Quotient, The Game

[Update: As the author points out in comments, this review is based on an early release of the game, which has since been substantially revised. Also, I did find the game to be likable overall in its earlier form. Readers are advised to take both of those facts under consideration. I've removed my rating from the game's average.]

Inform 7 makes it easier than ever to code a game. It remains difficult to make a good game.

This is very clearly a first effort. Michael J. Coyne's list of "First-Timer Foibles" remains relevant, and this work earns a CQ (Coyne Quotient) of 6 for items 2, 9, 11, 12, 14 and 15.

It's hard to take this game very seriously on its self-proclaimed merits. The functional plot (i.e. what you experience as a player) seems more concerned with offering guided tours (especially around Ohio) than being a spy thriller. (I will admit that I found this to be something of a saving grace; some interesting facts are presented, which will probably be among the most memorable parts of the play experience.) The game also seems pre-occupied with paying homage to Infocom, Star Wars, Narnia, and various (presumably real) food establishments, to the detriment of its focus and continuity. In fulfilling the PC's mission and/or scoring all points, you will: (Spoiler - click to show)visit a pun-oriented maze; build a bonfire using flint, steel and 69,105 leaves; visit a privately-owned (and ostensibly secret?) space station; fly to Africa to retrieve a MacGuffin from a villain conveniently hanging out in one of the handful of locations there (using a weapon retrieved from the Oval Office, no less!); craft a lightsaber; enjoy a parade of junk food and sweets; visit several architecturally-significant buildings; make use of a divinely-delivered laser; find, wear and use a magical pendant; and do something else worth 2 points that I never figured out. Are you intrigued? If so, read on.

There are many "puzzles" that are pointless. They qualify for the term only because they are things one must do to score points; their impact on the world state with respect to the ostensible plot seems to be zero. These appear to originate solely as artifacts of the process of learning to code, and not as part of an integrated design of puzzle and story. (In fact, the points awarded for following the mission are a small fraction of the intended total.) While anyone new to coding can appreciate the thrill of victory felt when overcoming early technical challenges, such learning exercises are generally not appropriate to include in the final game. The adage "Be ready to kill your darlings." applies. (An aside: My final score was 352 out of a possible 214. There is a scoring bug in which a 10-point award can be repeated indefinitely.)

Certain other "puzzles" are classic examples of poor puzzle design in the vein of mind reading and/or guess-the-verb. The very worst offender here is the command needed to reboot a computer: (Spoiler - click to show)>CONTROL-ALT-DELETE. A close second is the command required to get out of a VR simulation: (Spoiler - click to show)>BLINK RAPIDLY. (Technically, there's something that might be counted as a clue -- by British puzzle fiends only -- for the latter. The VR environment seems totally optional, anyway.)

I note that the >CREDITS list "TBD" as beta tester. Obtaining beta testing is almost universally regarded as a prerequisite for a serious-minded public release, and its lack is keenly felt. I get the strong impression that this game was originally written for private circulation (in large part because it seems to contain a cryptic marriage proposal -- (Spoiler - click to show)"The display says: '01101101 01100001 01110010 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101101 01100101'" [which for the lazy translates into ASCII as "marry me"]). Based on the blurb, it's now intended to serve as publicity for the author's novels set in the same universe.

The fictional world presented borders on absurdist in its outlook. Here is the description of the President of the United States: "President Bridget O’Connor is a wise leader. She was formally the head of the NSA. The President is aware of Quotient’s operations." (Yes, "formally.") And here's that of the Prime Minister (presumably of the UK): "Prime Minister Jason Stevenson is a skilled martial artist in addition to an ingenious political leader." I could not help but interpret items like these as comedy.

All that said, I'm giving this work two stars, which I will note translates roughly as "has some positives but needs improvement." It is exuberant, yes, and silly -- but I still found myself liking it more than not. Your mileage may vary. I wish the author luck, and we can all hope that the recipient of the marriage proposal said yes.

This game is a tie-in with the author's two published books, Quantum Time and The Quantum Contingent. All three deal with a spy agency and a quirky cast of characters.

In this game, you are a new agent arriving at headquarters, and you have to get your assignment from the chief of the spy agency you work for. Once you get it, you end up setting off on a jet to locations across the world where you can gather items, face danger, and help a quantum-entangled experiment.

Genre-wise it's similar to Zork set in the modern day, with a combination of science fiction and fantasy without much regard to how well they fit together; instead it follows the 'rule of cool'. So there are things like light sabers, magic, virtual reality, etc. It also contains detailed, enthusiastic descriptions of locations, especially in Oxford, which were fun to read and which gave me some googling to do.

The book tie-in setting here was both a blessing and a curse. The great part about it is that the world feels vibrant and alive, with characters connected to each other and backstory everywhere you look. The curse is that the game assumes you know this info. I started the game with no idea what to do; it said I needed to get my mission, but I was by a farmhouse. It was only by exploration and looking at a spoiler-free map that I discovered I was supposed to be trying to find the base. Early on the game mentioned Martin but I didn't know who that was. Near the end it was hard to know what my last tasks were (after fixing Cassandra's computer). It felt like the author had spent so much time in this world that some facts felt obvious or natural, but weren't to me as a casual reader. Nevertheless, the further I got and the more I learned about the world, the more all of the references and discussions made sense.

I think people will mostly enjoy this game if they like Zork-style humor and exploration. The game is both hard and easy; when there is a task you need to do, the game generally gives you a lot of hints and nudging on how to do it. Much of the points are optional (like finding treasures). The difficulties I did have were in figuring out how to type commands or what to do next. The most difficult thing for me was figuring out how to operate the jet (I tried TURN ON JET, ENTER COCKPIT, FLY JET, etc. It turned out I needed information found on another item).

The game is both superbly polished and unpolished. It is very polished because it has important nouns bolded and unimportant nouns in italics; has a list of Places and Things you've seen; has tons of things to talk to agents about, etc. It's unpolished because it is missing some background scenery (like the digital display in Cassandra's lab, which is not implemented despite being mentioned prominently); sometimes it just doesn't make sense (like the escape tunnel that says 'Martin has to show you the way first'); and sometimes it knows what you want to do but chooses to ignore it (like if you try to put something ON something and it says, 'No, you have to HOOK it'). All of these things are very normal in first games, and I have all confidence that the author's next games will be polished in every sense.

Here are my five criteria I use for judging when I'm not sure what score I want to give. Among all IF games I've ever played, I'd give this game 3 stars for great idea and mixed execution; for effort and as a first game, I could give it 4. So for the appearance of subjectivity I'll do the criteria:

-Polish: As described above, the game is very smooth in most respects but lacking in others. One area is quotation marks, which are absent in some text and at least once appeared gratuitously.
+Descriptiveness: The world felt very much alive and vibrant, with rich text.
-Interactivity: As described above, I often didn't know what to do and sometimes struggled to find the right command for the thing I wanted to do. Much of the interactivity was engaging.
+Emotional impact: I found the game amusing and entertaining. I plan on reading the books it belongs to when I find time.
+Would I play again? I would play a revised version of this game, and I look forward to future games by this author.

However, on reflection, I've decided to bump up to 4 stars.

When learning something new, the most important factor – I’d argue bigger than native ability or quality of instruction or anything else – is often enthusiasm. No matter how quickly things click, you’ll invariably run into road-blocks, and no matter how fun developing one aspect of a skill might be, there’s always going to be something else that’s a slog. Sure, all those other things, skill and good teachers and so on, can reduce the friction so it’s easier to power through, but you still need that motive force to keep you moving even as things get tough. And beyond overcoming obstacles, enthusiasm can have active virtues too: even the most jaded critic can be charmed by a roughly-hewn work if the palpable excitement of creation comes through.

The thing is, though, enthusiasm can only take you so far. A short game with all the flaws of inexperience can still leave a positive impression if it’s fleet enough to end before those flaws weigh down its exuberance. But if things drag on too long, the nitpicks start to pile up, the bubbly energy starts to feel exhausting, and the jaded critic (hi, it’s me!) loses track of what perked them up about this thing in the first place.

Quotient: the Game could have been engineered in a lab to illustrate the principle. The ingenuousness of its spy-thriller-meets Zork premise wins it a smile, which is only deepened by the cornball appeal of its love of junk food and Ohio pride (seriously, your jet-setting spy can go to Oxford, DC, “Africa”, outer space – or Cleveland and Cincinnati). And there are some solid puzzles that help keep the momentum going. But over the course of this two to three hour game, the constant in-jokey references to Dr. Who and Star Wars start to grate, the lack of adequate player direction or clueing lead to floundering, and the weight of minor bugs and small implementation threatens to overwhelm the fun stuff. Most of Quotient’s issues are ones first-time authors have to deal with (especially those who don’t benefit from a lot of pre-release testing); it’s just a shame that so much time and energy appears to have gone into this debut when it’s likely that the lessons learned from completing a game would help the author write something a lot tighter the second time out.

On to specifics: Quotient self-consciously invokes Zork with its setup: you’re outside a house, with a leaflet promising adventure to come, and a scoring system that rewards the accumulation of treasure as much as progression of plot. But this is no fantasy pastiche: instead we’re in the realm of a technothriller, as you play a new recruit to the eponymous spy agency, tasked with … well, it’s not really clear from the outset. One of the first challenges I faced with Quotient is that the game seems to assume you already know about the important characters, the world, and the basic outline of the plot – there’s some exposition, but almost always it left me with more questions than answers. Not getting bogged down in details until the player’s invested in the game can be a powerful technique, but here the other shoe doesn’t really drop. Like, once I solved enough puzzles to be admitted to the spy agency as a probationary agent, I finally got a mission briefing, which read as follows:

"Welcome to the team. Your mission involves two things. One is simply treasure hunting. This will earn points toward your rank. While we were setting up this training mission, a real mission came in. This is the second and most important part of your mission. The Lion has escaped and interfered with Cassie’s time experiment. We need your help on this mission. It’s critical we help Cassie complete her experiment. All of our agents are already working it. There is no time to explain more, you’ll have to figure out the rest as you go."

I eventually groped my way towards a fuller understanding of the premise: the aforementioned Cassie is a scientist working on a future-prediction machine that uses quantum computing, but a villain stole the magic crystal that powers the device, so you have to track him down and take it back. The game doesn’t end at that point, though – to my surprise – as you then need to help Cassie complete her experiment. Each of these steps is either underexplained (exactly what the experiment is, or what it requires, isn’t really spelled out) or overexplained (I got a few updates from Florian about how to find Robert well before I had the slightest idea of who either of those people were).

As a result, it’s most natural to treat Quotient as a treasure hunt – just wander around, solve puzzles because they’re there, grab whatever’s nailed down. And on that score it works OK! Here’s where the enthusiasm really tells; the game is palpably excited to show you around such tourist attractions as the National Mall, Oxford University, and downtown Cincinnati. In the farther-flung locations, the narration is very much lifting up the Wikipedia highlights and flubs a few minor details (I’ve lived in DC, and the geography there is slightly off in a way that kept wrong-footing me). But the local Ohio stuff elevates what sure seems like it must be the author’s favorite diner, and the allegedly-famous Cleveland sign. The gonzo would-a-teenager-thing-this-is-cool sensibility is also in best display in this section, like when you get this readout on the current British PM:

"Prime Minister Jason Stevenson is an experienced leader with a deep understanding of European state affairs as well as genetics. He is a skilled martial artist and has been known to relax in front of a videogame at times."

The puzzles are also pleasantly moreish, for the most part. There are two mazes and some unmarked exits, and some of them rely on completely arbitrary clues, like a deck of cards that for some reason spells out the steps required to complete a high-tech feat of engineering, but on their own terms, that’s fine. There are some password challenges, a couple straightforward inventory puzzles, dark areas that require a flashlight – it’s all basic but goes down easy.

Well, it goes down easy until it doesn’t. At what I think is about the 2/3 mark of the game, my progress slowed substantially – I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to be doing, and I’d run out of puzzles that I could easily figure out how to solve. There are some in-game hints, but they tend towards the cryptic, and don’t account for stuff you’ve already done, but I was able to use them to grind through a few more puzzles, albeit these ones felt more arbitrary than the earlier ones (Spoiler - click to show) (I’m pretty sure praying in the National Cathedral made a laser pop out of the floor; if that’s explained anywhere, I missed it), and threw the unhelpful nature of the thinly-implemented NPCs into sharp relief (after I’d recovered the crystal she was looking for, why didn’t Cassie unlock the door to her lab instead of making me fly halfway across the world to try to dig up a keycard?). And then I hit a wall when I realized I’d soft-locked myself by fiddling with a much-earlier puzzle (protip: don’t put anything into the lighting tube you want to get back).

So yeah. At the one hour mark, I’d have said that I was enjoying the silly, giddy ride that Quotient has to offer, but at the three hour mark, I was mostly just frustrated. None of my complaints are mortal ones, I don’t think, and again, they’re incredibly common among first-time authors – assuming the player will know what they’re doing because it’s obvious to the author, missing that some puzzles don’t have nearly enough clueing or motivation to allow the player to solve them, going for a larger cast of shallow characters rather than just a few more deeply-implemented ones, and not quite enough time polishing and fixing bugs that arise when the player doesn’t do quite what’s expected. Unfortunately Quotient goes on long enough that its early promise does have time to curdle into annoyance. The good news is that usually second-time authors quickly learn how to avoid these mistakes – it’s just that for both author and player, there can be an advantage to getting to that second game sooner rather than later.