Ratings and Reviews by Juhana

You play Sam Harlow, a private investigator. The game begins in your office where you receive a phone call and you must escape thugs who want you dead.

The problem with the game is that scenes seem to be tied to locations, not to each other. If you visit the locations in the order the game expects you to, then everything works fine, but if you explore the city in wrong order you miraculously stumble into places you should not be aware of yet and get scenes that would belong to later parts of the story. This makes following the plot a bit like watching Memento.

True to its era there are also random sudden deaths and places where doing anything other than the right action will end the game in death. Another annoyance is that the exits are not described anywhere. Presumably the game came originally with a printed map.

There are some fun parts too in the game. I especially liked a chase scene in the beginning that has speed and action. There's a graphics window that depicts the surroundings in relatively accurate details instead of being just a static location image and the parser is a bit more sophisticated than a simple two-word parser. It recognizes left, right, forward and back (in relation to the graphics shown).

Annoyingly the parser pretends to be smarter than it is: examining a word that the game doesn't know always says "You see nothing special" which suggests that the word was right but it doesn't have a description. Only examine seems to do this, other commands reply correctly "I don't know the word x."

Eric the Unready chronicles the adventures of a fumbling knight, a laughing stock of his peers, who accidentally gets assigned the task of saving the princess. Eric is not a very imaginative choice for the protagonist but the game fortunately manages to keep him in the "lovable loser" category as opposed to the "annoying twit" category that are very very close to each other.

The interface has several windows that are, among others, a compass rose, a picture of the location, an automap, a list of available commands and a list of objects in the location. The lists are not of much use to experienced players and can at times even be considered minor spoilers but they can be hidden from the view giving the text area more room.

The jokes vary between hit and miss, fortunately there are more hits than misses. References to popular culture and other games of the era abound. The humor and the game's world in its absurdness resembles Monty Python very much; influence from The Holy Grail is obvious.

Resemblance to Monty Python doesn't end with the humor. The gameplay is very episodic and after the player has finished with one set of puzzles in one location, he is transported into new location with a new set of puzzles. There's not much to tie the scenes together. While this is usually not considered the best design choice, it works here for the same reason it works for TV's sketch shows: the jokes don't have a chance to get old.

As the game was published in 1993 and has been out of print for many years now it might be hard to get your hands on it, but if you can find a copy it's definitely worth playing.

Slouching Towards Bedlam was the game that introduced me to modern IF so I might not be the most objective person to review the game. Still I am probably not far off saying that the game is too often forgotten when we are talking about the modern classics.

The game is about exploration and finding out what has happened in the asylum where the protagonist works. Assisting him is Triage, a hearwarmingly steampunky computer/dictation machine, that can give details and information of the surroundings. While it doesn't actually do anything other than follow the protagonist around and show information on request it is an important part of the whole and the game would be seriously lacking without it.

What brings Slouching Towards Bedlam above others is the way it builds and sustains the atmosphere and mood. The only other game that accomplishes the same is Anchorhead and I would be hardpressed to choose which one does a better job. Another nice touch is how meta-game commands (UNDO, SAVE, RESTORE etc) have been given an in-game explanation. They fit seamlessly into the story, not feeling like artificial additions.

The game is not entirely without flaws, of course. Some gameplay mechanics are unnecessarily awkward (for example making the player type long strings of numbers to a machine one at a time) but my main quibble is that some puzzles feel like they are there only because "IF must have puzzles". They break the mood and yank the player out of the game's world. The authors could have trusted their creation to work as a game without locked doors and hidden items.