Ratings and Reviews by Wade Clarke

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.

If certain scenes from the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy were more serious in their theology, and were also molested by Philip K Dick, Ray Bradbury and some poet, the result might be one of those awful what-if mixed metaphor things of the kind you have just read in this sentence. But the result might also be something like the short game called The Wheels Must Turn.

The game opens with a quote about misery from a fatalistic tome called The Book of Servos, and the first location is 'Walking in the Hamster Wheel', the latter fact a sure sign that the player's lot is not going to be a splendid one. You do actually play a hamster in this game, albeit one with great sentience and the power to communicate.

The setting is something like purgatory or machinery hell, where you and other hamster slaves manipulate wheels in a Big Brother like environment. You can't do much, nor does the voice of your consciousness urge you to do much. The clotted cream poetry of the game's prose could irk in a longer game, but to me, this is about the right duration of game to make such a delivery work.

Wheel's strongest quality is that it will inevitably prompt thoughts along the line of 'What was that all about?' when it's over. It's not very long, and your interactions mostly move the happenings of the game forward, rather than making them turn in any directions. There is one puzzle (in a sense, it's almost overkill to call it a puzzle, but it is a moment where there's only one thing you can type to make the game conclude) and if you can't pull the answer out of your brain, the good news is that nothing is spoiled by pulling it out of the walk-through.

On paper, the idea of this game wouldn't have appealed to me in that I like gamey games - gamey defined by me as being able to offer tons of different states, based on the number of moving parts. Wheels is a line from A to C with very few states, but the writing and the ideas are interesting, and it's short and idiosyncratic, so in playing it I demonstrated to myself again that you should keep on trying different things. It's a game probably best talked about with other people who have played it. It's difficult to describe more than I have without spoiling it or indeed dumping the game's contents. Ultimately I think it's a good sign that something this small can promote this much mind activity.

This comic horror mini-adventure was written in three hours for Ectocomp 2010, and fits a clever central conceit and a great 'Aha!' moment into a handful of locations.

The game begins with your head being sawed off by an evil bad guy and placed on a table. To speak more explicitly on the content in this review would, unfortunately, amount to game-wrecking, given the petite size of Headless, but what I do particularly like about this game is that it doesn't fall down that speed IF hole of being overreaching and underimplemented. Headless's design is totally amenable to the format's logistical restrictions, and the game has a good trick that's fun to work out. This is one "they done sawed my head off" game I am not shy about recommending to the non-squeamish and sundry.

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.

Six-Chamber Champion was written for "The 371-in-1 Klik & Play Pirate Kart II: Klik Harder" (it was one of the non-Klik & Play games, obviously) with development time limited to 2 hours. The resulting compact game lets you indulge in a round of Russian Roulette, and it doesn't beat about the bush. You and your opponent are seated, a gun loaded with one bullet is placed before you, then an armed referee and a bloodthirsty crowd watch over the pair of you as you take turns putting the gun against your head and pulling the trigger. The survivor will walk away with €1 million. There is no extraneous story or detail, just visceral suspense ala The Deer Hunter. A few other actions might occur to you and you can try them en route.

The game is cleanly programmed and operates only in the service of the situation, so player reaction to the whole thing isn't steered. It turns out that Interactive Fiction's delivery method of breaking reality up into tiny discrete steps might as well have been designed to play virtual Russian Roulette. It works very well here to create suspense and excitement, and to elongate individual moments. I found my fingers reluctant to commit to entering the PULL TRIGGER command that could blow my brains out each time. The outcome is randomised whenever you restart, and I was surprised to find that the reluctance effect wasn't significantly diminished on replays.

This game does exactly what it says on the box, and it does it well, so there's not much guesswork involved in deciding whether you might be interested in playing it or not. While having a gun at one's head might sharpen the mind wonderfully, sanity advocates will quickly point out that there's no shortage of less dangerous ways of reminding oneself that life is infinitely interesting and exciting. Though it must be admitted that those other ways don't give you a 50/50 shot at winning a huge pile of money right away.

Kukulcan (1984) is an educational graphic adventure game set in 1519. The player takes the role of an Aztec scribe summoned by Montezuma to seek knowledge of the Feathered Serpent, in hopes that this knowledge may stave off the arrival of evils portended by recent omens. The Aztecs were right to have been worried around this time; the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez was soon to invade Tenochtitlan (the future site of Mexico City), arrest Montezuma and bring an end to the Aztec Empire. Thus Kukulcan is a game which allows you to experience some of the events, atmospheres and customs of the end days of that empire from the perspective of a man on the ground.

I spent a decent amount of time trying to work out Kukulcan when I was a kid, playing a copy a friend had made for me, and I probably progressed about three quarters of the way through the first of two floppy disks. This was with the friend telling me explicitly what to do at certain points, and also after I had listed part of the program to try to cheat. The game seemed pretty inscrutable. I would go around doing things like wearing slave clothes, peering at temple columns and sacrificing butterflies atop pyramids without any true understanding of why I was doing them. Admittedly I had already got the idea that you sacrificed people in this kind of game by hearing about another Apple II adventure called 'Mask of the Sun', in which you could SACRIFICE RAOUL. Kukulcan's game parser was of the two word verb-noun school – LOOK PRIEST – SACRIFICE BUTTERFLY – CLIMB ROOF – and within that school it was of the simplest incarnation possible. There was no real database of vocabulary, just code explicitly checking if you had typed something relevant to the location you were in.

In spite of its opaque qualities, Kukulcan had a distinct style, and numerous flourishes that other adventure games of the time weren't giving me. The opening sequence of the sun rising with some flickery birds flying overhead was semi-animated, and played a few notes of music too. The optional introductory sequence felt dangerous, as you had to enter Montezuma's presence and perform several actions exactly as instructed so as not to insult him – ENTER – BOW AND ADVANCE – and say MY GREAT LORD – though I was annoyed that actually typing 'SAY MY GREAT LORD' resulted in death. The graphics were clear, bright and extremely attractive, and offered additional close ups of certain items and architectural features, like beans that had fallen into a crack in the causeway, or a butterfly hidden in the eye of a skull. There was mystery and a bit of awe involved in wandering the game's majestic temples beneath its blue skies, and wondering what it was all about.

In retrospect I can see that the impact Kukulcan had on me was one that it would have been pleased to have had as an educational game – it provided my first encounter with Mesoamerican history, and I did not forget what it showed me. Even with nothing to compare it to, my younger self was able to instinctively feel the authenticity of what was being presented. I had never before seen words that looked like the ones I saw in this game, words so long or with such interesting spellings - Tenochtitlan, Quetzalcotl, Tzompantli (the 'skull rack'). The game also included captions and titles atop the graphics, describing where you were or what you were looking at. And the way that people and places came across in Kukulcan had that sense of alien but unremarkable conviction about it that is attendant upon most people's first encounter with a foreign culture.

More than twenty years after Kukulcan's heyday, I discovered that my chances of completing the game as a kid, using my pirated copy, had been zero. The game shipped with extra hardcopy historical notes that provided completely unguessable information vital to completing it. I also found out that you could type 'H' at many of the game's locations to glean additional historic information in-game. Today, you can use a walkthrough to reach the conclusion of Kukulcan in a quarter of an hour or so, but the unfurling of the game in response to the commands you will issue in the process remains amusingly baffling. The original documentation, which would undoubtedly fill in all the gaps, remains unavailable. Between this fact and the game's tiny parser, Kukulcan's solveability worth for a retro gaming passer-by is, frankly, nil. But the game's inherent worth is great. It is novel and attractive, and educational in the best possible way, the way in which learning isn't even a conscious issue. The game fascinates the player with its world, and after that, any learning tends to be automatic. I find I am able to recall various sights and words from Kukulcan to this day without any prompting. Especially the fact that a Tzompantli is a skull rack, which I've wormed into more than one game of Balderdash.

* Further information about Kukulcan is available online at the Gallery of Undiscovered Entitites.