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Review
Uninteractive Fiction 3
I finally got around to playing this with a group of people today.
It kind of reminded me of Hard Puzzle 4. Hard Puzzle 1-3 each had a single puzzle with a hilariously complicated setup which ultimately could be solved by a single command or similarly simple strategy. Hard Puzzle 4 was a full-on game.
Uninteractive Fiction 1 and 2 were one-note games that were tiny jokes.
UI 3 is a larger-scale game that attempts mechanics and plot, which means I'd prefer to compare it to other games that attempt mechanics and plot.
There is a timer on the screen that counts down from 60. Once it reaches 0, you can hit PLAY and tap a drum. This increments a global counter. As that global counter increases, you get different text. Once it reaches a multiple of 400, it starts over and increments a red number at the top of the page.
I recruited several people to help me today, and we got through the whole game in 1 hr.
The writing kind of reminded me of Swigian. When I wrote Swigian, I originally was trying to prove that any polished parser game that isn't repetitive and last 200 moves or so would place highly in IFComp. I just wrote random filler things, having a tree to chop and an axe and a flint. I didn't know what to do after that, so I had the character fall asleep and wake up somewhere else, and then decided to throw in some Beowulf references. But the stuff was just there to fill up content.
I kind of felt like that about the text here. There were some parts I thought were really cool, but I didn't really feel compelled by a narrative arc, it mostly felt like filler. I did enjoy spending time collaborating and talking with others. I've seen Damon write some fantastic stuff (I love the candy detective games), but this wasn't as strong.
So where does this leave the series? This entry is a very slow timed-text vehicle for a semi-randomized mostly-linear narrative without strong plot points and only the occasionally gorilla gif to present variety. Making it more fun makes it more interactive. It's interesting.
It'd be fun to see the code for this afterwards, the secret-keeping parts like having the text not be highlightable would be especially interesting.
