Being Andrew Plotkin

The concept of the game is quite funny : it transposes the movie Being John Malkovitch into the interactive fiction world. I saw the movie before, and when I played it I could see all the references to this (odd) movie ; however, because of an imperfect knowledge of IF classics, I missed some other references to other interactive fiction games (the author provides a list of those references at the end of the game). The game is quite funny in itself too ; the story is linear (not a drawback for me though), and you can sometimes have the impression that you are watching a movie ; the implementation is good (though (Spoiler - click to show)you can take the copier in the early scenes because you can take it afterwards...). Not exactly a classic, but certainly a great game.

Being Andrew Plotkin probably makes a good deal more sense if you've watched Being John Malkovich; so if you haven't seen it, you may well enjoy the game a lot less than I did. I'd definitely recommend watching the film first, if possible, since a fair bit of the amusement I got from the game came from remembering similar scenes in the film. I don't think playing the game first will make you enjoy the film any less, though; and I don't think it counts as a spoiler to note that it's certainly not a direct transplant from screen to, er, screen — and the ending is quite different.

Quick recap: the protagonist of the movie/game finds a magic door that leads into John Malkovich'/Andrew Plotkin's mind. Shenanigans ensue.

For the most part, the game follows the plot of the movie quite closely. The biggest alterations are jokes and references to IF in general and Zarf's games in particular. Since I wasn't around in the era of sizzling and bubbling creativity on the intfiction newsgroups in the 90s, a lot of the references went over my head. I'm also not intimately familiar enough with Andrew Plotkin's work to recognize all the jokes and shout-outs.
However, having roamed the internet for IF-history sources, a lot of the game did ring a funny bell.

For a text-adventure about a PC who's a hobbyist text-adventure writer entering the mind of one of the most renowned text-adventure writers of the era, there's actually precious little actual text-adventuring to do.

Most of the game pushes you along the rails laid out by the movie, with frequent conversations where you can choose to say a silly thing or an even sillier thing. Only in the very last sequence before the epilogue does a puzzle show up. And it's a rather mediocre one at that. (One could call it a callback to the classic puzzles, if one were generously inclined...)

The writing and tempo are great though. Exciting scenes zip by at rollercoaster speed, the descriptions are detailed and evocative, the conversations are very funny indeed.

I enjoyed the ride.