Spur

Continuing a string of Western games, I decided to try this one from 1995 -- the dawn of the hobbyist era. This distant origin is immediately evident when one sits down and begins Spur; its comprehensive failure to invite players to actually, you know, play is a shock to modern sensibilities.

The action begins in media res with the protagonist in the middle of a showdown with someone named Roy Heffer. It's kill or be killed (ending the game) in the first three moves -- there doesn't seem to be any way to de-escalate the situation or otherwise escape the necessity of gunning down this man, whose conflict with you is of vague and uncertain origin. This inevitability becomes clear after a dozen quick restarts, so... goodbye, Roy.

As a player, you might feel that at least you have the justification of self-defense, but local law enforcement seems to disagree. Within about ten turns, they'll arrive and haul you to jail (ending the game). Per the walkthrough, in that time you're supposed to figure out that you can (Spoiler - click to show)recruit the town drunk to move the dead guy's body, giving access to the dead guy's wallet. How you're supposed to figure this out without consulting the walkthrough or source code is not at all clear, but it's an essential step.

Following that... wait. You know what? I was getting ready to go through the list of every problem encountered, but there's really no point. As far as I can tell, this work is entirely composed of gameplay problems. It demonstrates just about every bad old school habit I can think of: withholding information from the player that is easily available to the PC, zero flexibility in overcoming obstacles in other than a single prescribed manner, limited time access to critical objects that the player has no reason to expect will be necessary (or even present in the scene), lack of explicit description of a key exit from a room, a described but inaccessible exit from a room that should go to a key location, an inventory limit that irritates due to its pointlessness, moon logic solutions to key puzzles, and more -- and that's all within the first 50 moves. (50 consecutive moves, that is -- hundreds of cumulative moves across sessions.) After using the walkthrough to get through the first handful of mind-reading exercises masquerading as puzzles, I gave up hope of encountering an actual playable part and just followed it through to the end.

All of those flaws are excusable in a game from 1995, since the model of near-constant frustration established by commercial producers was the only model anyone knew or expected. That doesn't, however, make them justifiable -- or fun. (For those who've read my review of Spur's contemporary Christminster: Boy, howdy, does that seem like a player-friendly paradise compared to this.)

Spur is written in Hugo, a language that never seems to have quite caught on. Any system needs its "admirable example" to encourage interest among prospective adopters, but this work does not fit the bill. That said, the source code has been made available, and perusing that was significantly more amusing than the game itself. (Favorite line, which seems exceedingly unlikely to be encountered without knowing about its existence: (Spoiler - click to show)"Clown-killing asshole," he mutters, before wasting you.) It was the source code that prompted the title of this review; for some reason, there seems to be an awful lot of attention to detail paid to being able to kill almost every living thing the PC encounters in the game universe. (Also because (Spoiler - click to show)pretty much everything the protagonist does is more along the lines of scoundrel than hero.)

The feature that stands out most positively about Spur is its innovative response to the >SCORE command, which relates the current state of progress in a kind of summary of the action so far. The way it's phrased seems to imply that there might be other ways to handle certain aspects of the scenario, but that's illusory -- the source shows that very little variation is possible. Still, it's a neat effect that I haven't encountered elsewhere, and it's one that might have broader applicability to story-forward games that don't provide a numeric score.

I can't recommend this game to play, but it is worthwhile to examine as a target-rich environment of solvable problems. The gap between its current state and a potentially fun version isn't really that large, and one could make an exercise out of identifying the shortest path to get there. It's also a solid Hugo implementation of a fairly complex scenario, so if you're interested in trying Hugo you can probably get a good feel for how well it fits your style within 20 minutes of skimming the well-organized source.