Reviews by Mr. Patient

Don't let it scare you (except for the scary bits), January 6, 2019

(I wrote an unmemorable 1% of this game. The stars are for the other 83 people.)

I'd like to push back just a little bit on some of the introductory text from Cragne Manor. Not the parts about how the game is insane and brilliant and fun; that's all true. I'm immensely proud and grateful to have been part of it. No, it's the stuff about being prepared to be frustrated or overwhelmed on account of its hugeness. I completed it a few days ago, and I was surprised at just how playable it was.

There are a couple of things that distinguish Cragne Manor from something like The Mulldoon Legacy (which is amazing, but is definitely overwhelming). First, Cragne provides a fantastic amenity in the form of an item that tells you if you're able to solve the puzzles in a given room, or if you need additional information or items from elsewhere, or if you've done everything you need to do already. It's difficult to overstate how comforting this thing is. I get overwhelmed in huge games from the combinatorial explosion of rooms, puzzles, and information. I can't keep everything in RAM, so to speak, and become exhausted even looking at my inventory. The (Spoiler - click to show)coffee cup in Cragne kept my headspace manageable.

It also helped tremendously that each room was written without knowledge of the other rooms. Without saying too much about how the game and its puzzles are structured, this means that almost every item or piece of information is single-use. There are definitely things you'll need to take notes on, but for the most part, you use an item or a piece of info, and you can then throw it away (or put it in the zipped-up trash pocket of the brilliantly-implemented carryall). And many of the biggest and best set-piece puzzles are standalone.

I worked alone in my playthrough, and only needed a few hints. It probably took me over 30 hours to finish, and 6800 turns (maybe twice that when you consider moves lost to restores). But I always knew what I could do next, what would have to wait until later, and what items were still useful, and that made it manageable. Don't let the size of Cragne Manor scare you off.

IF cotton candy, November 11, 2017

Thaumistry, by famed implementer Bob Bates, would slot pretty well into the Legend catalog of the early 1990s. It's fun, it's breezy, and very well-polished. It's also less ambitious than the best-regarded works from Infocom or modern IF. No heavy themes, no unfamiliar gameplay mechanics, no fiendishly intricate puzzles. It'd probably be an excellent first game for newbies.

You're Eric, a struggling inventor who learns that he's also a bodger; which is to say, a wizard who seems to generate an inordinate amount of bad luck. You spend the game discovering your powers and foiling a threat to the hidden bodger community. Spellcasting is Enchanter-style, where accumulating spells with silly names and effects is the primary means of progressing through the story. The tone is "restrained zany" in the Infocom house style. Prominent members of the IF community past and present (Bates's Kickstarters and former colleagues) show up as NPCs. I enjoyed getting to prod baf up onto a stage.

The puzzles are straightforward, and most don't require a lot of lateral thinking. There are very few takeable objects, and a finite number of spells. Solving the puzzles is generally a matter of running through the list of objects and spells until a new result is obtained. With some of the spells (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)summoning Greek waiters), there's no way to anticipate what the spell will really do, so it's just a matter of trying it everywhere until something happens.

The real strength of the game is in the implementation. It's as thoroughly-tested and bug-free as anything Infocom or Legend ever shipped, and, since we're no longer playing on Commodore 64s, much more richly implemented. It gates you in a tutorial area to begin. It ensures you can never end up in an unwinnable state. It minimizes pointless tasks, and teaches you shortcuts as you go along. There's a very handy THINK/RECAP function, which summarizes what you know and what you need to work on. There are appropriate and funny responses to almost everything, and Easter eggs everywhere. The feelies are fun and don't overstay their welcome. Presumably the hints are helpful and well-designed; I never actually looked at them. All in all, it's an extremely smooth experience. A little more friction might not have been so terrible, though.

A very challenging tour, November 4, 2017

This is a traditional-style text adventure set in a sort of mathematical wonderland, populated by mathematician NPCs and puzzles based on physical manifestations of mathematical concepts. You can tell it comes from a place of deep love of the subject.

I was a decent math student. I made my way up through calculus, and was able to memorize and apply formulas, but I can't say that I truly understood the concepts underlying all of them. And that was 25 years ago. So this game was not exactly in my wheelhouse. I managed to solve some of the puzzles on my own, but there were more than a couple where I stood no chance without the walkthrough.

That's OK. A Beauty Cold and Austere is well-written, polished, and witty, with modern amenities and forgiving gameplay, even if the puzzles can be trying for math mortals. My favorite amenity is the ghost who can tell you if an object you're carrying is still useful. I would pay cash money to port this ghost over to a game like The Mulldoon Legacy.

My main complaints:
1) It takes too long to acquire the carryall. There's no reason to delay that, I don't think.

2) The game is several times the size of a normal comp game. Math majors might be able to finish it in four or five hours, but I doubt anyone could complete it in two. Near the end, it's possible to tap out early with what seems to be a successful ending, but it takes quite a while to get there. I would have liked a structure a bit more like Shuffling Around's, where you can get a successful ending within two hours, and then return after the judging period to explore the rest. Do enough to get a C, in other words, and come back later for extra credit.

An off-kilter western, October 4, 2016

In last year's comp, Jeremy Pflasterer gave us Koustrea's Contentment, an intriguing, atmospheric, very large, and somewhat underclued game that initially lacked a walkthrough, leading a lot of players to give up on it. This year, Pflasterer has submitted Hill Ridge Lost & Found, which is similarly intriguing, atmospheric, and still a little underclued, but also about the right length for the comp. And the walkthrough, thankfully, appeared much earlier (though not on day one).

Hill Ridge is an off-kilter modern western, mixing familiar tropes with alien but relatable elements. We're the Ambler, an old cowboy gone to discover the fate of a long-unseen neighbor. Like with Koustrea's Contentment, proper names are all askew -- there's a Langle Olk and a Mrs. Vumfarr, and the missing neighbor is Lonon. There are cows and barns, but also jiller vines and vorairs, huge temperamental armadillos. The weirdness is pleasingly low-key, and the writing is understated and effective:

It's not good to sit still with suspicion. Better to carry it somewhere, quick and careful. But it ended up being somewhat late in the day that Sunday when you set out, after all manner of procrastination had run its course. And that, for you, was unusual.

The gameplay is classic text adventure stuff: explore the mostly-abandoned site, take all the things, fix what needs fixin'. It begins with an imposing wall of text, but it does give you a clear initial goal -- find Lonon -- that I thought was lacking in Koustrea. Once I achieved that goal, though, I was at a loss. There were clearly puzzles to be solved, but I didn't have any idea what my PC was trying to accomplish. The inference I was meant to draw after visiting some of the game's locked-away areas, and the action I needed to trigger the endgame -- these are leaps I wouldn't have made without the walkthrough. Hill Ridge also has a couple of misleading responses, especially with the (Spoiler - click to show)bicycle/lamp (the game reads UNSCREW LAMP as an attempt to open the bottom of the lamp for some reason, rather than unscrewing the screw that holds the lamp to the bike).

Overall, I liked Hill Ridge pretty well, more than Koustrea's Contentment, and I think the author has made a more accessible game this time around. With a little better cluing and a clearer motivation for the PC I think it might be excellent.

Warning: Broken, May 20, 2015

I wanted to like this one.

The story, such as it is: after escaping your bedroom, you find yourself captain of the eponymous sailing ship, searching for the lost sons of the previous captain. The game is amazingly, almost endearingly primitive. There are no descriptions of anything. Almost every command is met with "I can't" or "I see nothing special." You can't even recall the room description without exiting and re-entering. There are severe guess-the-verb problems, starting with the opening room. But for all that, I was still having a good time about 2/3 of the way through it. The puzzles (mostly) made sense. I stumbled around the map but somehow always found the right place to be, and I was able to progress with a little help from the walkthrough when verb-guessing became impossible.

But then I hit a point where the game is simply broken. An object that is supposed to be there, isn't. Following a footnote in the walkthrough, I came to learn that the only way to complete the game is to hack it with The Quill to conjure the missing object. That's quite a ways beyond where I was prepared to take it. It's a shame.

Loose leaves, loose ends, November 30, 2013

Time for Tea makes a terrific first impression, with signs of a lush, deeply imaginative setting, great atmosphere, and strong writing. That impression isn't quite sustained through extended play, but even so, it's a deserving winner of the 2nd Metafilter competition.

The setting was adapted from Clarabelle Chong's Time 4 Tea, from the 2010 One Page Dungeon competition. Most of the other entrants that I looked at were in a D&Dish vein: caves and orcs and that sort of thing (although I see that Adam Thornton had a winning entry that year entitled Central New Jersey After the 'Big Whoops'). Time 4 Tea is a fantasy/SF Victorian "dungeon" with an enormous amount of imagination stuffed into the one page. There are tea alchemists unlocking magical powers, tea pirates, missing persons, mysterious notebooks, strange symbols, sinister labs filled with unusual machines, and of course, the rough outline of an actual dungeon which ends with the word "secrets!".

Virtually all of this ends up in the IF game (which was not written by Clarabelle Chong), along with some new elements: airships, a cult of Hermes Trismegistus, permutation theory in mathematics, and a touch of Lovecraftian horror. The setting seems fully-formed right out of the gate. Very quickly -- before having left the first room, even -- we find a notebook filled with historical details. We're encouraged to SOCIALIZE with the other patrons in a tea garden, suggesting that this will be a game which takes its pseudo-Victorian backdrop seriously. The initial objects we encounter have been given the deluxe treatment:

> x silver coin
Minted just two years ago, the coin carries the visage of Blake Whitstone, who founded the eponymous city in 1843, just after the War of the Rosy Cross. On the reverse is a diminutive picture of a fleet of clipper ships with minuscule tea leaves inscribed on their tiny sails. The coin should be just enough to buy your afternoon tea.

It's quite a lot to absorb from an opening, but it says to the player: There's some deep world-building going on here; you're in good hands. Unfortunately, while it remains fairly compelling throughout, the game doesn't quite fulfill this promise. The central problem is that it writes a lot of checks that it can't cash. We know from the start there's a grand mystery or conspiracy involving the tea trade, alchemy, and a missing person. As we persevere through the game, more gets piled on. There are grotesque statues, mysterious plants, a bookstore we can't get into, massive machines, engravings, creepy paintings, old tomes, all lavishly described with seemingly important detail. It turns out that hardly any of it actually matters. At the end, when we have won, we have learned almost nothing. The author ran with all the interesting stuff in Chong's original design, added yet more cool stuff to it, but didn't actually tie anything together. The game is all loose ends. It's a shame, because it's a hell of a setup.

After that first room or two, Time for Tea also becomes somewhat thinly implemented: there are a lot of objects which appear important but are only painted on; actions which should be plausible but are not accounted for; synonyms expected but not found; and just a couple of NPCs with not much to say. The game is written with a definite just-enough aesthetic. If something is directly related to the solution, it'll be manipulable or takeable, and might have second-order descriptions. If not, it might still get a very detailed description, but otherwise will be swaddled in default responses.

The puzzles are mostly in the just-about-right range, except for two. One of these involves a (Spoiler - click to show)hungry animal who has something you need. If you are reading this, you already know the solution. The obvious actions do not work, though, and the failure messages you get are highly misleading. (In fact, the solution makes no sense at all, as you have to perform the action on the (Spoiler - click to show)wrong animal). The other puzzle is one of the hardest I've ever seen in any game. To access a certain location, you must place objects in a specific order. This order is determined by (Spoiler - click to show)understanding a bit of mathematics I've never heard of (and which took quite a bit of concentration to grasp), finding two codes, performing a very unexpected (and unmentioned) operation on those two codes, and then taking the result and decoding it back into a value. Or to be more precise, decoding it into one of two values, because the game randomly selects between them. As you work on the puzzle, there is no feedback to give you any confidence that you actually understand what you're doing. The game has built-in hints, but they are so limited and so coy as to be useless. The hint given for the ordering puzzle is "Everything in its right place, but which place is right?". Ultimately, I contacted the author for the solution.

I've been mostly negative here, and I didn't mean to be. I found the mystery at the game's center compelling enough to want to see it through, to try decompiling the game to help solve that inscrutable puzzle, and to track down and email the author for help. Time for Tea is unquestionably the cream of the 2010 Metafilter competition. But to actually tell the story it wants to tell, it would need to be as long as Anchorhead.

Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don't you think?, February 2, 2013

In Pinched, the PC is the hilariously crude Jayne Cobb, the accidental hero played by Adam Baldwin in Firefly. Jayne usually provides the muscle of the Serenity crew, but in this adventure, he does everything but that. It's an amusing setup, although it doesn't quite reach its potential.

The key thing in fanfic like this is to get the voices and behaviors of the characters right. Here, I think the author mostly does a fine job. Mal's voice in particular is well-realized, and almost all of the default responses have been replaced by funny things that I can imagine coming out of Jayne's mouth. Some of these are downright terrific (like the response[s] to SING). And naturally, there's lots of Whedony language and callbacks to the show. While not quite bug-free -- there are some minor run-time errors when eating unexpected things -- the game seems solid, and was allegedly tested, although the testers are also anonymous.

I wish it had a more open design, though. The game is broken into a series of one- or two-room scenes, where you either bide time during expository dialogue, perhaps interjecting something with JOKE or ASK QUESTION, or you solve (or brute-force) a simple puzzle. It's easy to code, I'm sure, but it's a real missed opportunity. The joy of playing a Firefly game (and writing one, I would think), would be in poking around Serenity and interacting with the crew: playing with the dinosaurs on Wash's console, or lifting weights with Book in the cargo bay. We don't get to do these things, or admire Jayne's prodigious gun collection, even though we're in his bunk. Firefly has a large cast, so I understand the challenges of implementing all of them as fully-realized NPCs with detailed conversation trees, but I was hoping for more.

The puzzles, while funny in the abstract, don't really deliver the daring heist promised in the blurb. A little bit of "Jayne is uncomfortable in polite society" goes a long way. Some more tension or derring-do would have been welcome.

Fraud for fun and profit, July 14, 2012

Speculative Fiction is an extremely sharp, witty game. I'm glad the authors completed it, after placing second in 2011's IntroComp.

At its core, the game is just a straightforward puzzler, but it handles the player/PC/parser divide in very entertaining fashion. You are a wizard whose mind is trapped in the body of his familiar: W.D., an uncompromisingly gluttonous raven who's not entirely thrilled to be sharing his body. You command W.D., and he describes the world and performs actions in a more-or-less ravenly way; the parser's voice is (almost) entirely his. In that sense, the game's structure bears a small resemblance to Suspended, I suppose. However, unlike the robots, W.D. has his own will, and can thwart you from time to time. He's also hilarious from start to finish.

Your wizard has recently looted the kingdom's treasury and replaced the gold therein with an illusion. Acting through W.D., you must find a way to replace all the stolen money before the treasurer gets hold of the king and you are executed. Replacing the money involves committing many more crimes. Some of these are sly, subtle jabs at recent financial industry malfeasance, like one involving a robo-signer. Others are a bit blunter and crueler.

W.D. is the game's great creation. Calling him a wisecracking bird would reduce him to an animated Disney sidekick; he's much better than that. It's tempting to list out dozens of great lines, but I'll restrict myself to just a couple:

>x signature
A poorly-executed forgery of the treasurer's signature. I suspect his name is not actually "The Treasurer." I also suspect he knows how to spell "treasurer." I wish your Spelling Wasp had caught on, boss. That one should have made us millionaires. Anaphylactic shock is a small price to pay for proper spelling.

>x beggar
He's got no eyeballs. Man, that's the best part of the human.

Even if you solve none of the puzzles, you should have a pretty good time just reading W.D.'s descriptions (as well as an excellent fake-terrible disambiguation message in the Stock Market).

The game is structured so that it's possible to get a decent ending by solving only the easier puzzles. The more puzzles you can solve, the better an ending you can open up. This would seem to make it newbie-friendly, except that the puzzles do become very challenging, verging on underclued, including one I didn't even realize was a puzzle until I read ABOUT HINT (which does not actually dispense hints, but simply lists the primary tasks).

The implementation is decent with a few hiccups. The authors have replaced most of the default responses with W.D.-appropriate ones, and they're terrific. However, there are occasional missing line breaks, a repeated word or two, some unimplemented objects, and a couple of bugs (one of which which allowed me to short-circuit the game's cleverest puzzle, albeit in amusing fashion).

But frankly, it doesn't matter. W.D. is so ingenious that you should play Speculative Fiction just for the writing.

Exciting, boring, nauseating, July 14, 2012

Note: the following review is for an AIF game. There is some spicy talk in the spoiler space below.

(Spoiler - click to show)SD3 is AIF set in and around a British secondary school. Fresh off the events of the previous installments (which I haven't played), you are urged by your best friend to score with his younger sister. Whether or not you choose to accept this particular mission, you'll have sex with a wide array of basically similar and remarkably forgiving girls, the least of which is your ostensible girlfriend. And they are all girls. There are a few adult women in the game about whom you can DAYDREAM, but the focus is squarely on the underage set. The PC is presumably 16 or thereabouts, so the partners might be narratively appropriate, but the player is very probably a balding middle-aged nerd, which makes the whole thing a little unsavory.

There are some suggestions that the game is set a couple of decades ago. There are VCRs, but no cellphones; David Hasselhoff, but no Bieber. However, the girls all have modern hairstyles and clothes, and, perhaps more to the point, Brazilians and landing strips and the like. I have no idea if these were à la mode among British schoolgirls circa 1994, but I am skeptical.

The big draw of SD3, and I'm guessing the reason it's so highly-rated (with 11 Erin awards, and a bunch of five-star ratings here), is that it's lavishly illustrated, with dozens of images ranging from the suggestive to the hardcore. The original illustrations all have that polygonish, alien computer art look, but a few of them are pretty hot. There are some real photos as well, including the aforementioned Mr. Hasselhoff in full Baywatch gear (surely the hottest of all). I found that the images overwhelmed the text -- blah blah creamy globes, blah blah moist treasures, let's move on to the next picture -- which is probably not a bad thing.

Although it's parser-based, the gameplay is CYOA-style. Do you ask your friend's sister on a date, or your own girlfriend, or someone else? How much money do you want to spend? And what to do about that other girl, vigorously masturbating just around the corner? The game tracks the various girls' attitudes towards you, and opens and closes certain paths accordingly. The paths mostly lead to similar places, of course. And that's literally: many of the locations you can visit are homes, and they all have exactly the same floorplan.

The parser provides bare-minimum functionality for the parts that don't involve sexytime. Even the sexytime parts are sort of minimal. Sure, all the basics are covered, but the game doesn't appear interested in implementing very much beyond thrusting and groping. (That said, it is almost adorable that it understands HOLD HANDS). It also nods a little too much towards realism, so to speak. I wanted to just throw down Stiffy-style wherever and whenever it seemed like it would be entertaining, but the game insisted on privacy and propriety, except at the very end.

So SD3 is not very good IF. Is it good porn? Sometimes. Like porn generally, it's exciting at first, turns repetitive and boring after a little while, and occasionally veers into gross. The younger sister storyline leads at the end to what must be the single most appalling sentence I've ever seen in IF:

(Spoiler - click to show)"Fuck yes, sis!" Mike crows. "Nice cunt!"

The sex scenes can last as long as you like, and a great deal longer. After the fourteenth orgasm or so, you might want to leave the room, but the game will insist that you WITHDRAW first. (It's an oversight we're all guilty of from time to time). SCORE keeps track of your scoring, naturally, but I found it a source of humiliation. Having combined every verb and noun I could think of, I managed to bring my virtual girlfriend to orgasm in only 6 of 26 ways before giving up.

Zork, without all the words, July 14, 2012

In Emerald Isle, you play a pilot who's had to bail out in the Bermuda Triangle. The back-of-the-box blurb promises a man vs. nature fight for survival: "You escape by parachute, floating downwards to the lonely atoll, the 'Emerald Isle,' from which few escape. The only way out is to solve its challenges...".

It turns out not to be a man vs. nature fight for survival. After extricating yourself from a tree, you...hunt for treasures, in a part-fantasy part-modern world. And then you put the treasures in a room to score points. Huzzah. It's exactly like Zork or Adventure, but inferior in nearly every respect. There are no room descriptions, only room titles. Objects are described with three or four words apiece. The parser is two-word, and not overly robust even in comparison with others of its kind. The puzzles offer no surface area for experimentation and feedback. You either guess the right action, or get an unhelpful default response. And several of the actions are simply unguessable.

What the game does have is a lot of empty space. There are at least 200 rooms, and maybe 1/4 of those have an object or something to interact with. It also has illustrations for every one of those rooms. I would have gladly traded half the rooms and all of the illustrations for a description of the train-ticket machine that went beyond "Looks dented."

Level 9 did some fine work, not least of which is 1987's Knight Orc, which had an excellent parser and a highly original story. Emerald Isle has to be one of their worst. In his indispensable walkthrough, Jacob Gunness had this to say: "Credits must go to Level 9 for producing one of the largest, dullest and most plot-less adventures in a long while."

I'll co-sign that.