Improv: Origins

by Neil deMause

Part of Frenetic Five
Superhero, humor
2022

Web Site

Return to the game's main page

Member Reviews

5 star:
(1)
4 star:
(2)
3 star:
(5)
2 star:
(1)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 5
Write a review


1-5 of 5


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
How far can you get with a dozen rubber bands?, January 14, 2024

There is something deeply endearing about the Frenetic Five franchise to me. If there was anyone out there long-awaiting another episode of this series, I was that one.

What do I love about the series? It's not just that it hits the superhero satire sweet spot better than anything since the Tick animated series, but that it does it in such a clever way. Author Neil deMause's sense of humor is both shallow and deep, running from playful one-liners such as

> QUIT
You can’t actually quit, since as an independent contractor you’re not technically employed.

> QUIT
Oh, *that* kind of quit.

Are you sure you want to quit?


to the refrigerator logic perfection of the fact that even though the superpowers of the main characters seem foolish, they truly *are* superpowers in the context of an interactive fiction game. (To wit: Improv is the player avatar whose "power" is to come up with improbable solutions with at-hand materials. Lexicon knows all the words in the game's dictionary, defeating guess-the-verb and guess-the-noun issues. Pastiche can violate the physical world model's containment rules at will, so no locked container is a barrier -- plot requirements of this episode notwithstanding. Newsboy's awareness is not bounded by scope; he can theoretically see anything happening in the game universe. Clapper's power bypasses visibility and concealment rules, obviating any lightweight "puzzles" that are based on objects being hidden in a room.)

This prequel is written in Inform 7, a departure from the TADS platform used for every previously-released episode. The author's notes indicate that writing it was partly an exercise in learning the new language, and the oft-noted bugginess of release 1 is undoubtedly in part a reflection of this fact. (As relevant background, a certain level of bugginess can be found in the author's TADS-based works, as well.) The presence of bugs (even the serious one noted by other reviewers) was not enough to prevent me from enjoying release 1, and in any case they are substantially addressed by release 2.

I found this episode to be as good as any installment of the series, in that the plot was just as flimsy (in a manner entirely in keeping with the superhero genre), the jokes were just as funny (in a manner entirely in keeping with the author's trademark style), and the writing was just as entertaining as ever.

For a newcomer to the series, this may not be the best first episode to play, because much of the strength of the series comes from the interaction between the PC and other members of the team. That kind of interaction in this game is almost entirely lacking -- the relationship between characters is (appropriately for an origin story) that of newly-introduced co-workers instead of familiar friends (and even roommates) as seen in episode 1. There is still enough to entertain in the way of deadpan comedy, unexpected puns and puzzle cussitude, but it just doesn't have the same feel of being a dynamic situation full of active and interesting characters.

The puzzles were more enjoyable in this episode, though I'm not sure how much of the difference is attributable to improved design vs. better alignment of my expectations. There is automatic hinting for several of them when no progress is being made, so I assume that an effort has been made to be "fair" in the strictest sense, even if necessary actions don't always make sense at first blush. Sometimes it may be necessary to stumble on a solution through experimentation, and it certainly appeared to be the case that involving NPCs was not optional in some places. As a result, there doesn't seem to be any reason to refrain from calling for help early and often.

The ending is somewhat anti-climactic, and the "post-credits" scene will make little sense unless the player is familiar with (or goes on to become familiar with) the chronological sequel: The Frenetic Five vs. Sturm und Drang.

The author's notes claim that he "will absolutely be writing more games sometime in the next two decades," and I hope that is true because I definitely look forward to whatever else he might publish. Welcome back, Mr. deMause!

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Bugged but excellent puzzles and very funny, January 31, 2023
by Denk
Related reviews: Inform

This is a very funny, puzzly, one-room parser comedy. However, it is also very hard and in the version I played, I had to work around a bug.

I rarely give a game with a significant game breaking bug five stars. In this case I made an exception because I realized that it was a bug and managed to work around it. Also, the author should be working on a 3rd version and I completed the 2nd version after having given up on the first version. So I think it is a shame if such an excellent game will be forgotten because the author didn't fix the bugs in time for ParserComp, even though the author is of course "responsible" (no one got hurt I suppose). In addition there are some other bugs which may require you to restore an earlier save, but they are quite obvious. So save often.

So if anyone found the game disappointing during ParserComp I understand.

I just think that this game is a real challenge: You start out with some rather easy puzzles and they gradually get harder, really hard. The hard ones are only very subtly clued but they are clued. But if you do not notice the clue you may have to start over to realize it - not sure, didn't investigate that issue.

Unless you are in a hurry, you might as well wait for the third version which hopefully takes care of those bugs and you will be playing an excellent parser comedy, assuming you love hard puzzles. However, knowing that there are bugs will probably make you notice it and quickly experiment to see what is triggering that bug. To me, the puzzles were great and the humor very funny so it was worth it to work around that bug.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A silly-superhero origin story, part of series, September 28, 2022
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 2 hours

I remember playing the Frenetic Five games a few years ago. They date back a few decades, and were a funny take on superheroes with characters that had pretty under-powered powers, always taking on villains with similarly silly ideas.

I never beat any of those games without hints, but I appreciated the vibes and felt they were internally consistent.

Although I've forgotten a lot about those games, I was happy to see a sequel/prequel released. This is a pretty fun game about trying to open up a vault.

It's a game that requires leaps of intuition for almost every step, which is a style that is both frustrating and rewarding. Given enough time, I probably would have wanted to play this off and on for a week or more, but instead I played an hour or so before using some hints that Dan Fabulich wrote on Intfiction.

I think the author succeeded in their goal, if their goal was to please fans of the former games and create a difficult one-room game centered on exploration and experimentation. I do like easier games myself, or ones centered on learning complex systems with easy individual parts, but I appreciate the vision of this game and hope the author keeps their intention to make more.

When this first came out in Parsercomp, I heard people talking about bugs, but the author seems to have patched them.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A funny, buggy, hard puzzlefest, August 8, 2022
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: ParserComp 2022

A prequel arriving more than two decades after the original series wrapped up, Improv: Origins is a funny, deep one-room puzzler that makes me interested to check out the sequels it sets up. There’s some old-school difficulty, plus a nasty bug or two that made things even harder than intended on my playthrough, so I can’t help bemoaning the lack of modern conveniences like a hint menu, so the game’s definitely not for everyone, but the entertaining cast of characters and intricate puzzle design made me glad I powered through (and, er, begged for help on the forum when I got stuck).

What we’ve got here is comedy superheroes. I see you shuffling for the door, and I know, I know, that sounds pretty dire. But the game makes a great first impression, with sophisticated jokes that go way beyond the typical played out super-parody. Like, your hero is a temp – so far so standard, but the reason the bottom’s dropped out of the heroism game is that a superhero bubble has just burst. The game’s set in a bank – your job is to open up a locked safe after the bank fired the inventor who created it, and they huffed off without sharing the trick of accessing the thing – and as a result there’s a set of economics jokes that kept me laughing, like the painting of two financial-themed heroes, PIN and Teller. Sure, much like with the game as a whole the author must have been sitting on that one for several decades, but it still got me.

It quickly becomes clear that the challenge on offer is no laughing matter, however. As befits a good one-room game, you’re presented with a clear goal and a dense space to explore in hopes of finding an answer. Atypically for this sub-genre, though, soon enough you’re not alone – your MacGuyver-themed superhero is eventually joined by others whose powers include object-finding echolocation, Google News searches avant la letter, and deep familiarity with the dictionary. This is the crew, presumably, that star in the 90s-era Frenetic Five games, and their powers – and personalities – strike a good balance between being comically useless and surprisingly helpful. The group is implemented well, too, with the team serving as a Greek chorus to some of your more hapless flailing, and interjecting into each other’s conversations with the occasional bit of kibitzing.

For all the fun banter and clever writing, though, the game is very much structured around that puzzle, and as mentioned up top, I found it to be a doozy. After finding that the obvious ways to try to open the vault end in failure, I wound up doing a lot of further poking and prodding in the environment not because I had a clear sense of how it would be helpful, but just because it was something to do. And this single big puzzle has a lot of sub-steps, some of which can feel more frustrating than they need to (the mini-puzzle of accumulating rubber bands especially seemed like it ended in anticlimax, though the bug I mention below might have contributed to that). There are definitely high points – I felt super clever when I sussed out how Lex’s word powers could be leveraged – but also moments where it seemed like reading the author’s mind, or using out-of-game thinking, was necessary to progress, and overall I spent a lot of time banging my head against the wall.

What’s worse, some of that banging was occasioned by what seemed to be bugs. The blurb indicates that it’s meant to be impossible to render the game unwinnable, but I think I managed to bork it up by (Spoiler - click to show) taping the rubber-band ball to the book, which rendered the former object unusable and didn’t seem to be possible to reverse. I also was sent on a wild goose chase when looking for a password for the vault, after consulting with the finding-specialist Clapper to locate it: (Spoiler - click to show)typing ASK CLAPPER FOR PASSWORD results in the heroines herself starting to beep, which by the rules as they’ve been spelled out indicates that she should know, or somehow be, the password. But that appears to be completely incorrect, unless I missed an alternate solution.

These are significant downsides to the game, and again, there’s no integrated hints or even separate walkthrough file to hold the player’s hand, which makes me think some might not make it to the end. Still, I think there’s more than enough creativity and humor here to make Improv: Origins worth trying. What’s even better news, the ABOUT text indicates the author’s return to the IF scene looks to be no one-time thing, so I’m looking forward to seeing more of their work – and as mentioned, I’ll likely check out their older stuff too, though I hope someone’s hacked together some walkthroughs in the intervening decades…

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Nasty, with bugs that make it Cruel, July 11, 2022

The object of this one-room game is to open a safe in the center of the room. The safe has a large red button. Here's what it says when you push it:

If it were as easy as that, the bank probably wouldn’t have needed to call a superhero, don’t you think?

That sounds like "you can't push this button" to me. But, instead, you're just supposed to "push the button" again. At that point, the safe asks for a password, on a countdown timer. If you don't have the password (or the (Spoiler - click to show)companion you need to get the password), there's no way to discover and use the password before the timer runs out.

This puzzle is "Nasty" on the Zarfian cruelty scale. The game doesn't benefit from a countdown timer at all, and there are multiple puzzles where you have to just do the same action repeatedly to get a surprisingly different result.

Furthermore, the game is buggy.

(Spoiler - click to show)
  • If you ask Pastiche to unlock the safe before you've solved the password puzzle, the game deposits an "invisible force field" in the room, which never goes away.
  • If you tape anything to anything that you're not supposed to, e.g. if you "TAPE THE CLIP TO THE PEN," you can never unstick them; you're walking dead at that point.
  • You can't call the office until you examine the pen. ("Which number would that be, then?") But when you do examine the pen and call the number, the game says, "Fortunately, part of your Ingenuity training is that you can memorize phone numbers at a glance. Not that you needed to here, since you have the number written on that ballpoint pen, but it’s a nice trick to show off at superparties."
  • Conversation topics with NPCs are very specific. You can "ASK LEXICON ABOUT WORD" but not about "THE WORD".
  • When you "ASK CLAPPER FOR PASSWORD" she claps and Clapper herself beeps. (This makes no sense, because she's not a password of any kind.)
  • The Safe has a password, and a lock, and it's hard to open when unlocked. But there's nothing telling you whether the safe is closed and locked or closed and unlocked.
  • After opening the security box, it's not described when you "LOOK."

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | View comments (1) - Add comment 


1-5 of 5 | Return to game's main page