Reviews by cgasquid

Coming at this from 18 years of being polyamorous and year 15 of a committed polyamorous relationship.

Okay. I'm not giving this game one star because it's badly coded, or because it doesn't work. I'm giving it one star because it is portraying a relationship type that many people, including myself, find to be a functional, stable, enriching environment -- and it's portraying it in an incredibly destructive way.

NUMBER ONE! Polyamory is not something everyone can do! It is not a "better" or "more enlightened" kind of relationship, it's just a different one. For Sarai to drag a person unsure about polyamory and hurl them into the middle of a complicated, adversarial relationship is absolutely unconscionable; these are things that need to be decided carefully and experimented with, and everyone has to be on board. And it's very clear that not everyone was, not that Sarai particularly seemed to care.

NUMBER TWO! Polyamory is not transitive! If I'm dating Alice, and I'm dating Bob, that does NOT mean that either Alice or Bob is in any way obligated to date each other! (I mean, for one thing sexual orientations are going to interfere; I could be a bi man dating a straight woman and a gay man.) This expectation is one of the biggest RED FLAGS in polyamorous relationships.

The fact that Sarai just DECLARED a change in the composition of the relationship without sitting everyone down in open communication and discussing the addition of a partner isn't polyamory, it's tyranny.

NUMBER THREE! Polyamory is all about communication! One of the very first things that happens is that Sarai tosses you together with one of her partners without saying the slightest thing about what you're expected to do. You and the other partner have to figure it out on your own. That is not something that should ever, ever happen.

In my playthrough, the relationship exploded (just as it inevitably would in real life). But it didn't feel like this was being portrayed as inevitable ... it felt like this was a losing condition in a game I was expected to win.

Sarai isn't the center of a polycule. She's an arrogant egomaniac who takes advantage of a friend's homelessness to drag her into her personal harem. It was absolutely transactional -- Jerri gets to stay with Sarai only if she accepts a sexual relationship not only with Sarai but also with several complete strangers. There are words for that.

Now, if this were just a story that happened to be about a destructive pseudo-polyamorous relationship, that would be one thing. But I really don't get that feeling; this is represented as an example.

Polyamorous people are a small minority that most people only have false, negative ideas about ... if you're going to write a work about a small minority that confirms everything false and negative that's said about that minority ... you bally well need a DISCLAIMER at the front that you're not trying to represent that community accurately! Again ... if you don't ... there's a word for that, too.

Urgh. This story made me feel so strongly I resorted to capital letters.

i'm going to come right out and say it: the writing in this game is gorgeously disgusting. the horror is real and visceral, and as you begin investigating it things just continually splatter from bad to worse. even images that might otherwise be comical (like the (Spoiler - click to show)laundry chute) have a cleverness to their descriptions that causes the gorge to rise and the eyes to be averted.

you are a test subject in an experiment run by a (Spoiler - click to show)corrupt and evil corporation ((Spoiler - click to show)really, did i even need to spoiler that?). as such, you've developed abilities beyond mortal ken, used with the new CONCENTRATE command. it takes some time to get the idea of how it works, and i kept finding new wrinkles in my powers as the story went on.

in terms of dream-logic, the horror is consistent and makes sense. you can never be quite sure if what you're dealing with is some kind of magic or merely a branch of science that humanity is better off not exploring. you find many diary pages and journals written by the doctors and others involved in your care, and it's very easy to start to care about certain ones (and to want to bring certain others on charges of crimes against humanity).

so, why three stars instead of five? well ... One Eye Open was clearly not adequately tested. there are constant issues with disambiguation any time you're in a room with multiples of the same object, and there are so many objects with the same noun. the notes your character carries are concatenated into a single object; why not the keys? and why isn't there a better way of navigating notes, possibly using the Invisiclues-style menu system that doesn't seem to have been used at all?

there are also cases where there only seems to be a single command that can accomplish the task. i knew exactly what to do in the (Spoiler - click to show)Autopsy Room but I couldn't get the parser to understand any of multiple phrasings. disambiguation stuck its oar in here as well, because (Spoiler - click to show)any attempt to refer to parts of the corpse, including the vital corpse hand, is redirected to the corpse's mouth instead. a situation like this, where you're locked down and being carefully timed, shouldn't have these issues.

finally, while it's possible to get a good ending, getting the correct ending is basically a matter of luck. throughout the game, you'll experience (Spoiler - click to show)flash-forwards to members of the staff dying in assorted horrible ways. in all but one such situation, there's nothing you can meaningfully do. but that one time, unless you ignore the chaos around you and take an unclued action, you're locked out of the true ending. you can't even replay the sequence to try again. this is not fair to the player at all!

overall, there are so many good ideas here. such a good story, albeit one firmly within genre conventions. clever puzzles. but One Eye Open needs more testing and debugging to fix the disambiguation errors, make your notes less of a chore to access, and to fix that one burst of deep unfairness.

this is not a piece of interactive fiction, or even really interactive at all. it's a completely linear narrative that uses some hypertext tricks to good effect.

like many similar works, this is an attempt to generate empathy by putting the player in the shoes of someone from an oppressed minority, then relating a very painful and very accurate example of how crushing and damaging that oppression is.

it's cathartic to read as a trans person. but i don't know if this kind of project can ever really have the desired effect, because the people who truly hate us want us to suffer. they don't experience empathy for us. a TERF would read something like this and probably laugh.

but maybe i'm just too cynical and old.

five stars for the writing, but again note, this is not a game or even particularly interactive. it's an essay in hypertext form.

There's not much to this one. A small number of rooms, shallowly implemented, many of them either empty or containing exactly one object. There are no real NPCs (there's one other character, but he seems completely unreactive). You can easily access the "waiting room" location (the place where objects that are not placed in a room are found) despite the game not otherwise being "meta."

Most of the puzzles are obvious, repetitive, or completely unmotivated. The shallow implementation can be a headache, with objects that are very different having no disambiguation.

It's a lot like someone's first IF, the one they write to learn how to code and only share with their friends -- a random layout of rooms, a paucity of interactive objects, and a few very basic puzzles.

There isn't anything specifically offensive about it, though; it's just a very basic work without much to it.

a very short treasure hunt in which you, the angel Gabriel, must return to heaven but cannot until you have collected the seven colors of the rainbow. you are assisted by Demeter, your (presumably?) mortal lover. (it is clearly not the Greek goddess Demeter.)

the writing is snappy and the relationship depicted is sweet. Gabriel is an adorable nebbishy type and Demeter -- you know, i mean i could describe the character, but looking at the author's name and the apparent resulting self-insert, i'm not comfortable describing a real person i don't know.

if this were a longer piece, perhaps spreading the colors out further or adding more tasks, i'd feel better about it ... but it's only two rooms, and while the colors are kind of hidden, they're not hard to find and the game is over in less than ten minutes. i don't have enough time to really understand the characters.

aside from its length, which is auctorial choice even if i don't agree with it, i had three problems with this game, all spoilers:

1. blue. (Spoiler - click to show)while i have seen pants that are the kind of bright, pure blue called for by the scepter, i've never seen a pair of jeans that were that kind of Platonic blue -- manufacturers tend to go for a light blue or a very dark one. i'd very much assumed my jeans were an "off" color like the burgundy furniture, and found they worked while looking for an Easter egg.

2. indigo. (Spoiler - click to show)the sky can appear indigo at sunset at high altitudes under very specific conditions. there's nothing in the game to indicate that those conditions are present. the clue is "what would you color with a blue-violet crayon," which i'd think would vary by child. also, you're supposed to have to touch the object, and the indigo light is scattering in the upper atmosphere.

3. (Spoiler - click to show)the game cannot be completed without getting at least two suggestions from Demeter -- both yellow and violet involve items that are only gained by asking him. under normal circumstances this would be good ... BUT talking to Demeter is presented as the game's hint system. it does not make me happy when a game is only solvable with hints.

but overall it's sweet and sappy and adorable, and being this length and this easy makes it a kind of like a Christmas card to send to someone you love.

Zork Zero, i hate you.

i hate your massively overblown size, mostly full of empty rooms with no purpose. i hate the excessive copy protection, with many promising puzzles (including the game's central puzzle) turning out to be "do you have the documentation" checks.

but the reason why Zork Zero feels like such a cop-out, such a zero-effort mess?

Towers of Hanoi!
fox, chicken, and grain!
Hi-Q!
Nim!
measuring liquid using two vessels!
true and false statements written on doors!
the executioner's paradox!
a freaking rebus!

what in the heck are all of these ancient bewhiskered cliches -- many of them extremely belabored and move-intensive -- doing in a game produced in the twentieth century? let alone in a Zork game, a series known for the cleverness and wry sense of humor in its puzzles?

the worst part is that these old chestnuts make up the game's better puzzles. the original ones, like catching the flies, breaking the couple's curse, and the fungus puzzle, are utterly half-hearted. there's no depth to them; frequently they're mostly just hauling the right objects across the bloated map.

about the only puzzle in this game that felt truly satisfying and Zorkian was breaking the hunger curse. i had to use a variety of objects in weird ways to achieve a completely loopy goal.

but everything else ... this is just a miserable slog of busywork and cliche. i understand making a game this huge is difficult, so there's a temptation to just fill it up with junk so you can boast about the number of puzzles ... but you know, you could just have made the game smaller and actually good.

generally, there are two types of hard games. in a game with fake difficulty, the problem is conveying to the story exactly what you're trying to do because you can't seem to figure out how to phrase it so the game will understand you. in a game with real difficulty, you have a wide variety of tools to tackle the situations you encounter, but each puzzle will require a different sort of lateral thinking and creativity.

a game with fake difficulty breeds frustration. a game with real difficulty induces obsession until you finally crack it.

Spellbreaker is absolutely a game with real difficulty. despite the surreal, disjointed landscape you're exploring, it's totally immersive. i never ran into the kind of blank incomprehension you see in a bad game; it was always just a matter of thinking harder about the puzzle and persevering.

this would be a five-star game, but i'm deducting a full star for the bank puzzle. it's derivative, uncreative, has iffy implementation, and even following the best-written walkthroughs i've never gotten better than a 50% chance of getting it right. (unfortunately, the use of stock puzzles would only get worse over time, hitting its nadir in Zork Zero.)

wordplay games have always been a tough genre to get right. on the one hand, you want to have consistent rules for word manipulation, so the player isn't just sitting there guessing words. you want to have the puzzles actually fit together into a larger picture, whether that's a treasure hunt (Letters from Home) or a detailed plot (Counterfeit Monkey). you need to make sure the game is tuned to the language, not to pop culture references, to ensure the game doesn't become incomprehensible five years from now.

out of the short stories that make up Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It ... one, perhaps two, fit any of these criteria.

the general pattern of these stories is to recognize the kind of "wordplay" at work in the story, then just examine items and type every example of that wordplay you can think of. in "Playing Jacks," you have to know a lot of words that have "jack" in them. in "Shopping Bizarre," if you see an item, you type its homophone. the biggest offender here is probably "Eat Your Words," which is just see object, type cliche naming object, continue.

there is a single highlight here: "Manor of Speaking." it's a haunted house game where each ghost has a different obsession, and you play them off against each other and solve actual puzzles riffing off wordplay. it's brief but delightful.

by contrast, the worst of the lot is "Act the Part," which requires the player to be familiar not only with unfunny gags from downmarket 1950s sitcoms, but also to recognize a phrase that is as opaque to me now as it was back then ((Spoiler - click to show)"better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"). this stuff was dated when it came out. (ironically, the opening-move puzzle in "Act," despite being incredibly frustrating, is one of the few that's stood the test of time.)

similarly culture-specific and extremely difficult are "Buy the Farm" and "Shake a Tower." "Farm" is at least well-written (most of Nord and Bert has nothing but short, terse responses) but some of the expressions in it are already passing out of English parlance. "Tower" uses spoonerisms, but it's also very cruel, utterly nonsensical, and nearly impossible to get a perfect score on.

people talk about the Oddly Angled Rooms from Zork II being too culture-specific. at least there there are at least three countries whose inhabitants should get the joke.

if all of this were beautifully written, or tied together in a coherent fashion, it might be another story. but it's just checking off disparate scenarios until you're allowed to go on to the last one, "Meet the Mayor," which is basically the same as "Buy the Farm" but with much more obscure language. (some of the phrases in "Mayor" are so obscure that even now, almost thirty years later, i've still never heard anyone use them.)

most of the games that Nord and Bert inspired did the job better. i was a huge Infocom fad, to the point of a fault, but there are still a couple of their games that i just can't defend. this is one of them.

a small number of locations, many of them containing nothing but scenery and background.

an NPC who follows you around and can be asked about things, and whose presence is necessary in certain situations.

a small number of objects to be collected to solve a handful of puzzles.

The Temple is very consistent with commercial IF in the late 1980s. it's a short game, with a couple of "read the author's mind" moments (it would never have occurred to me that (Spoiler - click to show)the translated book changes the descriptions of other items when carried, instead of it being an object i could CONSULT or READ) and lucky coincidences, but nothing truly awful. the prose is better than average, and i got at least moderately attached to the NPC by the end of the game.

a good way to spend a couple of hours. with a little polish it would be a classic short game.

Beet the Devil primarily shines in its writing. nearly every sentence is bursting with the PC's personality, from his individual judgments of the goings-on around him to his phlegmatic reaction to very extraordinary events.

that said, Beet the Devil is essentially a long, linear corridor, with the useful items front-loaded in the first few locations. you never have more than one puzzle to work on, and most of the solutions involve using vegetables for purposes they were clearly not intended for.

a small amount of lateral thinking is needed in some places, though if you WAIT at a location for a few turns you can usually get some kind of indication of how to proceed. the final single-turn puzzle is so obvious yet so difficult to think of that it's probably a masterpiece (on par with Madventure's).

on the negative side, the implementation is a bit shallow. TALK TO would have been nice, given the extraordinary number of puzzle NPCs, and many reasonable solutions to problems didn't work because the parser had trouble with prepositional phrases. as noted, the game is linear, so if you're stuck on a puzzle you're going to stay stuck. the few places that it seems the game is about to open up, it turns out only one exit is usable. you can get hints from the PRAY command, but they only tell you which object to use, not how.

overall, the writing is worth the half-hour of your time it'll probably take to make it through. i'd love to see something more elaborate from the author.