Sam Fortune - Private Investigator

This is the second noir IF game to come along in the last couple of months, but "Sam Fortune" is deeply unlike Make It Good. Some of the same conventions show up -- the obligatory bottle of whiskey, the double-crosses, the general shabbiness of the protagonist's environment, the women virtuous and conspiring -- but instead of deep and sometimes frustrating freedom of Make It Good, we have a highly directed, scene-based game that spoofs radio drama.

Each scene offers just a puzzle or two of sneaking around, and though the game bills itself as "nasty", this is not really a reflection of how hard those puzzles are. It's possible to lock yourself out of victory by not taking everything that you should take at a certain point, which is awkward and could (I think) easily have been designed around; but most of the solutions are not too difficult. The game provides built-in hints, as well.

There are some cosmetic flaws -- for some reason, Blanding doesn't always make things "scenery" when they ought to be. Or perhaps he just prefers the effect of having all the important objects listed on their own line even when they're also mentioned in the room description. In other respects the game often privileges function over immersion in the prose: there are exit listings in the status bar, the game periodically prompts you when it's a good idea to save, and conversation is handled with a standard menu system. Object descriptions are minimal unless the object is important to play.

Probably the most unusual aspect of the game is the way it's framed as a radio drama, complete with explicit commercial breaks and a sponsored product that shows up during play in Coke Is It! fashion. If you do something that loses the game, the story cuts away to a listening kid, whose mother comes in and abruptly turns off the radio. The narrative voice also swaps between first and second person, which may be a little disconcerting; but I took it to mean that the first person portions were voice-over narration from Sam's point of view.

The writing tries for hard-boiled wit and sometimes succeeds, but equally often comes off as corny -- a fact that is weakly lamp-shaded in one of the endings when the mother complains of the decreasing quality of radio drama these days.

So overall, it's hard to take very seriously -- but it isn't trying to be taken seriously.