Ad Verbum

Ad Verbum is a great wordplay game, and one of the few works of interactive fiction that can claim to have been inspired by the work of Georges Perec. Its greatest claim to fame are undoubtedly the rooms where all descriptions, including all the library responses, are written in such a way that each word begins with the same letter (w, n, e, or s), and where only input in the same format is accepted. Try taking something and then going south when you only type words that start with an 'n'. These puzzles are excellent and wittily implemented. The same high quality is maintained in the library, where several other forms of constrained writing are practised.

It is really good to see some interactive fiction that takes the textuality of the work seriously, and that manages to craft enjoyable puzzles around it.

I do wonder why Nick Montfort thought it would be a good idea to add some puzzles that have nothing to do with wordplay. (I'm thinking primarily about a light source puzzle and a "bring an object to a person" puzzle.) It's not just that they lack the brilliance of the constrained writing puzzles; it's also that by the time you come to these puzzles, you are so trained to look for wordplay everywhere that you don't realise that these puzzles are not to be solved in that way.

My bigger gripe with the game, however, is that some of the puzzles seem to be excessively geared towards certain cultural backgrounds. To a certain degree this is unavoidable: one cannot play an English wordplay game without having a great command of the English language. But some of the puzzles required the use of what I presume are American slang terms that I had literally never heard of; and there was one puzzle which you cannot possibly even start to grasp unless you already have detailed knowledge of a language game which might be well known in the US, but which, again, I had never before encountered.

(Which ones do I mean? Here are the spoilers. Taking a certain object in the library: (Spoiler - click to show)you need to "rip" the wee writ, where this is apparently a synonym for "take". Exiting the s-room: (Spoiler - click to show)you need to "scram", or "split", apparently synonyms for "go". And the language game you need to know is of course (Spoiler - click to show)pig latin, a puzzle which is by the way made unintentionally difficult by the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)the pig doesn't understand "outhsay" but only "ogay outhsay".)

After encountering one such puzzle, the reader will start believing than any puzzle he cannot solve is such a puzzle -- in other words, the motivation to persist when things are difficult is greatly decreased.

All this might not apply for people who do have the right cultural background to understand the more obscure puzzles, but for me they lessened the fun of the game enough to have me drop my rating from 4 to 3 stars. Still, you owe it to yourself to play this game.

The game has no plot to speak of, which is fine. The puzzles are similar to Nord and Bert, where you use wordplay to obtain items, and to exit rooms.

Some of the rooms are obvious, such as the room where everything begins with S only allows commands and nouns that start with S. Which makes it difficult when you're trying to find ways to go north.

The parser is pretty smart, however, the nature of the parser forces you to think so far outside the box it might become frustrating. (Spoiler - click to show) Especially when you try "walk where west was" to go east and get no response. . Some puzzles are straightforward, like knowing more dinosaur types (Spoiler - click to show) Though I think "anything"saur will work, since it accepted "boobasaur" . I found what I believe to be a glitch that made the game unwinnable concerning the sofa (Spoiler - click to show) I was apparantly not supposed to be able to remove it from the upstairs room without the verbosifier, but I did, and the verbosifier wouldn't work in the other room .

All in all the game is great and different enough from standard IF games that it will keep you occupied beyond the "take all" nonsense. The included hints don't give the answer completely away, but do tell you what you need to know. Interesting is the fact that in some rooms "save/restore/undo/quit" don't work, but that's in the nature of the way the author redesigned the parser for each room.

Gives a lot for an aspiring player or writer to live up to!

Ad Verbum is solely a puzzle game (no story or plot). Unlike traditional IF puzzles, the puzzles in Ad Verbum are word puzzles, mostly of 'guess the verb' form. In general, I detest 'guess the verb' puzzles, but this game succeeds beautifully by creating logical constraints for the verbs. While playing it, I found myself happily mulling over synonyms for 'take' and 'exit'. The writing in the game is very clever, and the author does an exceptional job of following the rules presented in the game, managing to give entire room and object descriptions using only, for example, words that begin with 'w'.

The game is relatively short. Most of the time you spend playing it will be spent thinking over puzzles. Ad Verbum is great for delivering the 'ah hah!' moment of a cleverly solved puzzle. It's also a terrific game for involving others in the puzzles. Normal IF puzzles are difficult to share with others, but it was simple to turn to my husband and say "I need a word that means 'exit' that begins with 's'." Indeed, my husband provided the necessary solutions for at least two of the puzzles.

This game is highly recommended as a diversion from more traditional IF, and is a must-play for any puzzle-lover.