Altered Destiny

I've been playing this, and overall the experience has been cautiously positive, barely. The game doesn't often give you clear goals, so it's about experimenting; and the game is a bit weird about the information it gives you, and how much. You are in an alien planet, where you know nothing about the creatures and vegetation; but if you look at them, the narrator is happy to give you information you couldn't possibly know. You are expected to type "l plants" and "l creatures" often; the narrator's disambiguation will tell you what they are called, and so you will know how to refer to them. Which is neat in how it diminishes "guess the noun", but it makes very little sense. By the way, this differs from other Sci-Fi and fantasy games (like, say, Space Quest) in that, in this game, the PC is not part of this fantasy world. Roger Wilco may know the name of some alien species even if we don't, but there is zero way that the protagonist of this game can.

Talking to characters is a bit like trying to extract teeth. While they respond to suitable topics, there is zero notion that a conversation is taking place, and only rarely can you follow up on anything they say.

What I found most interesting about this game is the parser. It's the type of parser you expect from regular IF, but certainly not from these parser-driven graphical adventures. "It" is recognised. If the games asks you a disambiguation question and you respond to it (>GRAB FLOATER. "Which do you mean, the small flotater or the large floater?" >SMALL) the game actually recognises and parses that correctly. You can drop your inventory items at any time (and have an inventory limit), and, amazingly, you can >DROP ALL and >GET ALL.

Apart from that, it's a product of its time; design-wise, somewhere between Sierra and LucasArts. You can certainly die a lot (and there is only one death screen; this game taught me the value of having Sierra's entertaining death messages), and most of the times it'll be because you stepped somewhere you shouldn't have, or stepped off a path. In fact, there is some bugginess associated with this, as you may find the character will trigger a death-collision even though they didn't actually collide with the thing. Certain objects can be drawn in front of the character during animations, when they shouldn't be. In one place, it's very easy to walk into an unwalkable area and just break the game visually.

There seem to be no noteworthy walking deads - or at least, no cruel ones. There are a couple of things that are clearly, or seem to be, irreversible; if you keep a healthy amount of savegames, and are careful not to make irreversible blunders unless you're exploring a path and therefore have a savegame to go back to, you should be fine. It appears that you won't find anything like the earring from Codename: ICEMAN in here.

The music is quite unspectacular, mediocre. Which fits in well with the generic plot, the dissonance of learning this alien flora and fauna via the narrator, the graphical glithes, and the blandness of conversations. This game is, overall, bland. It's not that it does things bad, mostly, it's that it doesn't really make them worthwhile.

When I got stuck, I found that exploration and experimentation usually paid off, which made me rather trust the game. Although some of the player feedback could be misleading or unhelpful; baiting the cage was an exercise in frustration, and some parser responses may lead you to think that a certain action is futile and not worth trying again, whereas it may be worth trying again in a different screen, even if it looks like it's exactly the same situation as the one you just got told off for.

Now, here's the thing: I didn't finish the game.

Why?

Because there is a whole section that's full of those Sierra-style winding paths that kill you after you fall off from them, that you have to traverse super carefully. Plus, it's got branching paths (not quite a maze) so you have go back a forth a few times. I did that section, it seemed like I had done everything I could, then left and never went back again.

So, stuck, I turn to the cluebook.

And I read that I have to go back there again.

And... my heart sinks, and I just go... "ok, I think I'm done."

I don't remember much about Infidel, also by this author, except that it was a decent puzzler (if ultimately forgettable - I certainly remember nothing except some hyerogplyphics) with a whopper of a memorable ending (Berlyn wrote many other games, of course, including "Suspended". For some reason, though, he is forever the author of "Infidel" in my mind. Unlike, say, Brian Moriarty, whose various games are memorable in their own right... but I digress). This game certainly feels like it has the technical and design influence of one of the Imps, but it falls short in almost every level (by which I mean, it's "not quite there", rather than being actively bad). Quite a few puzzles I solved by lucky exploration, but then would go "why did I try this? What if I hadn't? I could have been really stuck here for the longest time." Now, credit must be given for a game that gets you into the mindframe where you DO stumble upon these puzzle solutions, which is what I mean when I say it doesn't get things wrong or bad, it just fails to achieve anything stronger than "bland".

And then of course you have that moment in which I felt my soul drain through the soles of my feet, as though I was staring into a deep black hole (i.e., the prospect of returning to that branching path of deadly walkways)... I can't fault it TOO much because it's a design choice of the times, we can blame Sierra for it, and it was the graphic adventures' version of a more physical, less cerebral, less "you can beat it just by typing the commands in a walkthrough" moment. Kinda like minigames. It's a kind of minigame, where you stop playing the adventure game and instead fiddle around trying to get the character through a difficult spot. We have Sierra to thank for a number of horrid design choice staples, and this is, sadly, one of them.

I can't fault it TOO much...

...but there is NO WAY I'm going through that section again, either. Here endeth my playthrough, at about 130 points of out 350. I could go up to almost 200 points, I think, but for that I'd need to embark on a path I was not yet prepared for, clearly.

So the final thoughts are... this game is not discussed much, and there's a reason for that (there usually is). The most memorable thing about it is how friendly the parser can be, compared to other parser-driver graphic adventures. It even abbreviates "ask about" to "ab". It doesn't support "x" but does support "l" ("l"ook). As I delete the game from my hard drive, that is the strongest impression the game made on me.

Oh, here's a little tidbit. Those walkways of death? The last couple are so windy that the game just takes control and navigates for us (too little too late, buddy). When I saw that happen, already in an unforgiving mood, all I could think of "the testers must have really balked at this section, so they had to automate it instead of making it playable, but they still thought it was worth keeping. Gah."