External Links


SoFar.z8
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
sofar.zip
THL hint file
(Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)
SoFar.sol
solution
SoFar.step
solution

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Playlists and Wishlists

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page

So Far

by Andrew Plotkin profile

Surreal
1996

(based on 71 ratings)
4 reviews

About the Story

Sitting in a cramped theatre, irritated that your partner apparently hasn't turned up, you are strangely intrigued by a current of air. It will lead you to a place very different from your own familiar surroundings...
[--blurb from The Z-Files Catalogue]


Game Details


Awards

Winner, Best Game; Winner, Best Writing; Nominee, Best Story; Nominee, Best Setting; Winner, Best Puzzles; Winner - Opening the gate, Nominee - Riding the creature, Nominee (Cramped, crawling), Best Individual Puzzle - 1996 XYZZY Awards

34th Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2011 edition)

Editorial Reviews

Baf's Guide


In this haunting and dreamlike work, you discover unnatural shadows that allow you to travel to a variety of strange places, each with a different prevailing mood. A sprawling work, thick with prose, variously enchanting and disturbing. Has a definite recurring theme of near-misses and creative tension, as well as numerous less-identifiable undercurrents with plenty of room for interpretation and speculation. (Is the tribal dance you witness in the grasslands just another retelling of the play you watch in the prologue? Is there some connection between the sculpture in the park and the coming lunar conjunction?) Excellent puzzles, chiefly based on experimenting with unfamiliar objects. Lots of attention to detail, especially irrelevant detail, with the effect that the world seems much larger than it is. Highly emotional and pleasantly confusing.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

IF-Review
A Step
This is the kind of game where you not only have to read each piece carefully and thoughtfully the first time, you also have to stand permanently apart from what's going on. You're doing things that make no real logical sense -- by the hundred, it seems. Graham Nelson's Player's Bill of Rights is triumphantly defied by some of the acts of intuitive leaping, save-and-restore decipherment, and hindsight required to get through the game properly. Even so I only managed with liberal use of Lucian Smith's Invisiclues and suggestions from friends on ifMUD. As Duncan Stevens says in his recent SPAG review of the same game, _So Far_ works thematically, but the plot doesn't entirely make sense.
See the full review

SPAG
It's a noteworthy title, for a whole slew of reasons. IF's traditional features have been handled extremely well, in that the writing, the puzzles and the coding are as near flawless as they come. There are further aspects however, concerning the game-world and the player's place within it, that add new and thought-provoking elements.
-- Alistair G. Thomas

It's difficult, in the end, to explain what it is that makes So Far so memorable. The settings are vivid, but not spectacularly so, and the strongest theme in the descriptions is decay and abandonment--compelling on an emotional level but not necessarily captivating as IF. A few of the puzzles are memorable, but there aren't enough puzzles here to make the game work on that basis alone. My own sense of why I found the game fascinating was that it demanded attention and analysis; indeed, without analysis, it's not even vaguely memorable, because very little of what's most interesting about So Far is there on the surface. More than any other IF I can think of--Losing Your Grip is the only game that comes close--So Far is best appreciated through poring over the transcript and drawing connections between events that aren't necessarily juxtaposed in space or time.
-- Duncan Stevens
See the full review

50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron A. Reed
So Far, released in 1996, was one of several amateur games that year that might have passed for an Infocom game in scope and depth of worldbuilding.
[...]
The game is written in a mode of text adventure design that today seems harsh, requiring judicious use of save, restore, and undo to successfully navigate; the puzzles often require thinking with a brutal dream-logic that many players in the years since its release have found hard to connect with. But So Far enchanted players in 1996 because it pointed toward a richer future for interactive fiction. Its puzzles and story intertwined in a way that elevated both over the sometimes simpler games of the eighties, or the fan works of the early nineties that often worked to emulate them. It felt like something new. Interactive fiction, it seemed, could evolve.
See the full review

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)
Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.

Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Member Reviews

5 star:
(25)
4 star:
(29)
3 star:
(12)
2 star:
(3)
1 star:
(2)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 4
Write a review


Most Helpful Member Reviews


13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
Horribly unfair, hauntingly beautiful, March 29, 2008
by jingold (UK)

There are very few bits of IF that have stayed with me and will do forever. So Far is one of them, which in a way is a terrible shame, because it's almost impossible to share with anyone else. The game is famously difficult and cruel (it's the only game I can think of that actively encourages players to do self-destructive things) and to say I got through it without hints would be a lie, lie, lie. But it was a beautiful thing, finely wrought, casting shadows across itself like a spinning sundial. It made me feel horribly jealous not to have written it and deeply privileged to have played it. Sigh -- those were the days...

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Jung on Myst, April 24, 2012
by Rymbeld (Greensboro, NC)

Well, I don’t know how to start writing about this game. Really I don’t. I know that I liked it, so I’ll start there. I liked it far more than Plotkin’s previous game, A Change in the Weather, by a wide margin. It was immediately engrossing: the writing was luxurious and invited me to read the game as text in a way that the previous games I’d encountered had not. The game opens with the protagonist at a play, worried about Aessa, presumably your girlfriend. She’s stood you up. And the game strongly implies (by way of the play which you’re watching, and the hints near the end of the game) that she is actually having an affair.

So Far seems like a representation of one man’s internal coming to grips with this awareness of betrayal, loss, and loneliness. Sure, one could read the various worlds you traverse as literal—that the game is a fantastic world-hopping adventure—but Plotkin put too much detail and care for us to legitimately come to that conclusion. For instance, each world is keyed to some environmental markers: “autumn, cool, smoky” or “bright, bitter wind.” The game opens in “hot, sticky,” which mirrors the protagonist’s mood: “Damn the crowd, in truth: your mood was hot, foul, and dark when you came in.” The pathetic fallacy runs rampant in So Far, to such an extent that it is hard for me to believe that the various worlds you end up exploring exist “out there” at all. Then environments become increasingly bleak, dark, and shapeless, mirroring various stages of acceptance. And the end of the game--oh, the end.

Cracks show up a lot, too. Keep an eye out for them. Cracks in walls, in the earth, etc. Seems like a blatant symbol of the rupture in the protagonist’s relationship. The cracks are often associated with water (yonic?). There’s even a puzzle that involves (Spoiler - click to show)trying to rupture a crack in order to cause a glacier landslide, revealing a chill tunnel leading to a cave of light, where “ripples of gold light fall through milky blue veils.” The game begs for a Freudian reading.

Shadows are important in this game, too, another thing hinted at right at the game’s outset. The game opens with the final act of a play, and Plotkin deftly wove in all the major themes of the game into this scene, which you watch play out before you really can do anything. “Rito has finally found out about Imita's affair, and he stalks the stage, whipping voice and hands about himself. A footfall behind him; he turns, and sees Imita,” the game begins. Rito turns to Imita and berates her: “How come you, harlot? Dare you come this way, / your skin yet dark with Tato's shadow's stain?” “Shadow” here is obviously a marker, since the action of the game involves finding odd shadows and stepping into them.

In fact, this game kept reminding me of Myst. Traveling to different worlds and solving puzzles. However, unlike in Myst, many of the worlds in So Far are populated. On the other hand, the people in those worlds are either hostile to you or indifferent. You typically don’t feel connected to anyone, except the lost boy perhaps—and that boy might even be you, a homunculus trapped in a maze of rusted metal. The puzzle here(Spoiler - click to show)--clanging metal pipes to move around—suggested to me a prelinguistic stage of psychological development, and the boy simply that innocent, bruised self hiding in all of us.

The writing and the way some of these worlds were structured suggested Myst to me, too. The first world you encounter involves a castle and a radioactive power generator. Here’s a sample of the room where you first appear:
(Spoiler - click to show)
Abandoned Road
The sky is almost violet, infinitely distant -- you've never seen such a sky, and without the haze of metallic heat that summer should have. But the wind is sharp and chilly, and the trees nearby are a quilt of orange, red, and gold.

Beneath you the road is old, filled with weeds and ragged moss; dirt shows only in patches. To the south, the track is choked with trees, as it runs into the fringes of an autumn forest. It continues the other way, though, towards an immense stone wall that hems the northern horizon.

The puzzles are generally not too hard, but not too easy, either. There is some trial and error to go through, of course; and the logic of the worlds doesn’t always make sense, especially as you progress through the game and the worlds become more abstract and strange: in one, you wander a desolated landscape, manipulating platonic solids. And then there is the darkness and the shadows and the shades of the happy couple you and Aessa once were. This protagonist is an awfully cerebral individual who works out his issues by plumbing deep into his psyche.

Is there anything wrong with this game? It’s puzzle-heavy, which isn’t to my taste, but on the other hand, they are mostly woven into the theme pretty well, though Plotkin’s writing. There are a few that are fairly silly and don’t fit, though. And some of the more tedious ones take you out of the world completely, in terms of player immersion. That is, you’re reminded that you’re just playing a game and you forget all about this cool world you’re in.

But I think the major failure of the game is that it is written in the second person. I know that’s a convention of text adventures, but in this case the prose would be more compelling, I think, if Plotkin had experimented with the first person. Especially in a game like this, which could easily be read as taking place within the protagonist’s head in a surrealist psychological drama. The standard game engine response of “I don’t understand that verb” when the player fails to guess the right verb, or makes a typo, felt particularly jarring after I began to understand the game in this way. Granted, the second person is the standard convention in IF, but I look forward to playing some games which break this rule.

Taken together with A Change in the Weather, it seems that one consistent theme between the two Plotkin games I’ve played so far is isolation or loneliness. In the previous game, the protagonist wandered away from his friends in search of some solitude; in So Far the protagonist is dealing with a breakup, or perhaps infidelity. Text adventure games are typically solitary affairs by their very nature, so it’s nice to see Plotkin incorporating this into the plot of the game.

(re-posted from my blog, gentle hart desire)

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | View comments (1) - Add comment 

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Simple and enjoyable., April 30, 2017

This was the first IF game I've played by this author. All in all, it was a good experience, and it took 6 days for me to complete.
It wasn't too terribly 'verbose' in its descriptions--but I see the advantage to that--the best images are created by the mind of the reader. For the most part, the descriptions were 'good enough'. But one reason I gave it only 4 stars was because in some places the author could have been more clear. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)no matter how hard I tried to look at it, I just could not understand how the huge gate in the 'autumn' area worked, but maybe I missed something about it. Also, I think he could have tightened up the grammar in some places, though I know programmers aren't necessarily professional writers. Plus I understand that the author was in his mid 20s(as I was) when this game came out in 1996.
Perhaps like a number of others, I thought this game was going to be a cinch when I first started playing it. Not quite. The first problems were simple, but soon after, I got stuck. One hint--it really helps to take a step back and take in WHERE you ARE. There is plenty of teleportation, and though it seems that you remain on the same planet, the many places you visit are different. The problems are varied and interesting, and I know it's a good game when I get obsessed about solving them.
Warning, however---there are also plenty of red herrings. Locked doors, paths and entrances that seem to admit you, objects that seem like they could be used for SOMETHING, but turn out to be non-essential. At one point, I thought I might be able to make out a pattern to solve what I thought was a problem, but it was like reading tea-leaves--the problem wasn't what I thought it was. Also, there are one or two loose ends, event-wise, but, as they say, that's life. At any rate, I follow the old IF rule, 'If you can take an object, keep it.'

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

See All 4 Member Reviews

So Far on IFDB

Recommended Lists

So Far appears in the following Recommended Lists:

My Top 10 List (Not In Order) by Sami Preuninger

Favorite Fours From Industrious Implementors, 2G by Walter Sandsquish
Some IF writers write more than others. Here are my favorite four games from authors who've released at least half-a-dozen games to date. This list covers 2nd-generation text-adventure implementors, who published the bulk of their work...

The Best Puzzle Games There Ever Were by jingold
Puzzle games are out of vogue these days and even if they weren't, I just don't feel like I have the time to play them any more. But when I did, I loved them, and these are the ones I loved the most.

See all lists mentioning this game

Polls

The following polls include votes for So Far:

Really hard puzzle/adventure games by Silius
You know like with lots of puzzles you have to solve.

Games with the best writing by A. I. Wulf
Games are a new medium of art. It's still a maturing medium. But still some works May have succeeded in being truly classic in their writing. As an enthusiastic writer I need to know about the growth of IF in this field.

The absolute hardest non-broken games you've played by MathBrush
After reading Jason Dyer's post on his excellent adventure blog (at bluerenga.wordpress.com) about the hardest adventure ever (which I haven't tried yet, but want to!). Everyone has a game that they've experienced that is just absolutely...

See all polls with votes for this game




This is version 9 of this page, edited by JTN on 30 May 2023 at 11:22pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page