Reviews by Wade Clarke

The Pyramid of Anharos hails from the heyday of Eamon, a time when Eamon authors who were making what you might call serious adventures – rather than jokey or personally expressive ones – were constantly trying to come up with new ways to outsmart (read: destroy) players who by now had about 100 different paths to hack or cheat their way around standard Eamon mechanics. Where swathes of powerful monsters might not ultimately stop a PC, difficult custom-programmed puzzles that paid no heed to the PC's engorged stats or superweapons probably would. Thus solidified the tradition of difficult, player-killing puzzle Eamons.

My speculation is that this author versus player attitude was exacerbated within Eamon because of authors' infuriating visions of character-hacking, upstart players who really needed to be facepunched to the floor. After all, if you had slaved away at making a challenging Eamon adventure, and you'd finally got it out there back in the days when getting it out there was infinitely more difficult than it is now, would you enjoy the thought of having your game cleared promptly by cheaty types?

Pyramid of Anharos definitely facepunches the player to the floor. It's not really wrathful about what it's doing, but if you put a character you like in the disk drive, it's guaranteed that they will be killed and deleted, probably multiple times, assuming you backed them up or cheated in the first place. The reason this is so tiring in Eamon is because you do have to keep cheating, hacking, breaking the game off and switching disks if you want to complete it, restarting every time. Your saves are deleted, too. Pyramid has tough puzzles and one undoable instant death after another. I reached a point where I become too annoyed with all this to want to risk experimenting any more, so I hit the walkthrough.

The puzzle collection and overall coherence of this game is actually pretty good in an adventuresome sense, and that's why I give it three stars – I consider it a worthy example in the Eamon catalogue of the kind of hyper-frustrating aesthetic I've described. I don't recommend playing it today if you're seeking an entertaining challenge; I only recommend playing it to see what these killer games were like.

There's a desert maze you can overcome if you just hire a guide. Glyphs you can read to learn secret words you need to say. Mummies you can search to find magic items. A few annoying riddles to answer. A gauntlet of deadly rooms with increasingly ravaged corpses on their thresholds as a warning. You also need to keep your water supplies topped up or you die of thirst. The main problem with Pyramid is that you get killed just for trying things out. The other problem is that it's particularly variable in its implementation approach. Sometimes important items are picked out, sometimes they're buried in the scenery. Sometimes you find a secret door by just LOOKing again, sometimes you need to examine a specific unhighlighted object. This amounts to you having to try interacting with everything in about four different ways to pluck the needles from the haystack. And in Pyramid, nothing is not in the haystack.

The author, Pat Hurst, was known for throwing some moral content into his Eamons, mostly of the 'help a beggar or pay later' variety. There's another beggar in Pyramid, though weirdly there's also a desert raiders camp where you basically need to pick which group of folks you'll hack down in order to get to the other side – the children, the women or the men. Tom Zuchowski's walkthrough opts for the women; like he says, it's the most direct route. And when a game is as unreasonably difficult as Pyramid of Anharos, you probably don't want any more indirect routes. It has notable production values, but it's also a prototypically devilish player-killer from middle school Eamon.

Baluthar is a fantasy-horror adventure set on a world which has been invaded by the Ivarns, a destructive and technologically advanced race. While this setting informs the events of the game, it does so from quite a distance. The game itself is really about a father following his missing son down the horrible dungeon in the well outside their hut. You play the father, and must first drag yourself out of bed after reading a heavy, non-diegetic quote from the book of Ecclesiastes.

The construction of the sense of the greater world in Baluthar is impressive. The game physically presents just a very specific part of it, but through the ruminations of the character of the father, and through scenic features like paintings and through the anthropology of the game's rather horrible monsters – which are lovingly described – a strange portrait of the whole begins to emerge. I see that the game was criticised upon its release for not letting the player venture out into that whole, but this element didn't bother me. The game's achievement is the grotesque inventory of creatures and weird artefacts it delivers in the space of a single dungeon: a child-ghoul, rooms awash with rivers of fist-sized corpse beetles and a half-alive skull embedded in a laboratory wall amongst them.

Getting around these creatures and overcoming hostile magic are the subjects of the game's puzzles. They aren't too complicated, and there's a completist hint system built in if you get stuck. The writing is vivid, certainly purple at times, overloaded with too-long sentences and prepositions, but given the intensity of the content and the shortish duration of the game, the style does not outstay its welcome for what it's doing. It is also clever in building up the world mythology out of little strokes and asides distributed throughout the prose.

The parser itself is the weak point. It just isn't honed enough to deal with some of the more obvious ambiguities of player intent in relation to the game's content. Baluthar was the author's first game, and programming up the interactions is his obvious site for improvement. But as a fantasy puzzle game with a horror-leaning aesthetic, it is self-contained, imaginative and satisfying.

The game potentially doesn't follow up on the existential weariness expressed in its opening, but I'm not sure. After it was over, I found myself thinking about the way the character of the father had been expressed. Weary at first, single-minded in his quest to find his son, wordless by the end. Perhaps it was the ASK/TELL system, implemented rather feebly in Baluthar for communication between the father and son, that left a querulous feeling on this front.

Bug-ridden, incomplete, and unintentionally very funny.

The opening line is: "This text based game puts you inside a modern American with the intent to steal a very desirable item..." Presumably a kidney.

Room descriptions are definitely from the couldn't-be-bothered school: "There is a single window here but nothing else, really. Some grass I guess."

And for a game which is about breaking into a house to steal something valuable, the burglar protagonist has set some pretty low bars. My favourite response came when I entered GET TOWEL while scoping out the house's swimming pool:

"You pick up the towel. Nice."

If I'm this admiring of my completely unimpeded theft of a used towel from a suburban back yard at 12:34 AM, and apparently also of the towel itself, I don't think I really need to be heisting jewels to satisfy my will to power. Some much simpler and infinitely less dangerous activity is in order for me!

A quick CYOA in which - in game parlance - you die and must restart after every second move because whatever you decide to wear and wherever you choose to go (two choices) you are sexually harassed by a man or men.

The mixture of cuteness and smartarsery in the writing, in combination with the girly pink colour scheme, is broadly funny. This tone extends into the dialogue and content of the harassments. That they are so frequent and display such a variety of dialogue and invention that they acquire an overkill quality in this context which is inevitably funny and exasperating, and makes them palatable in spite of their volume. And the game is in tune with player exasperation. It starts to offer an 'I give up' option at about the right time.

The punchline when you do so is: 'BLAM! Welcome to life as a woman.'

(OK, I admit I added the 'BLAM!')

So this very small game is well structured for its idea. This leaves us with the idea and the question of who it's for. I'm already aware of the specific point that a woman might be sexually harassed whether she is wearing a low cut item or a tracksuit, and this is the game's main point. So telegraphing that at length and then saying 'BLAM!' was not revelatory for me personally, but that doesn't mean it might not be revelatory for someone else. The practicality of the point makes it a good one for people who might not have thought about such things much, or at all.

Based on what's (figuratively) written on the box, a woman need not play Female Experience Simulator. After all, she doesn't need to simulate the experience of being a woman; she's experiencing it. Nevertheless, were she to play it, my punt on what her experience might be like - informed by my experience of playing Female Experience Simulator - is that the game would be likely to hit the recognition spot with a leavening of humour, but obviously without any revelations.

If the game actually advocated hopelessness or hopeless behaviour (eg 'You MUST run home to cry whenever you are sexually harrassed!') I would have flushed it down the toilet to join other self-deludedly defeatist crap like the works of Samuel Beckett. However I think it's obvious that this game is not making a point beyond: A woman can experience sexual harrassment in spite of how she dresses or presents herself. Which is important if not known. A man may learn this by playing. A woman already knows it. The game manages to do this with some humour, and it's pretty light, so it's a stretch to read much further into it.

This review is already in severe danger of brandishing more content than the game itself, so it's time to stop.

The Interstellar Text Adventure materialised on the official website for the film Interstellar in March 2015. The ASCII art title screen and mention of Zork in the first paragraph of the FAQ gave off a vibe that the game might turn out to be more of a novelty promotional item rather than a legitimate standalone entity, but this proved to be an unfair assessment. The Interstellar Text Adventure is a small but narratively solid prequel story to Christopher Nolan's film. The game sees you playing one of the Lazarus mission astronauts, and opens with your waking from cryosleep on an unknown planet. Your goal is to determine if it is fit for human life and then to broadcast your findings so that they can be picked up by any who might follow you. Your companion on the mission is a walking, talking robot called PLEX, whose Humour and Honesty settings can be adjusted, as per the film.

The prose is good at evoking the geographical strangeness and splendours of the mystery planet, and does so at length. The dialogue for the robot's practical observations and bad jokes is also effective. However, it should all have gone in for more proofreading; sometimes it's evident that an automatic spellchecker has made the wrong choice and that the result simply hasn't been picked up.

What may cause a few old hands to smirk is that the game's puzzle content is very traditional. It includes a maze that can be solved by dropping things and a text version of something akin to the old Lunar Lander game, where you must burn fuel at the correct rate to touch the ground at a safe speed. There's also an oxygen limit attached to your spacesuit, but you can refill the suit whenever you return to your ship and you're unlikely to find yourself in real danger of running out.

The puzzles must still be viewed as being of potentially extreme hazardousness, given that there's no proper save feature. You can save the game and return to it later, but you can't manually restore an old saved position; to die is to return to the start. Once I'd confirmed this, I felt no compunction about using the COMMANDS HERE option at critical moments, which handily lists all valid commands for the current situation.

So there is a novelty angle in the game after all, in that it builds on a popular modern film and uses it as an opportunity to demonstrate some old school entertainment to a lot of that film's audience who will be unfamiliar with it. But importantly, what surrounds these puzzles is a genuinely interesting narrative about what may be necessary to support human life on an alien planet. There is also a moral choice to be made about what you will do if you are forced into the position of being the bearer of bad news about this planet's habitability.

The game's parser is certainly clunky. It hardly knows any synonyms, and expects a mixture of simple and very complex commands to be entered in turn. Fortunately these problems are mitigated by the presence of the COMMANDS HERE feature, along with its inevitable embrace by anyone serious about completing the game. There are a few other bugs about, the robot's variable settings are under-utilised, and there are puzzle moments that don't work because important text scrolls away and can't be retrieved.

In spite of these problems, the story delivery works. The potentially complicated business of installing environmental probes around the planet is made accessible and comprehensible. The environmental science musings are interesting. The astronaut's relationship with the robot can be affecting, even within this short span of game, and I found the finale moving. The whole game fits as a satisfying elaboration of one aspect of the film. The weird physicality of the robot is probably the only element you won't perceive if you haven't seen the film, as it is not described in the game, but I think that the rest of the content is capable of standing alone. You'll just comprehend it faster if you've seen the film.

(This is an edited version of a review I originally blogged during the 2014 IFComp.)

Milk Party Palace is a brief CYOA comedy in which you play a slack hotel employee who needs to round up six gallons of milk to appease visiting celebrity Alec Baldwin. Your eye is also on the twin goals of attending Baldwin’s "Milk Party" and finding out what a milk party even is. With the tone of the game being a bit juvo-Hollywood-teen-comedy wack, I wondered if a milk party might turn out to be a celebration vaguely along the lines of a lemon party, but I will not spoil such a revelation in this review.

Milk Party was made in Unity, a rarity for a text game, and demonstrates a clean and efficient link’n’click style. Once I'd reached one of its three advertised endings, I decided I'd had enough. Obtaining the gallons of milk involves cajoling or harassing various hotel guests by negotiating some absurd scenarios in their respective rooms. This absurd comedy seems to be Milk Party’s main purpose, but I quickly fell offside with the game, which caused me to click away impatiently at each encounter in an effort to hurry through it. I felt critical of my unreceptive state afterwards and tried to work out what I hadn’t liked.

It could be as simple a factor as that it all started off with the anticipation of a very short game involving a celebrity, a description which made me interest-weary. Then came the business of chasing up the milk itself, which was almost hard slog. The guests are understandably wary of your bugging each of them for milk, and the encounters are structured around the pains of you trying to extricate the needed gallons in the face of ridiculous verbal and physical hurdles. These hurdles somehow reminded me in nature of the kind of conversations I’d expect to have to suffer in hell, were I to end up there, albeit shorter in length. It's testament to some kind of effectiveness of what the game is doing along these lines that I did feel aggravated by the hurdles, even though they are less "real" than they might be in a parser-based game, where you could become physically or literally stuck against a puzzle. That can't happen to you in Milk Party, but I was still a bit teeth-gnashy throughout the experiences described in the prose.

So even though Milk Party is not all that long, it feels strenuous. Its brand of absurd thwarting is legitimate comedy fodder – and I found some of it funny – but that wasn't enough to drive me to want to engage with its stuff. Deep down in my heart of hearts, I did not feel motivated to care about getting milk for Alec Baldwin, as fine an actor as he is, and thus I did not get into the shenanigans involved in doing so.

(This is an edited version of a review I originally blogged during the 2014 IFComp.)

Sigmund's Quest is the visually colourful point-and-click introduction to an incomplete CYOA style adventure based on a tale from Norse mythology. It runs in a web browser, and its deliberately magnified, pixelated colour graphics fill the screen. Unfortunately this is way too short (I reached the end in about five minutes) to sell or indicate much about the game-to-be except that it will have some charming graphics.

The blurb mentions werewolves and incest; none of either were in evidence in my playthrough. The tip of the story didn't hook me, as the content demonstrated up until the endpoint was too generic a tale of medieval royalty. The prose is simple and a bit workmanlike, with an earnestness which does little to riff off the playfulness that the graphics suggest as an aesthetic possibility.

The author cites the inspiration of King's Quest. This is writ large in the visuals, but the aggressive attitude of the King's Quest games (which I really, really don't miss - both the games and the attitude) is not. Yet I feel there needs to be some kind of attitude here to something. That's what's missing.

Sigmund's Quest competed in IFComp 2014. There was no rule against entering incomplete works, but historically they've faired poorly. The context is 99% of the reason why. If I'm given scores of games to play, why would I want to play one which isn't finished? Or in this case, barely begun? In IFComp, receptivity to a demo can plummet at the moment the player realises it's a demo.

To put an Introcomp spin on what I experienced of Sigmund's Quest, I wouldn't be interested in playing the rest of it if it were to continue in the fashion already demonstrated, and that’s primarily because I'm not trusting the prose or writing to become interesting if they continue in the fashion already demonstrated. Such a perception all comes down to the smallness of the sample space presented by this intro, one way or another.

(This is an edited version of a review I originally blogged during the 2014 IFComp.)

As much as I dislike dwelling on the concept of tropes, Slasher Swamp is an old school (i.e. all puzzling for puzzling sake, sparse prose, several schtick mazes, scores of instant deaths, no UNDO) adventure in which you find yourself a witness to a nonsensical mishmash of splattery horror film tropes after your truck breaks down in the middle of nowhere. It’s a Windows application with the TADS engine under the hood, and the author proffers a small command set which can be used to clear the whole thing. I mapped the game and played to completion in about an hour, but I have to admit I achieved this by brute-forcing the content of locations. And there are a lot of locations.

The prose is a mixture of the atmospheric, the overdone atmospheric, the jokey and the juvenile. It's a tone that will be recognised by anyone who’s played any old school games which indulged their authors.

I mildly enjoyed ticking off a variety of silly death scenes, but they're assembled in this game with no overriding design and no consequence, and thus to little effect. Most objects go unused, including conspicuously important-looking ones. The player has no direction or purpose other than to keep throwing themselves at everything until they can win by a kind of exhaustive attrition of props and puzzles, though there are few puzzles in light of the size of the map. The forest mazes are small but tedious, and the random deaths are numerous, and truly, deeply random.

The worst symptom of the disabling of UNDO is that from any of the scores of rooms with teleport-like one-way exits, you can’t go back. I would often save the game just so that I could try each of the four exits from a room without having to circle the entire map after each teleport.

In the end, Slasher Swamp has all the shortcomings of both old school senselessness and aimless design. The world is the base for something decent, but the hodge podge of blood'n'excrement scenes aren't woven into any specific gameplay content. They’re just there, usually described to you and then gone again all in the space of one move, unrelated to each other, unrelated to progress in the game.

In spite of Slasher's shortcomings, I still got moderate amounts of fun out of it.

As a basic-as-can-be, clickable Choose Your Own Adventure aimed at helping people to read English, or which at least tries to be easy to read, Find the Gold isn't achieving its aims. I expect such a game to be absolutely transparent in its communication. Problems include:

- The way new information fades in over the old information is likely to be visually and mentally irritating to any reader.

- The game prints the consequences of clicked on actions only after reprinting the current room description and hyperlinks. That would be OK for a 16kB game from 1980 but it's not OK for a Twine program from today with educational goals. Actions and their consequences get separated.

- The turn of phrase 'a door in back of you' is weird, and it's used all the time. I think in this context most Americans would still say, 'There is a door behind you.'

- The 'You can only take one thing!' message is important but poorly chosen. If it actually means 'You can only ever hold one thing', players will be confused. I was confused.

- It is difficult to download and open this HTML file-based game in the first place, requiring trickier than average navigation of Google Drive followed by manual dropping of the product on your web browser.

Find the Gold's writing, logic and programming all need lots more work. So does the distribution method.

A game like I'm Fine is pretty hard to assess as a game. It's the hypertext monologue of a young gay man suffering through the most grinding lower layers of depression and hopelessness. Player choices are along the lines of ‘Take the call’ or ‘Ignore this person’, and as per the level of dysfunction of the character, tend to make little difference to his life. If you do take someone's call, you're not doing so with the wherewithal to exact a change on your existence. The communication is likely to be totally ineffectual, still drizzled with the protagonist's conviction that all is useless. I wouldn't expect otherwise from someone in this state.

I don't like assuming stuff about autobiographical qualities in games. Maybe that means I'm destined to miss the point of Twine games like this one. Maybe I'm supposed to start from a position that this is entirely confessional - in which case I would say that the author knows the dirge of the self-hating monologue very well. The experience of this game is the experience of reading the diary of someone who is morbidly depressed. Day upon day, page upon page. This kind of depression scrapes away all of the horizon, leaving only a circling in language which is devoid of individuality and consistent across sufferers who express it.

Rhetorically: Do such confessionals makes for good games? The nature of the phenomenon written about in this game makes it pretty impervious to your interactions or most other kind of digression. You'll read screen after screen of the same self-critical thought processes. If you recognise them, it's variously an unpleasant reminder, an empathy stirrer, but still basically frustrating, because you already know that all of the pages are the same - unless the only attitude you bring towards the whole game is: “I hear you and your pain.” This is an explicitly uncritical gesture that is essential to make at some point towards anyone suffering like this, but this game isn’t the person, and I can't be uncritical towards it when I am explicitly being a critic. A game is an entreaty to become involved using my thoughts, but perhaps more importantly to have some kind of Me or in-body relationship with an avatar. Again I feel this may be the principal difference between the audience that accepts this kind of game as simply an expression, and myself with all of my questions about an expression like this taking the form of a game.

If you don't recognise the thought processes expressed in this game, the experience may become a battle between your interest in perceiving something new (keep playing) and just wanting to get out once you realise that the protagonist is thoroughly convinced of the hopelessness of all actions. There is an overlap here with the mechanic of the much vaunted Depression Quest, but while I view that game as more of a novel tool/primer which can begin to educate people about the experience of depression, I’m Fine is absolutely realistic and out in the deep end.

I won't spoil the ending of the game, but I will say that I liked it and it made me feel that it had been worth persisting. 'Worth persisting' is also decent advice for the protagonist, and conceptually, the end of It's Fine is what brings the most value to the whole. The catch remains that the bulk of the game is spent moving through material that you will find almost verbatim in the diaries of the morbidly depressed or suicidal.

I continue to find it extremely difficult to interpret games like this, let alone stick a star rating on them. ( I know I don’t have to use stars, but I tend to like to be able to do so within the context created by this site. I don’t want to say something like, ‘This is too personal a game to the author for me stick a star rating on it,’ because I don’t think the author gets to decide that if they submit their game work to a site with star ratings.) Perhaps I'm not supposed to find it difficult at all; just to respond to and accept someone's expression. But in art I don't ever want to take an attitude of uncritical acceptance. Not every raw expression will make for a good game experience, no more than every cathartic expression a human being makes will be of benefit to all other humans. The expressive act itself can be the important thing. I understand that my floundering in this confessional game terrain comes because I often feel I’m being presented with the raw act and expected to find the value in that context, rather than that I should consider what decisions have been made to transform that material into a game. I want to do the latter because the material is being presented as a game.