Remembrance

Baf's Guide

This is barely IF; it owes much more to choose-your-own-adventure stories. It's a series of web pages written in Javascript, essentially, and there's one thing you have to do to on each page to get the next one in the series. You get a pull-down menu with a few verbs on each page, but if you don't do what the Javascript is looking for, you essentially get an error message and try again. (Well, there's one point where you actually have to type something, which takes some syntax-guessing, but that's an exception.) The story itself--it revolves around World War I--isn't bad, and there's one puzzle that might have been rather clever if it had been implemented on a system with a parser (as it is, the verb list gives it away). As it stands, though, this doesn't really work.

-- Duncan Stevens

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Remembrance is less interactive fiction than it is forced-participation fiction. That is, to see the next page of the story, you have to enter the magic word. There is no possibility of exploring the landscape, no opportunity to attempt other routes, and very few things to even try along the way...

However, all that aside, I still found Remembrance touching. Perhaps I just have a soft spot for World War I stories ever since I saw Gallipoli, and certainly the type of tragedy depicted in Remembrance is an easy target for a tearjerker, but the interplay of letters and scenes, encompassing the trenches, the planning rooms, and the homelands, made for a nicely affecting overall presentation. It's not the sort of thing I'd want to see very much of, but it was definitely worth my time once through.
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