Reviews by cgasquid

You have a surreal world based on an academic subject, with the protagonist being a practitioner of that academic field who seems to have forgotten everything until after they've solved the relevant puzzle. Aside from the weird locations and situations, there are also famous geniuses in the field hanging around to be interacted with, including the Greek hero Achilles (as seen in one of Zeno's paradoxes).

The description above describes both The Chinese Room and A Beauty Cold and Austere. Half of the description also applies to Dr. Dumont's Wild PARTI. The main difference is that while the latter two games apply to the hard sciences (mathematics and physics, respectively) while the former applies to philosophy.

The secondary difference is that the latter two games actually work. I don't mean "work as a game," although that's true as well -- The Chinese Room is incredibly buggy and insufficiently implemented.

You have a ludicrously small inventory limit for no particular reason. You have a container, and objects are shifted in and out of it when you use them as expected. Three specific objects, though, can be put into the sack -- including automatically -- and can't be removed. In two of the three cases that's an instant no-win situation.

"Light lantern with lighter" works, but not "light lantern". The qualiascope requires very specific syntax and functions inconsistently. Certain conversational options not only don't work, but show a parser error message. There are typos throughout, in a few places actually making the meaning of sentences ambiguous. Most of the nouns in the text are unimplemented, in some cases bafflingly so ("trees" is implemented but not "tree"?) Objects are obtained by solving a puzzle, used once, and discarded; the puzzles are strictly one-per-room and the game only contains two rooms without a puzzle in them.

Most of all, though, is the handling of the subject matter. A few puzzles are actually solved through application of philosophy, but more of them seem to be jokes. In a couple of cases actual philosophical dilemmas are given pat, "correct" answers. While it's not uncommon for games in the genre to just randomly dump historical figures into a room, The Chinese Room may be setting a record for useless cameos.

The tertiary difference is that the two better games are both fairly po-faced; the situations are often funny but they aren't wacky. Whether this is good or bad is up to you.

Overall this game has a lot of potential; the writing positively sparkles and there are some great moments. But there's just this feeling that the whole thing is .. rushed.

Note: This is the only game I think I've played where the player character is firmly established as bi.

When you build a game with conversation, particularly conversational puzzles or conversations that set flags, it's not enough for it to just offer a challenge and a compelling story. "The Elysium Enigma" has challenge and it has an interesting story.

What it doesn't have are good characters.

There are essentially three NPCs in this game; your PC is a generic male Star Trek space guy and doesn't really have a personality.

The main NPC is a farm-girl named Leela; she is immediately described as attractive. When you first meet her she's dressed in rags and begging for help; the next time you see her she's stark naked and perfectly happy to walk around in that state indefinitely. You can give her femme accessories like combs and mirrors and talk to her about herself. (Spoiler - click to show)She will also kiss you, unprompted, and you can flirt with her and ask if she's up for a relationship. At one point she even throws herself on a bed. If you're thinking "hey, this is a ridiculous heterosexual male fantasy woman who exists solely to be a sexual object," then I'm right there along with you.

(Spoiler - click to show)Until it's revealed that she's a spy from an enemy space nation that wants to go to war with your space nation. This becomes incredibly obvious when you find a tight-fitting alien jumpsuit that fits her perfectly. Of course, the second she's exposed, she becomes a vicious ice queen who does nothing but try to kill you -- in other words, as soon as she begins acting intelligently she becomes a dire threat.

While one could make the argument that "Leela" is a disguise intended to pander to the PC's libido, she breaks character so briefly and solely for a fight scene so it's hard to consider that an excuse. You can do everything short of actually bedding her, and that feels less like forbearance and more an attempt to keep this from being classified as AIF.

Then you have Petroc, who is the SOLE person in the town and is a grouchy Luddite old man. While he certainly seems more realistic -- this is what you expected when you came to the planet, after all -- he's almost entirely one-note. Talk to him about anything and he'll turn it into a jab at the concept of technology or offer to let you give up your job and settle on the planet. (He makes this latter offer over and over.)

(Spoiler - click to show)That's all I really have to say about Petroc, but I had to have a spoiler here so the one for Leela doesn't make her blatantly obvious.

Finally you have Soolin, your ship's pilot. She, too, is immediately described as attractive. Despite the fact that she spends the entire game sitting in the shuttle trying to get you to give up and come back, she's probably the most likeable and realistic character in the game. Her responses to conversation aren't a syrupy male fantasy nor completely predictable. I liked her.

(Spoiler - click to show)Again, nothing more to say about Soolin.

I also have to say, having no one in the town but Petroc feels like a huge cop-out. You're visiting an alien planet with a vastly different culture! (Spoiler - click to show)Not that the culture has anything to do with the plot, but it's still interesting ... Give us some random NPCs hanging around, maybe split some of Petroc's information among several characters, anything to make this planet not seem so completely deserted.

This is a technically competent game. I only ran into a single bug, and it was just that an automatic numbering system couldn't spell the word "twelfth." It has some pretty good puzzles, like finding the flag, actually using the raft, and obtaining the passwords. The basic plot -- (Spoiler - click to show)a brief and boring mission turning into a hunt for a spy -- is serviceable.

But frankly, when you build a game where conversation is so crucial, having your characters consist of an irritating fanatic, mission control, and little miss Captain-Kirk-Teach-Me-Of-This-Thing-You-Call-"Kissing" feels like the missed opportunity of all missed opportunities.

I'm really not sure what this is meant to be. I won on my first attempt, just by answering the questions (the interviewer's three, and the one question Josh asked me). The actual gameplay was tedious; mostly just (Spoiler - click to show)waiting and passing the plate when indicated.

I tried talking to the other characters, but they all just looked at me funny. In particular, they weren't interested in discussing the particulars of the experiment ... ? Maybe having a menu-based conversation system would help? I didn't talk much and still won, so ...

Are there really people who could (Spoiler - click to show)look three innocent people in the eye and murder them all for a plate of cookies? I mean I guess fascist aliens might, but the experiment doesn't seem to have anything to do with the interview!

(Spoiler - click to show)Cicero was killing his son as an example, performing an evil act to increase his army's efficacy. Nietzsche advocated creating one's own morality system guided by the will to power, but the selfishness of this doesn't extend to coveting very minor material gains. And the alien, while monstrously selfish and evil, was fighting for real temporal power and security. The aliens have things they could offer that the subjects might kill for -- freedom, greater privileges, the ability to send messages to loved ones, etc. -- but they are offering something worth barely anything. How could ANYONE come to the decision to kill for a trivial, transitory gain?

The experiment is faulty, it doesn't prove anything, and from the IF player's perspective it means you mostly just (Spoiler - click to show)keep typing Z and every few turns PUSH THE PLATE. That's Annoyotron level gameplay.

... this kind of game CAN'T be written under time constraints.

When you've got a wordplay game, you really need to be prepared for absolutely anything the player would try. There has to be some kind of feedback, some kind of cluing, some way for the player to think of the rhymes that the author intended. Here, typing anything wrong pops up a reminder that it didn't recognize your rhyme and normal verbs don't work.

What's more, there was a feature in another entry I played where you were informed if you got half the rhyme right. I got a rhyme half right in the second room and just got the same generic message.

Andrew Schultz is very good when taking as much time as is necessary; I very nearly solved Very Vile Fairy File with no hints because the game itself was so user-friendly. But these time-limited competition games just fundamentally do not work.

This story is the direct adaptation of the Call of Cthulhu adventure "The Haunting," typically used as the first adventure in a campaign to get players used to the research-investigate-probably die cycle that the RPG follows. The game follows the investigation point-for-point, and quotes from the adventure repeatedly.

Nowhere in the game or its description do I see any mention of the original adventure, of the fact that this is an adaptation and not a fully original work, or any credit given to the original author. There is a vague reference on the itch.io page, but frankly, that's not enough.

In any case this is a poor adaptation.

The early part of the game functions similarly to Leisure Suit Larry, where you have to know the names of specific locations to drive there, but there is no friendly cabbie to let you know the list of locations if you TALK TO DRIVER.

When you do think of the proper locations, all you do is walk through maybe a single room with an under-detailed NPC and then SEARCH whatever's in the room beyond. You can't LOOK UP things in the card catalog, you can't effectively ask people for help, just get to SEARCHing. The game has a conversation topic sequence but you don't get enough words for it to make a difference.

For all that the room descriptions are lush and detailed, not much else is. There are piles of unimplemented objects and default responses to natural actions, you "see nothing special" about unusual objects, and the shallowness makes solving puzzles impossible without reading the author's mind. There are also situations where your PC "decides" not to do something that would be a natural action, or where only one of two synonymous commands has been implemented.

Finally, the game ends with a randomized combat sequence that is heavily weighted against the PC. I was only able to complete it with repeated undos and retries.

All in all, this is not Ectocomp's shining hour. I'm honestly surprised nobody caught this, as "The Haunting" has been included as a sample adventure in several editions of Call of Cthulhu and is one of those "shared experience" adventures that most players have gone through and love to share their individual stories about.

the one-move game Aisle has been endlessly remixed, parodied, copied, and reiterated at this point. most of the copies have ignored the pathos that was the original's intent, instead focusing on the bizarre responses the original provided for more out-there commands that seemed to hint that the protagonist was suffering from dementia.

in this offering, you are sitting at a restaurant table with your lover, and you intend to leave them. you have one move. every response the parser recognizes will print out a joke interpretation of what you typed as a method of dumping said lover.

the key here is "every response the parser recognizes." most of the things i typed after the obvious were not understood. objects whose presence had been established in one narrative were not implemented, and couldn't be interacted with in the next restart.

it's not that this kind of game can't be done well, though admittedly i can only think of two times it worked: Rematch and I'm Having a Heart Attack from the Apollo 13 collection. in both cases the implementation was extremely deep, and you could (and needed to) build on what you learn about the setting from your previous actions to give you ideas for later attempts.

here i ran into too many brick walls of unimplemented words and lost interest.

+=3 was intended to make the point that a puzzle can have a perfectly logical solution and still be virtually unsolvable.

It does not make this point, as the puzzle does not have a logical solution.

For those not in the know, the goal of the game is to pay a troll by handing it three items. This is the first puzzle and the only puzzle, and you encounter it immediately. However, there aren't three items in your inventory, nor are there any other items to be picked up. So, what to do?

The solution presented is to (Spoiler - click to show)think of objects that have been implemented but that are never mentioned in any descriptions at all, that are omitted from your inventory even though you possess them, and that can't be found by examining yourself -- specifically, clothes.

Unfortunately, as too often happens when an author is trying to lecture the audience, it just doesn't hold up.

First, regarding the response to EXAMINE ME. (Spoiler - click to show)You're described as the adventurer from Zork. There was an object that said adventurer possessed that wasn't implemented: (Spoiler - click to show)the compass, mentioned only in the Alice-in-Wonderland area in Zork II. But it couldn't referred to. It conveys the information that you're a fantasy adventurer -- yet the words BOOTS and ARMOR aren't implemented. Thus, even if someone does think of trying to obtain items by undressing, the first words they're likely to try won't work and they'll give up on the idea!

Second, regarding the game's tiny nature. (Spoiler - click to show)You're said to have just conquered a dungeon, but the game won't let you retreat to gather more items. In the games of this era there was always detritus left over -- the adventurer from Zork would at least have a lamp and sword. There's no logical reason to block this area off; the game is just refusing to allow you to go there because it isn't the intended solution.

And, lastly, regarding the shallow implementation. (Spoiler - click to show)A handful of different words for specific articles of clothing -- modern ones -- are available. Given the esoteric nature of the solution, again, someone isn't necessarily likely to keep trying clothing nouns unless they happen to hit on one first try. Trying to remove my dress or shoes and being told the game doesn't understand would cause me to discard this way of thinking. This game needed a LARGE vocabulary of garments -- and given how little game there is otherwise, there was absolutely time to implement it.

Overall, the reason that this puzzle is "logical but impossible" is because the author's rigged things up that way. All this proves is that IF authors are able to write puzzles where the only way most people can proceed is to read the author's mind or guess the right word, and buddy, that ain't news.

i have mixed feelings about Spiral. when i first began playing i was sincerely impressed; it opens on a very compelling and intriguing situation, with two people bound and gagged facing each other and occasionally assailed by sprays of insecticide. i was immediately curious about how they ended up in this situation and what the connection between the two of them might be. the ability to swap between characters indicated i might be in for some cooperative puzzle-solving, for instance working out how to get out of our bindings and escape.

this was, unfortunately, not to be.

very quickly the characters find themselves transported into their dreams. in (Spoiler - click to show)eco-activist Ross's dreams, a giant machine is destroying the earth to feed a Beast; in the other, Helen has been condemned to hell (and i've been playing IF long enough for that latter to draw an instant eye-roll from me).

note that i had a single-word tag to describe Ross, but none to describe Helen. that's because at no point in this story did i manage to put together any kind of picture of Helen, who she was, what she liked ((Spoiler - click to show)besides meth), or what was important to her. she was a complete cipher.

Ross is sketched out in more detail, but while we hear about his family and friends and learn (Spoiler - click to show)one of them went past "activist" to "terrorist" I still never got a real idea of what kind of person he was.

the shallowness of the protagonists isn't helped by the hollowness of their dream-worlds. there are puzzles, but only one of them, (Spoiler - click to show)working out how the sticker and sickle work, seemed clever or original (and i can remember another game with that puzzle off the top of my head).

one "puzzle" is self-evident and still needs to be done repeatedly. one character has to gather seven treasures -- that's what they are, so that's what i'm calling them -- and most are either sitting in the open or only require you to search a specific obviously-searchable object. there's a potentially intriguing gimmick, (Spoiler - click to show)passing the items between characters, but it's only signaled by one clue that's easy to miss, and i ended up needing to use the walkthrough to find it.

there's also a softlock for Helen where you must have a specific object to get out of a given location, and if you went there without it, hope you saved. the location is ominous, to be sure, but it's no more ominous than literally everything else in the game.

Ross's dreamscape at least has resonance with his personality and beliefs. Helen's seems to come from being (Spoiler - click to show)non-religious in a Christian family with a Christian boyfriend. that could leave these kinds of scars, but given the events of what the game calls "the fateful day" something more related to (Spoiler - click to show)having her stillborn child removed would have made more sense.

the ending was the biggest disappointment. (Spoiler - click to show)it's completely nonsensical. helen and ross are in a train car; whichever character you collected the treasures for first has to use a weapon to kill a misshapen infant. this obviously makes no sense as a resolution for Ross, and doesn't really work for Helen either -- she didn't have an abortion, she had a stillborn baby removed. that is very much not the same thing. this apparently kills one character, then you briefly play as a wasp, and then all meaning goes out the window for a nonsense ending.

also, (Spoiler - click to show)the connection between the two of them was that there was none, nor is there any hint of how they got into this predicament or what any of it meant.

the writing is good and the initial presentation is terrific. but the characters are ultimately shallow, most of the puzzles are lackluster or completely absent, and the ending makes it hard to care about anything that's happened so far.