes up with the obvious goal of survival. After picking your weapon, the next important choice you have to make is which of the four floors of the building you will investigate in hopes of escaping. Give or take the odd exception, that's about sixteen outcomes, but there's next to no variation of choice within outcomes. More problematic is that the writing is bad to unremarkable, there are no dynamics, there is no atmosphere, no suspense, reason, or really any point of interest. The choice you have to make before making the second important choice is whether to avail yourself of some pornography or not. This is potentially a moment of inspired dumbery, but it also might not be.

(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.