Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

...then how will the Aardvark learn to swim?"

A small taste of the sometimes absurd sense of humour that pervades Augmented Fourth

King Goosen of Papoosen did not enjoy your rendering of "Ode to a Duck". Consequently, you and your trusty trumpet are thrown down the pit, where you discover a community of sorts living at the bottom of the volcano.
Determined to make it back top-side, you must now overcome the obstacles that stand between you and the closed off ladder to the castle. You have your wits and your magically enhanced trumpet.

Instead of memorizing magic scrolls, in Augmented Fourth you must obtain and learn music sheets. Each of the melodies has its own effect on your surroundings and as such functions as a wizard's spell. This magic system is worked out in detail. If you play a particular ditty in a location that is not the intended puzzle-room, the surroundings will still react, sometimes hilariously. The actual effects of the spells are mostly natural phenomena (rain, gravity, ducks...), so it is not too difficult to judge which spell/song to play to solve a particular puzzle.

The game keeps a nice balance between magical solutions and more prosaic adventuring puzzles. Along with summoning ducks through trumpet-playing, you will also need to do the usual bit of exploring of the cave and manipulating of the objects.

The cave under the volcano has a splendid map. The adventure starts off in the center of the volcano, also the central hub of the area. All directions save one are open for exploration from the beginning, and multiple puzzles are accessible from the start. Almost without noticing though, you will have less and less options to pursue, effectively pushing you to the bottleneck in the northern quadrant. From there on out, the game shifts gears and the story gets on fast-moving railroad tracks to the hilarious finale.

A finale that is foreshadowed throughout the game in small amusing intermezzos narrating what is happening with the King up top, who is spiraling down to ever more insanely funny despotic madness.

Modern IF is often lauded for the way the puzzles are seamlessly integrated into the story. Augmented Fourth turns this on its head: the story is woven seamlessly around the puzzles, which are without a doubt the real reason of existence for this game. In many of those puzzles, well-known adventuring tropes are averted, subverted, completely avoided or twisted in a knot. Breaking down the player's expectations often leads to fantastically comic situations, when a certain build-up of tension is suddenly relieved in an unforeseen direction.

There are also a number of playthings that are just that: items to play around with. They're not even red herrings (of which there are also a fair number...), just opportunities to idly while away the time. In the same vein, there are a number of books that provide hints; they mostly provide page after page of completely unnecessary sillines.

A very silly, moderately difficult and very smoothly playing puzzle-romp.

Isaac Newton: Mathematical Lawmaker.
Charles Babbage: Father of the Computer.
Abraham-Louis Breguet: Master-Horologist.

These intellectual giants played front-stage roles in a cultural movement during the 17th and 18th century where natural phenomena were being pulled out of the realms of chaotic randomness or transcendental intentionality and grasped in terms of their inner mathematical and mechanical orderliness.
The passage of Time ( Abraham-Louis Breguet), the patterns of Thought ( Charles Babbage), the regularities of Motion and the intricacies of Calculation ( Isaac Newton) were captured both in logical/mathematical deductions in the mind and in mechanical contraptions of cogs and chains.

While aiding in freeing the human intellect of religious dogmatic thinking and opening up the path of naturalistic explanation and exploitation of the world, its mysteries and its resources, this mechanistical worldview carries within itself a rigidity not dissimilar to religious dogma. Once Nature is caught in Logic and Clockwork, it is unchanging and deterministic.

The world of The Shadow in the Cathedral exists as an exemplar of this rigid-mechanistic historical path. The cathedral from the title is a worshipping place for the three saints mentioned above. Worshippers make the sign of the lever when they PRAY. Priests gather around an altar and bow to the clockwork in the tower. Mechanical order replaces/equates divine order, with very similar institutions to uphold that order.

“The candles move in the space between floor and ceiling, the way the stars move between Earth and the Great Darkness of Heaven.They follow winding metal tracks that cross and recross along the length of the Great Hall, and as they move, pools of light form and then dissolve, so that some parts of the chamber are brightly lit at times whilst others are quite dark. The candles move day and night, with automatic systems to replace those that burn down to the stub.”

This paragraph might seem somewhat wordy, but it captures the atmosphere of the game-world perfectly by elaborating on something as down-to-earth as candlelight while the bigger background is never laid out this explicitly. Instead it has to be inferred from these detailed minor descriptions. To this reviewer’s preferences, a leather-bound tome on the development and history of the clock-bound civilization to LOOK UP BABBAGE would have been very welcome indeed.

Wren is a lowly clock-polishing grease monkey in the Abbey. While cleaning the Abbot’s grandfather-clock, he overhears a conspiracy between a mysterious Figure in Grey and his Abbot to mumblemumble…

When even the Archbisshop will not hear him, it is upon Wren himself to unravel the nefarious scheme.

Story takes precedence in every way in this game. The authors have gone to great lengths to eliminate annoyances for the player. When there is an important action to be taken, numerous but well-considered commands act as a trigger for that action to further the plot. There are calm exploratory and conversational parts where both Wren and the player can catch their breaths and learn more about the city. There are frantic chase sequences where it seems both Wren and the player will be out of breath a moment later but still push onward.

And of course, there are obstacles. Many, many obstacles. Not one of them breaks the flow of the story. And some of those puzzles are beautiful. Beautiful in that they combine storytelling, logic, engineering, associative reasoning and storytelling (yes, I meant to write that twice…) to engage the player and commit the Wren-and-Player team more and more to solve the mystery together.

Two puzzles are extraordinarily good. They are also great examples of the breadth of reasoning the player is asked to do . One is a completely down-to-earth physics question ((Spoiler - click to show)the door in the warehouse). The other is an excercise in associative programming ((Spoiler - click to show)the clockwork computer).

During Wren’s investigation, he will meet several people on his way, both friendly (good for Wren and the player needing clues) and malignant (great for the authors and the reader needing suspense). Although the conversations are ASK/TELL, they do not descend in awkwardness. Sometimes the characters won’t answer, but they are almost always believably occupied with other worries or tasks of their own. And even while they are otherwise engaged, their dismissive answers make sense in context. Nifty programming and great attention to both the detail of the immediate surroundings and the big picture of where Wren has gone before.

The Shadow in the Cathedral is a remarkable feat of intertwined puzzle-engineering, worldbuilding and philosophy.

Of course it is sad to have the story broken off after what should be the first chapter of a series. A word of wisdom to the prospective player: let the clock’s tick-tock take you to the bell, and let your imagination take over from there…

I loved every minute, hour and day of this game.

And a small but hopefully annoying heads-up to the authors: the chapter-titles are misaligned. for example: (Spoiler - click to show)the chapter-title says “The Rooftops of St. Philip” after the chase across the rooftops. By then Wren is already safe with Covalt. This is just an example. Every chapter’s title (except 1 & 2) comes after the story it’s supposedly about. A grating flaw in such a great piece. I would find it hard to believe that you would not return to The Shadow of the Cathedral to put the titles in order. (or is this a reflection of the rebellion against the clock?).

It all begins with a rather awkward protagonist to control: a pig (which can alledgedly sniff out wizards...) Since pigs walk on four feet and have no opposable thumbs, a lot of commands are thrown out the window by nature of the PC. And although pigs are known to be very clever animals by those who study them (pigycists?), this particular pig does seem to rise even above normal intelligence levels of other members of the species Sus scrofa. For one thing, it can read...

Seeing that this smart pig is somewhat limited in the handiness department, it must find other ways to further its goals. Cue NPCs. By virtue of an excellent grasp of human psychology, our protagonist-pig can manipulate the other characters into following it around and it nudges them to interact with objects or other characters through very deliberately SNIFFing of pieces of the surroundings. Different characters will act upon this sniffing in different ways, according to their nature.

One of the pig's major ways to solve puzzles is therefore to choose the right NPC to come along and do the hands-on work. Instead of switching between PCs with their special abilities, here our pig-protagonist has to switch between NPC accomplices. The way this is handled in-game is both elegant and hilarious.

The puzzles flow seamlessly from the story and the setting. Some of them are pig-adjusted variations on standard adventure-fare, while others are truly surprising and original.

The writing is fresh and crisp, with a truly great comedic touch. There is lots of physical slapstick comedy, but at least as much of the humour comes from the pig's observations of the humans. Our pig always keeps a certain distance and so can easily see through the notions about identity the NPCs have about themselves.

Through these observations and the development of the story, what started as a laugh-out-loud comedy evolves into a character-driven drama by the finale. The Aesop that becomes clear near the end could have been cliché and heavy-handed, but the lightness and subtlety of the writing lifts it far above a finger-waving moral-of-the-story.

Truly one of the greatest games I have ever played.

On the surface, Magic Realms; Sword of Kasza is a nice but not too memorable oldschool quest. After being framed for the murder of the King's messenger, you escape and learn that the evil Rerex has reawakened. His first plan was to possess the magistrate of your town and let him throw you in jail to get you out of the way, for you have been foretold to be "The Chosen One".

But now you are free! After proving your worth to the king, you are sent on a quest to recover the fabled "Sword of Kasza".

The map is interesting. Five magical realms are accessible from a single convenient hub-junction. Each realm holds part of the Magical Sword or some wisdom to be gained or a foe to be vanquished in order to get closer to Rerex. The realms are self-contained puzzle areas. You do have to bring your backpack with you upon entering each one, but everything needed to advance in the game is in the realm itself. (The reason you need your backpack is to avoid the inventory limit and, more importantly, to have your beef jerky with you, should you get hungry...)

Sword of Kasza is fairly light on puzzles. Most are straight from the old build-your-own-adventure box for beginners. There is a code-breaking puzzle which left me scratching my head even after checking the walkthrough. And there is one truly fun variation on the distract-the-guards theme (although not that original).

There is a great and deceptively simple solution to getting into the king's castle. It relies on the player truly imagining what to do in the PC's place.

Instead of more intricate puzzles, the game relies more on the player finding the appropriate actions to trigger story-events. Sometimes these have a great dynamic effect (talking to the right NPC opens up a whole new set of locations), sometimes they are not so well executed (you have to SIT to advance the story...)

Nearing the endgame, there are some rather nice action-sequences. The text here is timed for dramatic effect, and although it may be too slow for some, I enjoyed this.

So far, a run-of-the-mill oldschool fantasy adventure that would not stand out among the hundreds of others of its kind.

The true strength of Magic Realms; Sword of Kasza lies in its completely new approach to player-immersion. Getting the player to forget she is playing a game was an explicitly stated goal of the Infocom Imps.

Authors have tried different ways to absorb the player in their stories. Some weave a story so breathtaking the player cannot help but be moved by the characters' fate. Some go to extreme lengths in building a detailed fictional world to mentally transport the player there. One step further, they might try to achieve a near-perfect simulation where almost every possible action the player thinks of is accounted for.

Here, the author takes a different path into the player's mind. Since interactive fiction is a textual medium, and players of interactive fiction may on average be considered to be more sensitive to language and writing than mere mortals, author James Malette decided to emulate the hardships of the questing hero in the player's experience through the cunning use of linguistic torture.

The most brutal yet least sophisticated example is the simple misspelling. "Messenger" becomes "messager". "Corridor" becomes "corrdior". These are the blunt-force weapons used to make the player feel the Hero's pain.

Of course, multiples of these can be joined together in a single sentence to act as a textual cluster-bomb. Consider this example:

> "This area has a fense inclosing a large field where horses are glazing."

A well-chosen rearrangement of letters in a single word can give new meaning, baffling the reader:

> "The village of Moon has been destoryed by the hand of Rerex!"

Far beyond mere destruction, we are facing a villain who can wipe a village from the story with a handwave!

More subtle than these are the slowly grating "mistakes" that get under the player's skin, making shouting at the screen or even throwing the computer against the nearest wall a real possibility.

> "You're" is "your". Every single time.
> Plural nouns become "noun's". Almost every time.
> The English past tense is written by gluing "-ed" to the verb. Just enough so it catches you by surprise every time.

The foulest weapon of all in this linguistic arsenal though is the dreaded "Seemingly Random Semicolon". It can show up in an innocent list of objects where, although painful, it is at least obviously out of place. It also rears its head in the middle of a descriptive paragraph, forcing the player to doubt her interpretation and reread the offensive sentence over and over, each time with a different emphasis. A truly haunting experience.

> "Beware the traps within, for amany bold knight entered; none never returned."

With this masterpiece I leave you to ponder the power of text, and text alone, to inflict harm upon the player comparable to the harm we put our protagonists through when exploring interactive fictional worlds.

Conveniently for the author of The Plant, his protagonist's car breaks down right in front of a sketchy detour leading to a mysterious plant off the main road. Equally convenient is the fact the boss of said protagonist is very eager to explore said plant...

While the circumstances leading up to the start of the game are a bit convoluted, once the story starts, I got drawn in fast and deep. The main reason for this is the excellent writing and pacing. The player's curiosity is piqued along with the PC's, and the boss's nudging adds some extra motivation to find a way into this mysterious facility.

The puzzles provide good pacing to the story, forcing the player to slow down and take note of what is happening. A good deal of actions trigger cutscenes, giving movement to the game/story, instead of being a static stage with the PC walking around it.

I did not encounter one bug, and only one puzzle that could be a bit more player-friendly in design ((Spoiler - click to show)When moving atop the glass ceiling, you have to LOOK each time you stop to see the particulars of your surroundings). Everything else is smooth, well clued (that doesn't mean easy...) and executed perfectly. The technical skill shown in the design of this game makes sure the player trusts that even though she is stuck, there is a way to win the game, and that it makes sense. (Lord of the IF-realm knows I've played games not so trustworthy...)

I'm still of two minds regarding the finale. It seemed like a profound breach of tone, but on the other hand, I did burst out laughing.

Very good original puzzles, extremely good pacing. Maybe a tad impersonal. Recommended.

Founder's Mercy is very unclear about its backstory, but there are some hints to be gleaned from a Holy Book left on an altar, some personal memories of the protagonist upon entering locations and examining the surroundings.
You're on a generation ship sent out to the Lagrange 5 parking spot trailing earth in its orbit. (For those interested: Lagrange points are fascinating. The next huge space telescope will also be parked on one of them.) Your ancestors hoped to bring a civilization to fruition on this ship according to their godly laws. It didn't turn out that way and now you're the last one left.

Food and water are getting scarce and the life support machinery is slowly breaking down. Plus, you're yearning for human contact.

Founder's Mercy takes place on a very small map. Too small perhaps to give an accurate impression of the game world. It's only when you have the opportunity to look at the entire ship from a vantage point that you get an impression of how enormous it is.

Since you're on a wheel-shaped spaceship, directions are not the default N,E,S,W, but rather SpinWard, AntiSpinWard, Starboard and Port. This doesn't lead to any confusion however. The map is small, almost straight and circular. You can find whichever location you need by going SpinWard the required number of turns.

Like the backstory, the surroundings are not given a lot of attention. It's clear that the game wants to focus your attention on the puzzles.

The obstacles are quite easy to overcome. There was one that took a little bit of thinking around the corner, but it's mostly find-object-use-object stuff.

A nice and short diversion.

As I was reading the lengthy and funny prologue to Dr. Dumont's P.A.R.T.I. I was quickly drawn into the backstory to this game. Allthough it's a fairly traditional comic/surreal puzzle romp, the fact that the weirdness is explained in-game put the entire experience in a whole other light.

Our protagonist is an accidental guinea pig trying out the newest particle accelerator in the university lab. The A.I. controlling this advanced particle detection machine needs genuine creative input from a human mind to teach it how and where to look for the elusive particle X. In order to get this input, the computer generates a metaphorical world in which the human subject must solve puzzles for the computer to learn from.

With this in the back of my mind, there were many instances where I could relate the superficial silliness of the puzzles and their solutions to my limited layman's knowledge of actual scientifically demonstrated properties of the subatomic world. ((Spoiler - click to show)the golfball, the bubble wand,...)

It's certainly a welcome change from getting lost in a magical realm as an explanation for unbridled silliness. When push comes to shove, that is exactly what this physics-themed adventure is: a stack of bizarre, weird and silly circumstances with their own internal consistence, strung together for the player to test her wits against.

After a bit of just wandering around enjoying the views, I did have some trouble to find an appropriate starting point to the game proper. The map has a spoked hub-structure with each spoke open to exploration from the moment you find the central hub. I assumed that each spoke would be its own self-contained puzzle area, independent of the others until I had gathered everything needed for the endgame. I found out this was a wrong assumption after bashing my head against a timed puzzle in the first spoke I tried. It turns out that although the spokes are freely accessible from the get go, they have to be entered and solved in a particular order to solve the game, each game area building on objects or clues you got in the previous one.

Once this was clear however, I had a very enjoyable time finding my way through the many locations. The puzzles were just right for my skill- and knowledge-level. Most are common sense physics/mechanics puzzles with enough of a twist to keep them from being overly obvious. There is also a tip of the hat to a quite common link between quantum physics and Zen meditation (nature of reality stuff...) that appears in many layman's books about particle physics. Suffice it to say that you have to MEDITATE ON some topics to get the insight needed to find the solution to a puzzle.

The writing is consistently funny, the humour ranging from slapstick to surreal, interspersed with small in-jokes for the subatomically in-the-know. A lot of the comedy comes from the descriptions, behaviour and conversations of the NPCs, who all seem to be the same guy in various transparent disguises.

Gameplay-wise, Dr. Dumont's P.A.R.T.I. is very much a classic puzzle-heavy text adventure. The quirky humour and the quantum-physics background does set it apart from others of its kind.

Not too hard, lots of laughs, lots of fun. Chucklingly recommended.

Whom the Telling Changed is a different kind of IF. I was enthralled by this story within a story on multiple levels.

Superficially, this piece is a retelling of the story of the Cedar Forest and the demon Humbaba from the Gilgamesj epic. An interesting tale on its own, and also of great historical worth, it being the oldest recorded epic poem known in literature.

The setting is that of a non-descript tribal shepherding and farming community somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, some 3500 years ago. A group of newcomers have arrived, and the tribe is stricken with fear. There are also those who are curious to learn, and see these newcomers as an opportunity. You play the role of one of them, standing up to your war-hungry rival Sihan.

The epic poems that survived share a great relatability, centering on the great human questions of life and how to respond to them. It is here that Whom the Telling Changed places its interactivity. While the Storyteller relates the story of Gilgamesj and his friend Enkidu, you are allowed to comment and interject, hoping that your questions and suggestions will lead the emphasis of the story in your preffered direction and so sway the people to your point of view.

I imagine this sort of discussion over the meaning of old and well-known stories during a ritual telling around the fire may have been very important in the decision-making of pre-literate peoples. We still see this in debating the "true" meaning of religious and ideological texts.

Indeed, this is the wisdom the Storyteller imparts: Stories are not true or untrue. They convey meaning to the listener who makes them so...

The game-aspect of the story lies in traversing the pre-existing (and perhaps known to the reader) story in ways that emphasise the peaceful or curious sides of our human nature, as opposed to the violent or fearful ones.

Or not. The player is free to explore all the different directions the story may take, thereby sending the attention of the tribe and the relation with the rival Sihan in different directions.

Apart from some standard parser commands which are generally not needed, the player is offered a range of topics to choose from in the form of highlighted words in the text. There is also the opportunity to PRAISE or MOCK other speakers, to get the tribe on your side. Be careful, this may backfire.

I found there was a very believable and focusing contrast between the strict ceremonial protocol of the Telling and the freedom to interject at almost any time during the story. The game refuses all commands that would take the protagonist out of the frame of the Storytelling, most times responding with a valid in-game reason. On the other hand, there is a combinatorial explosion of choices that can lead you through the main story in many different ways, evoking different reactions from the tribe along the way.

The writing is exquisite throughout. The author has adopted the style of the epic oral poem, with repetitions and formulas, but he has also adapted this into readable and playable written IF-prose.

A story to play and replay, and, for me at least, a reason to expand my knowledge of the source material.

Very interesting, very impressive.

It had been a long time since I ventured into Hecate, the land of Alaric Blackmoon. I was immediately drawn back in. I love the high-on-questing/low-on-magic surroundings. Alaric is a down-to-earth veteran who got appointed Duke for saving Hecate in the first game, Axe of Kolt. Since then he has been roaming the lands to help his people where he can.

In The Lost Children the children of Hecate are being kidnapped by the trolls, who are normally friendly commercial partners. Might there be some magical coercion behind their changed behavior?

The story of The Lost Children is standard but great fun. Alaric goes on a straightforward, unironic quest to save the missing children, solving problems and puzzles on his way. The first area, west of the Fireheart Mountains, involves two fetch-quests. One is particularly weird/hilarious. The mother of one of the missing children has information Alaric needs, but she demands that he fix her leaking roof first. The fact that she's an Elf who knows through a psychic connection that her son is alive and well might help explain her warped priorities, but still...

The puzzles here range from the very simple find-object-use-object kind to more elaborate obstacles where our hero must obtain the right information first and go through a multi-step plan to get what he needs.

It is during one of these fetch-quests that the player encounters a magnificent puzzle where they have to take stock of their inventory, the geography of multiple locations and make a mental leap that would come natural for a playing child. The moment it clicks is fantastic. ((Spoiler - click to show)Skipping into the cave across the cove.

The area east of the mountains offers a whole other set of obstacles. Here Alaric comes face to face with the trolls and must find ways to deceive, kill or in some other way go around them. There is certainly some learn-by-dying involved in the endgame, where the player has to figure out which steps to take and then restore and execute those steps in as few moves as possible, or else be caught by trolls or pulverized by wizard-fire. In a game as proudly oldschool as this one, I had not one bit of a problem with that.

The problems with <iThe Lost Children mostly lie in a lack of gatekeeping between the two areas. It is exceedingly easy to move through the tunnels under the Fireheart Mountains to the valley of the trolls from which there is no return, and only then notice that you lack a necessary object to kill the ogre.
Indeed, there are many, many ways to get the game into walking-dead terrain. Too many. That's a shame, because the good oldschool features (I learned to like a well-thought-through try-die-repeat puzzle) of the game threaten to be buried under the frustration that comes with too many restores and lack of clues and guidance.

I enjoyed playing through this game with a massive amount of hints and explicit help. Without that, I would recommend playing another Alaric Blackmoon-game like Die Feuerfaust instead.

An oath sworn in anger and grief leaves two men immortal, bound in their fate until one succeeds in killing the other.

One of them is Kasil, a merciless warlord who led his men on gruesome slaughter-rallies through England in the early fourteenth century. The other is you. You saw your village butchered at the hands of Kasil's men and your sister raped and murdered by the man himself. At the end of an undecided duel, you swear that you will either kill him, or die by his hand while trying. And so the curse takes hold...

First, let's get this out of the way: Yes, this setup is very reminiscent of the <Highlander-movies. It's too good a story to dismiss it as derivative or even plagiarizing though. I categorize it as "an original story in the Highlander-universe", even though the particulars of the spell/curse are somewhat different.

I was very impressed with the structure of this story. Augustine begins with an action-packed prologue where the player learns the backstory of both characters and their bond of fate.

The contrast with the start of the story proper, where you are a bored office clerk in the city of Augustine could not have been greater. Looking for a way to spend the evening, you buy a ticket for a ghost-story tour. It's during these stories that the player learns that the PC is indeed the same centuries-old warrior from the prologue. Although it could be a bit more refined, the author still makes good use of the PC knowing more than the player.

Through flashbacks brought on by the different stories, the player gradually traverses important events of the protagonist's life, coming to know and understand him better. Eventually, this leads us to the expected final showdown at the end of a second and rather more eventful story-tour.

An enthralling story to be sure, but very flawed in execution I am sad to say. When going over my notes for this review, I was reminded of my comments on Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter. A great adventure story, but not an adventure game. Apart from some fightscenes where you can THRUST and PARRY, there is hardly any exploring and no puzzle-solving whatsoever. Exploring the story would count as adventuring for me, were it not that the game is so railroaded that there might as well have been a next page-link at the bottom of the paragraph instead of a parser-prompt.

Indeed, I would have enjoyed this story more as an ink-and-paper macabre horror fiction piece as were popular in the second half of the eightteenth century.

Add to this a very annoying lack of synonyms (>THRUST AT KALIS. You would have to unsheath your sword before you do that. >UNSHEATH SWORD. I do not know the verb "unsheath". Aaargh!) and an all too generous sprinkling of misspellings.

Summary: very good story, badly executed as interactive fiction. Read it, but don't expect to play it.