Reviews by deathbytroggles

It continues to surprise me that apparently so relatively few people have played First Things First. It seemingly has everything most players want: a good writer and coder (Wheeler), a fun premise (time travel mechanics), and lots of old-school (but fair) puzzles. It's not overly long or overly cruel. It even starts out like Curses! with some putzing around the house. It's about the most perfect game I've ever played.

The time travel mechanic is just lovely. You get to move between five different time periods over a fifty year period and tinker with things in each time period and see the ripple effects. Puzzles involve messing around with nature and seeing what happens, messing with your house and seeing what happens, messing with the bank and seeing what happens, and finally messing with people and seeing what happens.

There are two separate endings to your messing with the universe. The first one is more of a neutral ending and I was able to complete this path without a walkthrough and I'm a walkthrough kind of guy. The second one is much tougher and has more walking dead situations, but also much more rewarding. And if you just save on the regular, you should never have to replay too many portions as long as you keep going through the time machine and checking your work.

A must-play for those who enjoyed A Mind Forever Voyaging but wanted more agency, or for those who enjoyed LucasArts' Day of the Tentacle but wanted a more serious plot, or for those who just like any time travel game they can get their hands on.

Shrapnel is impossible to describe without spoilers, so just know that if you like Cadre's writing or like gimmicks (and don't mind low interactivity) you should just play it. It takes about fifteen minutes.

Now, some spoilers:

(Spoiler - click to show)This could have been great. After being eaten by dogs and regenerating and seeing your own corpse, I thought I was in for a game of a lifetime. Sadly, like the game itself, the plot just collapses in on itself. The scenes are too short and too confusing to illuminate the characters. I've played it four or five times, and while I really enjoy the themes and the writing, I just find it terribly unsatisfying. Perhaps the part that disappoints me the most is when we meet the time traveler from the future who tries to explain things but just adds to the confusion.

Shade was released the same year, and while there are definite similarities, I thought Plotkin's work had a tighter narrative and felt more immersive.

All that said, the gimmick thrills me enough to give it four stars. Still, one of the weaker offerings from Cadre.

I just finished Photopia for the second time, almost twenty years after my first playthrough. I worried that time or perspective would change my opinion, and while that did indeed happen, it remains a treasure I will still recommend to anyone who delves into the world of interactive fiction.

When I first played I was about 20 years old and was mostly moved by the big dramatic moments. Like others have mentioned, time has led me to find these somewhat manipulative, lacking depth. The character of Alley in particular doesn't move me any longer, though I reject that she is a Mary-Sue. We don't see her flaws, though I believe this is because we only see her through the eyes of others who have no reason to highlight her flaws. On this playthrough then I was moved by the characters around Alley, her parents especially (perhaps being the parent of a daughter now helps that). The best parts of Photopia are the ones that don't move the story, where you learn more about everyone through the conversation system or by examining the world around you. The only part I actively disliked was the scene from Alley's suitor, who is nothing but a trope here.

Beyond the characters, I am still amazed at the technical skills on display. The dynamic maps during the bedtime story sections are amazing. Cadre also does a wonderful job of pushing the player through the game at the perfect pace in order to tell his story. While this could have worked as static fiction, I believe the medium improves immersion.

Even with its now recognizable flaws, I remain very fond of this work and will hopefully play it with my children when they are old enough.

Tapestry was one of those games that was pretty revolutionary when it was released. Replaying parts of one's life wasn't a new concept by any means, but the storytelling device was ripe for the interactive-fiction treatment. As such it wooed me at the time, but replaying it all these years later I mostly just see the flaws.

The first problem I have with the game is that the story and all the player's goals are spelled out entirely in the prologue. It's a somewhat interactive text dump, but for the most part it successfully removes all wonder from the playing experience. You are shown key moments from your life you can replay, you are told how you can replay them and how you can reach the three distinct endings. What follows is essentially the video game equivalent of cutscenes: lots of exposition without much interaction. Yes, there are a couple of puzzles, but they're rudimentary and you have to more or less repeat the puzzles on each playthrough which is quite tedious.

The second problem I have with the game is the simplicity of the moral choices. The first one involves deciding whether or not to go to the hospital to watch your mother die or save a small family business from going under. Perhaps somewhere at sometime a real human has had to face such a decision, but it didn't move me; all I could think about was that my jerk of a coworker Mike couldn't cover for me while I went to the hospital. The second moral choice involves euthanizing your wife or trying to prolong it with a new drug treatment; the moral debate over euthanasia aside (and why are there only two options here?), all I could think about was how silly it was that the player and his wife seemed to never have once had a discussion about this before the player is forced to make the choice.

The overall theme of fate and guilt is a good one, and Ravipinto's writing and coding are solid. But the design of the game and the moral choices left me cold and I found it hard to care about the characters or their fates.

I really wanted to love this game. Thrown into the middle of an at-bat during the American League Championship Series, it has one of the better hooks I've seen, and I honestly would have played an entire baseball game coded by Sousa. Ultimately, however, this game can't decide what it wants to be and it left me deeply frustrated.

The first third of the game is well above average, as the first several sections are tense and well-paced. It has the feel of spy movie with exotic locations and contrived danger. But then came the barn.

Even if I could look past that a complex, multi-step puzzle feels entirely out of place in this otherwise frenetic game, the way it's coded is aggravating. At one point you must pour liquids into containers using a funnel, and you have to individually unscrew each cap, insert the funnel, pour the liquid, remove the funnel, screw on the cap, and repeat. And that's just one example of how the game needlessly complicates basic tasks. None of the puzzles are terribly difficult; they all make sense within context and the game will often push you in the right direction if you're on the right track. But there's...just...so...many...steps. Heaven forbid you have to restore back to an earlier point and redo the entire barn puzzle (yeah, that happened).

There's also some sloppy coding. Sometimes doors are described as closed when they're open. There's a door entrance that's apparently its own room, but only while going in one direction. And some fairly obvious synonyms are not programmed. But in other ways it's coded really well. With one or two exceptions, the game will let you know if you try to save in an unwinnable state.

I honestly feel bad being the only person so far giving this game less than three stars. There's a lot to like here, which is why I finished it despite my frustrations. But At Wit's End left me feeling as much.

Dating simulators are inherently unsatisfying, in part due to the nature of choose-your-own-adventures. It's hard for the author to tell any kind of cohesive narrative as choices are often so disparate that the endings all require the reader to rewrite the protagonist in their heads to fit that particular branch. And even if one accepts that the player character is a cipher for your personal choices, this only works for one playthrough (assuming you like any of the choices). After that, one is tempted to just read the other branches for completionist sake, which devolves into tedium.

Add all of the above problems onto a dating simulator is even more problematic, as in real life, successful dates are so much more complex than decisions; my wife was drawn to me because of my looks, my sense of humor, and that I accidentally had sunscreen showing on my face when we first met. While I had some agency in all of that, I honestly wasn't trying that hard. I just was who I was. So dating simulators have a difficult time with immersion even for a second. It all just feels like playing with dolls without the ability to use my imagination.

Chris Cornell definitely gets this. Save The Date explores these themes over what makes a story immersive and satisfying. The player is tempted to play this like any dating simulator and constantly struggles against the author who pushes back.

I want to like this more than I did. Given how thoughtful Cornell is about the theme and style of the game, I wish the writing was more lush. There's a lot of stilted dialogue and a lot of clicking past short sentences, which is one of the primary problems with actual dating simulators. But mostly I was annoyed by the ending, as I found it ultimately negating my experience playing the game rather than enriching it.

Others have felt differently, so play it if you enjoy metafiction.

While it would be hard to argue objectively that Bureaucracy is the best Infocom title, I believe it is the funniest and ergo my favorite. Hell, even before you play the game there's several laugh-out-loud moments just perusing the feelies, my favorite being the triplicate credit card application that is different on every page.

On start-up, you're asked to fill out personal information (to identify the character you'll be playing) and you'll be ridiculed (and your information will be misrepresented anyway, bureaucracy and all that). By this point if you're not hooked you probably won't be.

What ensues is comic madness, and unless you are a very good puzzle-solver, it will lean towards madness. As your blood pressure rises while playing the game, so does the character’s. There’s a blood pressure gauge in the status bar that goes up for every mistake you make. And yes, you can have a heart attack and die if it gets too high.

I did need a few hints to win this one, but even I was amazed at my persistence with some of the puzzles. The game’s tightly developed plot and brazen humor kept me away from the hint book several times. While there are a couple of instances where the game seems unfair, with one walking dead situation, if you persist you will be duly rewarded with the genius that was Douglas Adams.

In 1999 I discovered the IF Archive and the first game I played was not Babel. It was Heist, by Andy Phillips. While I was terrible at it, I was impressed by the parser since the last new text adventure I had played was Bureaucracy. The second game I decided to try was Babel, and I was simply blown away.

The standard criticisms thrown Babel's way are fair. The game uses not one but two sci-fi clichés (amnesia and a doomed Arctic research station). Most of the story is told via flashbacks. The puzzles are mostly perfunctory. The ending is predictable. None of this mattered to me twenty years ago. And I played it again last year and it didn't really matter to me this time either.

Finley is a great writer and accomplished two things here. He was able to develop several multi-dimensional characters (via the flashbacks) and pace the reveals well enough (hence, the perfunctory puzzles) to increase their intrigue. And he also created a tense atmosphere that had me on the edge of my seat as a college freshman. While on my recent playthrough I wasn't quite so moved, I was entertained and once again impressed with the game's breadth and technical strengths.

While it's true that flashbacks are not the strongest storytelling technique, and while it's true that unlocking a bunch of doors is not the strongest use of puzzles , Finley masterfully weaves both facets of his game together, engaging the player in both goals and necessitating the player use one aspect to inform the other. Additionally, the game is so well coded that it's great as an introduction to interactive fiction.

Babel is not my favorite game ever, but probably the one for which I am most fond as it led me to this wonderful community. I even paid to register my game and get the feelies. It's too bad they appear to have been lost to the ether.

I normally am a sucker for anything involving time travel and paradoxes and I tend to prefer linear gameplay. Jon Ingold is also one of my favorite authors. So All Roads should be right up my alley. I judged the 2001 IF competition and remember giving this one a score of "6" and then being surprised it took first place and won a whole slew of XYZZY awards. I decided to play it again recently to see if time would change my mind, but I left once again feeling underwhelmed.

At first, I thought I was bothered that the shifts and paradoxes were so fast and furious that I didn't have time to get a grip on the characters or their motivations. But Shrapnel and Shade are both similar in this regard and it didn't bother me there.

But looking at Jim Kaplan's review, I think he nailed it: Ingold does not trust the player here. If you spend too much time experimenting in any particular area, the game practically force feeds you what you should type, getting you to the ending as fast as possible. I play interactive fiction because I find satisfaction in being involved in the story, even if minimally, and here I felt like a puppet on a string.

That said, it's short enough that everyone should give it a try to see if it's up their alley.

One of Infocom’s most overrated titles, The Lurking Horror is essentially the company’s only foray into the horror genre. Unfortunately, it feels more like a Lebling Zorkian dungeon crawl than an atmospheric mystery. While there are some creepy parts to this college campus caper, it is mostly a disjointed puzzlefest with a smattering of Cthulhu mythos.

Admittedly, I played both Theatre and Anchorhead first, which had the advantage of better development systems. With that in mind, I'll give the simple NPCs here a pass. But the things that annoy me the most about this game have nothing to do with technical restrictions. There's a hunger daemon, which is the slider puzzle of text adventures. There are several illogical walking dead situations. And while I can deal with inventory restrictions (oh how I miss thee, bottomless trenchcoat), even here I felt like I could reasonably carry more than the player character.

Ultimately I would have forgiven all this if I had been immersed in a scary story. But I found the writing mediocre and the ending abrupt and unsatisfying.