Ratings and Reviews by TempestDash

Earl Grey relies on what I think is a pretty ingenious gimmick (which may or may not make up for any other shortcomings it has). The avatar in the game is given a magical bag that allows you to manipulate the words used to describe the world around you in one of two ways. You may either ‘KNOCK’ a letter out of a word, or ‘CAST’ a letter into a word.

For instance, if you are “Standing in the room with someone’s Aunt,” you could ‘KNOCK’ the last word in that sentence and suddenly you’d be “Standing in the room with someone’s ant.” The only restriction the game places on the player (presumably, there are a few missteps in the implementation) is that the resultant sentence must be grammatically correct.

This clever manipulation of the world is pretty exciting at first, but the game very quickly falls into drudgery when you realize how carefully every sentence is worded such that KNOCKing and CASTing opportunities are, in fact, limited to a single linear path of puzzles leading you from start to finish. The incredible freedom you might imagine with the power to change one letter in any description just doesn’t measure up to the implementation here. Often your avatar is shoved from featureless room to featureless room using one-way portals instead of doors so you end up with no spatial reference.

In the end, if a room has something in it, it’s going to be KNOCKed or CASTed eventually. The stranger the placement of the word in the sentence is also a good sign that something needs to be manipulated. You might think this would be a benefit to gameplay, however, the puzzles you are presented with sometimes require two or three separate KNOCKs and subsequent CASTings to solve and the intermediary steps often don’t appear to be taking you any closer to your goal.

Furthermore, there is a definite feeling that the puzzles were developed prior to the environment they were placed in, which explains why portals whisk you from place to place and that the flow of solutions doesn’t seem to follow logical sense. I’d think the most satisfying chain of puzzles would involve making a number of changes to a single sentence that get you closer and closer to your goal until they all add up to the solution. But Earl Grey doesn’t have many situations like that. In fact the only one I can think of that comes close was (Spoiler - click to show) when you saw a statue with a crown, and then continued to knock it until you ended up with a moon in the sky so you could turn the moon's 'luster' into a 'cluster' of rocks to stand on. Only that last bit will make sense and the rest is just playing around with anything the game lets you. Instead, if there are three sentences describing an area, there will be three changes to be made one to each of the sentences and ONLY in the order the game wants you to make them.

So, while the game has a brilliant idea here, it doesn’t succeed in fully exploring it, which disappoints. It does, however, have a very funny and charming commentary by the player character that appears after the command prompt after every effective action. It appears to be the stream of consciousness of the PC you’re controlling, and, if so, he’s a pretty sarcastic person and definitely witty. One action comes to mind is when you enter a room and see a large clock standing to one side. Naturally I tried to KNOCK the clock and, as a result, a large lock ends up standing to one side. The commentary at the bottom of the screens says: “Yeah, that could have gone one of two ways.”

So, my recommendation is to give it a try at least to experience this interesting gameplay mechanic, but keep the walkthrough handy for when the game goes off on a path that doesn’t immediately make sense.

Gleaming The Verb does away with any pretense of a story and, honestly, almost every IF convention along with it. You can still examine things (if I recall correctly) but beyond that, every other action (or ‘verb’) you enter at the command line is offered as a potential solution to the puzzle before you. So there is no exploration, no interaction with any objects other than the puzzle before you, and no story beyond the fact that you are trapped in a featureless room with a floating, glowing cube.

At this point, one might wonder why this person even used Interactive Fiction as the basis for the game when it could easily have been done with forms in a webpage or even a Quizilla. Well, the only reason I can think of (being the jaded person I am) is that if they used a webpage or Quizilla they couldn’t have entered it into this year’s IFComp. So... I’m left thinking this person just wanted a greater audience for their work and picked IFComp to do it.

This is a shame, because, if anything, having it presented on the surface as an IF-game only forces it to be judged on measures it shouldn’t be judged on. I wouldn’t normally open a puzzle book looking for a story or an interactive experience, and their absence here meaninglessly detracts from what is not a terrible string of word games.

Yes, it’s short, and yes, the game suffers from it’s implementation (Spoiler - click to show) – presumably the puzzle ‘cube’ in the game requires the avatar to physically manipulate it in some way that solves the riddles present, which was fine by me until I was asked to TITRATE the cube, which is simply absurd – but otherwise, I wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong with seeing these five puzzles presented on a page for me to solve.

So, I guess, my recommendation is to go into this game with your expectations properly set and you could get a good 10 minutes or so of enjoyment out of it.

Deadline Enchanter is one of a relatively small set of games that turns the player-parser relationship on its head a bit. Typically, the PC is unaware of your (the player’s) existence, and the parser invisibly takes your commands and transforms them into thoughts that appear to originate from the player character’s mind.

A few games, however, like Deadline Enchanter and, a particularly memorable example from the 2008 IFComp, Violet, change the relationship between the player and the player character by giving the parser a personality. In Violet, the PC is the significant other of the titular Violet, and Violet herself is the parser, replying the way the PC’s girlfriend would, adding tidbits of information and occasional commentary on the player’s attempts to solve the puzzles.

In Deadline Enchanter, it’s even more complicated. The PC in the game is another player of a piece of IF within the game world. The parser in this game is the voice of the person within the game world that wrote the IF game.

Still with me?

It’s terribly surreal at first, playing DE, but as you move through the game it starts to make more sense and you start to understand the rhythm of the game. Through the course of the game, you learn that what has occurred is that the parser, a princess trapped in a tower, has created an IF game as a means of training someone to go through the motions of freeing her. You, the player, is in essence playing someone who has found the game and is playing to figure out how to free the princess.

It’s a pretty ingenious setup in my opinion, but hard to classify and even harder to explain. The game ends up using a few narrative tricks that offer variety to the game play experience, and the ending... well, it gives the player just the slightest hesitation, in a manner designed to create player agency.

In the end, I liked it, and would encourage others to give it a try. It’s actually rather easy, and probably not terribly bad for beginners to IF. I wouldn’t go into it expecting this is how most IF goes, though.

Alabaster, in retrospect, is very, very similar to Galatea, an earlier work from Emily Short. This time you are playing a fractured version of Snow White. You are the Huntsman, that poor servant who is instructed by the Queen to kill Snow White and return with her heart in a box. The game begins as you are walking through the forest with Snow White and stop to examine a dead animal on the path from which you intend to extract a heart to fool the Queen with. Apart from Snow White and the dead animal, there is nothing else to interact with. And moving in any direction is interpreted by the game as the decision to either return to the castle or travel to the safe haven populated by seven dwarves. Your only means of making up your mind as to which place you should go to is to interact with Snow White, and she has a lot to say if you ask her.

Unlike Galatea, however, Snow White’s identity is not shaped by the questions you ask. Whether you find out who and what she is does depend on the questions you ask, but the game makes pretty clear that even if you don’t ask the right questions, her nature is the same.

This is both a benefit and a drawback in my opinion. Where in Galatea after a while you could see the seams in her programming that allow her destiny to change based on what questions you ask in what order, here Snow White’s responses are uniform, and the tiny hints always line up with the broad declarations. The integrity of the game’s characters is maintained.

On the other hand, once you figure out what’s going on with Snow White, getting the other endings is often an exercise in willful ignorance, which is not very satisfying. The very first ending I got in the game, in fact, revealed to me her true nature, which would have made subsequent playthroughs pretty disappointing had there not been one extra action I initially had overlooked that helped me to realize that Snow White’s real face was not the only mystery the game had to offer.

Still, the game’s world – as limited as it is – is very well defined and the prose is very enjoyable, as I’ve come to expect from Emily Short’s games. Of course, not all the prose came from Short.

The other ‘feature’ of this game has nothing to do with how it’s played, actually, but has to do with its genesis. The game was an exercise in collaborative storytelling, initiated by Short and offered up to the IF community for expansion. She had written the initial description and created the environment, but then let everyone who played the development version of the game offer additional dialog choices and responses. Short collated all these options and integrated them into the game, lining up the dialog trees and creating endings for certain lines of discussion. So, really, the game has many, many authors, who have all been corralled into a gameplay mechanic devised by Short.

So, in conclusion, the game is enjoyable the first few times around, and there really is a lot to discover about this version of the Snow White fairy tale. The multiple endings start to wear thin after a while, which may be unavoidable but since there are so many offered I have to believe that it was intended at least for some players to try to get them all. The experiment in collaborative story development, however, is pretty clearly a success, as the game is well written, imaginative, and cohesive, yet still has nearly a dozen authors. I dare the movie industry to do so well.

On the surface, Galatea is a relatively simple game. You are an art critic, and you are standing in one room of a gallery observing a piece of art. The piece of art and its podium are the only things in the room, and you can’t leave the room or the game ends. So there is really only one thing you can do: interact with the piece of art. Fortunately, the piece of art is Galatea, the statue come to life of the Cypriot sculptor Pygmalion from Greek myth. In the game, Pygmalion is gone now, for reasons not initially clear, but Galatea has a lot to say about him and herself if you choose to ask.

The game’s simple structure belies its careful construction (much like the eponymous statue herself). Nearly all of the gameplay involves asking Galatea questions and turning her answers into more questions to ask. Through discussion, you learn about Galatea’s past, how she was created, and, depending on what chain of dialog you choose to follow, what might be in her future. There is not a singular solution, but dozens, and most are distinct from each other, rather than variations on a theme.

I enjoyed the game thoroughly, though I did have to turn to a walkthrough to get more than a handful of endings. Ultimately, who Galatea is and why she exists is not predetermined. As you play the game, and approach certain paths, her responses change and she starts to more firmly manifest a single form. But the next time you play the game, she’ll be back to a blank slate again and your questions may push her destiny in another direction.

In concept, I find this style of gameplay intriguing. The idea that a character is nobody until she is interacted with; it definitely has potential as a metaphor for human existence and bears similarity to the idea of tabula rasa, first posited by Aristotle, another Grecian historical figure. Unfortunately, the concept is not directly embodied in the game very much – at least to my recollection – and is more of a meta-concept than a deliberate one. I would love to see a game use this idea more overtly, where a series of blank forms are given purpose and even history by the player through their interactions with them.

In any case, the execution of this idea is entertaining for a while but starts to lose its novelty the longer you play and start to see the seams at the edges. Once you start to understand how certain discussions lead to certain endings, you can see more clearly where Galatea’s purpose seems to shift dramatically from one question to the next if you don’t follow the preferred line of inquiry. So, in the end, the game glows with the wonder of possibility at first... then rapidly fades the longer you play with her.

Which is a shame, really, because that is the exact opposite of the progression of the player character – the art critic – in the game. It seems his initial reaction is one of boredom, but the longer he talks with Galatea, the more his interest grows and he begins to realize how much more she is than the simple plaque beside her podium states. I’m almost envious of the critic by the end, because in the endings where his life seems to progress alongside Galatea’s, it’s clear his eyes have been opened to possibilities that were never there before. It makes my growing awareness of the limitation of the game feel depressing in contrast.

But, then again, I cared what happened to Galatea, and that’s really the goal of any artist, right? To get me to care about their creation? Regardless of the ending you reach, Galatea has a strong voice that I really took to. I just wish we could both have reached a satisfying end.