Reviews by Mr. Patient

It's been a very long time since I read Wuthering Heights; I can remember the names Heathcliff and Catherine and little else. So I was worried that my faded memories of the book might limit my enjoyment of the game. They didn't.

That's because there's no game here. There's hardly anything at all, as far as I can tell. No takeable objects, no NPCs, no puzzles, nothing. You can wander through seven rooms, examine the few objects which the author took the time to implement, observe the numerous misspellings, and then quit. There are a half-dozen locked doors, but no keys, and the game does not understand the word "door" at any rate. The only ending appears to be in response to examining the dog (I won't even dignify that with a spoiler tag). The help text encourages the player to "find all of the mansion's hidden secrets!". They must be awfully well-hidden.

I don't understand why the game was posted to IFDB in this state.

The Best Man is a rare example of an action thriller in a medium known mainly for leisurely contemplation. In the game, you are en route to a friend's wedding, to serve as best man (naturally), and deliver the ring for the bride. After a short flashback sequence, you find yourself aboard a train which, within a few moves, will be hijacked by terrorists. If you want to deliver that ring (and survive), you'll need to defeat the terrorists singlehandedly.

The game does a lot of things right. For the most part, it fulfills its action-movie goals. It resembles Die Hard in its one-man-vs.-the-terrorists setup, but there is rather less ass-kicking on the protagonist's part, and rather more chemistry. That's not to say there's less death -- in fact, there's a shocking amount of it, which could just as easily have been written away -- but the dirty work is all handled offscreen and indirectly. The first half of the game is tight, exciting and well-done, and the initial puzzles are at the sweet spot in terms of challenge, even if there's a lot of learning-by-dying, which turns some players off. The story works well enough for the genre it's trying to emulate, even though it doesn't make a whole lot of sense (and there are suggestions that much of it (Spoiler - click to show)might be a dream). It has excellent feelies (good luck trying to fold that spider).

On the other hand, there's not enough characterization of the PC for the transformation from everyman into terrorist-fighting hero to really work. The PC is pretty much a blank slate (as good looking as ever, in fact). There's a brief setup scene where we learn that we're the survivor of a plane crash on a previous attempt to serve as best man for this same couple, but there's nothing which really prepares us in a character sense for what happens later. Terrorists take over the train, and we suddenly become a coolly competent terrorist fighter, because that's what protagonists do.

The game as a whole is on a timer, and there are a few smaller timed puzzles as well. The time limit is more forgiving than the one in say, A Change in the Weather, but it is not exactly slack. I played a pretty taut game, restoring frequently to optimize, and I still finished with only a few moves left on the clock. It's definitely as cruel in the Zarfian sense as A Change in the Weather. It's extremely easy to lock yourself out of victory without knowing it, and by performing actions that look reasonable at the time.

The Best Man is too old-school in its gameplay than it should be given its year of publication. Doors don't open automatically, even those you've opened before, an annoyance felt all the more keenly in a game with a time limit. More disappointing, though, is the inventory management system. There's a very strict inventory limit, and even the "carryall" object has a limited volume. Items which are in the carryall must be brought to hand manually before they're dropped or used. The game tries to juggle some items for you, swapping items into your carryall as needed, but it always managed, seemingly with malice aforethought, to stash the item I actually wanted to keep at hand (or to transfer liquids into the carryall while leaving the containers in hand, breaking the game). Exacerbating matters, there are a number of similarly-named objects, and a great deal of movement that relies on having free hands. The end result is that much of the game is spent laboriously dropping and stashing items, a gameplay style decidedly at odds with the action-movie genre.

The puzzles are mostly fair, but there are a couple of doozies involving the (Spoiler - click to show)bomb. It's very confusingly described and hard to picture. There are components mentioned in its description which can't be examined until the thing is opened, and worse, there are very critical components which are not mentioned at all until you've tripped over them and died. The (Spoiler - click to show)balances puzzle is fiddly to the extreme, with disambiguation issues compounding the overall challenge of solving the puzzle. After looking at it for a few minutes, I had a good idea of what I wanted to do, but I still couldn't do it, because a) I struggled with (Spoiler - click to show)all the various tubes and flasks and bottles to express what I wanted to do; and b) the quantities of liquid involved were too great. The puzzle would have been greatly improved had the beakers contained only 20 or 30 ml of liquid each, so that experimenting produced feedback more quickly and reliably.

The hints, as other reviewers have noted, are not as useful as they could be. You generally can't access a hint for a given puzzle until you've died failing to solve it. In general, I find adaptive hinting pretty annoying; very rarely does a game seem to know what I actually need or want. There are no hints at all for the endgame (a three-move timed puzzle with no slack, and with at least three nonobvious prerequisites), even after you've died. There really aren't very many clues, either. I always find that rereading feelies is helpful in these sorts of situations.

I've dwelled on the negative too much. The game really is very exciting, and handles the action genre better than any other IF I can think of, except perhaps Border Zone and the endgame of Spider and Web. If it had a more forgiving and convenient inventory system, I'd give it an easy four stars. If the (Spoiler - click to show)bomb puzzles were made a little more sensible and the PC given a little more characterization, I'd have no trouble listing it among the best games I've ever played.

This is pretty well-polished for being Speed IF. The amount of text and depth of implementation makes me wonder if it was actually completed in only three hours.

In the game, you play a monster hunter of sorts. To say much more would give away the game's central joke, but it's suggested in the title. There's a very long prologue -- too long, really -- but it's pretty funny. The gameplay then consists of three rooms and three small puzzles, none of which are terribly taxing. The last of them, however, is extremely finicky about wording. I referred to an object using the name I saw in my inventory (and the name suggested in disambiguation messages), but the game resolutely refused to perform the right action with it until I used different phrasing. This is the sort of thing which happens in Speed IF, I suppose.

On the other hand, it's rare in Speed IF for virtually all the described objects to be implemented, but they are here, so kudos to the author for that. There are even built-in hints, but I didn't find them especially useful, since I knew exactly what I wanted to do; I just couldn't phrase it properly. I was amused by a number of the descriptions, especially Dracula's. I do wonder how anyone could possibly (Spoiler - click to show)dance to Rush's Tom Sawyer.

I would enjoy seeing this expanded to a full-sized game.

I hadn't played any Scott Adams games before encountering Buckaroo Banzai, but I did recently read Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages, so I had a rough idea of what to expect. It's probably unfair to dwell on the game's technical limitations, as it's an old game made under tight memory constraints. I'll just note that even though I was prepared for a two-word parser and small vocabulary, I was still amazed at how primitive the gameplay was, given the year of publication. I was exhausted after an hour, and tracked down a walkthrough. It didn't improve matters.

The real crime here is that the game has virtually nothing to do with Buckaroo Banzai. I love the film; I can quote it chapter and verse. It's got a richly detailed world (almost impenetrable, really, on first viewing), terrific heroes and villains, and it's howlingly funny. It deserves a good IF adaptation.

This is a miserable one. There are no Hong Kong Cavaliers, no Lectroids (red or black), no Secretary of Defense, no Penny Priddy, no Kolodny Brothers or Rugsuckers or Blue Blaze Irregulars, no neurosurgery, no particle physics, no rock and roll, no laughs and no action. Most of the game is spent laboriously gathering and using items to refuel a car. The greatest insult comes at the end, when we learn that (Spoiler - click to show)to defuse a bomb, we need to transmit the code "warfin" [sic]. This despite a memorable scene in the film where John Lithgow spells out his name to a telephone operator: "That's W-H-O-R-F-I-N. You got that, honey?" Perhaps it's an homage of sorts to the Red Lectroids' misadventures with English, but given the rather lax attention to spelling and grammar throughout the game, I doubt it.

The Casual Gameplay Design Competition #7 must have produced a lot of very good games if this one finished eighth. (I've also played Party Foul by Brooks Reeves, and really enjoyed that; it came in fourth).

As the blurb says, you're buried alive with your dead queen. It's your job to perform some rituals to lead the queen to the afterlife, and then kill yourself as well. From this premise and the cover art, you might expect this to be meditative and brooding, but no, the setting is pure gonzo fantasy, and silliness abounds: the king is Stanley, his pet is called Bobo, and there's a god named Larry. It's ostensibly a one-room escape game, but there are actually two rooms. Maybe that's why it finished eighth. The puzzles are fair and solvable (if sometimes a bit uninspired or baffling), everything is implemented, it is polite and forgiving, and the writing nicely evokes the combination of absurdity and dread that the PC is experiencing. It's a solid first effort from the two authors.

I had a few minor problems. The puzzles, as mentioned, were all very reasonable, but none stood out as particularly clever. The (Spoiler - click to show)potion-making puzzle was reminiscent of the sorts of problems you solve in the analytical portion of the GRE, only simpler. From an in-game standpoint, the puzzle makes little sense; its only real purpose is to add a couple of minutes to the play experience.

I didn't really understand the mechanics of the (Spoiler - click to show)climbing puzzle. I have to drop everything before climbing a railing, and then from there I can climb onto a lintel; that much makes sense. But how has my rope magically made its way up to the lintel with me?

Finally, I must say I was confused by the ending. I honestly can't tell you what happened, or how it relates to the goal I thought I was pursuing. But it seemed to be a winning ending, and I couldn't find another one other than dying (and reading the walkthrough, it seems like I did what was intended).

That said, I enjoyed it, and I'd definitely play the authors' next game.

After a few minutes of playing One Eye Open, I thought to myself, "I remember playing this game when it was called Babel." But after playing it for a good bit longer (much longer than the two-hour judging period), I decided that I liked it quite a lot on its own terms.

The similarities with Babel are legion. In both games, you play the subject of nefarious mind- and body-altering experiments performed upon you by uncaring corporate overlords. You're alone in a research facility in the aftermath of those failed experiments. You gather up the history of the experiments and the facility, piece by piece, (Spoiler - click to show)often by touching objects (although Babel's methodology for this is more organically tied to the story). In both games, you (Spoiler - click to show)fashion an antidote -- tragically never completed by the experimenters -- and have to safely enter a tainted airlocked lab in the northeast corner of the facility. So things may seem awfully familiar.

The primary difference is in tone. Babel is a science fiction/mystery story, with an emphasis on uncovering the truth of what happened at the station. One Eye Open is a horror story. There's a mystery here, but what you really need to know is: the experiment is really, really bad. Your job is to undo it as completely as possible.

There's no build up to the horror. It's all right there in front of you, almost from the first move, which runs counter to the usual horror imperatives of suspense and dread. What it lacks in those areas, though, One Eye Open makes up for in ickiness. The style is early David Cronenberg with the gore turned way up: meat and organs and orifices everywhere, pulsating behind everyday objects. It's agreeably revolting.

The game is a bit too long for the Comp. After two hours, most players will not have completed it (or at least they won't have gotten a good ending, I don't think), and the story is slow to unravel. When it finally does, though, it is very compelling. It's a testament to the storytelling skills of the authors that I persisted long past the judging to get a pretty good ending, and then finally found the best ending days later. Like with certain Cronenberg pictures (I'm thinking here of Videodrome or eXistenZ), I'm not entirely sure what it was I just saw, but I know that I couldn't take my eyes off it.

The coding was mostly solid, with a few minor bugs and annoyances. I wrestled with the parser to get past a certain locked door, had trouble (Spoiler - click to show)putting a vaccine in a syringe, and found myself stymied by files in cabinets. There were some walls of text that could perhaps have been trimmed down as well. But these are insignificant issues that can easily be addressed in a post-Comp release. Familiar as it was, One Eye Open stuck with me, long after Babel did.

FLOOBY (love the acronym) is an unreconstructed old-school treasure hunt. The author explains in the ABOUT text that he and a friend began work on it in 1983, but never managed to get it done. As of this writing, it's still not finished: this is a 2010 IntroComp entry.

The gameplay is pretty much what you'd expect: enter the house, find the secret passage to the Zork-like fantasy setting, outwit or overcome some mythical creatures, and take their stuff. Most of the puzzles are straightforward and some are familiar from literature and other games. Indeed, there's one ported wholly (every detail intact) from the original Adventure. It's probably meant as a good-faith homage, but without any sort of original spin or subversion, treads over into aping territory. I was able to get all 60 points, but couldn't get a final reply (To be continued, Thanks for playing, etc.). I'm not sure if there is one.

The author acknowledges that the appeal of this sort of game has diminished over the years, and he's not wrong, but I think he's selling the potential of his game short. I still enjoy old-school treasure hunts from time to time, and I imagine a lot of people do, provided that they're innovative and well-written. As tight as the memory requirements were back in the day, Crowther and Woods and Blank and Lebling managed to draw some pretty evocative scenes. FLOOBY doesn't, at least not yet. An old-school game can also be done with a modern sensibility, without being tongue-in-cheek and without losing any of the appeal of the classics. (See Emily Short's flawless Savoir-Faire). We've had 35 years now to learn what players find entertaining and what they don't (mazes!). There's no reason the author can't make a version of FLOOBY that stays true to his teenaged vision, while still benefiting from decades of progress in the form. My advice to him: don't just finish the game you were making in 1983. Make the 2010 version of the game you wanted to write in 1983.

There's kind of an illicit thrill in playing a real superhero in IF. For decades now, the overwhelming majority of IF characters have been decidedly un-super in their abilities. Really, they're incompetent, unable to perform even the simplest and most intuitive tasks unless they have exactly the right tool for the job (>BREAK THE SMALL GLASS BOX WITH THE HAMMER | "A valiant attempt."). This is what makes playing the Earth and Sky series (especially in the role of Austin) so refreshing. When you encounter a pair of massive steel doors in Earth and Sky, you don't need to faff around for hours finding the rusty key or inserting the crystalline cylinder or answering a riddle. You simply SMASH THE DOORS. It's a nice bit of therapy for emotionally-scarred IF players.

I really enjoyed the first two games in the series, which combined humor, comic-book action, and a relentless focus on ease-of-play to great effect. Luminous Horizon continues in the same vein, but it's not quite up to the level of the others. The second (and strongest) game centered on an extended puzzle which combined multiple objects and rooms in a pretty satisfying way. Most of the puzzles in the third installment are just variations on SMASH THE DOORS. It's fun and cathartic, but not as rewarding as something a little more elaborate would have been.

One nice feature of Luminous Horizon is the ability to switch back and forth between control of the two siblings, which you'll naturally need to do several times to complete the game. Each sibling sees and describes the world in a different way, which adds a real richness to the experience of playing them.

The author does a good job of eliminating frustration. Like with the other two installments, it's impossible or at least extremely difficult to make the game unwinnable, which is always appreciated. The game also implements a nice (and customizable) conversation system, where you can choose from a menu of replies, ranging from the sincere to the snarky. Unfortunately, your choices don't matter very much -- the game proceeds pretty much the same way no matter how you choose to play the characters.

The conversation system also provides built-in hints. In principle, if you get stuck, you can TALK TO your sibling and get nudged in the right direction. After repeated nudges, the sibling may just solve the puzzle for you. However, for the most challenging puzzle in the game, the hint system is nothing of the kind. It's actually a misdirection system, focusing your attention on something which is almost entirely unhelpful at the moment the advice is being dispensed. Be warned.

At times, it feels like more was planned for the game than was actually implemented. There are areas with interesting objects that can be manipulated, but which don't ultimately matter. There are story threads which seem like they'll be featured prominently (like (Spoiler - click to show)rescuing Dr.
Andrews), but which get resolved off-screen. I'd be interested to see what could have been done with this game in a longer format.

If you've played and enjoyed the first two Earth and Sky games, then you certainly ought to give Luminous Horizon a whirl; it's a decent conclusion to the series, and you'll want to know how it ends. But it's not quite as satisfying as it could have been.

Completely by accident, I played Fail-Safe in the same week that I played the Infocom classic Suspended. Fail-Safe is essentially Suspended's more cynical little brother. In both games, the PC is immobile and completely dependent on NPCs for sensory input, movement, and manipulating objects. Both are also set in science-fiction worlds where a massive calamity has just occurred, and the PC has to walk the NPCs through repairs that they have trouble describing and can only dimly understand.

Fail-Safe is very short, and as mentioned elsewhere, does not permit saves or restores, which is less painful than it might sound. Once you have figured out the basic plan of the game, you can quickly get back to the part where the crucial decisions are made (and where the game's black humor really shows itself). You'll definitely want to replay a few times to make sure you get all the endings. At one point, there's an unfortunate guess-the-verb problem, but for the most part Fail-Safe is entertaining, well-written, and definitely worth playing.

Moon Over Jupiter was my introduction to Speed IF, and I have to say, it's pretty damned entertaining. You're stuck aboard a spaceship waiting to disembark on Io, and have to persuade your colleague to open the airlock. The colleague doesn't get a lot of screen time (the game is tiny, obviously), but he certainly is memorable. The game is funny throughout with a bit of a Meretzky/Douglas Adams vibe, and it's reasonably polished given the constraints under which it was written.

It's a fun way to spend 5 minutes, for sure.