Murderworld

Murderworld, by Austin Auclair

I had both high and low expectations for this game. Austin Auclair previously wrote His Majesty's Royal Space Navy Service Handbook, which I enjoyed quite a bit. On the other hand, this game is X-men fan fiction, and many fan fiction parser games in the past haven't been that good.

Overall, I had a good experience with this game. It's big (it took me exactly 4 hours to play with total concentration, and the file is 6mb. I swear I saw Austin on blusky with an image showing this game has over 500K words, which I would believe, but I'm not sure it's the same game).

The idea is that you get to play as a ton of different x-men. You start off with a brief tutorial on a plane, then you have a chance to pick one of six different X-men to use to solve a major problem at the X-men's mansion. You don't swap between them; instead, the game just has six different paths through this section, which is quite long in itself. I played as Storm, which was fun given her powers.

This is about where the title screen drops. I'll spoiler the rest, although everything in this spoiler is only about as descriptive as the above and doesn't give much away (it's essentially the same as reading the table of contents of the walkthrough).

The game contains a set of young characters that I thought came from other media but which seem to be completely invented by the author. They fit well enough that I didn't really suspect that they were OCs (if they're not, someone can correct me!).

This game managed to avoid several of the flaws that very long games often have in IFComp. Instead of one sprawling world where everything is interconnected and you have to lawnmower trying every item in every room, the game silos off each section, so each section uses only the objects and people immediately available. It essentially is a collection of minigames with an overarching story, and I love that setup (I've used it for several games myself). It is also much more polished and fair than many long IFComp games, which can at times be very buggy or filled with impossible puzzles. I never had to consult the walkthrough, although I did use 'mission' a lot to remind myself of the goal, only realizing a little later on that it functions as a kind of in-game hint nudge (which I really appreciated). There are lots of blank white lines (a common issue for all inform programmers) and I did frequently try typing things that didn't work, but the VERBS command always got me back on track.

I like the plot; I'm divided on the writing. It's clear that Austin Auclair is talented at executing his desired goal, I just have some minor quibbles with the goal itself. Two things that stuck out were character descriptions and overall emotions. The descriptions are focused on detailing the costumes of the characters in minute detail; this seemed more like a replacement for visual media rather than writing for writing's sake, if that makes any sense, kind of like alt-text for a picture. The descriptions for the OCs were much more natural which makes sense, as that was 'pure Auclair' and not a reassurance that the x-men are in their authentic costumes. As for the emotions, I felt like the setup made this game very dramatic, but when we arrive at the disaster everyone seems relaxed and chill, joking almost. This fits in great with the comedic later segments (appropriate for the 'Murderworld' setting) but that initial dissonance of 'why are we pranking each other with the phone when people might be dying?' threw me off.

Dialogue is appropriate for X-men. I thought Storm was stilted and Scott was cringe, both of which are 100% accurate. Nightcrawler's segment had some great dialogue, and I enjoyed the final battle (and the reveal of who the true instigator is and why (Spoiler - click to show)Storm was spared).

I think people will like this. You don't have to be an X-men expert to solve this, as there are numerous help systems (especially VERBS) to remind you of what the powers are. This is probably one of the best superhero parser games I've played, similar to the Earth and Sky series' later entries. My big gripe with most superhero games is that I really want to use my powers, but most games limit you severely in how you can use them. This game really thinks out the limits of your superpowers, and lets you use them quite a bit (Storm gets a big playground for doing all sorts of weather shenanigans, Wolverine can chop up almost everything, etc.). With my minor gripes, I'd rate this a 9/10 or 4.5/5, which I'll round up to 5 on IFDB. (I won't mention most of my ratings here on intfiction, but I thought this one would be good).