Ratings and Reviews by Juhana

So here we have Textfyre's first finished product, the first serious attempt at commercial interactive fiction in a long while. The story is of a street urchin who is destined for greater things in life in a generic non-magical medieval world. This is part 1 of 3 and the story ends in a cliffhanger, so expect to pay for the whole trilogy if you want to see a full story.

The custom-made FyreVM interpreter imitates a book spread where the text is on the left page and illustrations on the right page. Mostly the picture page shows just the main character and occasionally locale pictures, and most of them are what look like halfway-done sketches. At the moment the illustrations are not much more than a waste of half the screen. Apparently Textfyre is adding more pictures for the upcoming versions so this is likely to change. The map spread is nice though, it's like a built-in virtual feelie. I was hoping it could be printed out to make it a real physical feelie too.

The puzzles are mostly trivial and the solutions are usually spelled out by the story or accompanying NPCs. The player is left to type commands given more or less explicitly in the previous paragraph. This is arguably more interactive than "press enter to continue" but not much. From this naturally follows that the story is not only so easy that it could even be called puzzleless, but also heavily railroaded. Locations are mostly void of anything else than the one thing you need for the plot to continue and in many places there's nothing else to do than the glaringly obvious action that advances the script.

The main character is suffering slightly from a lack of personality other than the ability to be nervous of everything. The (Spoiler - click to show)cross-dressing aspect has potential to say something meaningful, but unfortunately the narrative never leaves the comforts of reinforcing gender stereotypes (and this game has no "heteronormativity off" command!). This is of course understandable when considered that Textfyre intends to market the game to schools and libraries, but that doesn't make the underlying attitudes any less annoying.

That's a lot of nitpicking for a game that's still far better than the large bulk of amateur work, but if you're aiming high, you'll be judged against higher standards. For a commercial venue there's a surprising amount of rough edges, for example standard "You see nothing special about x" replies to examining many things.

There's a silver lining here: easy puzzles, handholding from start to finish, and flashy interface make this a perfect game to introduce someone to interactive fiction. I would not hesitate to recommend it to someone new to the medium if they are willing to pay for it. The only minus in this plan is that the most freeform non-railroaded gameplay is right at the beginning which might put off some people.

The existing IF community is not the target audience of The Secret Letter and it shows. Last time I wished for a version made for children - now I find myself wishing for a version made for adults. It's hard to predict how Textfyre's potential customers will react to the game. The expectations of a greater audience are often not the same as a niche group's so there's a good chance that it will find fans from outside the current IF community. It'll be interesting to see how the company and its products evolve over time. The next publication is supposed to be more to the tastes of current IF players, so I'm looking forward to that.

Madam Spider's Web is another "fractured fairytale". You are a housemaiden in a giant spider's house, but you can't remember where the cleaning supplies are or what your tasks are or how you even ended up there. (Amnesia must be pandemic among IF player characters.)

The puzzles are easy and interesting and there's a sense of exploration, even though the area to explore is quite small. It won't take long to get through to the ending. The puzzles are well clued and I didn't have to look at the walkthrough or use hints even once when I played. That does not happen very often. For hardcore puzzle fans this might be a disappointment but for me it's important that the puzzles don't interrupt a good story. The implementation is thorough and I didn't run into any bugs.

The ending is somewhat unfortunate because (Spoiler - click to show)a) it's been done many times before (and it's been done better) - the player's reaction is not "oh, clever!" but "oh, this again." and b) the connection with the preceding game is not that obvious. If you're going to make a dream world (a dream within the fictional world, that is) you should take extra care to make sure that the allusions to the real world are there, otherwise the dream world, and the entire work, loses its meaning for the reader completely. (To be fair I might have just missed the point entirely.)

On the plus side the ending you see is based upon your actions during the game, not just the final move; on the minus side without looking at the walkthrough it's not immediately obvious which actions affect the ending or even that there are multiple endings.

If you only look at the basic setting, the gameplay and the length, this would be a perfect game for children. Unfortunately (Spoiler - click to show)gruesome imagery in the end and some scary characters make this unsuitable for that purpose. It would be nice to see a version made especially for children where selected parts of the game would be changed or left out.