Ratings and Reviews by Simon Christiansen

This review was previously published on a blog in connection with IFComp 2012

Eurydice is a game about dealing with grief. It is well-written, and quite moving at times, but it needs some more polish to reach its full potential.

(Spoiler - click to show)The game begins with a boxed Tennyson quote, which unfortunately covers up the initial room description, and refuses to go away. A bit of experimentation revealed that the quote box worked fine on other interpreters (I am using Frotz), so I am willing to give the author a pass here, but still kinda set the tone for the game to come: Lots of small errors interfering with the otherwise very good writing and atmosphere.

The main character is grieving over the dead of his friend/girlfriend Celine, who has apparently committed suicide. It’s not quite clear what kind of relationship they had, but it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that they clearly cared for one another, and the main character is having a hard time letting go. The “help” text implies that the game is based on the experiences of the author, in which case he is doing a great job describing his feelings.

The game starts in the upper floor of a house, where you wander around alone, exploring Celine’s now empty room, your own room, and maybe some of the others. A sense of desolation and abandonment pervades everything. Celine’s room has been emptied, and all the stuff in your own room just serves to remind you of your loss. The lyre in your room is the only item that doesn’t really fit the mood, which is just as well since you are supposed to notice it and take it with you.

When you finally come down to the ground floor, the atmosphere changes to one of social oppression. Tons of people either live in the house, or has come to show their support, and you would really prefer to be left alone. The scene in the living room turned out to be one my favourites in the game. All of the character’s can be examined and talked to several times, and they all seem like three-dimensional people, even though you don’t get to spend much time with them. I loved interacting with these people, and wished they had played a greater part in the story.

Unfortunately, the implementation problems with the game started to become really apparent by this time. While the things the author wants you to interact with, like the people in the room, are implemented very deeply, he tends to forget everything else. Nothing but the people seems to be implemented in the living room: The sofa, the table, the go game and lots of other things don’t actually exist in the world model. While the implementation can be delightfully deep when it wants to, it’s in sore need of more breadth. Mowing through all the “you can’t see any such thing”s, becomes a chore.

There are also a few too many Inform standard responses for my liking, but most of them aren’t really the kind of actions you would naturally try – unless you are like me, and like to obsessively go through a ton of standard actions to see if the author thought of them.

The writing is very good, with lots of beautiful metaphorical language that only occasionally tends towards the melodramatic. It does a great job of setting the mood, and making you identify with the main character. Unfortunately, it’s also marred by minor technical mistakes. There are several spelling mistakes, some odd formatting errors, and some very long paragraphs that would benefit from being broken up into smaller pieces. Still, it manages to work very well, and I’ll take good writing with spelling mistakes over impeccable mediocre writing any day.

After a while, you decide to go for a walk, and the game gradually segues into an afterlife dream sequence, where the mythological themes become more obvious. You take the place of Orpheus trying to rescue his love from the underworld, with the underworld turning out the be the asylum where she was committed. The character’s in the asylum stand in for various mythological character’s: The Doctor is Hades, the other woman in the asylum is Persephone, and so on.

The game becomes a lot more puzzly around this time. You need to figure how to get the Charon stand-in to sail you to the hospital, how to get past Cerberus etc. At first I was disappointed that the Lyre seemed to be the solution to almost everything, but I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that you are supposed to be tempted to overuse it, as it represents the main character’s escapist tendencies. By using it to solve the puzzles you get a sub-optimal ending, in which the character escapes into a fantasy, and never learns to properly deal with his grief. The prosaic – and much harder – puzzle solutions keep you grounded, and allow you to reach a better ending.

I thought this was a really neat effect, which worked very well in my case. Puzzle based IF and literary IF are all too often considered to be at odds with each other, but you can definitely use puzzles to create literary effects, as this demonstrates.

The various endings neatly illustrate various stages of grief, although they probably work best if you get them in the right order. You can fail to deal with your grief, escape into fantasy, try to forget Celine by focusing on your friends, or truly deal with the grief and move on.

Unfortunately, the puzzles are also a bit marred by inconsistent implementation. For instance, there are several cases where you need to give objects to people to proceed, but merely showing the objects just gives you the standard “X is unimpressed” message. Being the possessive type, I tend to show things to people instead of immediately giving them away, so I struggled to solve some puzzles that were rather simple in themselves. I also had trouble retrieving the object hidden in my coat. You are told that there is something stuck in the lining of the coat, but you can’t interact with parts of the coat, or the “something” in any way. You have to type “search coat” to find it. While searching is an Inform standard action, it’s rarely used nowadays, and it didn’t occur to me to try it.

Despite of all the niggling problems, I was moved by this game, which is something that happens all too rarely. There are lots of things wrong with it, but they are all small things that can easily be fixed with some extra work. I guess my only major problem with it is that it reminds my own complete failure in trying to write a game about grief. I get the feeling that the author is an experienced writer, but new to programming. I recommend teaming up with some veteran IF testers, perhaps even a collaborator, and giving the game a few more coats of polish. As it is, it’s still probably my favorite game in the comp so far.

This review was previously published on a blog in connection with IFComp 2012.

Andromeda Apocalypse is a science fiction story, which is the sequel to last year’s Andromeda Awakening. It’s an excellent game, and a must-play for any science fiction fan, regardless of whether you’ve played the previous games in the series.

(Spoiler - click to show)Andromeda Apocalypse is the sequel to last year’s Andromeda Awakening, which I haven’t played, but remember being somewhat controversial. There were a lot of complaints about the language of the game being hard to understand, due to the author being Italian, and using weird turns of phrase. The phrase “cyanotic light” in particular seemed to draw people’s ire.

However, the game must have had solid fundamentals because it seems to be pretty well regarded nowadays, and two more games have been written in the same universe, by different authors. This is the first case I am aware of where a shared universe is used by several IF authors. Judging from the quality of this game, I’ll have to go back and play those games, to get the full backstory.

Luckily, playing the previous games wasn’t necessary to appreciate this one, as it does a pretty good job of establishing what is going on. You are the last survivor of the planet Monarch in the Andromeda galaxy. The ABOUT menu contains a helpful summary of the backstory: The planet has been destroyed by a mysterious race of black spheres, called Hyerotropes, which has lain dormant beneath the surface for millennia. These go around destroying solar systems and galaxies for unknown reasons, and also have the ability to convert matter to “cold, azure light”. I can only assume this must be the infamous “cyanotic light” I’ve heard so much about.

As the game begins, the main character has escaped the destruction aboard a Hyerotrope, which can luckily also be used as a spaceship. For some reason I didn’t quite understand, the Hyerotrope also contains the Voyager probe, along with its famous golden disc. The only thing the main character has managed to bring with him is a single expired railway ticket, a melancholy reminder of his loss. The game uses feelies to great effect, by including pictures of the disc, the ticket and a postcard from the planet Monarch, to set the mood. I wish there had been an option to display these pictures in-game, but the game itself is entirely text based. Perhaps this choice was made to ensure compatibility with browser based interpreters, who don’t seem to be able to handle pictures very well yet.

uring the game there are frequent flashbacks to the late planet Monarch, where you get to have conversations with your uncle and best friend, while watching the approaching storm in the distance. Both the descriptions of Monarch, and the conversations themselves are well written, and did a great job of making me feel nostalgic for the place, even though I had only the faintest idea of what it was supposed to be like. Unfortunately, they also suffer from being almost entirely non-interactive: The only thing you can do is type TALK TO X over and over, until the conversation is over. Attempting to ask about a specific topic tells you that you prefer to follow the flow of the conversation. Worse, when you later need to talk to the main NPC of the game, you do need to talk about specific topics to proceed. By this time, I had resigned myself to the fact that the game would use TALK TO conversation, so I had to check the hints to figure this out.

After a while, you crash into a huge space station, and it is here that the bulk of the game takes place. The station turns out to be an ancient ark that a previous civilisation used to escape the destruction of their home galaxy by the Hyerotropes. The station is very large for a Comp game, with lots of places to explore, and controls to fiddle with. The exploration is helped by the fact that all the exits are listed in the status bar, something I really wish more IF games would do. I’m terrible at visualising how locations are connected, and too lazy to draw a map, so I always end up getting lost in most non-trivial environments.

Soon enough, you manage to activate the station’s AI, which provides conversation and hints throughout the rest of the game. You can talk to the AI from any location, and receive location based comments and backstory. The conversation is topic based with the syntax conveniently implemented as “NAME, TOPIC” in addition to the usual ASK/TELL syntax. This is something I would like to see done more often since hardly anyone seems to implement separate responses to ASK and TELL these days.

The topics you can talk about are highlighted in the text, which helps avoid “guess-the-topic” problems, but also means that the conversation system is really no different than a menu system, except you have to type in the options rather than selecting them from a menu. You end up just lawnmowering through all available options without much thought. I think I prefer having to figure out what topics are available myself, even if it means occasional frustration. In spite of this, I really did enjoy talking to this AI throughout the game, and felt kind of attached to it at the end.

The puzzles in the game are generally very good, and I was impressed by how intuitive the solutions felt. The necessary actions almost always felt completely natural, and on the few occasions where I got stuck it was usually because I hadn’t been paying attention, or had typed something blatantly wrong.

The hint systems is also very good: The game uses the usual menu based “invisiclues” type of hints, but makes them context sensitive, so you can only see hints for currently active puzzles. This neatly solves the usual problem with menu based hints, where the menu options spoil events that have not yet happened.

The only time the hints let me down, was at one of the late game puzzles, where you are chased through the station by a ravenous beast. The hints only mention one way of defeating the beast, but I had unwittingly closed off that option earlier in the game. Just as I was about to give up, I managed to find an alternative solution. It’s a testament to the excellent puzzle design in the game that I found this solution with no hinting, but if I hadn’t found it in time, I would have assumed that I had put the game in an unwinnable state, and probably rated it lower. Authors should take care to mention all the possible puzzle solutions in the hints, and maybe even include an in-game walkthrough. Sometimes I just want to get to the end of a game, without having to wade through 20 gradually more explicit hints to figure out how.

I greatly enjoyed playing this game and can recommend to pretty much everyone, especially people who enjoy science fiction. The ending of the game strongly implies that there will be a sequel – at least I hope that’s the intention since I am not quite sure I understood what was going on. Did someone else escape the apocalypse? Is that presence in the distance the Hyerotrope king or something? Will there be cyanotic light where we are going?

Hopefully I’ll get to find out in the next game in the series. Perhaps I’ll even find a use for that expired railway ticket I’ve apparently been carrying with me since the first game. I’ll definitely have to play the previous installments while I wait.

This review was previously published on a blog in connection with IFComp 2012.

Spiral is a dark surreal game about despair and the possibility of getting a second chance. It is very well implemented, and quite atmospheric at times, but the relentless darkness gets tiresome after a while.

(Spoiler - click to show)The game begins with one of the more original beginnings I’ve seen in an IF game: Two people – a man and a woman – wake up in a mysterious train, tied up, gagged and unable to act in any way. The player starts the game as one of the characters, but quickly discovers that it’s possible to switch between them at will, using the BE command. It’s never quite explained how the player can do this, but the game does imply some answers, which I will get to later.

To make up for the initial lack of agency, the game introduces both a THINK and REMEMBER command, so you can learn about the two characters. At first I thought this might be a game entirely about thinking and remembering, but there turned out to be a lot more too it. A game where you are completely unable to act might be pretty cool, though. Sort of like Rameses, except with actual physical restraints instead of mental ones. Stuck as a passive observer, your only options would be to think and observe, trying to make sense of your situation. But I digress.

Anyway, while the game turned out to be about a lot more than being tied up in a surreal hell-train, I did spend a lot of time just examining everything and thinking. This was in no small part due to the impressive depth of the implementation. Not only can you think, and think, and think, gradually remembering a massive amount of information about the character you are currently playing as, but you can also examine both yourself and the other character several times, getting different perspectives each time. Even the room description changes subtly depending on the perspective. On the one hand, this is technically no different than just writing one really long description, and maybe having the player press a button to get the next text-dump. On the other hand, it totally worked on me, and I felt completely immersed in examining and thinking over and over again. Somehow, deciding which piece of information to read next felt like a meaningful choice, which helped me identify with the characters.

The male character, Ross, is a young radical leftie whose friend tried to bomb the London Underground, and may have succeeded. He is also traumatized by the death of his mother, whom he called by her first name for no particular reason. He seems to have become disillusioned with the socialist cause, and no longer believes that society can be saved.

The woman, Helen, is a religious girl, who suffers from both guilt and depression because she got pregnant after a wild party, and had an involuntary abortion. She considers herself a horrible sinner beyond redemption.

After spending some time getting to know the backgrounds, you are told that you are sleepy, and this is where the real game begins. Going to sleep sends you into a symbolic dream world where the locations and items represent the neuroses of the character. Each of the two characters have their own private hell to explore: Ross’ is a gigantic machine funnelling everything, including his soul, into the maws of a giant beast. Helen’s is the fiery hell in which she feels she belongs, filled with fiery lakes and reminders of her life. As you explore these hellscapes, new topics become available for “remembering”.

The writing is dark, brooding and metaphorious. Everything is described in dark, depressive terms, with metaphors scattered everywhere like the dead wasps littering the floor of the train car. At first, I found this to be atmospheric, but as time passed it started to grate on me. Everything is horrible and depressing to these people; Their lives, society, their friends; It’s all terrible. It would have been nice if the characters had had some kind of positive passions and interests to break up the monotonous darkness, but everything in the dreamworlds seems to represent some kind of neurosis. Nothing is ever just an interest, or a neutral character trait.

The objectives to be completed are basically scavenger hunts: Ross is trying to recover the pieces of his soul, which have been scattered by The Beast. Helen is similarly trying to collect the pages of the book of her life, to figure out what it all meant. This serves the usual scavenger hunt purpose of making the player see all the interesting parts of the game world, but also starts to seem a bit mechanical after a while. None of the items to be collected have any unique properties, you are not even allowed to read the pages of the book, so they are basically just tokens that prove you managed to reach them.

The actual puzzles are generally good, avoiding the usual problems with surreal games that only makes sense to the author. I loved the little surreal puzzle features, like being able to peel a door off a wall, and use it to gain access to other locations. Unfortunately, the game suffers from the fact that the central puzzle mechanic – being able to pass objects from one dream world to another – is completely unintuitive. I don’t think I would ever have figured it out if I hadn’t spoiled myself by peeking at some of the other reviews before I wrote this one. The problem is that the thing you have to do to transfer the objects, either feeding them to the beast or throwing them in the lake of fire, seem like they ought to be destructive, and is not really something most players are likely to try spontaneously.

To make matters worse, the game has no hint system. Instead, typing HINT results in one of those infuriating messages where the author pedagogically encourages you to keep exploring, and tells you to write him if you really need help. Please do not do this. I am not interested in writing e-mails when I’m in the middle of playing your game, especially not when I’m trying to finish it before the Comp deadline. And are you really sure that your e-mail address will still be valid ten years from now, when some starry-eyed IF enthusiast digs up your game from the archives? And will you still remember the puzzles by then? Luckily, the game does come with a walkthrough, so I was able to finish it, but using the walkthrough is never ideal since it’s hard to avoid spoiling yourself. Please always include a hint system.

For some reason, there are a lot of puzzles involving the creation of bridges by placing poles in holes. If this has some kind of symbolic significance it went completely over my head.

After you manage to completely at least one of the scavenger hunts, you are transferred to the burnt out wreck of the train that has been bombed by Ross’ socialist/anarchist friend. Here you have the opportunity to kill some kind of horrible humanoid thing, after which you are back in the train car, where you get to possess a bee and kill yourself, which somehow brings the other character back to life, after which you, as the bee, commits suicide and you get a long ending cut-scene. Somehow getting one of the characters killed prevents the tragic event of the other character’s life from occurring, maybe providing a possibility of happiness? You are then somehow rescued from some kind of horrible facility, which may be connected to the train car, maybe, and the other character turns into a still-born infant or something, and I’ve long since stopped trying to make any sense of this.

I am, to say the least, not entirely sure what this is trying to say, if anything. Did I change the past by sacrificing one character for another, or were the events not determined in the first place before I somehow chose which possible world to actualize? Were these characters connected by some kind of karmic thread that meant only one of them could get to live a happy life? Perhaps you are a single soul trying to choose a destiny, which is why you can change between the two characters? I have no idea, but it was a pretty engrossing experience none the less.

I actually gave this a much higher score in the Comp. I was thoroughly engrossed for the first two hours, but as I played through the rest of the game, I got more and more tired of the relentless darkness, and increasingly inscrutable surreality. It’s still a very well implemented game, and definitely worth playing, but I think it could be improved with some editing. I’m not sure how, though.