Reviews by jingold

Great writing, great dialogue, great scenes, and some of the most gratingly awful game design I've ever encountered. The idea is to happen across a story by wandering around: the reality is an empty shell where nothing happens until you've done a full circuit of the map to pick up the next thread. Writing smooth, fluid interactive scenes is so time-consumingly difficult that it's almost painful to find a game just a few steps of being fantastic.

There are very few bits of IF that have stayed with me and will do forever. So Far is one of them, which in a way is a terrible shame, because it's almost impossible to share with anyone else. The game is famously difficult and cruel (it's the only game I can think of that actively encourages players to do self-destructive things) and to say I got through it without hints would be a lie, lie, lie. But it was a beautiful thing, finely wrought, casting shadows across itself like a spinning sundial. It made me feel horribly jealous not to have written it and deeply privileged to have played it. Sigh -- those were the days...

Writing this was a strange experience. I started with a simple idea and a short series of puzzles, and everything just kept falling away - locations, the status line, the command prompt, the puzzles and the ending - until suddenly it was two parts long, and strangely fluid. Looking back I'm not too happy with the writing and I don't know that I'd ever bury myself in such a mess of code again. But I'm glad I did it, if only just the once.

My favourite of all my games. I've been interested in the idea of "interactive flashbacks" ever since writing My Angel. There were some complaints that conversation was clunky: the system was never really meant to handle complex strings, only to pick up on keywords a little better and might have been better off going unadvertised. But as to its being horribly unfair first time round, that's probably quite true.

In thinking of great IF I keep coming back to this one - it's puzzley but not too puzzley, it executes set-pieces in a way that might even have been novel for its time, and it balances progression and frustration excellently. Add to that the well-rendered setting that changes over time, the characterised NPCs and I think you've got something really special. One of my all-time favourites.

I admire the concept of this enormously (I remember that game Sleuth, it was brilliant!) The implementation is also deeply good, and the NPCs are good examples of interesting characters with rich conversation but without the need for too many bells-and-dongles. I also liked the system for making an accusation; it felt natural and smooth. But I found some of the details of the puzzles frustrating and thin and all to quickly I was just prodding and poking my way forward blindly. There are so few IF mysteries that it's almost a shame the author didn't just write one great one! But a deserving award-winner and a neat bit of coding.

My favourite Art Show entry so far: interesting objects, with interesting (if quite little) interactions that fit together in interesting ways. Discrete elements that wait to be joined together in a mental jigsaw. The only thing that would have made me happier is if it had some kind of ending, some kind of net result to uncovering and understanding the way things fitted together.