Balances

Balances is a relatively short, old-fashioned puzzle game set in the world of the Enchanter series and riffing on Spellbreaker in particular: the player must find scrolls, learn their spells, and cast them in order to collect white cubes. It shares a number of design characteristics with those games: rooms represent fairly large open spaces, there are more animal NPCs than humans to interact with, and a loose, playful approach to world-building means that the various areas don't have a great deal to do with one another.

The puzzles are not all fair by modern standards, and it's easy to lock yourself out of winning by doing things in the wrong order. (Spoiler - click to show)In particular, avoid taking any lottery tickets from the barker until you're sure you've found out everything from him that you need to know. One or two discoveries also require the player to act in somewhat counter-intuitive ways. (Spoiler - click to show)The fourth cube can only be found if the player casts a spell he has reason to think will be dangerous.

Fairness was arguably not the game's paramount concern when it was written, however. Balances was released as a source example, showing how to do tasks that were technically virtuosic at the time, such as allowing the player to name objects and subsequently refer to them by name and usefully parsing numbers from a wide range. (Modern systems make most of these very much easier, but at the time these effects were not easy to accomplish.)

For players who have fond feelings towards the Enchanter series, however, Balances offers good value as a game. Several of the puzzles are quite clever, the effects of the various spells are entertainingly applied, and there's a very satisfying twist on the spellcasting mechanic from the original games. (Spoiler - click to show)The lleps spell reverses the effect of any existing spell, so your spell book is essentially twice as effective as it seems. Moreover, the unfairness is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the game is so small and there are only so many things the player can reasonably try to do.

'Balances' is a short game based on Infocom's celebrated Enchanter series. In fact, the opening area is directly based on the sample walkthrough in the manual of the original Enchanter game.

This game demonstrates some of Inform's best abilities: indistinguishable objects, games involving large numbers, magical spells that interact with each other, a balance that weighs different objects, etc.

The game is relatively fun, but short and without a coherent plot. It can be a good introduction to the Enchanter series for those who aren't sure about Infocom games.

Graham Nelson wrote a longer game with similar elements: The meteor, the stone, and a long glass of sherbet. Those who like this game should definitely try the longer Meteor game.

Balances is labeled as a demo for Inform 6 (originally developed for Inform 5), and was distributed as such along with its source code when the language was in its early stages of adoption. Magnus Olsson notes in his review that discussion of the game (for it was widely regarded as a small game instead of a demo) produced "the first big flamewar of rec.arts.int-fiction" due to the "enormous" debate over the fairness of its puzzles.

It is interesting that the copyright notice for the game lists the years 1994, 1995 and 1996. I assume that release 1 made its debut in 1994. The following year saw the release of Nelson's influential essay "The Craft of Adventure," which includes his famed Bill of Player's Rights.

What I'm finding most surprising is the contrast between the two. I wonder how much the debate over this not-quite-game directly shaped Nelson's views about what constitutes fairness. There are several direct contradictions between the game itself and the Bill, namely:

2. Not to be given horribly unclear hints -- (Spoiler - click to show)The historical note from Olsson suggests that this one is arguable. I can't cite anything that qualifies unambiguously, but I can say that I did not find the "critical puzzle that hinges on a pun" to be "delightful."

3. To be able to win without experience of past lives -- (Spoiler - click to show)This may be technically true about Balances, but it seems extremely unlikely in practice. Showing up at the temple and learning after the fact that each cube should have been marked on acquisition (specifically, with their circumstance of origin) was not amusing, though in theory I could have marked them then and then taken 100+ moves to try all combinations. Perhaps those more familiar with Spellbreaker would have found it natural to do this immediately.

4. To be able to win without knowledge of future events -- (Spoiler - click to show)See #3 above.

5. Not to have the game closed off without warning -- (Spoiler - click to show)I hope that when you read 'Now the furniture is matchwood...' in the opening room you decided to >X FURNITURE instead of >X MATCHWOOD, or you might have gotten the impression that no such object was implemented, as is the case for just about every other scenery object. If you didn't, and you later >RIDE HORSE, then congratulations -- you have closed off the game! It's possible to get back to the starting location after the horse only if one has done this, in which case there is no need to do so.

6. Not to need to do unlikely things -- (Spoiler - click to show)To get the most difficult cube, one must take pains to win a stuffed pink elephant, then use a reversed spell on it to try to make it dangerous. Why would anyone be motivated to do that except by metalogic? Also, there is a sharp contrast between the Bill's advice that 'If you intend the player to stay somewhere for a while, put something intriguing there.' and the need to wait an indeterminate amount of time on an empty road to get a key item.

9. To be allowed reasonable synonyms -- (Spoiler - click to show)See #5 above. Also, I spent a frustrating span trying to figure out how to refer to the numbered tickets, which must have the form >TAKE TICKET 1234 instead of just >TAKE 1234.

Notably, at the tail end of the Bill, Nelson admits via footnote that "[L]ike any good dictator, I prefer drafting constitutions to abiding by them." Perhaps the disagreement between theory and practice was intentional. (I can't quite buy into the "it was only ever just a demo" argument; compare and contrast with other early Inform demo programs such as "Toyshop," which make no pretense of being games.)

In the context of its original release, Balances was surely a marvel -- a vignette of Infocom-level quality IF demonstrating techniques that recreated classic gameplay and which would become widely emulated. Olsson's contemporary advice to "current and future IF authors," which urges them to "not to use this spellcasting system in their games," is ironic in view of the numerous Infocom-style spellcasting games that were released in the wake of Balances, many of which no doubt cribbed from the example of its source code. Nelson's Bill of Player's Rights also became hugely influential, shifting trends in the direction of the modern "player-friendly" style very early on in the hobbyist era. My two-star rating reflects the very uneven quality of Balances as a game, which is handily surpassed by any of Nelson's better-known titles. Though I'd recommend this work as an object of study for its historical significance (and for its source code, which is beautifully direct and compact), its value as a game is dubious.

[Side note: Balances release 5 was constantly crashing for me under Gargoyle (i.e. the Bocfel interpreter), though admittedly my version is a bit out of date. I had to play it in Frotz, which produced several error warnings but did not crash.]