The Edifice

Despite its fame, The Edifice is a fairly rough-edged affair, and I seem to have bumped into just about every one of those rough edges.

As winner of IF Comp 1997 (the third ever), this game looms large in the early post-commercial history of the form. It has what may be the second-most famous puzzle in the history of parser games, the first being the climax puzzle of Spider and Web. I had tried The Edifice a few times before and never got very far, but this time I was determined to stick it out.

After an hour of mucking around in release 2, I took a look at the walkthrough. This is where I discovered that something I'd tried to do before, specifically (Spoiler - click to show)>SHARPEN STICK, will work, but you need to be holding something else in your inventory. The default failure message gives absolutely no clue about this, nor any clue that the verb in question can take an indirect object.

In the second scenario, I promptly managed to crash the game in a manner similar to what the release 2 notes say had been fixed. The same bug did not recur after a >RESTORE, and I was able to get to the part that makes this game notable. Author Lucian P. Smith took advantage of some rarely-used affordances in Inform 6 to create an NPC with his own language, which the PC (and by extension you, the player) must learn in order to communicate.

This puzzle is brilliant, and nearly unique. The only other game I know with a comparable task is Absence of Law. The constructed language used for the NPC consists of a relative handful of words -- only 25 are recognized by the game -- but the amount of interaction that is supported is surprisingly large. The "foreign language" parser takes a few shortcuts to simplify its implementation, which can result in confusing replies on occasion. It's not necessary to completely understand every word in order to solve the puzzle, and, in fact, even a complete understanding is not sufficient to do so.

Smith has been extremely open about his design and implementation of the puzzle, having provided an extensive overview of the former in XYZZY News issue #16 and an analogous implementation of the latter's code (using a different invented language) after the game's release.

For all of the effort that has been put into NPC conversation over the years, what's achieved here feels the most "real" of any that I've seen. The effect is almost totally an illusion, one created and maintained by the player's own slowly dissolving ignorance, but the breakthrough moments are extremely satisfying in a way that few puzzles based on comparably complex systems manage to achieve.

Unfortunately, the rest of the game isn't on a par with the centerpiece, though the apparent gap is substantially widened by relatively minor issues. As always, bringing a modern perspective to an older game results in certain small flaws being much magnified -- what was once an easily overlooked oversight can seem like a gaping hole in the interaction today. It's easy to forget that modern standards are informed by many years of lessons learned, and that a series of small improvements can result in a subjective improvement that is more than the sum of its parts. That said, my instincts run toward both two stars (for the numerous small issues) and four stars (for the brilliant centerpiece), so I'm splitting the difference.

By current standards, some of the frustration that a modern player might feel is very much not the player's fault, so for those trying the game my advice would be to seek hints as needed without worrying about spoiling the experience. Those interested in the game purely as an item of study might prefer to go straight to the materials linked above; these are undoubtedly worth the time to examine in detail.

The Edifice is a puzzly, rather sparsely implemented parser game in the tradition of Zork. It's very well-regarded, winning a XYZZY award and appearing on several "best of" lists, but I think it's aged very poorly and it doesn't meet my standards for interactive fiction in 2021.

Let's begin with The Edifice's narrative. Although this game is mainly puzzle-focused, it makes a stab at an ambitious high-concept theme -- a sweeping retelling of the dawn of humanity, the discovery of fire, and so on. Unfortunately, this is handled very superficially and comes off more as set dressing than a real story. There is no overarching conflict, no rising tension, and no resolution. The central plot device of the Edifice hardly even plays a role in the different stages of human evolution; rather, it escorts the player from half-baked vignette to half-baked vignette. And that's a shame, because in creating these grand narrative expectations, The Edifice sets itself up to disappoint when it doesn't follow through.

What about the puzzles, then? The Edifice is centered around three major self-contained puzzles, each one representing a particular period of human history. There are also minor puzzles peppered at the beginning and within individual time periods. I thought that all the puzzles were competently implemented and their solutions made in-world sense, but I found them unfair, unfun, and kind of painful to play through. (I used the walkthrough to complete the game.)

What is a fair puzzle? In my opinion, every puzzle is a sort of contract between the puzzle designer and the puzzle solver. The puzzle solver promises that she will make a good-faith attempt at solving the puzzle, using all means available to her. Meanwhile, the puzzle designer promises that if such a good-faith attempt is made, the puzzle is solvable and the solution is obvious in hindsight. If you can't figure out a puzzle, look at the walkthrough, and think "Oh, of course, I'm an idiot" -- that's a fair puzzle. On the other hand, if the puzzle forces you to guess verbs, or make use of information you couldn't possibly have known, the puzzle is unfair and poorly designed.

The Edifice's puzzles suffer from that boogeyman of 90s parser games: guess-the-verb. All of the puzzles require verbs that are rarely used in parser games, have never previously been hinted at in the text, are only used for a specific puzzle, and never appear again. For example, the very first puzzle requires you to (Spoiler - click to show)HIDE from the Enemies. Other examples of puzzle solutions that require flash-in-the-pan inspiration to solve are (Spoiler - click to show)STRIP to turn branches into kindling, SHARPEN to create the spear, and POINT and DRAW for the language puzzle everyone seems to love so much. The game includes a list of commands, but it's condescending, hidden behind a dismissively written fake help page, and doesn't include any of the verbs I listed above (and also omits some others that are required to complete the game, like DROP and ENTER). So much for "info."

Even when the puzzle solutions don't require guessing verbs, they include leaps of logic that don't follow from any in-game clues. They make sense according to real-world logic, but no one expects a game to perfectly model everything that a person could try in real life; for the player to try an action, some kind of hint has to be placed that the action is actually possible in the game world. To solve the language puzzle, (Spoiler - click to show)we not only have to come up with the idea of DRAWing an image, but the idea that the crushed berries will make suitable ink, the bone will make a suitable writing implement, the bark is suitable for writing on, and the author has taken the time to implement all these things. This insistence on off-the-wall puzzle solutions is exacerbated by confusing room descriptions that don't always make clear the positions of things. (Spoiler - click to show)I didn't realize the protagonist's Hut could be entered, because it didn't appear in the list of exits. I thought the bark was across the river and spent many turns skipping rocks across the water, only to find that the river was an unimportant diversion and I could just have typed TAKE BARK.

Over and over, my playthrough of The Edifice ran into pain points that made me feel as though the author was more interested in creating theoretically elegant puzzles than making sure the game was a positive experience for players. One puzzle is possible to make unwinnable, and the solution is so convoluted that it's likely you'll do this multiple times before reaching the solution; the game does reset the puzzle after a while, but this requires waiting so many turns that you might as well restore a saved game instead. When you do happen on a useful action that can solve a puzzle, it's blocked with an unhelpful message that comes across as a "you can't do this at all" message -- unless you do it at precisely the right time and place that the author wants you to. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)if you aren't holding the Useful Rock, SHARPEN STICK returns "The Stick will not readily hold an edge." An even more egregious example is (Spoiler - click to show)TAKE OFF HEADDRESS, which returns "Headdress represents your authority in the Village. If you took it off, you would be abdicating your position, and the People would elect a new leader. If you want to accomplish anything here, you had best leave it on." This reads as the clearest "You can't do that" message I've ever seen -- and yet it's a required move to solve the horse puzzle. Insane.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh on this game: after all, this is a Z-code offering from 1997, when Short and Veeder and Reed and all the other vanguards of the "new school" of IF hadn't yet entered the scene. Perhaps some allowances should be made for the game as a historical artifact of the Before Time. But then again, Graham Nelson wrote The Craft of the Adventure in 1995, with a Bill of Player's Rights that reads much the same as the criticism I'm offering now. And discussions of accessibility, of affordances, of the user experience, have been around as long as the field of design has existed.

In closing: The Edifice is an ambitious but fatally flawed classic parser game. It attempts and soundly fails to convey a high-concept narrative. Its prose is mechanical and derivative without a memorable voice of its own. Its puzzles are so unfair as to be impossible to solve without a guide. Overall I wouldn't recommend this to anyone, except as an example of why so many modern game-players think of "text adventures" as a dead genre.