A Taste of Terror

Garry Francis has a good system for taking a concept ('mystery in a high school', 'searching for the holy grail', 'fairy tails') and turning it into a tersely-worded parser game on a grid-like map with traditional fetch-quest and lock-and-key puzzles. His games are consistently well-coded and are generally well-received.

This game is one of the larger of his games, and it is very open-ended. I and a few others ended up exploring large portions of the map before discovering key items we needed very early on. The game recommends drawing a map, and so do I. It's also useful to look under things.

The map takes us across plains and hills, ponds and cabins, cemeteries and crypts. I once made a game with a horror area and, to instill that horror in players, used the scariest thing I could think of: diagonal directions. Here, the author has made the same decision, with numerous diagonal directions possible.

Once I found the necessary items (I found it useful to use HINT in multiple locations; it is location dependent, which I didn't realize), I found the finale gruesome, but satisfying. I do wish in some ways that the game were either more terse or less so; at times there are descriptions of reaction and emotion, and at others none, giving an odd disparity.

Whether due to Puny Inform or the author's own choices, the parser can be petulant, a feature I've seen a few times in this author's punyinform games. By mimicking an old school parser's features when new school features are available, it can give the feel of instructing a toddler who is not very motivated:

"Johnny, can you go east?"

"But there's a door in the way!"

"Johnny. It's okay. Open the door, and then go east."

or:

"Johnny, can you pick up that rock?"

"But my hands are full! Wait, let me see." He takes off his backpack and rummages around with the items in my hand. "Can this grapefruit fit in the backpack? No. Can my dinosaur toy fit in the backpack? No."

You are waiting patiently.

"Can my coin fit in the back pack? Yes!" He puts the backpack back on and struggles to his feet. Then he bends down to pick up the rock. "I did it! I picked up the rock."

or:

"Johnny, can you look up 'abracadabra'?"

Johnny looks at you very seriously, and says, "You have to say, 'can you look up 'abracadabra' IN something."

Me, looking at the only book in the room:"...can you look up abracadabra in that book right there?"

"Okay!"

or, finally:

"Johnny, can you write 'hello' on the paper?"

"I don't have anything to write with!"

"Oh, Johnny, where is your quill? Look for your quill."

"Here it is!"

"Where?"

"In my backpack!"

Me, increasingly frustrated: 'Can you take it out of your backpack, Johnny? I was hoping you would do that yourself."

"But my hands are full! Wait, I have an idea." He takes off his backpack and sets it on the ground. "Will this grapefruit fit in the backpack? No. Will this plushy fit in the backpack? No." Johnny looks up at you with very serious eyes. "Sorry, I can't pick up the quill. My hands are full."

Besides that, I thoroughly enjoyed the game, and expect that most people that play parser games on a regular basis will do so as well.

Garry Francis's A Taste Of Terror (TOT) is a classically-styled horror text adventure with an exotic provenance. Francis completed it based on translated almost-forty-year-old design notes for an Italian adventure which was to have been released on the cover tape of Viking Magazine issue 12, circa 1987. The magazine was cancelled, the game never completed and the original designer's identity remains unknown; fuller details are available in the game's ABOUT.

I found these details added a pleasing aura of horror timelessness to the experience. These trapdoors and attics, concealing curtains, consultable books, chapels with pews, openable coffins, mystery-concealing locked doors - and your aunt's hairpin - they all could have been in the original game, they're in the new game, and many are staples of horror IF, and some of all IF.

The PC is ten-year-old, judogi-wearing chess champion Sean. He's visiting the farm of his beloved aunt Clarissa for a break from his apparently intense chessing life. The game begins with Sean waking up to find his aunt missing and his back hurting. The mystery is wide open, as is the map. On my first play I wandered out into the countryside, my back pain increasing until I dropped dead. The time limit imposed by the initial problem is both suspenseful and helpful, as it gives a range limit and a focus.

With sixty-ish locations, mapping is essential. The game's open style means you'll ultimately need to apprehend most or all of its contents at once to solve the puzzles. As there are several ways to die and an eventual level of physical grisliness (manipulating severed bodyparts) which some might find extreme if it weren't tempered by the chilled and sometimes humourous tone, the game feels dangerous for the player but mostly ranks as Polite on the cruelty scale, occasionally Tough. I'd say it takes a minimum of two hours to complete.

There's a mixture of modern niceties and old-schoolness in the tech. Sean has a respectable inventory limit, and a holdall can be found to increase that, but there are still more items to be found than the player could ever hold at once. The PunyInform engine used to create the game hasn't the space for much automation, so expect to handle a lot of keys and doors manually, to take extra steps off things stood on, etc. The game's contents, however, are precise. They are precisely described, placed, and fit well into a design. There's one barn location with numerous tools, and TOT is the kind of game that will distinguish between the uses for a screwdriver, a pair of pliers and a hammer in a stimulating way while allowing for red herrings.

The story develops in stages with different goals, an interesting design for such an open game. The goals escalate from the mundane to the spectacular via a shock-horror moment which demarcates what might be considered the first act. Yet once you've solved your back pain problem, you have access to almost all the map, except the locked door silos. Story development is controlled by a few major encounters and conversations. The final act is the classic IF puzzle game where you have to find all the parts, identify the puzzles, solve them and win.

There's a tone to the game's writing that's recognisable. It leans more to traditional IF description than to horror, occasionally making a joke at the PC's expense or going glib on the violence. Pared back, it might have read as fairytale, but it sits in the place where practicality has to win. After all, the player is eventually going to be carting around bodyparts to solve puzzles. This particular tone has its own charms, and given the amount of puzzle-solving that has to get done in this game, it's probably the right place. There are definitely some really good shocks and creep-outs, often just by surprise.

I found A Taste of Terror to be thoroughly engrossing. It opens in the tradition of horror stories about kids having to face off with adult levels of mystery and supernatural horror, then becomes a big, enjoyable mapping and puzzle-solving game.

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forum during ParserComp)

In the first couple turns of A Taste of Terror – an Inform 6 reimplementation of a lost ‘80s game by an unknown author – the ten-year-old protagonist, whose defining backstory element is that he’s a middle-school chess champion, gets his hands on a matchbox and also a dagger. “We’re going to get into the fun kind of trouble,” I thought to myself, and reader, I didn’t know how right I was: by the end of the game, I’d added a pitchfork, bolt-cutters, and a length of chain to my melee-weapons arsenal – to say nothing of the two severed heads I was toting around – and used accelerant to make a big bonfire, and blown a witch away with my trusty double-barreled shotgun. The grindhouse air perhaps makes little Sean an inapt protagonist (most fifth-graders can’t do quite such a convincing impression of Ash from Evil Dead) and while the game has a modern polish, there are some archaisms like a bigger-than-it-needs-to-be map and a lack of clear direction for much of the middle section. But beyond the mayhem, this is a tightly-constructed adventure with some cute flourishes and a satisfying execution of its theme.

The plot ultimately goes to predictable places – there’s a cult, evil magic, a ritual to perform – but I enjoyed the grounded way Taste of Terror starts: as it opens, you’re visiting your aunt and uncle’s farm on a school break, but your uncle just died under mysterious circumstances, your aunt is acting weird, and you’ve woken up in the middle of the night with odd back pains that make it hard to sleep (bad news, kid: in a couple of decades, you won’t need to cast about for a supernatural explanation for those). It doesn’t take too much effort to effect a cure, at least as long as you remember this is an old-school adventure and you should be SEARCHing and LOOKing UNDER and BEHIND everything you see, but the game prevents you from just going back to sleep. In the event this turns out to be a good thing, but it does mean that you’re then left to explore the rest of the house, and a large outdoor area, with no real in-character goal other than to poke around. Fans of detailed character motivation might find themselves a bit nonplussed by the amount of unprompted breaking and entering you need to perform – as I crawled my way through a broken window in the middle of the night, while juggling the aforementioned pitchfork and most of the contents of a workbench, I found myself wondering whether this was going to be worth the tetanus I was most assuredly about to catch – but there is a lot of fun stuff to uncover, with some satisfying puzzles to work through, even if I wasn’t always sure why I was doing what I was doing. I was relieved that eventually there are some revelations about what’s going on, and what you need to do to stop it, so my priorities for the last third of the game were a lot clearer – again, this is the kind of the game that’s much more about the puzzles and the gameplay than a deep, never-before-heard story, but the various revelations hit their marks, and I’m always a sucker for a collect-the-ingredients-for-the-spell quest.

As that summary indicates, we’re also in pretty familiar territory when it comes to the puzzles, but there’s a pleasant variety, with a bevy of locked doors to be opened, a few action sequences and navigation puzzles, and the aforementioned ritual-components bit. There’s nothing here that will make you sit up and take notice of its daring innovation, I don’t think, but many puzzles have alternate solutions and most of them are reasonable enough – it was smooth sailing throughout, except for one time when the requirements for getting raven’s blood seemed oddly specific (Spoiler - click to show)(I was out of shotgun shells at that point, but STAB RAVEN WITH PITCHFORK and THROW DAGGER AT RAVEN both failed to get the desired result; THROW PITCHFORK AT RAVEN feels much less likely than those other two theories, though), and then I spun my wheels for an extra fifteen minutes at the end since I’d neglected to notice a clearly-marked exit in one late-game area (the instructions suggest making a map; I didn’t, and don’t think it’s exactly necessary, but it would have helped!) Meanwhile, the handful of characters are implemented to a fairly deep level, responding to just about every conversational topic I could think up (though referring to the Roma characters with the g-word is one thing that could have stayed in the 80s).

As for the writing, it’s not going for anything overly fancy, but it conveys a spooky vibe and gets across the information you need to solve the puzzles with a bit of flair – it’s not Proust, but the prose is more robust than what you would have gotten in the '80s. While I do think the lurid nature of events would have made a slightly more intense impression on the protagonist than what we see, Taste of Terror isn’t the sort of game that would be improved by a realistic treatment of PTSD – and I suspect actual ten year olds would be tickled pink by the Grand Guignol horrors here on display.