Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson
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Quarter-century look-back at a flawed game., February 2, 2024---> Our learned co-contributor to Intfiction and writer of the comprehensive IF and Infocom-related blog Gold Machine has unearthed an interesting work from the early modern ages of Interactive Fiction in the form of one of his own old games. In a considerable labour of IF-related textual archaeology, he has published a Critical Edition of the seriously flawed 1996 Inform 5 game Repeat the Ending. It consists of an edited version of the original source text (i.e. the game itself), supplemented and supported with in-game annotations and a separate Reader's Companion (referred to together as the paratext.)
This Critical Edition collects a series of contemporary and new essays on a wide range of topics such as the genesis of the original and the edited game, exploration of the themes in the work, the (supposed) development of authorial intent, the evolution of language-use, and the shift to a more player-friendly version of the high Zarfian Cruely level of the original. The articles found in the Reader's Companion were contributed by P. Searcy, D. S. Collins, C. A. Smythe, A. H. Montague, and Drew Cook himself. Each imparts their own emphasis on topics viewed from their personal field of interest.
Along with these scholarly texts are included a number of reviews, both contemporary and of later dates. These give a nice insight not only into the reception of the game, but also into the IF-ecosystem at the time of their writing. An interview with the author is also attached, although the vagueness of the answers to pertinent questions means that it hardly contributes more than some amiable atmosphere to the discussion.
Reading the entire Reader's Companion requires a fair amount of time and focused attention. It's worth it though, since its contents give the player a life-line to guide their interpretation of the sometimes obscure storyline and design-choices in the game proper.
More easily accessible are the annotations scattered throughout the game-text. They clarify, raise questions about, or merely point out notable or confusing responses and features the player may encounter, and may then choose to delve into further in the Companion. The footnotes double as much-needed tutorial information for new and experienced IF-players alike where such guidance for tackling the game is absent from the source text.
In the combined paratext, much attention is directed toward the differences between the 1996 original work and this 2023 edition. The authors views on a number of topics seem to have, if not radivally changed, then certainly noticeably shifted in the two-and-a-half decades since first writing Repeat the Ending in 1996. Interestingly, on many occasions, both in his own words and when paraphrased by the other contributors, the author vehemently denies any such shift has indeed taken place. He claims that this new version is the one he always intended to create, putting aside any real differences as artefacts of his inadequate proficiency in Inform 5 coding at the time. This is hard to believe, to say the least. When studying the essays, and comparing the new edition's text with a transcript of the original game that was circulated in 2003, it becomes clear that the 2023 "definitive" version is close to a complete remake.
An important caveat, and an in my view critical flaw of this Critical Edition is that the original source material, i.e. the 1996 version is not included in the package, neither as playable game, nor as source-code. All comparisons between the original and the new versions therefore rely on second-hand references, the word of the author, and the text of the 2003 transcript. The veracity of this last bit of data is problematic to say the least, as all acounts regarding it characterise it as implausible, misleadingly edited at the very least, perhaps even dishonestly doctored in full. The results, statements, and deductions found in the so-called "Critical" Edition's essays are all built on loose sand because of this omission of the original source text.
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--->Apart from analysis and clarification, the paratext serves an important, if secondary, role when viewing the work as a whole, i.e. the totality of game, essays and footnotes. Careful, measured perusal of the analytical asides while playing leads to greater involvement and deeper engagement with the game as the player is experiencing it. The paratext delivers a conceptual framework for attempting to understand the game's meaning, it opens an intellectual pathway to the strong emotional impact of the game's story.
Conversely, and at the same time, the scholarly approach provides protective distance from the distressing themes and actions. This certainly applies to the player who can withdraw into a more reflective state of participation when direct experience becomes overwhelming. It is hard not to speculate if the author chose this scholarly approach for the same reason, not to be confronted too directly with the hard themes of the game, but to have a roundabout way of writing about them when immediate handling of them became too painful...
When the paratext messages are disabled in the final chapter of the game, this protective effect becomes very clear. Here, the player has no choice but to experience the unfolding of the story directly, without the option of circumventing, avoiding, or delaying the emotional intensity of the story.
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--->And here, now, dear patient reader, I must abandon all pretense of engaging in distanced scholarly debate. For I have to speak of the source itself, the heart of the work, the game Repeat the Ending.
I am dead serious about the defensive qualities of the scholarly diversions in the paratext. This game hits hard, and is brutally vulnerable at the same time. The protection offered by the distanced paratext seems to work in the other direction too. An intellectual wall shields the sensitive heart of the work. It's cradled in an analytical nest to keep whatever harm at bay.
The elaborate room descriptions in Repeat the Ending are interspersed with personal comments from the point of view of the protagonist. Interacting with the contents of the locations through the habitual IF-commands quickly runs into a frustrating wall.
Unproductive, unimportant, unsuccessful commands (of which there are many!) are met with plaintive, self-pitying, or even hostile responses.
The author subverts the traditional expectations of who the parser/narrator is speaking to or about, and uses them to blur the lines between the player and the protagonist on different perceived levels of reality.
The dramatic, mentally unstable state of mind of the main character, his lack of control over his life-direction is directed outward, ascribed to unrelenting external forces such as abuse in his childhood or poverty in his current situation. Or it is attributed to uncontrollable internal influences, the driving urges and voices in his mind. The latter is very effectively conveyed through the dissociation in the mental monologue of the character between the narrator and the actor. The ambiguous use of pronouns (we, I, you) points to the in-game confusion and powerless state of the protagonist. However, once the player realises she is controlling the character's actions through her input of commands, this ambiguousness extends outward to encompass the player at the keyboard. It pulls her into a complicit, even guilty role since she is the one responsible for the protagonist's decisions.
Throughout the game, there are two seemingly straightforward objectives. The main character must pick up his medications from the pharmacy, and visit his mother in the hospital. However, it soon becomes clear that none of the successful steps in the direction of these objectives raises the player's score. Indeed, it is only when the method of increasing the score becomes apparent that the true underlying goal of this piece reveals itself. While there is a straight pathway through the story that succeeds in both superficial objectives, real "progress" depends on rebelling against the railroad. Taking actions that go against the narrow definition of success, that take the protagonist outside of his automatic routine often lead to failure and death. However, these actions do signify desperate attempts of the main character to fight back, to regain some measure of control, some small grasp on life.
A telling insight into the dismal state of mind of the protagonist is offered by the confusing, disjointed images. They seem to come straight from a dream or some other, more terrifying subconscious process. Despite their surreal quality, the rough-scribbled outlines, splashes of colour, skewed perspective, and, most touchingly, their choice of details depicted lend an impact surpassing that of any realistic depiction of the scenes.
Repeat the Ending features an innovative magic system that exemplifies some deeper point of the game. Instead of the usual fixation on object-manipulation, this game is about recognising processes, changing states of the surrounding world (and of the mind). The deeper meaning of the work is reflected in this focus of the magic system: pushing against and redirecting the laws of reality to change the circumstances. Finding a way over or through the predetermination of the protagonist's life.
The multiple endings that can be reached are in line with both the struggle to break free of the railroad, and the depressed and dissociative mental state of the main character. They are a measure not of success, but of steadfastly reaching outside the limits of perceived set-in-stone possibilities while failing.
No matter which way the heartbreaking final scene plays out, the story will end on at best a bittersweet note. The best both player and protagonist can (and should!) hope for is a small sense of regained control, of personal responsability, of self-knowledge.
Lucky Charm, January 31, 2024If you play this game without slavishly following the walkthrough to the smallest detail, you will ragequit when the endgame throws you out right before the final 6 or 7 moves.
I did.
Many puzzles in Jinxter have a straightforward adventure-game solution. This solution has potentially life-threatening side-effects. You don't actually die though, but it takes a little bit off your luck-stat. Which you need. Which I didn't know. Which I only found out when I was thrown out of the endgame because I was low on Luck.
Restoring won't help this late in the game, the only way to experience the endgame and the good conclusion of the story is restarting and finding out the intermediate steps of caution in every solution.
>"Somehow, you don't feel quite as lucky as you did."
If you read the above line, it's time to restore and tackle that last puzzle again. Carefully...
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Now, do play Jinxter! It's fun!
No, really, it is.
For ages, Aquitania has been under the protection of an enchanted bracelet which grants above-average luck to its inhabitants. Recently, the power of the bracelet has diminished by the theft of several of its dangly charms. An opportunity for the Head Green Witch Jannedor to enlarge her influence on the land of Aquitania.
Your quest is clear. You must find the missing charms, restore the bracelet's enchantment, confront Jannedor!
Wait... Who is this "You"?
It appears that our savior of the land is actually a random hapless passer-by, designated by Fate (and a rather befuddled Guardian) to take on this land-savioring task.
Perhaps Magnetic Scrolls earlier works provide a clue to who You is...
-There's no mention of gills and fins, so it's not the dimension-portal jumping goldfish-detective from Fish.
-No exceptional catburglary skills, probably not the thief from Guild of Thieves either.
Nope. Seems like You is just an ordinary adventure person without any distinguishing traits.
The world that unfolds for You to explore is large and varied. It all starts out in the mundane comfy familiarity of You's own home, and it goes progressively more into fairy-talish territory with each new area.
(Ahem... When I said mundane, I should point out that's a rather relative term. The street in right out the front door is a literal Neverending Lane, and your furniture becomes, well, animated from time to time, presumably caused by the uncontrolled leakage of Luck.)
When I glance at my pen-and-paper map, the general shape is a narrow connecting line with bulges that represent multi-location puzzle areas. Four large areas are connected by some sort of vehicle ride (with attached puzzle). Apart from the connection between areas 1 and 2, these are one-way only. I love vehicular travel in adventures. It draws open the map and gives an impression of real long travel, as opposed to traversing unrealistically long distances on foot.
At least one sneakily hidden passage requires some weakly clued detection work, but the area it leads to is more than worth it.
Jaunty and exuberant writing pulls You into the cheerful atmosphere of the game-world; vibrant location descriptions are supported by beautiful pictures that are helpful in constructing a clear mental image of You's surroundings.
>Spring
>This cool spring, surrounded on all sides but the west by steep banks, bubbles up from underground. It looks entirely artless and natural, belying the fact that Xam's crazed gardener constructed it by means of an intricate system of dams and hydraulics, initially flooding half the neighbourhood and leading to a series of acrimonious lawsuits lasting several years.
At other times, it's more restrained, slipping in a drily humorous response to an EXAMINE-command.
>The telephone is a telephone, just like a red one, except it is green.
Speaking of the EXAMINE-command... There is none. Everything is done with LOOK (fortunately its abbreviation L is accepted). It took some conscious effort to redirect my fingers' deeply engrained automation from X [object] to L [object], but the adjustment wasn't too big.
On the whole, the parser is perfectly adequate. It recognises complex commands (DROP ALL EXCEPT) and multiple-action commands (SMELL DEAD FLY THEN LICK IT). It is however somewhat too fine-grained, making the PC feel like a toddler who has to be pointed to all the discrete components of a seemingly simple action. Until you get used to holding the PC's hand, this leads to a lot of "With what?" and "To whom" responses where a modern parser would deduce these things without problem.
---->Short aside as to why I'm mentioning this: Jinxter was published in 1987, when these finer points of parsing were not by any means to be taken for granted (still aren't, actually, when you look beyond the strongest of modern parsers). Boasting about parser-strength was a real promotional tool, and players then would not have found these "shortcomings" to be disruptive.
To be sure, I never encountered an instance where parser inadequacy hindered the solving of a puzzle. The puzzles were more than enough of a challenge all by themselves.
The first area is gentle enough, the puzzles are easily recognisable and the limited amount of items in You's inventory makes it rather straightforward to come up with the correct solution. (Look out for that additional Luck-complication though!)
The later areas, however, are much harder, especially the midgame. A bunch of interdependent locations necessitate running from one part of the area to the other to find the right item to use on a distant puzzle, there's an unknown order to the obstacles that needs to be figured out in order to make real progress, and the puzzles are just harder.
Add to this a further complication: the "carry-all" You picked up early in the game turns out not to be a carry-all at all. It's handy to keep all You's stuff together, but each item still fills up your inventory, whether it's inside the container or not. The inventory-limit is generous, but in a game like this it's hard to predict if you're going to need those nailclippers a second time or not. It never certain when it's safe to discard an object, so You ends up carrying every carryable article around. This becomes a problem when one of the one-way passages prohibits the transporting of the carry-much and forces You to choose which items to bring.
The majority of puzzles are clever and fun to hypothesise about. Some are very elegant and surprising, with a solution so simple that it's not obvious at all. Others are obscure, underclued to the point of unfairness, requiring many attempts and possibly a few RESTOREs.
---->Be sure to put a checkpoint-save at the beginning of each new area. Allthough it's impossible to die in Jinxter, it's exceedingly easy to wind up Zombified. I also encountered a bug that would have made the game unwinnable had I not been able to restore to my checkpoint. ((Spoiler - click to show)The Bartender gets fussy when you give him the wrong coin. He gives you a glass of beer that you cannot interact with.)
There are many NPCs to interact with. They're of the thick cardboard type, but the cardboard is painted in bright colours and cartoonish features. They're fun to mess with a bit, amusing caricatures, but don't expect any depth of conversation. Their main purpose is to serve as obstacles, to be fooled, distracted, mislead in the search for the missing charms.
There's also a weird Guardian (the one who appointed You as the right person to undertake this quest in the first place) soaring around who will regularly appear out of nowhere. It's worth asking him about the problem at hand, but don't count on a helpful answer. He might point You in the right direction, but it's just as possible he'll be too confused to help in any way, or too busy with finding the nearest whatever-it-is that he's after this time. In short, you shouldn't rely on the Guardian as an in-game hint system to help you find the charms.
Collecting the charms grants access to the magic powers they possess. Each charm encapsulates a single spell. These work as simple and straightforward manipulations of the surroundings, nothing too complicated, but a nice extra toolbox to consider when pondering a puzzle. And of course they're a lot of fun when thrown around randomly at innocent, unsuspecting things or people in your immediate vicinity...
I started this review with a warning about the unfairness of the endgame, or, more precisely, about the necessity to do everything just right during the entire game to even be admitted to the endgame. And I did not restart and replay to enter the final few commands that separated me from the conclusion of the story. Nevertheless, I found Jinxter to be an engaging and entertaining exerience. Just watch your step and leave your temper at the entrance.
Il Reggente., January 24, 2024How Unseemly!
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The King is dead! All hail the Ki... well, seeing that Prince Charles is a five-year-old nasty specimen of royalty who has barely outgrown his toddler nappies, that should be "All hail Primo Varicella, Regent of Piedmont!"
Once you've managed to outmaneuver your rivals to the Regency in the maze of backstabbery and treasonous wit that lies before you at this time, that is...
Several times during my earliest forays into Interactive Fiction, 20-odd years ago, I started playing Adam Cadre's Varicella and quickly bounced off it. My expectations then were firmly geared towards long linear quest-adventures, and this game's time-limit and simultaneous sub-puzzles stumped me. I never got much further than trying to kick one of the guards in the nads when he wouldn't stand aside. (A swift death was my reward.)
In the past years, I have played and enjoyed a bunch of optimisation games, and delving into the historic vaults of IF had exposed me to many Cruel games with numerous try-die-repeat puzzles. With the added wisdom and experience so accumulated, I felt ready to once again tackle this highly acclaimed Classic of the Renaissance with an openness of mind and the patience to appreciate it on its own terms.
>"Photopia has made more of a mark, I suppose, but Photopia is a short story; Varicella is a world. There are so many things to see and do…"
--Adam Cadre on Varicella--
A very true assessment. What the author doesn't mention is that no single playthrough will ever contain even half the content this game has to offer. Merely to gather the absolute minimum of information necessary to solve the game requires multiple focused playthroughs. Finding out about the other conversation topics, item descriptions, hidden nooks kept me happily engaged for a good while after I had solved the central puzzle.
Varicella is amazing.
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----Rise Of Primo Varicella; A Truthful Account Of Our Behind-the-Scenes Assistance To One Palace Minister In His Ruthless Ascent to Power----
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--> I. In which We Acquaint Ourselves With The Pallazo del Piemonte:
As a first move, we slide our pocket pocket watch into our breastpocket, we won't be needing it anytime soon. Let death come as it wills. (In other words, do not pay notice to the advancing clock in the status bar.) In these first few visits to the Palace, our primary focus shall be on the basics of this imaginary world: the Map! Exits and entrances, locked doors and other puzzles, the locations of items to pick up and NPCs to chat up.
The Palace on each level is built according to an almost completely symmetrical floor plan. This arrangement will be most convenient later on, when time is of the essence. For now, we might as well draw our map and note and label the offices of our rivals for future reference.
Pairing the practical to the pleasant, our tour allows us to take in the halls, rooms, and corridors of the Palace, all described from Primo's point of view.
>\>LOOK
Your Quarters
You may have been relegated to the top of this tower, but that hasn't impeded you from imbuing your quarters with an excellence that not even a team of interior decorators flown in from Kyoto could achieve. Only someone with your finely-honed sensibilities could have taken this amount of space and kept it from seeming appallingly cramped. Though the panoramic windows to the north and west do their part in opening up the room, you still have to give most of the credit to yourself.
His attention to the smallest details of ornamentation reveals an inordinate fondness for luxury and style, this seeming to be his greatest priority in life, apart from his unquenchable thirst for power.
--> II. In Which The Gap Between Primo Varicella's Knowledge And Our Own Is Bridged, And Our Shared Understanding Is Broadened:
Having lived here for years, Primo has been involved in the palatial scheming and plotting for a long time before we made our entrance. It's essential for the player's understanding of what's going on to absorb all the information at hand to catch up with him.
Both the explicit asides in and the implicit hints at palatial power-dynamics between the lines of the room descriptions have already given us a view of the treacherous web of ambitons we'll need to navigate. A good way to get more insight is Primo's own record of his rivals and potential allies. (He has a nifty gizmo...)
This leads us straight to the next step: seeking out the other palace residents. Each and every one of them has their own flavour of wretchedness. Be it raw lust for power coupled with the guileful cunning needed to reach and hold a position in the Palace, the powerless misery of being a mere plaything in the machinations of the Court, or the distanced watchfulness of one awaiting the developments before choosing sides, all the players on this stage are deeply disturbing.
For at least one of them, the ordeals that life amidst these scheming villains have pushed her firmly beyond the reach of reason:
>\>ASK CHARLOTTE ABOUT ME
"i see a little varicella of a man," Princess Charlotte replies. "scaramouche! scaramouche! will you do the grim fandango? i think you will!"
Primo, with all his cynical scheming, is not by far the worst of the lot.
Gaining access to the personal quarters of the other palace inhabitants confronts us with the first few obstacles. Easy and straightforward as they may be, they provide the necessary first steps toward the cogs and wheels we'll need to set in motion. Careful navigation of the conversations and attentive investigation of their rooms will reveal secrets and weaknesses to be exploited later on. The items available in the private rooms point us toward potential ways to eliminate our rivals.
--> III. In Which Fragments of the Scheme are Discovered and Executed:
The accessible rooms and halls of the Palazzo di Piemonte fully investigated, the other denizens interrogated in as far as they would let us, important-seeming items in our inventory, the mind reeling with possible scenarios... It's time to finally act upon the hunches and what-ifs that were triggered by our exploration.
Each of Primo's rivals has their own puzzle-chain, their own sequence of steps toward their elimination. Because life in the Palace moves along at its own pace, and our adversaries are busily deploying their own sets of perfidious tactics, many of our actions are time-dependent.
A number of obstacles require intimate knowledge about the other residents gained in previous conversations to goad them in our desired direction. Other hurdles are of a more physical or technical nature, where we manipulate nature instead of people.
The main objective here is to find the way to take out each of Primo's rivals separately, without worrying yet about the others during one particular tour.
--> IV. In Which I Piece together Primo's Plan:
Alas! I failed at this final task. I had figured out the movements and weaknesses of Primo's rivals, and for each of them I found a way to exploit this knowledge against them. The distinct sequences for eliminating each of the other power-hungry wolves were clear to me, without even once peeking behind the curtains.
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Speaking of peeking behind curtains, we're treated to a nice reference to the Bard if we do precisely that:
>LOOK BEHIND TAPESTRY
The tapestry is flush against the wall, with nothing behind it but cool marble. You were expecting Polonius?
---Adam Cadre, Varicella---
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QUEEN
"What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me?
Help, ho!"
POLONIUS (behind the arras)
"What ho! Help!"
HAMLET
"How now, a rat? Dead for a ducat, dead."
----He kills Polonius by thrusting a rapier
through the arras.----
---William Shakespeare, Hamlet---
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Despite repeated attempts, I never succeeded at ordering the moves in these discrete seqences into an effective interlocking whole. After getting rid of the majority of opponents, there always remained at least one foe that I had not dealt with soon enough.
It's not enough to execute the separate sub-schemes one after the other, no matter in which order. Primo needs to think many moves ahead and slide the distinct plans together to have a chance of defeating the large-scale puzzle. Acquiring items and solving preparatory puzzles for a later adversary must be taken care of while still dealing with the present opponent, so that the whole of the masterplan is as time-efficient as possible.
When I felt utterly defeated and finally looked at a step-by-step walkthrough, the ultimate all-encompassing sequence of moves presented itself as a magnificent complex web, dealing with every circumstance and threat in an interwoven simultaneous master scheme.
Following the walkthrough and seeing events unroll showed me a vision of an inescapable, interlocking, overarching solution which has an almost mathematical beauty.
--> V. In Which Primo Varicella Prevails:
At the end of this horrible tale, Primo stand atop a heap of corpses, rewarded with the Regence of Piedmont. With the child Prince Charles under his protection and authority, his dream of power is fulfilled.
>"Yet it cannot be called talent to slay fellow-citizens, to deceive friends,
to be without faith, without mercy, without religion; such methods may
gain empire, but not glory. Still, if the courage of Primo Varicella in
entering into and extricating himself from dangers be considered,
together with his greatness of mind in enduring and overcoming
hardships, it cannot be seen why he should be esteemed less than the
most notable captain.
--Nicoló Macchiavelli, Il Principe; Chapter VIII: Of Those Who By Their Crimes Come To Be Princes.-- ("Agathocles" changed to "Primo Varicella)
The short epilogue concludes the story of Regent Primo Varicella in a fitting manner. It left me staring unseeing into the distance, pondering the fate of my luxury-loving, power-lusting companion whom I, contrary to my wishes, had grown somewhat fond of.
Varicella is among the very best IF has to offer. Magnificent.
Non Cogito ergo Non Sum?, January 19, 2024First of all: A Beauty Cold and Austere is extremely well coded and implemented. Every action I tried that had even the slightest relevance to the problem at hand was understood. The parser understands tons of synonyms and guesses accurately what you want to do from differently formulated commands. This is a joy in every adventure, but it is doubly so in a game like this. There is a lot of precise fiddling of switches and turning of dials here, and any less near-perfect implementation would have made this a hell of frustration.
The puzzles here are logic and fair (duh). The author has put in a lot of effort to guide the player to understanding why the solutions work. I daresay that I have learned a (vague) thing or two about calculus.
The game truly shines in its visualization of abstract mathematical concepts and problems. An algebra problem made concrete with balancing scales is something one could find in an oldschool text adventure. Making an infinite converging series tangible or visible is harder. And programming, nay, creating a working machine in the game that lets you manipulate such series at will is just a heavenly present to any IF-tinkerer.
The writing is very good. Well-described locations, the occasional joke (well, a bit more than occasional, but it stays within bounds...), good NPCs. On the larger scale, it's harder to say:
Like The Chinese Room, a game that explores some basic concepts of philosophy, A Beauty Cold and Austere explores many mathematical concepts. And, like The Chinese Room, A Beauty Cold and Austere does not have much of a story beyond that.
It makes up for this though. Instead of a story-structure, we get an ever-widening understanding of mathematical concepts and how they are linked to eachother. And this widening understanding is beautifully reflected in the way the gamespace evolves. The map itself expands and deepens with your mathematical discoveries (or inventions, depending on your philosophical standpoint). You also have the backbone of math's history and many of the great minds in it to give the game a recognizable structure.
I like this game a lot.
At first, I didn't even know why I bought this Geiger counter..., January 18, 2024...but then it clicked.
Scavenger is what it says on the tin. The tin is corroded and highly volatile. It might be radio-active. It's located in some raider base you just happened to find the coördinates to. Whatever it is, find the tin.
Sounds straightforward enough, doesn't it? Well, it mostly is. Until you start to collect pieces of evidence of what exactly happened before this existence as a scavenger on a blasted Earth. Until you meet a little girl who managed to survive in a ruined bunker... Until you get to the bottom floor of the base.
Scavenger plays as the epitome of old school scavenger hunts, and in doing so far surpasses most of them. Verbose, evocative descriptions, a sympathetic-but-not-quite protagonist, a backstory savoured in bits and pieces...
The thieving-adventurer brought to his knees, stripped of his kleptomania, given purpose and sent out into the world again. A barren ruined world. This time taking whatever is there for bare survival.
Must play.
A new perspective on Grandad's mansion, January 18, 2024Ruby’s riding the bus, on her way to the hospital. Her father’s not well at all, and Ruby’s struggling, wanting to see and hug him as fast as possible but at the same time reluctant to see him sick, postponing the confrontation with her dad in a bed in a too-white room.
There’s been a rise lately of a new genre or side-branch within IF: Works where the main game is embedded within a frame-story which opens a perspective on the protagonist and the (fictional) writer, which colours the player’s interpretation of the events. In Repeat the Ending and LAKE Adventure, what would have been a rather standard text-adventure on its own gains a more complex meaning and narrative depth by the player’s experience being informed by the frame-story.
Hand Me Down's prologue introduces Ruby and her father, Miles Walker, in a slice-of-life choice-based manner. The choices have no immediate consequences for the rest of the game, the player can choose to rush to the hospital room, or go with Ruby’s reluctance and opt for a number of delaying activities without special punishment or reward. The simple presence of the choices as a depiction of Ruby’s worries is enough to put the player in the right mindset for what follows.
Once Ruby is with her father, he is quickly wheeled off for medical tests. Before that, however, he offers her a much-belated present: a game he has written in TADS3 for her sixteenth birthday.
-A Very Important Date-
The main game, considered outside of the frame-story, is a straightforward treasure hunt. There’s a party going on in the back garden of the manor, but no one, not even you, the birthday girl, is allowed without an invitation, a costume, and something to share with the other guests.
The manor has an expansive map which is almost completely open for exploration from the start. There are outdoor and indoor regions, some rooms with unexpected functions, and loads of stuff to examine and investigate.
Simple (but thorough) exploration will yield a great harvest of objects, some necessary to gain entrance to the party, some apparently just stuff lying around, either on its own or as left-overs from finding another object in or under them. The inventory can become quite unwieldy if you should choose to hang on to everything. Leaving items behind might mean that you lack a crucial object for a puzzle you have yet to encounter… I picked a convenient central stash-spot to dump everything I didn’t regard as useful at the time.
Puzzles range from simple lock-and-key to clever physics to fiendishly difficult multi-step decoding, and even dating. (In the historical sense, that is.) This latter variety absolutely requires the use of outside sources to solve, something generally frowned upon in IF. In A Very Important Date however, with its game-within-game setup, it’s not only justified but could even be leveraged to deepen the player’s engagement. (More on that below.)
The “fiendishly difficult” puzzles could be brought down to simply “perplexing at first” by a scrupulous pruning and streamlining of the gameplay relating to those puzzles. More gentle nudges toward a solution when the player is flailing around aimlessly, cleaning up some of the clutter in rooms with such a puzzle so the pertinent parts are more readily visible.
In fact, the implementation as a whole is rather uneven. For most of the game, it’s more than adequate, splendidly surprising even in some instances where examining bits of scenery returns a beautiful reverie about the sun’s rays, or in one memorable instance, a not entirely shabby freestyle rap. In other parts though it seems the author fell victim to a heavy bout of implementation fatigue, leaving all but the most immediate objects undescribed and thus dropping much of the moodsetting scenery descriptions aside. At one point I joked with the author in a PM that I could read his state of mind through the depth of implementation, whether he was in the creative flow or stressing against time, playful and free or distracted and worried.
The same criticism holds for the writing. Here and there the descriptions feel cluttered, grating sentences and elegance lost. This actively works against clear visualisation of the surroundings by the player. It makes me suspect that the author too did not have as coherent an image of the room as he wished, or that more time was needed to sort the important and unimportant bits.
This said, there are true flashes of brilliance too. The Vegetable Garden with its compost heap, or (my personal favourite) the Statue Garden with its intricately carved figures are a beauty to imagine, and made a lasting visual impression on me.
For any other game, I could close the review here, concluding that I had fun with this challenging and satisfying treasure-hunt puzzler, and that it might benefit from another run through the testing mill. With Hand Me Down however, I have only laid bare the superficially obvious. The game-within-game approach deepens the emotional response I had, widens the range of interpretation considerably.
Synthesis
Throughout A Very Important Date, there are reminders of the “real world” of the prologue. The author, Miles Walker, Ruby’s father (!), has left pictures, notes, letters, all kinds of information about his own life and that of his father, Ruby’s grandfather, around the manor. Perhaps these started as little Easter eggs for his daughter to find, little tidbits about her family’s history to discover in her birthday present. Along the way, however, Miles has begun using his writing of A Very Important Date as a way to capture intimate lost moments, ventilate anger and grief, remember or break down turning points in his own life.
The PC-Ruby in A Very Important Date remains a typical underdescribed player character in an old school adventure game, frozen in excited exploration and casually conversing with funny animals. Miles Walker understandably wrote her like this, expecting his real-life daughter to project her personal feelings of joy and discovery onto this digital placeholder. This PC-Ruby shows no emotional response to her father’s sadness and frustration evident in the notes he hid in the game. But, with the Ruby from the prologue still echoing in our minds, we can only imagine the effect this all has on that girl sitting in the too-white hospital room with the laptop on her lap…
This is where the intense emotional impact of Hand Me Down lies for me: In keeping in mind that I am not playing A Very Important Date, I am playing Ruby who is playing as herself in this text adventure her father made for her as a deeply personal gift. I’m channeling this girl in the too-white hospital room, shaken by worry about her sick father, learning intimate details of her father’s life she didn’t know or realise. My mind’s eye kept flashing back and forth between the manor, where my PC was doing all this fun and frustrating stuff, jumping through the hoops as we make our adventure PCs do, and the too-white hospital room where Ruby is typing commands onto the keyboard, worried about her father, maybe crying…
This invites further speculation about this tangled web of of relations. If the player is channeling Ruby playing PC-Ruby, then what of the fictional author? Miles Walker, Ruby’s father, is a character in Hand Me Down. He’s the in-game writer of A Very Important Date. While he was struggling with TADS3’s containers, was Brett Witty channeling Miles Walker as he is seen by the player?
The continued tension between levels of reality, the juxtaposition of the girl exploring the manor and the girl crying in the too-white hospital room, lift Hand Me Down to a degree of sophistication, a height of complexity above and beyond the qualities of the surface adventure. The characterisation and emotional weight set by the prologue reverberate throughout the game-within-game, the father’s intimate intrusions serve as a bridge, feeding “real-world” feelings into the imaginary adventure, regularly jolting the player’s realisation of the wider story in which she is taking part.
It is here that I think there is a great opportunity for the puzzles requiring out-of-game resources to play a significant role in leveraging the identification of the player with Ruby, and in more closely entangling the text-adventure with the frame-story. The father, aware of the fact that his daughter is an adventure-novice, could break the in-game fourth wall to leave little encouraging remarks, explaining to her that she might need to look up some information in an encyclopaedia. (“Hey Ruby-doo! I’m glad you’ve already made this much progress. If you found this note in the skull, you might want to open up Wikipedia.”) This would strengthen the in-game father-daughter bond, and it would also alert the player to do what Ruby’s father says: prepare to do some out-of-game research.
Bugs and momentary lapses in implementation aside, Hand Me Down had me deeply engaged for more than five hours (fortunately I remembered to enter my rating at the 2h-mark).
Remember: The player is not you. The player is Ruby, the girl in the too-white hospital room, worried sick about her dad, crying over the “treasures” of her father’s intimate revelations her adventure-counterpart discovers in the family manor.
Very moving.
----wipes dust speck from left eye----
Cats & Dogs, January 16, 2024Alien Cat Beings from Extra-Terrestrial Outer Space have dognapped your dearest Tookie! And they have a remarkable propensity for subjecting dog-rescuing humans (point in case: you) to riddles, math problems, and other tests of wit.
Tookie's Song starts off with a brilliant first puzzle. (Spoiler - click to show)A simple and elegant bit of misdirection. Most of the other puzzles are more standard adventure fare, several having alternate solutions, and some requiring a bit of thinking around the corner. An algebra calculation can be solved independently by the player, but in-game resources are available to make the calculation for you. There's a riddle, but its solution is so obviously clued that those who don't know it can easily deduce the answer so it doesn't lead to an annoying out-of-game web-search.
A mostly symmetrical hub-and-spokes map offers four areas of puzzle solving. They're not completely self-contained, so if an obstacle stumps you, just explore a bit more and the answer will be obvious when you find the requisite item. The descriptions of the rooms are short but evocative, appealing to different senses.
The seasonal theme of the spokes seems to be completely arbitrary, but it lends atmosphere and a bit more depth to the different puzzle-areas.
The implementation is on the shallow side, but everything important is well-described. Trying to manipulate irrelevant objects quickly sets the player straight with a funny slap on the wrist.
The cat-aliens you meet have distinct personalities. Especially Gus the Bartending Cat is a pleasure to chat with for a while. And when you have to bend your personal ethics a bit to get past an NPC, it helps if he’s clearly described as a smug bastard (in this instance: Eddie).
The writing is snappy, funny, upbeat. I often got a smile out of some entertaining turn of phrase or an amusing remark by one of the cats.
A fun bit of entertainment, good for an hour or so of lighthearted puzzle-solving. I liked it.
Antiquarian saves world., January 15, 2024Decades ago, the benevolent and righteous King Serak was corrupted by the foul influences of the Demon Lord Malthazar. Knights and Mages from across the land united to form the White Army. Led by the brave Lord Thaylor, they defeated the dark forces in a great battle. The once-good King Serak was incarcerated in a magical prison beyond space and time.
Recently, the Evil of Serak is rising once again. Escaped from his magical bounds, he has taken the now elderly Lord Thaylor and his daughter Leoria in captivity and threatens to overtake the fair lands of Malinor. This time, the grave task of saving the world falls upon Maddog Williams. An antiquarian. Alone. (Perhaps the knights and mages were on a tea-break?)
The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian is a curiously malformed chimera of a game, with elements of various styles of gameplay illfittingly wrought together. Nonetheless, it manages to rise above the awkward joining of its components to form an altogether enjoyable piece of IF.
At heart, Maddog is a traditional parser-based graphical fantasy adventure. In a pseudo-medieval setting with castles and dragons and magic, the player needs to guide the protagonist through a series of puzzles and obstacles to defeat Evil and save the land.
For the most part, the puzzles are straightforward and well clued, unlocking doors and secret passages with a variety of key-objects, figuring out when to use the magical properties of an item. It's a bit dissapointing that although Maddog Williams is introduced in the prologue as an antiquarian and a tinkerer (the opening scene shows his alarm clock to be a watersprinkling Rube Goldberg contraption), neither of these specialities play much of a role in the problems he faces during his quest.
The parser is of in-between quality, adequate and up to the task. It does allow for complex multi-word commands, but in practice it gets easily confused by anything more complicated than LOOK UNDER. Unless there is a clear goal for a complex command, it's best to stick with simple two-word instructions. LOOK and LOOK [object] need to be typed in full since L and X are not provided. INVENTORY, some other game functions and all meta-commands are handled through the F-keys, which took some serious getting used to.
The fantasy setting and Maddog's actions within it are conveyed in a gently mocking tongue-in-cheek tone, poking fun at the tropes of the genre without slipping into outright parody.
The locations are rendered in simple but pretty pixelated graphics, and the pictures are supported with lush descriptions in the text descriptions.
The writing as a whole seems to strive for a mixture of funny entertainment and heroic gravity. Its success at this is uneven, often it comes across as overwrought, but even then it's a joy to see the effort that went into the elaborate cutscenes and conversations.
Many futile actions and failed attempts are accounted for and met with a funny custom response, rewarding the player's playfulness at poking around the surroundings.
According to the Merlin-lookalike who welcomes you to the game, the player takes the role of Maddog's counsel and advisor. In this setup, "You" should refer to the player directly. Throughout the game however, the narrator is often inconsistent about this, sometimes using "You" in the plural for the duo of Maddog and the player-as-advisor, sometimes reverting to the usual 2nd tense adventure narration where player and PC are conflated into one agent, sometimes narrating events from Maddog's 1st person viewpoint, sometimes having Maddog speak to the player/advisor directly. Rather than being confusing or annoying, this adds to the loose and casual atmosphere of the game.
The overall pacing of Maddog's quest towards the inevitable castle dungeons at the end is pleasantly varied. Obstacle-heavy areas where the tension runs high alternate with more relaxed village-exploration with the obligatory visit to the local pub.
Exploration of the world of The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian is done by (here comes the first awkward hybrid-element...) walking around with the arrow keys. Typing N/E/S/W is not understood by the parser, the entire world must be traversed by wandering from location to location at a leisurely pace. Contrary to parser-players' expectations that everything in sight should be immediately accesible for taking or manipulating, it's necessary to stroll around inside the rooms too, otherwise PULL LEVER will be met with a dry "I'm not close enough."
This unfamiliar way of moving around was actually very cool. Not only does it give a very tactile connection to the game world, it also opens up a nice tactic to respond to tense real-time threats: you can pre-load a command into the parser and fire it by pressing the enter-key at the appropriate time.
Of course this means some exploratory self-sacrifice beforehand to identify said real-time threats. As a rule, Maddog in its entirety is not averse to unavoidable PC deaths. Sacrificing our curious antiquarian's life is on several occasions necessary to gain indispensable information toward puzzle-solutions later in the game.
On top of the keyboard-movement, Maddog's Adventures are further "actionised" by awkwardly grafting multiple gameplay elements from other gaming genres onto the main adventure trunk.
-On a regular basis, Maddog comes upon an enemy who must by defeated in a fight. This requires the player to press the F1 key to enter combat-mode, whereupon our protagonist and his foe square off toe-to-toe in a 2D fencing match which amounts to stepping back-and-forth along a line, taking turns bashing each other's head in until someone's life points are drained. (Play in EASY-mode and you'll be fine.)
-At a crucial point in Maddog's quest, he'll call the help of a friendly Dragon to cross the mountains to the Evil Castle. On the way there, they must engage in some 2D arcade-style dragon dogfighting, blasting unpredictably appearing hostile dragons out of the air. Lightning reflexes, furious button-mashing, and a good amount of swearing are prerequisites to complete this stage, especially for the player accustomed to the tranquil tempo of parser turns.
-Once inside the dungeons, it must have seemed like a good idea to mix things up a bit by incorporating a platfroming room as an obstacle. Jumping (SHIFT-key) from pillar to pillar (in something resembling 3D this time) with, ahem, less-than-accurate movement control is, ahem, challenging...
Although the jumping and fencing and shooting are clumsy and frustrating, I found these things ultimately charming. They never take too long, and mashing my way through these sequences felt a bit like a throwback to the NES-console days of yore.
I've used the words "clumsy" and "awkward", and I stand by my assessment of The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian as a somewhat illfitting and malformed chimera. Nevertheless, I immensely enjoyed the hours I spent playing the game. Highly recommended for those who wouldn't mind a bit of a disruption of their normal parser-gameplay expectations.
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