Ratings and Reviews by DB

Warning: spoilers, because this game is so short. But a lot of blathering to go on.

(Spoiler - click to show)I must admit I have to feel a bit of a soft spot for a game which accepts as its first moves >GET KNIFE, >KILL ME... and then continues. In that beginning, the whole world is winnowed down to one room with a nothing outside and four things: a bed, me, a knife, a throat. And one must do something... or else one could wander the world forever finding only a nothing “Outside” and rooms with beds, knives, and your throat.

Constrained implementation makes the suicidal restlessness of the PC signify strongly, controlling and consuming the viewpoint protagonist's entire umwelt to represent its intention. In this way, the text of “baby tree” is not sparse, but dense. This is not the faux minimalism of NoM3rcy, but a crafted and toned torture machine shrunk to miniature scale. Minimalist perspective sharply delineates, but actively obfuscates existences in a world of nightmare.

The space of the game is odd, but odd in a way that tells us about the world inhabited by its characters. When moving, rooms simply cycle from “Room” to “Outside.” One can move in any cardinal direction from “Room,” and up or down and in, but not out-- to “Outside.” It makes normal sense to not be able to move out from Outside, but to go from Room to Outside by going in instead of out does not make sense in world of normal physical laws. That retreating inward can bring one to an outside space suggests not only a retreat from a world of logical forces, but that entropy in the inward retreat is constant and irreversible to the protagonist, who cannot return from her inner state. In this way, the world of “baby tree” is a reflection of the incoherent non-logic of nightmare.

Even this initial room might not be the protagonist's own. The geography of “baby tree” exceeds the bounds of a personalized domestic territory-- for how have we returned to the same “Room” by continuing in a direction away from it? Geographical connections in this world must be senseless, as we can move at half-cardinal directions like northeast or southwest and end up “Outside” in a spot that once was a “Room.” It is because of these diagonals that-- rather than a constrained, simple world of two rooms or an infinite, static checkerboard of rooms and outsides-- the layout of “baby tree” suggests madness, a conspiracy of death stretching across an endlessly networked map, a tainted carrier of disease killing dogs and babies whose wanderings haunt the uninhabited rooms of a nightmare nowhere, affecting only each other with no ecology beyond ghost children, unpeopled rooms of beds and knives, dogs for dying, a sickness inside to be cut out, the cries of the baby tree, an inescapable trap of infinite death and guilt with an unreachable history.

I can think of one way in which this nightmare could maintain diagonals and sense, but I do not want to consider for the moment the implications of “baby tree” spanning a scale of eternities in which civilizations rise and fall, their outsides becoming rooms, their rooms becoming outsides. Although the game has no explicit relation to time, to me the measure of 1 turn per command (the game's only relation to time) seems to indicate a more local scale: one second, maybe, or one minute, not one millenium.

This horror is not without controversy. The identification of the protagonist as female in the ending has led some to interpret this story as punishment for the evils of abortion, an interpretation the author has said was not intentional. It also means that the player's description and second-person narration are misleading to a male audience in a way that-- violated so abruptly at the end-- breaks suspension of disbelief. Clearly the second-person has been dealt with wrongly in this IF; if the protagonist is to be distinctly gendered it should be made clear the identity of “you” is separate from the player. Instead, the author used the most basic one-word AFGNCAAP description: explicitly “you.” This invites the reader to imagine themselves. If the author had not intended gender association between male players and the PC, he should not have invited it with second person. On the other hand, Mr. Galin might just as easily change one word at the end of the game to more fully embrace his use of the second person perspective, perhaps changing it to “person” or “human.” This would also preserve controversy, if the author finds that a valuable element of his storyworld.

For what it's worth, I did not interpret the story as being about abortion-- partially because I didn't interpret the second-person PC as a female until the very end. The baby tree initially suggested to me the guilt of a person (perhaps a doctor) who wants to save everyone, but can't. In my first reading of it, these were the faces of all of “all the babies you killed” through inaction or inability, of babies dying across the country or in other parts of the world, the nightmare guilt of which traps the PC in this inescapable nightmare. As a self-proclaimed experiment in madness, I think this space for personal interpretation works in its favor.

Even in the minimal presentation, there are some misfires in implementation.

(Spoiler - click to show)>LIE ON BED
can't
>GET ON BED
ok

This isn't entirely without precedent in an experimental work. There are shades of Rybread's Symetry here... darker, better-formed shades that thankfully don't abuse another author's work as a crutch.

In the end, although I found it horrific, I do have to wonder how the story would be different had the author used ghost puppies or kittens or even just plain ol' corpses instead of babies. Would a “corpse tree” with the screams of adult ghosts be as effective?

Gordebak has potential as a writer, but (as, I assume, a newcomer to interactive fiction) seems unfamiliar with I.F. conventions which might benefit his work. "What the Murderer Had Left" is a good example: in an interesting story about examining people and the exceptional qualities they may willingly or unwillingly express versus those they might hide, the PC has only a default description. Experienced players are likely to notice this, as X ME is one of the first things a lot of them might type.

Still, I think this is definitely worth the minute of your time it'll take to read through.

Interesting static fiction (there's really no use of interactivity in it), but the ending is wrong in my opinion. (Spoiler - click to show)The retreat back inward, back into the source of the player character's stasis, should have been overturned in the final action.

Still, work like this makes me wonder what a stat fic publisher's reaction would be to receiving an IF transcript as a submission. Has anyone tried this?

The book, of all things, is unimplemented. Stronger implementation (even of just a few important details) could reap stronger immersion and affect. There was also a (Spoiler - click to show)cigarette at one point which the PC had, but again, not implemented, not in the inventory, so it pulls one out to suddenly realize it *is* there.

(Spoiler - click to show)All one does here is type >READ. While I'm open to the idea that a single-action, multi-turn IF could express something powerful, here I think the forced single-mindedness of the player prevents them from connecting with the distracted state of the player character.

(I'm trying my best to avoid spoilers here, but in a work so short it's maybe a little tough.)

Despite its stated goals, "Edge of the Cliff" is not actually non-interactive. Once past the initial questions (Spoiler - click to show)(false choices which still manage to frame the content of the piece, and can only be said to actually have been ignored *if* the player chooses a configuration other than the pre-authored one and *then* executes a command-- such as examining oneself-- which allows them to see that one's input has, in fact, been ignored), the player's choices matter. Choice and interactivity shape the content of the narrative in some significant ways. (Spoiler - click to show)Does the PC roll off the cliff in his/her sleep? Trip and fall? About what is the PC so concerned? Yes, these all ultimately wind up with the same end effect, but with different paths come different content and different meanings.

What I think this piece does successfully is to-- in a quick, highly replayable fashion-- portray a lack of agency. We may take actions, but even the PC seems to take any one of them too far (often by no fault or intention of his/her own). Its style is humorous: a farcical mode that pokes fun at overwrought or overly serious writing, at least funny enough to make me laugh.

"The Edge of the Cliff" may not have succeeded at non-interactivity, but it certainly fails interestingly.

A superhero origin story needs to go beyond the plain fact of how one gets their powers. To take an example, Peter Parker doesn't just get bitten by a spider, "The End." He gets bitten by a spider and chooses to use that power become a crime fighter. An origin story should tell us what a hero fights and why. Suzy, aka Scarlet, is fighting... what exactly? We don't ever really see it. She's not fighting from intrinsic motivation either, which makes her harder to work into the mold of a heroic figure. A lot more is left vague than I would've liked in that regard.

Superheroes need to be strong characters, defined by what they do. What does Suzy do? The interpretation I got was that she's a sexually harrassed waitress who hates kids and lugs around useless items that she loathes. Especially given her items, I felt like I was getting mixed signals, expecting Suzy to be a farcical superheroine, but that didn't pan out.

The story claims that her usual response when a crying child says their mother is trapped a building she can see is currently burning is "to shrug [her] shoulders and say, 'Yes? And?'", which didn't do a lot to make her likable to me. Is she supposed to be an anti-hero? I get strong reluctant hero vibes from her, but that doesn't really work with the rest of the setup unless (Spoiler - click to show)the Magic Eye compel at the end completely changes her, focuses her will for action in some visible way. If it does, though, we don't get to see any of that, so we're missing out on major character development.

I feel like I should've gotten some development from (Spoiler - click to show)Suzy's debatably brave rush into danger, but it sort of happens and is done, and that's it. Quite a bit of the game, instead, is spent developing interactions between Suzy and the annoying child (Spoiler - click to show)(giving it the mints and wiping its face with a tissue, oh-so-motherly-like), even when those representations seem to run counter to the rest of her character. Is she motherly at heart or does she hate kids? I'd be curious how the scoring breakdown of the game characterizes Suzy.

Come to think of it, overall I'm just confused about who Suzy *is*. Messages are too mixed. What one action in the game defines her as a heroine?

It's pretty hard to get an audience into a conflict the protagonist doesn't even care about. Like Suzy herself, the writing feels like it's just reluctantly going through the motions in an aimless, "Well, I guess I'm here, I might as well" sort of way. I much prefer this author's writing when it lets loose from conventions and blasts off full force into its subject matter, like in "For Love of Digby" or "Back to Life... Unfortunately."

I appreciated that some work went into getting players to execute non-standard commands and into the presentation of the inventory. The items, though... didn't really do much for me in terms of character development or usefulness.

We didn't really get to use (Spoiler - click to show)our New Alien Toy for very much. It would've been nice to use it in whatever way Suzy will regularly use it against crime at least once in this setup so we'd be ready for it when it comes up again.

I'd've liked to see how Suzy reacts to (Spoiler - click to show)being Magic Eye compelled at the end. The story just kind of stops there. Again, it sort of felt like if we just said, (Spoiler - click to show)"Peter gets bitten by a radioactive spider-- the end."

Every room in this game has a minimum of three mistakes in its writing, except for a room with no use and practically no implementation that only has two. The paragraphing manages to be all over the place and crammed together at the same time, and all dialog is in italics, so it's a mess even to read. Motivation for puzzles and plot is likewise scattershot, with no hints included. Confusing parser responses abound, largely due to a too specific method of task construction and lack of synonyms. Even scenery descriptions can be actively misleading ((Spoiler - click to show)e.g., a corridor where "There is a number of doors along the corridor" (sic), but implemented are only "the left door" and "the right door"-- without obvious synonyms). The small world map is artificially inflated with pauses; 3 second waits when moving from a room makes going east just once feel like moving through 12 rooms. Generally, all of the most potentially interesting items go unimplemented, but you'll see a lot of chairs, shelves, and tables, generally described in some hyperbolic state or another.

On the level of representation and tone, the game doesn't know which Camelot it wants to represent: a glorious, high fantasy kingdom of legend or a cruel world of "the darkest medieval age" (quote from the game). One moment it describes the deplorable condition of the dungeons or kitchen, this-or-that crude furniture, darkness too thick to see through and vomit-inducing stenches. It subjects the player to caste-based bigotry ((Spoiler - click to show)Why exactly the master chef would give the protagonist a loaf of bread with the express instructions to deliver it to King Arthur, only to have the guards look down on him and not let him in or take the bread themselves because of your character's station-- like most of this game's logic-- utterly escapes me. You never even do get the chance to deliver the bread to Arthur.), and even launches a totally uncalled-for ad hominem attack on a respected member of the IF Community. Then this game wants to turn around and fascinate us with images of peacocks strutting "like princesses," beautiful tapestries, and some really tasty (if "luke warn") baked bread. We just can't buy it. If there is an attempt at subverting the image of Camelot, it is quite poorly executed.

One wonders why the author chose Camelot as a location at all. The only character important to Arthurian legend that the player actually interacts with is Merlin, and even then that interaction is not beyond the barest extent of characterization. It's clear the author wanted Merlin to come off as likeable, but he never actually *does* anything likeable. If anything, I don't see why he couldn't be replaced with a generic evil wizard who might also kidnap a random library janitor (through a method of dubious reliability, but whatever, it's magic), make him into a kitchen slave to be somewhat routinely beaten and insulted by the staff of this savage castle, and then force him to do his dirty work. Add to this that there's no particular *reason* the PC can do what must be done that Merlin couldn't himself do... that's some evil wizard sh*t, right there.

The rags to riches story underneath it all is, like most of the other elements of the game, purely lip service. Ultimately, I leave the game feeling like I've been bribed by Muammar Gaddafi. There's nothing likeable in the PC, either-- the writing characterizes him as an almost supernatural klutz and kind of an idiot with no particular redeeming qualities. It might not be Escape from Camelot, but that's just because it's playable. That doesn't mean I won't give it the same rating.

Avoid.

Densely overwritten, yes, but nobody could charge Heal Butcher with unoriginality-- characters, setting, and diction all are out of the ordinary and strongly support the story's mood of mystery, horror, and the uncontrollable. There is even a shade of absurdist humor amidst its toil and suffering. At the very least, the quasi-flabbergasting verbosity of "The Wheels Must Turn" offers a refreshing break from the fairly rote descriptions one sometimes finds in interactive fiction. On these strengths, it warrants a play or even just a gawk.

On the other hand, the interactive element feels pointless to the extent that I cannot offer it more than 3 stars. Aside from conversation subjects, second-level descriptions only offer repetitions of what has already been said, and the plot structure, short as it is, is strictly linear-on-rails. The winning action seems overtly symbolic, but since what exactly it represents in the world is never clear it just feels empty. Perhaps these detractions were due to competition restrictions (I haven't been able to find the constraints of the ADRIFT Spring MiniComp 2001 anywhere), but player action holds so little meaning in this text that I have to wonder if it could have been better presented as static fiction.

Overall: strongly atmospheric, but left me scratching my head.