SPAG #56 is copyright (c) 2009 by Jimmy Maher.
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IN
THIS ISSUE
Editorial
IF News
Impressions of an IF Newcomer
by
Dorte Lassen
A DRIFTer's First IF Comp by Duncan Bowsman
IF
Competition 2009 Reviews:
The Ascot
The
Believable Adventures of an Invisible Man
Beta Tester
Broken Legs
Byzantine Perspective
Condemned
The Duel in the Snow
The Duel That Spanned the Ages
Earl Grey
Eruption
GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands!
Gleaming the Verb
The Grand Quest
Grounded in Space
The Hangover
Interface
Resonance
Rover's Day Out
Snowquest
Spelunker's Quest
Star Hunter
Trap Cave
Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort
zork, buried chaos
IntroComp
2009 Reviews:
Gossip
Obituary
Selves
Other
Game Reviews:
Acheton
The Bryant Collection
Cacophony
Finding the Mouse
The Nemean Lion
Sam Fortune -- Private Investigator
Shelter from the Storm
Spaceship!
Unscientific Fiction
SPAG Specifics
The King of Shreds and Patches
EDITORIAL
On July 14 of this
year, Muffy
St. Bernard posted the news to rec.arts.int-fiction that Paul Allen
Panks had passed away. The thread started with warm sentiments and
genuine sorrow, but eventually decayed into the all too typical Usenet
trolling and name-calling. Perhaps that's appropriate in a
way;
Paul certainly did have a knack for bringing just this sort of
"excitement" to everywhere he went on the Internet.
I didn't
really know Paul personally. My contact with him was limited to a
handful of emails, most associated with SPAG, including a couple of
"article submissions" that were just too self-serving for me to accept.
It did, however, bother me to see the vigor with which some posters
attacked Paul and his games. I was often tempted to say something, to
try to tell these people that it was obvious (to me, anyway) that Paul
was not mentally well, and that however dashed-off his endless string
of BASIC text adventures might seem to the rest of us they were quite
possibly the most important thing in his life at that particular
moment. But then I'm not entitled to climb on any high horse here; I
wrote one or two
scathing
reviews
of Paul's games myself. The fellow did have a way of getting on a
person's last nerve. What seems quirky and funny in retrospect -- the
creation of his own entry on Wikipedia, the weekly postings about a
"new version" of his magnum opus
Westfront PC, the bizarre choices in
development languages (IF in High-Level Assembler?) and stubborn
refusal to even consider Inform or TADS -- was, let's be honest, just
aggravating at the time.
So, no, this editorial is not intended as a finger-pointing exercise,
even though I do at least partially
agree
with Conrad Cook
that we could all stand to be a bit nicer, or at least more polite, to
one another at times. Certainly no one should be held responsible for
Paul's passing, a passing about which I know no details but about
which, based on Paul's history and the behavior of his family, I can
make some unfortunate surmises. Perhaps some of us, myself included,
can just try to remember a bit more often that the people we casually
slag off (or praise) on the Internet are real flesh-and-blood beings
with the same personal problems and joys as ourselves. IF as a form is
young enough that the passing of someone associated
with it is still a rare event, although this must inevitably change as
time goes on. And yet I don't think it is just the event's rarity that
made me want to write something about Paul's passing.
When
I first discovered adventure games, I didn't see them as "artifacts of
digital culture" or a "a potentially whole new form of literature" or
any of the other descriptions I throw about with abandon these days.
No, the boy who stood mooning over the rack of Infocom games
at
his local bookstore (remember when book stores sold computer games?)
saw them as worlds he could visit, preferably for an extended stay
given that adolescence does not always give one the easiest time of
things in the real world. I still feel echoes of that old shiver of
excitement sometimes, but I've played and written and thought too much
about IF now to completely abandon myself to the experience the way I
once did, even if I knew how to turn off the stresses and pressures of
the adult world. Paul, however, never lost that original excitement. He
didn't care about the place of IF in the cultural zeitgeist and
literary canon; he just wanted to lose himself in a different, more
orderly world where he could solve puzzles and fight monsters and be a
hero, where he didn't have to worry about finding a job or the effect
his medication was having on his body. I admired him for that in a way,
and wished I could recapture some of that joyous abandon in my own
playing and writing.
Of course I'm not
really
saying
we should abandon all the technical, theoretical, and literary strides
IF has made in the last twenty years; certainly even my appreciation of
Paul's qualities does not particularly make me want to play another of
his games. I am, though, saying that we are creators of, as
Zork I put
it, "self-contained and self-maintaining universe[s]." That was pretty
cool then, and it's pretty cool now. It's cool enough, in fact, to be
worth making a conscious effort to stop and remember on occasion, cool
enough to be worthy of whatever's left of our inner children.
As
for Paul: I don't believe in life after death, but in spite of that
I'll fondly imagine him WIELDing swords and KNOCKing doors in a simpler
world where heroes are heroes with no compromises or
equivocation,
where all the puzzles of life can be solved through patience and logic,
and where no action is too complicated to be expressed in a two-word or
less imperative construction. He may not really be in such a place, but
he
ought to
be -- and sometimes what ought to be is more important that what
actually is.
Back to Table of Contents
IF
NEWS
The Shadow in the CathedralTextfyre's
second commercial IF game, from respected authors Ian Finley and
Jon Ingold, has just been released for just $9.95, and
Emily Short, certainly a reliable critic,
thinks it is very, very good.
https://www.textfyre.com/Games.aspx
Stuga / Cottage
The Swedish game
Stuga
(1977-78) was quite possibly the first work of IF written in a language
other than English. Just thirty years later, English speakers can now
also give it a try, as it has been translated by Johan Ottosson under
the name
Cottage.
http://www.microheaven.com/svenska/stuga.shtml#nedladdningar
Ferret
And another oldie from the institutional computing era has been revived
as a port to MS-DOS...
http://www.jugglingsoot.com/
ZILF
The
indomitable vaporware continues to fail to live up to his name by
releasing a ZIL compiler, or at least a compiler for a language as
close to ZIL as he can piece together from the bits of old Infocom
documentation floating around on the Internet. (For those who don't
know: ZIL was Infocom's in-house development language in which they
wrote all of their games.)
http://hansprestige.com/zil/zilf-0.2.zip
AmForth!
Z-Machine abuses appear to be endless. The latest is this full
implementation of ANS Forth from Marshall Vandegrift.
http://code.google.com/p/zmforth/
Spring Thing 2010
Spring Thing, the
other
general interest annual IF competition, will be happening again next
year. See the contest website for rules and information -- and know
that longer games are not only allowed but encouraged.
http://www.springthing.net/
French IF Rendezvous
Jacqueline
Lott is visiting Paris at the end of this month, and to celebrate this
momentous occasion members of the French IF community will be coming
forth to meet her. You too can join in the fun if you happen to be in
Paris and (preferably) can speak French. I am, unfortunately,
disqualified on both counts.
http://ifiction.free.fr/taverne/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=733&start=0
Art of Fugue
Victor
Gijsbers is putting together a community-authored puzzle game based on
a very novel premise. Give the current alpha version a try,
and
maybe think about adding a puzzle of your own. My wife Dorte and I
already have.
http://gamingphilosopher.blogspot.com/2009/10/art-of-fugue-open-alpha-2.html
Saugus.net Halloween
Ghost Story Contest
The
community of Saugus, Massachusetts seems like a very cool place, at
least judging from their Internet presence. Amongst other things, every
year they sponsor a contest for original ghost stories. IF is
allowed -- and this year three IF games were actually entered!
http://www.saugus.net/Contests/Halloween/2009/Results/IF/
Back to Table of
Contents
Impressions
of an IF Newcomer by Dorte
Lassen (dorte.lassen SP@G gmail.com)
As a
medical student, soon in my final year of medical school, my interest
in
computers and their uses has been very limited. I have never been a big
computer or video game
player, and it was first through my lovely husband Jimmy Maher, whom
you all know – at
least by name – that I got introduced to IF. But as a newcomer I would
like to
share the experiences that I had the past few years playing multiple
games
with their strong and weak sides. And I want to share it with you,
because
Jimmy told me, that the IF community tries to get more "ordinary"
people to play their
games without necessarily participating further in the community.
English is not my first or even my second language, so please be gentle.
It was in December 2006 that Jimmy asked me for the
first time if I would
like to play an IF game with him: a game, that he hadn’t yet tried to
play himself, that was relatively new and had gotten very good reviews.
We are talking about Last Resort by Jim Aikin. I
want to thank Jim Aikin for writing
such a wonderful game. For a first time player it was nerve wrecking in
places; I just wanted to run away or kill everybody who wanted
to hurt me. But
as good as it was, it had one problem: it wasn’t suited for a
first-time player. Jimmy and I started playing it, but I was a little
bit slow understanding everything that I could or couldn’t do. So
shortly after we started
playing Last Resort we had to stop,
because Jimmy ended up playing all by himself. So he suggested that we
play Moon-Shaped by Jason Ermer, a
much better game for learning the basics of IF. And when we returned to
Last Resort later I finally could
participate
in the game and make some suggestions how to solve some problems --
though in the
end I think Jimmy did the main work.
But right here appears the first problem for the IF
newcomer. I know that many authors write an introduction in which the
player can read how to play. But already
there you will lose the first players, because "ordinary" people don't
read the banner in detail. And then it is a pain in the butt to go
back to the ABOUT menu over and over again, every time you feel unsure
about something. What
basic verbs can I use? How do I interact with other characters? How do
I see what I am carrying? It sounds terribly banal, but every player
has to learn these things first. I am not a big user of computer games
or the computer
itself. IF would just be too tedious for me to sit down and learn
through a lengthy ABOUT text; I can instead get a book
at the store and it will be ready to read right away. What seems so
simple and routine for you (using the computer) is not as simple for
the general
public. Before I came together with Jimmy, I could use the computer for
Internet surfing, checking my emails, and writing letters and papers
(plus a little bit more, but that was basically it). But when I renamed
a file,
it turned unusable, because the computer suddenly told me that it
didn’t know
which program to use to open that file. I stopped renaming my files,
because I
thought I lost them through that task. Jimmy showed me what I did
wrong, and
the problem is solved now. I am sure that everybody reading this now is
laughing and
knows what I did wrong (if not, think about file extensions), but I am
not the only one who doesn’t know. I already told several doctors how
to fix the same problem: well-educated people
whose knowledge is in a totally different area.
Several authors have recently put a tutorial at the
beginning of
their game as a starting option. I think that is the first step to
making IF accessible to the general public. Blue Lacuna by Aaron Reed implements another nice feature that
is very useful
for every first-time player: things that you can interact with are
blue, directions and
places you can go are green, and conversation topics are printed in
bold.
Another big problem
that I found to be very common is that spell-checking is not taken too
seriously
among a lot of authors. I am not saying that spelling mistakes cannot
happen and will not inevitably appear in every game, but I am saying
that if the game is not spell-checked at all it is terrible to read.
Nobody would read a mistake-filled book to the end (unless you have to
– like I do some of my
medical books). Nobody expects you to write great literature, but at
least listen to
the computer if it says that something is spelled wrong. And listen to
your beta-testers when they point out these kind of mistakes!
Another thing that constantly annoys me is that
people write sentences or descriptions that don’t make any
logical sense in the world of the story. An example of this is
found in Realm of Obsidian
by Amy Kerns. You are
walking along a tunnel when suddenly a skeleton sitting in a
wheelchair with a chainsaw attacks you. You have one or two turns to
save your life. Our inventory was limited, and Jimmy had
already tried most of it, when I suddenly started to imagine what would
happen if we threw the pillow that we had toward the skeleton. Follow
my
thought: I throw the pillow, so that it will hit the chainsaw. The
chainsaw
then will damage the pillow. The feathers will swirl around and block
the
skeleton's view, which will cause the skeleton to lose orientation and
run into
the wall. Imagine driving during a heavy rain- or snowstorm; it is
better to slow down, because the view gets limited. Well,
that was what I imagined. As it turns out, the pillow was the solution,
but for another reason. I threw the pillow, which hit the
chainsaw. The chainsaw
damaged the pillow, which caused the feathers to get released into the
air. But one
feather got caught in the chainsaw and brought it to a stop… That must
have
been one strong feather!
Another game I have to mention that made me laugh
tears
and shake my head in disbelief at the same time is the space adventure The Immortal
by Rob Anthony. We
landed on a planet and were standing in our spacesuit with our helmet
on next to our
spaceship. There
was a terrible sand storm raging around us. It was so bad that the game
told us we had to rub our eyes to get the sand out. Wait, didn’t we
wear
a helmet? Well, we did! And the problems didn't stop there. We started
walking and left
some footprints… that we could examine for quite some time... in a
sandstorm.
It might seem like small mistakes to some of you,
but when the whole game is written in such an illogical way it is
difficult to get into its story. Everybody is allowed to make their
own worlds, where the earthly rules don’t apply, but those worlds need
to be consistent for the player to find them believable. Are there
different rules that apply to me too, so that I suddenly can do stuff I
couldn’t have done in real life? Make a game world, but make it
logical. And
ask yourself if it makes sense.
Right
here I need to
mention, that it wasn’t my fault that the rowboat in Jimmy’s
game had a
rudder. I mentioned to him that you steer a rowboat not with a rudder
but with the oars, but by then he was so tired of that puzzle that he
didn’t want to change it. Thanks to Victor Gijsbers for
mentioning it in his article in this issue; it gave us (mainly me) some
great laughs.
A fourth thing that frustrates me, even
faster than it does Jimmy, is bad puzzles. I love puzzles in any kind
of form; I even prefer puzzles where you
have to think a little harder to get to the solution. But in the end I
expect a
puzzle to be logically solvable without having special
background knowledge.
Earl
Grey by
Rob Dubbin and Adam Parrish is a very refreshing and fun game from this
year's Competition. But
there is one typically illogical puzzle of the kind that you find in
far too
many games. We encountered it when we were
standing in the globe looking at the sea lions. Eaves was with us in
the globe,
but by then we had upset him so much that he didn’t want to talk to us
anymore,
though we tried several times. When Eaves suddenly got a cloud around
his head,
we were supposed to talk to him to advance the game.
But neither Jimmy nor I saw any indications that we should
talk to Eaves – after all it was very clear that he was mad at us, and
we had
tried several times before. In
other games it is even worse. No changes appear, but suddenly you can
do something
you couldn’t do before -- or you have to wait for several turns before
you can
solve a puzzle. The game does not indicate that you should be waiting
at all, so it
is a puzzle itself to find out how many turns to wait before the actual
puzzle can be solved. These kinds of puzzles are frustrating, because
there is
no way that you can logically solve them.
Cry Wolf by Clare Parker requires specific outside
knowledge in a certain
scene, where you have to do an operation. As a medical student it was
everyday
practice to me, but in later reviews I saw several people mentioning
that it
was too hard. And looking back I remember that Jimmy several times
wanted
to use the wrong tool at the wrong time, until I told him clearly just
to write
what I told him. But how should he have known better? A puzzle like
this will
be easy for the small minority that might have spend a few years in the
medical field or worked a long time on a farm, but the only time the
average person is in an operating room they are (fortunately) asleep.
Byzantine
Perspective
by Lea had the same problem.
If you don’t know
that the Byzantine perspective is an actual term in art history it is
impossible to solve
the game; this one puzzle basically is the game. We had
to use the walkthrough to get through, and only through
other reviews found out that a little bit more knowledge about art (or
maybe a little
hint by the author) would have given us the answer.
The Chinese Room
by Joey Jones and Harry Giles is my favorite IF game so far, even
though it also requires some outside knowledge to solve its
puzzles. This game, however, informs the player of this quite early on.
It has philosophy as its main topic,
and its puzzles are based
on different historical philosophical theories. You cannot find exact
solutions for its puzzles on the Internet, but by looking up
philosophical theories and their meanings you can get ideas about how
to solve them. One of the reasons I like The Chinese Room so
much is because it has great educational value. It is
an interesting way to learn about philosophy, or just
refresh what you once learned in school.
There is one genre of IF that is particularly bad
about requiring too much outside knowledge: science fiction. It is very
popular among IF authors and the community in general; at least that is
the
impression I have gotten through the years. As soon as I find out a
game is
science fiction, I am very skeptical of it for one good reason: I don’t
understand
the language. All these words that are used for the guns or the
computers or
the engine parts of the ship are genre-specific invented words that
don’t
exist outside that genre. I don’t even think that this language is
necessary. One game that showed us that everyday
English is perfectly adequate for a space adventure is Spaceship!
by The Guardian gamesblog
community. It was the first spaceship
adventure that I as a normal person could play and understand, because
it was
in my language. And that was the first time that I ever enjoyed a
science fiction
game.
Well, my
point is that there are a lot of good IF
games that are well worth playing, but if the community wishes to
expand the number of people who play, perhaps it should consider some
changes. First of all, the introduction to this kind of gaming might be
better implemented within the game itself as a tutorial rather than
placed in a lengthy ABOUT menu. Perhaps someone might even write a
small game designed specifically to teach the basics of
playing IF; other IF authors could then place a link to the starter
game within their own games. ("First time playing IF? Try out this
starter game first, then return here to play on!") Not everybody is as
fortunate as I am to meet somebody who is in love with IF. Second, if
you
want more people to play your work, then you have to spell- and
grammar-check your work. This is as important to an IF game as
it would be to a book or short story.
Third, make sure that the story makes sense. There is no way, that the
player can
solve any puzzle in the game, if he cannot rely on his logical
thinking.
Fourth, it shouldn’t require outside knowledge to solve a puzzle,
unless you give a hint in the beginning that this outside knowledge
will be needed. Finally, don’t make puzzles which are impossible
to solve. Frustration is the most common reason why somebody stops
playing a game.
I
think that IF could have a great deal of appeal to many readers and
thinkers who have not yet discovered it. To attract these people,
however, IF authors need to make their games both more accessible to
the beginner and more professional in general. I
know perfectly well how hard it is to make an IF game, and especially
to make a “perfect” IF game. I have never done it myself, but I
followed
Jimmy’s mood through the whole process, and I learned to appreciate
every game
a lot more since then. But in the end, it is the player who decides if
a game
is worth playing.
Back to Table of
Contents
A DRIFTer's
First IF Comp by Duncan Bowsman (bowsmand SP@G msu.edu)
No,
this article
is not about ADRIFT, but I do use that program, so here’s how this
article has
to start: since 2003 the ADRIFT community seemed to allow itself a
certain
complacency as regards the IF-wide comps in general since they could
always
count on their Golden Boy, David Whyld, to represent them, for better
or worse. This year,
however, Mr. Whyld announced that
he would go on an indefinite hiatus from IF while he worked on a novel. To that end, I told the
other ‘DRIFTers we
should all pull together and work on submitting something to the Comp. I’d always been interested
in expanding my IF
citizenship, so to speak, and IF-wide competitions seemed to be a great
opportunity to get a game played by more than two-to-four people.
Before
I tried
entering something, I spent a long time reading through reviews of
games
entered in previous competitions to get an idea of what judges might be
looking
for. Eventually, I
hatched my goal: to
ensure ADRIFT was at least somewhat respectably represented, I would
finish a
game a month or two before the deadline and spend that “extra” time
getting it
beta-tested. My
official entry, The
Ascot, was not the result of that promise to my
community. It was the
result of a weekend or so of work,
submitted in an overfrantic state about an hour before the competition
deadline.
My
other entry, Yon
Astounding Castle! of some sort, did result from
that promise. I
started writing it shortly after watching Willy
Wonka (the one with Gene Wilder) and then the intro to Big
(nobody
seems to have noticed ye evil wizard can also be defeated if ye “throw
thermal
pod”— then again, thank goodness so few people got that far and noticed
how
shoddy the implementation got there [already fixed in post-comp
release,
FYI]). At some point
while writing that
“well-bedraggled gamestory,” Tiberius Thingamus came into my head and I
couldn’t shake his voice, despite knowing his over-the-top linguistic
corruptions had the potential to irritate some, if not all, of the
game’s
reviewers. I admit,
coming in as an
unknown using ADRIFT (the platform alone seems worth negative points to
some
reviewers), I thought I had no chance of taking first place, but if
some seemed
amused by its IntroComp incarnation, perhaps I would have a shot at a
Banana…
After
submitting
my entries, something like the spirit of Christmas Eve came over me. The first day they came out,
I ripped open
Parchment and played four games (at work, on a dead day). All that day I was like, “The Duel in the
Snow— a wonderful surprise! And
then
Interface,
tally ho! Condemned…
well… I’ll come back to that… and Beta-Tester…
I’ve seen worse!” I
was like an excited, little IF chihuahua or
something. I couldn’t
help but throw my
hands up and flail every time I announced another title. “Resonance! Broken
Legs! GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands!!”
But
amongst the
face-to-face friends I hang out with around Port Huron, my babbling
was… well,
just babbling. They
couldn’t
relate. One of my
closest friends says
he never knows how to control IF, so he’s just not interested (he is,
admittedly, one of the reasons The Ascot is Y/N). My girlfriend just sort of
smiled and nodded
about IFComp in a very, “Oh, well it’s just his thing” sort of way, the
way she
does when I go on about different sorts of insects, the class system’s
obsolescence in fourth edition Dungeons
and Dragons, or H.P. Lovecraft’s dissertations on
doughnuts and the dissemination of processed cheese along the Hudson
River. Yet another
friend of mine works
at GameStop— I figured he’d be into it, but it turns out that while
he's all
about gaming, he’s pretty eh about IF specifically. He’s played Aisle,
at least, and
seemed surprised that I (or anyone else, for that matter) could blather
on
about it. He said he
might check out
some of the Comp games… maybe. And
another friend of mine I re-connected with has apparently begun
attending a
school for game design. When
I mentioned
I wrote interactive fiction, he actually scoffed!
What
total
trotting krips. At
that point,
the Comp was turning out to be sort of a let-down. Oh,
I’d play it through and enjoy it all, but
without anyone to share it with, what more could the experience ever
amount to
than just another quirk?
Before
I gave up
hope for my life and started teaching myself to speed-sort in reverse
alphabetical order, something happened. Tiberius
Thingamus got his first bit of feedback: an e-mail from a six
foot-something, red-headed, American hypnotist-turned-English teacher
currently
residing in Cambodia. This
man ran a
blog ostensibly regarding unpaired, moist footwear. This
stranger said, to paraphrase a section,
“Your game is about you rather than the player, and that is unforgivable.” I didn’t quite know what to
make of that
comment since it was obvious he meant the game was about this fictional
character, Tiberius Thingamus, rather than me, so I
wrote him back some
lengthy beast about emergent versus embedded texts and how I hoped the
game’s
content was well-directed, but knew it had failed at multiple points…
or
whatever it is I ramble on about when my inner game nerd takes over.
In
his response,
the mesmeric pedagogue said something like, “Hey, you should check out
the
Author’s Forum. I
think they’d really
appreciate your sense of humor.” Again,
here he was talking to Tiberius Thingamus, but I took the nod instead
and
headed over to the Author’s Forum ’09, where Comp authors can blab
about their
games all they want without risking disqualification. What
I found there, and what the Comp
proceeded to give me through the voices of reviewers’ blogs, more than
filled
the gaping social fissure left by friends’ disinterest.
In
the weeks
that followed, people were playing
and talking about my games
(with the exception of one
reviewer whose planet is extremely fated to die anyway, and anyone who
doesn’t
play games past SN— though to be fair, their feedback to The
Ascot was appropriate
enough). Holy patoot,
so awesome. I really
enjoyed listening to the thoughts of
my fellow Comp authors, especially as we reacted to the same reviews. At some points it got really
lively— mere
mention of Eruption
(or CYOAs… [Might there be some follow-up on a
possible Paul Allen Panks Award?]) seemed to be enough to spark
response from
somebody— while at other times thoughts had to be teased out, pulled
for,
chiseled at. I don’t
know that I speak
for all of the authors who participated, but after some time, I felt
like the
reviewers out there had said it all!
I
look forward
to trying my hand at IFComp next year— certainly my participation this
year has
me fired up to finish another entry! I
had good times all around meeting fellow interactive fiction authors
and
enthusiasts, and I hope to keep hearing more from and of them. How about that Post-Comp
Comp, guys?
A
Short
Afterword By the Author:
For the curious, I did consider inviting Tiberius
to join our fun on the Rule Five Forum, but I wondered if all his
prancing
about preening at his feathered cap, sticking people with quill pens,
and
frowning to say, “But ‘tis just ye waye I talketh!” might grate on some
people,
so I left him in the dark about the whole thing. Come
to think of it, I hope he doesn’t know
I’ve been snooping on his e-mail. Then
again, I kinda hope he doesn’t read this article either, or else he
might
actually get back on Twitter. Is
there
anything worse than a series of angry, faux medieval tweets?
Those
who
suggest Newton transcripts have my sympathy.
Back to Table of
Contents
IF
Competition 2009
Reviews
Another
IF Competition is in the books, and I'd say it was a pretty good one.
There was no single game that absolutely stood out above all the others
for me in the way I remember from some previous Comps, but the number
of good to very good entries was considerable; looking over my personal
notes, I would consider 14 of the 24 titles to be worth playing to one
degree or another. As usual, I have to credit the judges for doing a
pretty good job as well, or at least for largely agreeing with my own
tastes; every game in the final top 10 made my list of 14, although
their order is necessarily scrambled a bit from what I would choose.
But then my personal favorite is hopelessly idiosyncratic:
Earl Grey. You can visit the
Competition website
for the full list of results; here I will just offer my congratulations
to Jack Welch and Ben Collins-Sussman (authors of
Rover's Day Out),
Sarah Morayati (author of
Broken Legs), and Eric Eve (author of
Snowquest) for being the top three finishers.
Once
again this year, several reviewers came forward to contribute to SPAG
their thoughts on the Comp games. In addition to myself, J.D. Berry,
David Monath, Marius Müller, Dark Star, Juhana Leinonen, and Nate Dovel
all penned reviews. My thanks to them!
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Ascot
|
| Author: |
Duncan Bowsman
|
| Author Email: |
bowsmand SP@G msu.edu
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
ADRIFT |
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
J.D. Berry
|
| Reviewer Email: |
jdberry SP@G cox.net |
Do you want to read a review
of The Ascot?
Well, do ya,
fimblesnitz?
>
uh, maybe?
Really?
It’s going to be short and rather negative.
>
no
You
page down to the next review, hoping for something from
Paul O’Brian. To your dismay, Paul has retired from IF Comp reviewing.
You have sighed.
Choose
Your Own Adventure (CYOA) is a misnomer. You’re not
really choosing your own adventure; you’re choosing a few extreme paths
that
trigger virtual cut scenes. If the author carries 90% of the load, the
player
therefore has only 10% of story ownership—an accountability of
individual
actions. In turn, the identification with the PC and his predicament
lessens.
While nearly all IF is about creating the illusion
of choice, overcoming
such blatant transparency seems almost impossible for a CYOA. You’re
choosing
the author’s adventure (CTAA).
The
best a CTAA could hope for, then, is to be interesting
in its own right. The
Ascot wasn’t—for me anyway. It’s decently-written, it’s
quirky, it’s occasionally smirk-inducing. However, like the kid on your
school
bus telling raunchy stories with odd jargon, initial amusement quickly
fades to
annoyance. Eventually, you wonder if the joke isn’t you actually paying
attention.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Believable Adventures of an Invisible Man
|
| Author: |
Hannes Schueller
|
| Author Email: |
hannes SP@G goodolddays.net
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
J.D. Berry
|
| Reviewer Email: |
jdberry SP@G cox.net |
Sneaky at best, voyeuristic and
cowardly at worst,
invisibility is the most disturbing of all the superpowers. OK, Sue
Richards
made it work, but she’s a woman. Any invisible man, ipso facto, will be
a
creep.
Stereotypes
aside, motivating a player is difficult enough
when the PC is initially endearing. When an author creates a
distasteful PC,
he’s starting in the hole. Now he must show something extraordinarily
intriguing,
doubled-over hilarious and/or impressively unique. Additionally, the
author
must show the PC to have at least some redeeming qualities, if relative
to the
rest of his world. (See Varicella.)
These must occur early; the author has
forfeited any benefit of the doubt that the game will be worthwhile.
The
author of The
Believable Adventures of an Invisible
Man takes some steps to make the player feel the game will
be worth playing.
The PC takes down a “scummy guy,” which briefly ennobles him. In
addition,
there’s a lighthearted tone in different places showing that the author
isn’t
taking any of this too seriously. Unfortunately, none of this was
enough to
overcome my dislike for the PC, and with that the game itself.
To
the title’s credit, the adventures are believable once
you get past the whole invisibility thing. The PC’s tasks equate to his
petty
outlook. Also, the writing is decent and doesn’t get in the way of the
story.
Signs point to better things to come from this author.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Beta
Tester
|
| Author: |
Darren Ingram
|
| Author Email: |
ingcorp SP@G comcast.net |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
David Monath
|
| Reviewer Email: |
dmonath SP@G gmail.com |
Beta Tester
is a . . . jauntily written .
. . but loosely related collection of scenarios which range from witty
to
awkward. The events take place in a
virtual world as the player is, as titularly indicated, a beta tester
for CogCo
Industries, and must overcome a series of obstacles ranging from using
the space
bar (no, seriously: it was about two inches from being a successful gag
before
being bludgeoned into tedium), to reassembling a dismantled Rube
Goldberg
device, to snoring through a click-till-it's-over game of
chance. CogCo is a rather whimsical outfit, equipping
the player with a uniform consisting of bunny ears, tail, and backpack,
and an “Omniuseful
Adventuring Key,” which really tells you everything
possible about the work’s tone
Beta
Tester’s
writing frequently employs a staccato narrative in which the text is
presented
in brief spurts, requiring the player to press a key before continuing
on to
the next; depending on your individual tolerance, this may be amusing
five or
six times before you just hit the space bar like a lab rat with a
cocaine lever to make the sequence
finish. While the game is for the most part
bug-free, it’s impossible to avoid a frequent
conversational/command glitch in which no response (error or otherwise)
is
given to player input, although this doesn’t
prevent winning. The most entertaining
of the typically shallow and rigidly-focused NPCs may be an unusually
perspicacious hamster who’s visibly pleased or
impatient or encouraging as the player progresses. Beta Tester is
easily the sort of scenario
which would be a natural outgrowth of experiments in learning a
programming
language, but it makes for a disjointed gameplay experience: fitfully
amusing, and
occasionally clever, but may lack enough cohesion to propel a player
from
beginning to end.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Broken
Legs
|
| Author: |
Sarah Morayati
|
| Author Email: |
sarahcryst SP@G gmail.com |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher
|
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net |
This isn't entirely fair to Sarah Morayati or her game,
but the best shorthand description I can give for the experience of
playing
Broken Legs is a
cross between
Violet and
Varicella.
As in the former, virtually every default response in the Inform
library has been overhauled in the service of a unique writing voice:
Graham Nelson's subtly humorous brand of English understatement has
become the voice of a catty, sarcastic, and very American teenage girl.
And like in
Varicella,
the character you play is a repellent schemer willing to do anything
and manipulate and/or damage anyone to get ahead.
Most of us who have spent time even on the fringes of theater circles
realize that performers and would-be performers are
as cutthroat in their own way as the most ruthless Wall Street
sharks; indeed, that's a rather natural byproduct of working in a field
that perpetually has many times more aspirants than jobs available for
them. And
all of
us know just how ruthless and cruel teenager girls are. Well,
Broken Legs takes
place at female auditions for Bridger, an elite performing
arts-focused private high school. Rest assured: this game and its
protagonist, one Lottie Plum, are vicious and amoral right down to the
core of their black little hearts. You were the first girl to audition,
and you turned in a rather disappointing performance. Your only chance
to get it into Bridger, therefore, is to sabotage the aspirants that
follow you, to make their performances so bad that your own looks good
in comparison.
Again like in
Varicella,
achieving your goals will likely require plenty of replaying and plenty
of trial and error. This game is
hard.
In fact, it's excessively, unnecessarily hard. Solving it would seem to
require an almost mystical insight into the psychologies and
motivations of the other girls, not to mention increasingly perfect
timing as the game wears on. I got virtually nowhere with it before
turning to the walkthrough.
Violet
was partially undone for me by the same problem, and both
games leave me wondering why authors of such otherwise strong works
feel the need to undermine the audience's pleasure with impossible
puzzles. Is there still some mistaken belief out there that IF must be
nail-bitingly hard to be compelling? In this player, such design
choices produce exactly the opposite effect. The core of both
Violet and
Broken Legs is not
the puzzles; it's rather their unusual narrative voices and fresh
premises. Why block your audience from experiencing and enjoying that
with obtuse puzzle design?
Even discounting my displeasure with the puzzles, though, I for some
reason like
Broken Legs
less than I think I really ought to. Perhaps the boundless
cynicism of Lottie (and at such a young age) just becomes too much for
me; perhaps her endless cruel jabs and heartless asides become more
than I can stomach. Perhaps I am even, again unfairly, projecting some
of Lottie's attributes onto the author. It's just that some games, even
shoddy ones, have a good heart that makes me want to spend time with
them; others are, well, like this. The Competition results have not yet
appeared as I write this, but I suspect
Broken Legs is
going to do very well, and may even contend for the crown. And I can't
quibble with its (projected) success: it's ambitious, technically
polished, absolutely committed to its PC and her motivations, and takes
place in a genuinely original setting. Even I will be giving
it a fairly good score. I just wish I
liked it as much
as I appreciate it.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Byzantine
Perspective |
| Author: |
Lea
|
| Author Email: |
lea SP@G instamatique.com |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher
|
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net |
In this short puzzle game with minimal narrative,
you play a thief who has just penetrated a museum during the middle of
the night seeking a certain "gem-encrusted chalice." At least
the motivation for your thievery is a fairly good one, as such things
go: to pay for art school. If you're looking for more backstory than
that, you're playing the wrong game. This one is all about working out
how the pair of "night-vision glasses" you are wearing actually
function.
It's a one-gimmick game, but the gimmick is a clever one. Unfortunately
(and perhaps embarrassingly), I was utterly unable to decipher its
logic. I now know from reading some other reviews that the phrase
"Byzantine perspective" is not just the game's title, but a real term
with a definite meaning; I apparently slept through the art history
class that covered it. My advice to all prospective players who, like
me, do not know what the term means going in is to take a moment to
read
the
Wikipedia article on the subject for some vital clues for
solving this one. Of course, this information really should have been
provided in the game itself, or failing that at least an offhand hint
that you might want to look it up. Literally a single nudge, one brief
sentence, would have made the difference for me between being
absolutely stymied and enjoying a clever and original puzzle.
As it was I was deprived of that pleasure -- the only pleasure on offer
here.
Lea can at least take solace in one thing: as flawed games go,
this one is pretty damn easy to fix.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Condemned |
| Author: |
"A Delusioned Teenager"
|
| Author Email: |
m4rk70ne5
SP@G hotmail.com |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Marius Müller
|
| Reviewer Email: |
marius.ts.mueller SP@G googlemail.com |
Condemned
has a very promising opening scene. It's foreboding, terrifying, and
actually made me a bit scared to go on. Did I really want to
uncover what the PC is afraid of? Unfortunately, this is soon left
behind. The game does try really hard to sustain the mentioned mood of
strange foreboding. It fails, however, on two basic levels.
The first is interactivity. There is a ride range of it in the world of
IF, ranging from puzzles-on-rails to stories with so many possible
endings even the author can't remember them all. Now, story-on-rails,
that doesn't work to well. Typing Z nine times in a row to read
extensive text dumps isn't my idea of a fun time with IF. It also brings
up the old question: why not just write static fiction?
The second ties in with the first. The text dumps aren't completely bad
-- many of them establish characters and mood nicely -- but every so
often there is an odd turn of phrase, unintentional understatement, or
odd formality to the dialog. Keep in mind that most of the text is
quite enjoyable. There is just so much of it (one and a half screen-full
at a time) that you'd need really, really good writing to get away with
it. And with the oddities, it really becomes a chore. And mixed with
the dark story, this makes the game somewhat strenuous.
Which is a shame, really. I couldn't shake the feeling that the author
not only really and truly tried (and succeeded, in places), but that
he also has some real (albeit hidden) talent.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Duel in the Snow
|
| Author: |
Utkonos
|
| Author Email: |
utkonos9
SP@G gmail.com |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Marius Müller
|
| Reviewer Email: |
marius.ts.mueller SP@G googlemail.com |
I wish I could give this game higher praise. It has a lot of things
that make an interesting and worthwhile game – a fresh premise,
thorough implementation and some quirky responses. However, it's as
sparse as the landscape it describes: most feedback is evocative, but
too short. Many things are hinted at, few are explained. That can be
good, but it can also be overdone.
Due to these issues, I had no clear sense of what I was supposed to be
doing. (And really, I'm a bit tired of oh-so symbolic dream / surreal
sequences, but that's personal taste) . In addition, there was a moment
that could've been so much less teeth-gnashing if it hadn't been
pseudo-interactive. If you have a long stretch where the player can do
nothing to change an outcome he already knows, just write a cutscene.
Don't make me Z a lot, because that makes me want to Q.
But snarkiness aside, the game really gives you a good sense of the
protagonist – a somewhat awkward, heartbroken man, forced into a duel.
It's short, amusing in places, and, for what little text is there, well
written. Take note that there is more to do than might be obvious.
Also on The Duel in the
Snow,
from Dark Star (darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com):
The Duel In The Snow is a story with a faint moral
message, though in our desensitized times it feels odd to be put into a
fair fight. It’s a well crafted game; I had no problems technically,
and the world here is small and manageable with puzzles that are easy.
It makes for a nice entry that can be played in about 30 minutes.
The writing is good, but it fails to unveil the backstory that it's
built upon. I'm still left with questions about why Natasha left.
Kropkin could have filled me in, but the game didn't go there. Also, it
would have been nice to see characters with a bit more depth. Natasha
just ignored me in the dream sequence. It would have been pretty cool
if we could have talk about the fight, maybe fixing things between us
before waking up from the fantasy.
The puzzles are pretty easy, though I figure most people will end up
dying without looking at the walkthrough, and their simple design works
well, allowing the story to flow. Then it comes to a crashing halt
right at the first flashback scene.
To get around this the author should have a daemon ticking in the
background waiting for about 20 turns to go by. If the player hasn't
left the scene on their own and the time has passed, it should trigger
the end of the scene. The problem here is if the player doesn’t do
exactly what you want them to, it kills the game. So the author needs
to keep things moving along, and in a game that’s moving this swiftly,
and as pointed as it is, you might as well keep things happening.
This is a good game, but IF is a very malleable medium and this one ran
right along the rails. It also missed some opportunities to tell its
story, even though what it does tell is well executed. Some people
might like this game. I feel it has limited appeal.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Duel That Spanned the Ages
|
| Author: |
Oliver Ullmann
|
| Author Email: |
oliver.ullmann SP@G gmail.com |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
David Monath
|
| Reviewer Email: |
dmonath SP@G gmail.com |
Ages may be overstating things a bit, but
Duel nonetheless
spans several entertaining scenarios. It all has a rather
lurid
Buck Rogers
feel, from the swooping alien warriors and spider ambushes to the
infiltration of a desolate multi-leveled outpost. Depending on
your screen resolution, you’ll have to wade past one to five pages of
loosely relevant melodrama (to be fair, the game bills itself as the
first in a sequence, but the backstory to gameplay ratio pushes the
envelope for a short Comp game), but after that and a similarly
tangential opening bar sequence, the events are fast-paced and
intuitive.
Most of the puzzles are easily solved and logical, but even should one
should run into a wall,
Duel
has a comprehensive four-step hint system built into the Help feature,
a complete walkthrough, and a map. Puzzles run from a
potentially touchy medical device (which might require performing
certain actions in a very particular sequence on pain of restoring a
saved game) to a matter of inventory management and balance which is
considerably more awkward to describe than solve... although, not as
awkward as being shredded alive by a thousand gleaming chrome
spider-bots if you get it wrong. Overall,
Duel is a quick,
well-constructed episode of retro-60’s space pulp, but you may want to
skim the hefty prologue the first time through.
Also on The Duel That
Spanned the Ages,
from Dark Star (darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com):
So it looks like I misjudged another game title, though I’m not sure
how
The Duel That Spanned The Ages should conjure
up images of a science-fiction setting. This episodic game, the first
of three, is an interesting pseudo-military adventure that lacks the
nuances to capture a military tone, but the writing is strong and
there’s a lot to do with playtime extending the two-hour limit.
Here we have a real adventure that you can sink your teeth into, if you
know what I mean. It’s been broken into two solid sections, starting
out with your assault force investigating why the East Aquila Mining
Corporation has lost contact with a group of their miners. The game
uses strong visuals within its vivid writing, creating a world that is
harsh, unforgiving, and grotesque, but the whole thing has a surreal
tone with a backstory that’s rather touchy feely compared to the kill,
kill, kill, nature of the game play.
I did find a few things unnecessarily buried, like a piece of equipment
that I already had on me. Maybe if it had its own place in the
inventory I wouldn’t have needed to turn to the walkthrough, but the
solution I found there could’ve been rolled into the previous cut-scene
since they all seem to run a little long anyways. Keep in mind though,
too much of that and you get info dumps, so you do have to balance it.
This is a great game, don’t get me wrong, but when I see something this
good I start to poke holes at it, looking for any little thing I can
find. The biggest problem I had was not being able to ENTER THE
AIRLOCK. I must have tried that 15 times before going east. For me it’s
usually easier to enter a door than figure out which direction it's in,
not here. I also wished it recognized some alternative things I was
trying to do, like setting up the sentry gun so that it could go off
when the entire cave came alive to eat me. Even if I still died I
would’ve liked to seen the game at least recognize what I was trying to
do.
At the end of the game I started to feel a little lost; there didn't
seem to be any clear objective. Running low on time I turned to the
walkthrough, but I think this area could’ve been better clued. Like
when I put on the demolisher armor, maybe the game could have nudged
me, letting me know that I could now pick up a certain item that I
couldn’t before. We don’t see enough of this in IF, and simple clues
like something catching your attention can go a long ways.
I really like this game a lot, but I think it could use a bit more
work. Still, it did have that fun factor going for it. If you’re a
sci-fi nut like me I have to recommend this one, and I can't wait to
play the second installment. It will be interesting to see where it
goes.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Earl
Grey |
| Author: |
Rob Dubbin and Adam Parrish
|
| Author Email: |
dubbin SP@G gmail.com,
adam SP@G decontextualize.com |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher
|
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net |
Earl Grey is one of my favorites from Comp 2009. It's a
fresh, idiosyncratic game of wordplay in which you must transform
objects into other objects by removing single letters from and adding
single letters to their names. Your control is limited, however: you
can choose which word from which to remove or to which to add a letter,
but you cannot choose
which
letter. For instance, a "cart" might be transformed into a "cat" by
removing the R -- or it might equally become some "art," or a "car."
(This leads to, as the game describes it, "some trepidation"
when removing a letter from "clock.") All of the letter combinations
you create must of course form real worlds; injecting an R into "aunt"
is not possible. It's a premise that, needless to say, would only work
within the medium of IF.
Said premise is hitched to a light-hearted fantasy tale which doesn't
make a whole lot of sense but nevertheless is possessed of a deft comic
touch. There's a bit of a Lewis Carroll feel here, but the more
interesting comparisons can be made to two earlier games of IF
wordplay: Nick Montfort's
Ad Verbum
and Infocom's classic
Nord and
Berd Couldn't Make Head or Tails of It. Indeed, the feel of
Earl Grey is
very similar to
that of the latter game especially -- and that statement alone is high
praise indeed from me, for
Nord
and Bert ranks just behind
Trinity in my
personal Infocom favorites list.
That said,
Earl Grey can
also be an intensely frustrating work at times. It does quite a good
job of explaining its rather abstract premise through a sort of
tutorial at the beginning, but as you move on you will inevitably
discover perfectly legitimate transformations that the authors simply
never thought to implement. Further, the transformations that
can be performed
are often very difficult to spot, buried as they sometimes are two or
three levels deep within item descriptions. (Absolutely any word used
in the description of the storyworld is fair game for transformation.)
I found one episode near the end of the game particularly difficult,
and finally consulted the walkthrough to discover that I was suddenly
expected to TALK TO a character who had previously been incapable of
speech -- exactly the sort of unmotivated action that I hate to find
when I turn to a walkthrough. This puzzle is something of an outlier,
though; the game generally plays it tough but fair. And hitting upon
the
right transformation
at last feels, like solving any good puzzle should, hellaciouslly good.
I suspect that
Earl
Grey may challenge for the coveted Golden Banana; its
premise will immediately put some off at the same time as its attracts
lovers of wordplay like myself. This humble judge can only say that in
an IF world still overcrowded with
Zork-inspired cave
crawls he found its
Nord
and Bert-inspired lunacy went down pretty well.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Eruption |
| Author: |
Richard Bos
|
| Author Email: |
richardbos SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 6) |
| Version: |
Release 2
|
| Reviewer: |
J.D. Berry
|
| Reviewer Email: |
jdberry SP@G cox.net |
A simple story, told well. A simple game, crafted well.
Once I got by
the silly premise, Eruption
was a delight.
Setting and background integrate wonderfully. Sense of place
accompanies a
sense of belonging. I, the player, discovered the island and my culture
for the
first time, while I, the PC, discovered both anew. Eruption shares the
positive aspects of the original
Adventure
and goes some better. Both have concise, evocative descriptions of a
humbly beautiful environment, but Eruption
exhibits more freedom of text. Both
have obstacles to overcome, but Eruption
maintains the challenges while
removing the puzzles for puzzles’ sake.
I’ve
played many games where dying was amusing, but few
where dying was awe-inspiring. I’d almost consider not escaping in time
to be
Eruption’s optimal endings. Real life natural wonders may have views
from
different vantage points, but IF wonders may add views from different
lives.
Oh.
One other problem other than the premise. The PC can
carry heavy equipment up and down the volcano with no signs of
discomfort or
fatigue. In a game this subtly immersive, this is not trivial.
Still.
One of the must-plays of the Comp.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
GATOR-ON,
Friend to Wetlands! |
| Author: |
Dave Horlick
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 6) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Juhana Leinonen
|
| Reviewer Email: |
juhana.if SP@G nitku.net |
GATOR-ON, Friend to
Wetlands! starts with the player character riding a tour
tram through the Everglades. There's not much (or any) background story
given, but somehow we have in our possession a gadget that leads us to
a strange discovery and a greater destiny.
The author obviously has a lot of information about the Everglades.
Unfortunately he gives only brief glimpses of the knowledge he holds,
never letting the player in on any deeper insights. A tour guide drops
names of different species living in the swamp, but you can't examine
them or ask the guide for more information. The area you can explore is
quite big but there are only three or four different (very brief)
descriptions that repeat over and over again, and there's nothing to
examine in the locations.
The thinness of the setting hurts the story as well. (Skip to the next
paragraph now to avoid a minor plot spoiler.) On the latter half of the
game you save the Everglades from environmental destruction. I found
myself strangely indifferent to what would happen, possibly because the
sparse and cardboard-like environment the game had set up. There was no
reason to care; the game had not given me anything to care for.
I might be getting old, but I found myself hoping for more stuff to
learn. The environment is very interesting and it was frustrating to
find the game more like a holiday photograph slide show than an
immersive lifelike simulation of the Everglades. I'm hoping the author
will take the next version closer to
The Fire Tower, a prime
example of a natural environment simulation done well.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Gleaming
the Verb |
| Author: |
Kevin Jackson-Mead
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
J.D. Berry
|
| Reviewer Email: |
jdberry SP@G cox.net |
Gleaming
the Verb doesn't pretend to be more than it
is: an unabashed set of sentence puzzles. "This is my first game. The
set-up is intentionally lame. Shut up and start solving." Everything
works
on a basic level. That said, I wish it were
more than it is. The puzzles lack
creativity; and, since they are
the game, I just didn't have that much fun.
In
IF, a few commands affect the game's state, but all
commands affect the game’s experience. Responses to those not in the
former category might range from
refusal ("I won't do that!") to irrelevancy ("I did that, but so
what?") to death
("I did that. Oops!"). They won’t advance plots, solve puzzles or score
points;
but, for good or bad, they will establish setting, reveal the depth and
quality
of the puzzles, and convey information.
Gleaming isn’t
well suited to its medium. Its puzzles have little
depth; their aspects are superficial. Hints of any sort would be too
revealing.
Thus, cluing the player through “unsuccessful” commands isn’t an
option.
Shallow puzzles can work when integrated with humor or story. In such
cases,
unsuccessful commands won’t solve the problem but will cue a witty
comment or
trigger an interesting tidbit of background. Here, though, the puzzles
stand
alone, in and of themselves. These puzzles
probably wouldn’t work well in a newspaper,
either. Crossword puzzles may require one exact answer for each clue,
but they
allow alternate paths to those answers. If you’re stuck on 14-across,
you can
work on 8, 9 and 10 down. The more of the easy ones you solve, the more
hints
you get for the stickler. Gleaming’s
puzzles are strictly linear. I spent
excessively long on one puzzle, only to find a verb in the walkthrough
I
haven’t used since high school—frustrating, and not in a good way.
While that
particular puzzle made sense in retrospect, and I should have gotten
it, I had
no other puzzle options at the time. I see
these puzzles as a backseat-of-the-car activity, where
one person writes puzzles on some paper and another tries to guess
them. When
the puzzle-solver says, “aha” 10 miles later, the puzzle-writer says,
“woo hoo!
OK, try the next one.”
Based
on Gleaming’s
formatting, programming and language
proficiency, the author clearly has the skills to bring the fun with
his next
effort. Take advantage of the medium.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Grand Quest |
| Author: |
Owen Parish
|
| Author Email: |
doubleprism SP@G hotmail.com |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Dark Star
|
| Reviewer Email: |
darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com
|
In
The Grand Quest you find yourself
fulfilling a life long dream, finally arriving at a maze of traps that
protects a legendary goblet. There’s no story, no scoring, so the goal
is quite clear. You have to get to the heart of the maze, obtaining
this long sought desire. The problem is, the goblet is behind eight
rooms each containing a puzzle.
This is an all puzzle game, so I don't think it will have a wide
appeal, but even the puzzles themselves are poorly done. If it didn't
have a walkthrough I couldn't have gotten as far as I did.
Eight puzzles poorly clued... uh, what can I say. Some are easy, and
some are ridiculous. So, it starts off with a riddle using a solution
that’s not even a word as far as I can tell. Riddles are bad enough --
I don’t think they work well in IF -- but make it easy on the player if
you really think you need them. Use multiple choice. I’ve seen giving
the player the ability to guess their way through work in other games
-- just a thought for other programmers.
Fast forward to the end of the game where there’s a crazy card puzzle.
I wonder what the author was thinking, giving no explanation about how
this thing is supposed to work. You can’t even experiment with it; the
puzzle doesn’t let you know if you’re going in the right direction or
not. On top of that the game couldn’t handle the ambiguity of my having
two jacks, so I couldn’t even complete it -- something that could have
been easily avoided.
I don’t think that an all puzzle game really works that well, and one
that is broken will find its way to the bottom of the competition. The
story is uninspired, there’s little to no hinting, and the game can
even be put into an unwinnable state. Add it all up, and you get a game
that’s really not worth playing.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Grounded
in Space |
| Author: |
Matt Wigdahl
|
| Author Email: |
matt SP@G wigdahl.net |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher
|
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net |
Grounded in Space is an homage to the classic series of
science fiction juvenile novels which Robert Heinlein penned during the
1950's, in the days before he fell victim to that curious combination
of angry right-wing politics and general dirty-old-man
creepiness that brings down so many science fiction authors. About the
only thing here that
doesn't
evoke Heinlein is the presence
of a computer on your spaceship in place of Heinlein's slide rulers.
Otherwise, it's all here, from the simple but muscular prose to the
moral lessons about responsibility and self-sufficiency. Even the cover
art is period- and genre-perfect. Heinlein has not
featured on my personal reading plan for many years, but it's okay to
revisit that world for an hour or two (just don't make me stay
there much longer, please).
You play a clean-cut, can-do sort of young fellow who nearly blows up
his family's asteroid homestead through an ill-advised rocketry
experiment. To punish you, Dad decides to send you off on a spaceship
all alone for three weeks to "mine the Spinward Claim." That should
make a proper square-jawed man out of you! (It's actually hard to
imagine even Heinlein advocating such awful parenting, but we'll just
roll with it in the spirit of the genre.) Of course, your little mining
adventure goes horribly awry quickly enough: your ship run afoul of
Interstellar Space Pirates!, and only your quick thinking and bravery
stands a chance of saving not only your own skin but that of a certain
lovely young lady who is currently all alone and vulnerable on another
of the asteroid mining stations.
Most of the story rushes past at a pretty fair clip. But then, when
your ship is stricken and you attempt to make makeshift repairs, you
encounter one of the most obtuse, awful puzzles in this year's Comp,
and the whole thing slams to a halt with the same suddenness that that
rocket of yours impacted the ground back home. You are expected to
guide a laser beam through a series of zones using four adjustable
mirrors. It's as hopelessly fiddly as it probably sounds, is
presented with only the vaguest of visual aids, and is
described so obscurely that I didn't really understand what I'd done
even after typing in the (lengthy) solution from the walkthrough. I
don't get the feeling that Mr. Wigdahl really intended to introduce a
game-killing puzzle here, but that's nevertheless exactly what he did.
There's a lesson here for authors: when describing something, make sure
to ask yourself whether you've put everything on the screen that you
have in your head.
Once you get past the offending puzzle, it's once again a fairly
straightforward ride to the end. This isn't a masterpiece, but if
that puzzle were
fixed it would be a perfectly acceptable little golden age romp. And if
you like Heinlein more than I do -- and I suspect many of you do -- you
might just find this one to be a little gem.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Hangover |
| Author: |
Red Conine
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
ADRIFT |
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Marius Müller
|
| Reviewer Email: |
marius.ts.mueller SP@G googlemail.com |
If the author of
The
Hangover wanted me to feel what was like to play
IF when I was terribly hung over, he succeeded. If he wanted to write a
decent IF game, however, I'm afraid he failed.
It starts with the horrible spelling errors and the fact that they are
constantly reappearing. Does the author really think "women" is the
singular form and that aspirin is spelled "asprin?“ As many can attest,
I've had my grapples with the English language myself, but you know
what helps? Native speakers as beta-testers. There are cool people in
the community who gladly help with this problem.
By the way, in case you're wondering, Mr. Author, beta-testers are the
people who catch bugs in games. Like obvious actions that aren't
implemented. (This is, as I understand, however also in part ADRIFT's
fault). That includes checking if the game is winnable. If the
walkthrough suggest I should give something to someone, and the parser
response is that said person isn't interested, I'm stumped.
And yet, at other times the game tries to take you by the hand like a
three-year old (Here is "item!" You should take "item" and read "item"
and put it in your container. Thanks game, I've done this before.) or
needlessly insults you. Now, if I want snarky comments about the state
of my apartment I ask my parents; thanks again, game.
The bad thing is, even with some polish, this would still be a fairly
generic and bland game. As it stands, it's not even that.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Interface |
| Author: |
Ben Vegiard
|
| Author Email: |
bvegiard SP@G activeinfosys.com |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Juhana Leinonen
|
| Reviewer Email: |
juhana.if SP@G nitku.net |
Interface
puts the player in the treads of an unfortunate kid who becomes the
victim of his uncle's crazy experiments and has his consciousness
transferred into a robot. Now the evil lab assistant has him trapped,
with little intention to reverse the transformation.
Interface
is a very good game. The writing is proficient and the style stays
consistent from start to finish. There are only a few its/it's hiccups
and typos. One thing that could still be improved is that relatively
many items give the default response to examining them.
An experienced player should be able to breeze through the game fairly
easily. The puzzles are solved mostly by just doing the immediately
obvious thing (A puddle of water blocks your way. You are carrying a
large towel. What do you do?) This has never been a minus in my book,
on the contrary -- but that requires that the story and the writing are
enjoyable, and here they both are just that.
There's an empty non-spoilerous floor plan included as a PDF with the
game. I printed it out before starting to play and filled the room
names as I progressed. That worked pretty well and made mapping easy
and more visual than usual.
There was just one thing that made me twitch. The goddamn inventory
limit. An inventory limit is tolerable when a) there's a (good) puzzle
that depends on having the limit, b) the player has a quick access to a
holdall or c) there's only one room in the game so you don't have to
juggle with the inventory all around the map. Of course it's not
feasible for anyone in real life to carry around a stepladder, a
wedding cake, 15 meters of rope and a rabid platypus, not the least
when you're a little robot with not-that-agile extensions for hands,
but I'm willing to suspend some disbelief for the benefit of smoother
gameplay.
In addition to easy puzzles some might be put off by the shortness of
the game, and it could well have been a bit longer. On the other hand
shortness may have contributed to the fact that Interface is much more
solid than most longer works by first-time authors and if this is the
case it's a trade-off I'm willing to accept. Shortness and easy puzzles
also make this a game that could well be recommended to someone new to
IF as a gentle start towards more puzzling works.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Resonance |
| Author: |
Matt Scarpino
|
| Author Email: |
mattscar SP@G gmail.com |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
David Monath
|
| Reviewer Email: |
dmonath SP@G gmail.com |
If
the resting state of interactive fiction is
the cave crawl, then IF with some slight angular momentum appears to be
detective noir; a logical next step in a platform of exploration and
observation. While detective noir has a
limited number of tropes to draw from to begin with,
Resonance’s
storyline brings to mind a late-1980’s hybrid text/graphic adventure
game,
Meanstreets. Down
on his luck PI driven
to drink, busted business, beautiful endangered dame, telepathic voices
mixed
up with mysterious deaths, shadowy corporation bent on domination...
all set
in a miserable nocturnal timelessness. Your brother drives you
around Fair City in a heavy, reliable beast of a
Plymouth while you follow your own hunches and several clue paths
toward one of
at least three possible endings. Puzzles
rely on inspecting your surroundings and items thoroughly (but not
laboriously),
and generally involve logical deductions; however, the open-ended play
means
that several locations may well be optional depending on your choices,
and
certain situations or puzzles may not arise. This results in
an attractive replayability, especially since Mr.
Scarpino includes a game map, full walkthrough for each path, and
useful
two-tiered hints for the main progression.
Resonance
appears to have been thoroughly playtested and debugged; there’s
special recognition for several instrumental testers
in the credits, and indeed, everything from the timing of dramatic
events and
plot pacing to the intuitive numbered-tree conversation model operates
refreshingly smoothly. The game is
short, but not rushed; chock full of hardboiled PI flavor (hm, maybe
one
shouldn’t
dwell on that: must be a cocktail of bourbon, sweat, and unfiltered
cigarettes); and even if a tad clichéd, nonetheless engaging and
tightly
crafted. It’s worth an hour or two to don a trenchcoat,
salvage your career, save the girl, and make the bad guys pay.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Rover's
Day Out |
| Author: |
Jack Welch and Ben Collins-Sussman
|
| Author Email: |
rover SP@G templaro.com |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 11
|
| Reviewer: |
Dark Star
|
| Reviewer Email: |
darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com
|
The first game that I had a chance to play this year was
Rover's
Day Out, and after playing
Snack Time!
last year I thought this had something to do with dogs. I guess I
should've read the blurb, because it turned out to be a really great
science-fiction game.
The premise behind the game is cool. You play a virtual
program (referred to as the ACU) in a simulation that has a deeper
impact than it seems at first. Also, in order to operate the ACU you
use a simple interpreter creating a nice explanation for the IF parser.
Then there are the two programmers that wrote the simulation. They
imbue it with life as they wisecrack about some of the stuff you do,
giving the beginning of the game a great tone as you go through a lot
of repetitive actions.
This piece uses the same play area over and over again, waking
up in an apartment, but I don't think that the authors used all of the
possibilities here to their advantage. Like the simulation
gets
darker in
A Mind Forever Voyaging as
the story progresses, maybe this one could degrade because of the
photon state of the Flosix/OS. That way little things could be
different and it wouldn't feel like you're stuck in the exact same
area, doing the same things over and over again.
The game finally opens up in the second act, giving the player
a chance to move around and see a few more things, but the goals here
aren't clear at all. You actually change characters, but a lot of stuff
isn't explained. I didn't even know I had changed until doing a few
things and then looking at myself. There weren't any hints here like I
had become accustomed to in the first part. Lost, I turned to the
walkthrough. What I found there should have been dispensed by
the
game itself -- piecemealed maybe, but it is essential to play.
Something needs to help smooth over that transition, with a proper
amount of hinting towards what needs to be done next.
Another problem I had was with the plunger puzzle. It's in
some weird position that has to be random each time, because when I
followed the walkthrough to try and solve it, the directions didn't
work. I played around with it, tried a few things and got it to work,
but after solving it I didn't really know what I had done. Then after
running through the simulation a few more times I figured it out, but
I'm thinking that better cluing would've helped out here too. The
objective just wasn't clear enough.
I feel the writing in this game is wonderful with few
blemishes, and the implementation is rock solid. I think that some of
the puzzles and a few others things could have been better clued, but
besides that, I found this a great game that is a must play for Comp
'09. I expect it to place in the top 5.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Snowquest |
| Author: |
Eric Eve
|
| Author Email: |
eric.eve SP@G hmc.ox.ac.uk
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher
|
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net |
Eric Eve is by far the most well-known and respected
author
with an entry in this year's Competition. Certainly I personally have
generally been a huge fan of Mr. Eve's previous games; I awarded his
games 10's in each of the previous two Competitions which he entered.
Alas, I suppose such a streak couldn't last forever; while a perfectly
solid, enjoyable, and well-written game in its own right,
Snowquest doesn't
quite scale the same heights as
Nightfall or
The
Elysium Enigma.
Snowquest thrusts
the player into a desolate arctic landscape, which she is journeying
through on a quest for a mystical artifact told of in the legends of
her people: the Book of Yashor. Eve's descriptions of this brutal
environment are spare but evocative. In fact, one is likely to have
trouble supressing a shiver or two while playing; this is the strongest
single element of the game. The puzzles in these sections are also
generally strong, being challenging enough but solvable with a little
thought and common sense.
What seems to be a straightforward
tale of solitary adventure, however, gets rather more muddled when you
first bed down for the night in a mountainside cave. Here begins a
lengthy, surreal dream sequence that (clichés ahoy!) even includes a
unicorn. The game then proceeds to vacillate between your very real,
very physical struggles in the snow and yet more portentous
dream
imagery. Mr. Eve does at least do us the favor of unifying
these
two sides of the game's personality and clarifying What It All Meant at
the end, but the answers he provides are rather banal, sometimes almost
laughably so. For instance, a wolf you encounter in the snowy
wilderness is a stand in for... a man named Wolf. Sigh. And as for the
real identity of the white powder that surrounds you... well, trite
would be a nice way of putting it.
Technically,
Snowquest is
also not quite up to Eve's usual standards. Mr. Eve notes in his ABOUT
text that he chose to restrict himself to the Z-Machine this time
rather than allowing himself to use Glulx, all in the interest of
producing a tighter, more compact finished product. That
Snowquest
arguably is, but I also missed the more ambitious, non-linear designs
of so many of Eve's other games, not to mention the extensive character
interaction. You will spend most of
Snowquest
alone in snowscapes or dreamscapes. Only in the final stages is any
meaningful character interaction to be found, and while we do get a bit
of Eve's trademark NPC duplicity here (this time, interestingly, in the
person of a handsome but suspicious man rather than the usual femme
fatale), it's over all too quickly.
I have to emphasize again, though, that
Snowquest is
by no means a bad game; in fact, it's easily one of the strongest in
this Competition, and more than worthy of the 8 I awarded it. Had it
come from a new author, the tone of this review would likely have been
very different, but such is the price of IF authorship success. Eve is
even to be commended for trying something different from his usual fare
in crafting much of the game as a solitary wilderness
adventure.
In fact, I think this would have been a stronger game if it had
remained
just that.
As it is,
the disparate parts, while individually very strong at times, never
quite come together into a fully satisfying whole.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Spelunker's
Quest |
| Author: |
Tom Murrin
|
| Author Email: |
SoftwareEngineer875
SP@G yahoo.com |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Marius Müller
|
| Reviewer Email: |
marius.ts.mueller SP@G googlemail.com |
Clearly
some effort and
enthusiasm has gone into this: the ABOUT text mentions the authors' love
for old-school treasure hunting romps, and it shows. For people who
come from that era of IF gaming (back when games were unmistakably text
adventures) this might have some retro value. However, I was born 5
years after
Adventure
was released, so I can't give the game that.
The
premise is that you're traveling in Brazil, there's an accident, and
you wake up in a cave. And boy, what a cave. Instadeath rooms, combats,
nondescript items, finding hidden treasures.
Now what makes this
game so ugly is the repetitiveness of some actions and the sheer
unfairness of the puzzles. (I had to hit the walkthrough. A lot.) At
one point, I have to examine some fairly bland scenery in different
rooms (whose descriptions are all the same) to find an item. Another
time, an action that gives the same response every time (and I mean
every time)
suddenly does something that works, and works when used on something I
never would have thought to use it on.
Gameplay,
puzzles and scenery are bland, the usual mixture of fantasy and modern
elements. It says a lot, I fear, that I found the easter eggs to be the
most amusing thing.
This games has a lot of features IF as a form has outgrown. I was
reminded why.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Star
Hunter |
| Author: |
Chris Kenworthy
|
| Author Email: |
chrisken SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 6) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Juhana Leinonen
|
| Reviewer Email: |
juhana.if SP@G nitku.net |
Possibly the single most annoying and possibly the most
common "feature" in IF is an inexplicable and totally unnecessary
vagueness. I'm just sick and tired of not knowing who I am, what my
goals are or what the stuff I own is for. This withholding of
basic information is undoubtedly convenient for authors. There's no
need to laboriously write a background story or character bios. Puzzles
basically appear out of nowhere if you say a lighter is "a mysterious
device" and a hammer is "a contraption of iron and wood" and let the
player find out what they are through trial and error. I'm afraid this
technique is becoming so common that new authors think it's acceptable
or that they're even expected to turn everyday trivial actions into
puzzles.
It's one thing to blindfold the player this way, but
please, do not insult the players when they try to make sense of the
situation.
>X GIZMO
This metallic device is small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of
your hand. It can be pushed like a button.
The surface of the gizmo gleams with a pale silver color.
>PUSH IT
Nothing happens. What were you expecting??
I
expected to make some sense of the thing, that's what. Now it's
suddenly the player's fault for not knowing what the non-described
gizmo is.
Now that I've gotten that out of my system, let's get on with the
review.
Star Hunter
is, according to the author, "a cool space relics adventure". Dunno
about "cool", but at least they're using tapes to store information
again in the future, so maybe that's what "relics" refers to.
One
big problem of this game is that it has only implemented things that
are needed for a playthrough. While it's good not to have too many red
herrings, at least the things that are mentioned in the room
descriptions should be implemented. There's also a recurring issue of
missing punctuation at the end of many sentences and an annoying habit
of capitalizing the first letter of every item, proper names or not.
I'm
not a big fan of space sci-fi settings, and this one is as generic as
generic sci-fi settings come. The locations are described so sparsely
it's hard to visualize what kind of location I'm supposed to be in. The
salt of space operas, alien life, seems to be missing completely except
for a couple of non-descript androids. (To be fair there might be some
coming later on. I stopped playing at around the competition 2 hour
mark.)
The game looks to be quite long. I had to look at the
walkthrough a couple of times and when after about an hour and a half
of playing I looked at it for the last time there was still quite a lot
of it left. At that point I found out I had traded in a wrong item and
the walkthrough suggested I was in a dead end. The game had not
demonstrated anything of interest that would make it worth restarting,
so I did not.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Trap
Cave |
| Author: |
Emilian Kowalewski
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Node-X |
| Version: |
1.0
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher
|
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net |
Some readers may remember that Emilian Kowalewski entered
a game in last year's Competition entitled
Project Delta: The Course,
which was presented more as a demo of a new MS-DOS Choose Your Own
Adventure style development system than as a game to stand on its own
merits. This year, he's back again with this new effort. Not much seems
to have changed with the development system itself, and while it seems
quite competently put together I'm still left with a host of questions
after looking at it. Chief among these is why Mr. Kowalewski chose to
make it a clunky old DOS application instead of building something
deployable over the Internet; branching hypertext links are after all
something of a staple there. Or, as a second-best alternative, why not
reach more users (not to mention ease many Windows users fears of
running strange executables on their systems) by targeting the
Z-Machine or Glulx?
Node-X as a system may seem competent
enough, but this game is hardly a good advertisement for it. The
"English version" that most Comp judges will undoubtedly be forced to
play has only had bits and pieces translated from the German original,
resulting in strange juxtapositions such as English descriptions
followed by German menu options and vice versa. Luckily, I have a bit
of German, so I fired up that version instead. I can now happily inform
all non-German speaking Comp players not to worry -- you didn't miss
much.
Trap Cave is
an
unusually minimalistic cave crawl even in a Competition that contains a
disconcerting number of them. Without a word of background exposition,
you are informed that "you wake up dazed in a small cave." Evidently
your objective is escape. Doing so will require a lot of saving and
backtracking, however, for in places simply innocently wandering in the
wrong direction results in instant, unclued death. The weaknesses of
CYOA system for implementing an adventure in this style show up
everywhere. Puzzles become inevitably trivial when their solutions must
always be listed in a multiple choice menu. Working through this game
-- and make no mistake, it does feel like work -- is a matter
not
of deducing answers to the problems you encounter but rather of plowing
through the menus to work out which choices made when kill you and
which allow you to progress. Most irritating of all, there are places
where you get can stuck in dead ends because Mr. Kowalewski has
inexplicably failed to provide you with a needed menu option. Certain
rooms, for instance, do not allow you to retrace your steps back to go
back to where you came from. You can thus be stuck there without a
needed item not because the way back is not open but because you can't
choose it from a menu.
I think it is very much possible to do
something interesting with a system like Node-X, but at a much higher,
more abstract level of narration: think
Alter Ego
rather than
Zork.
Trap Cave,
however, does more to convince me of the system's limitations than of
its potential.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Yon
Astounding Castle! of some sort |
| Author: |
Tiberius Thingamus
|
| Author Email: |
tiberiusthingamus SP@G yahoo.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
ADRIFT |
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Nate Dovel
|
| Reviewer Email: |
atreyu918 SP@G gmail.com |
I loved
Zork. I
don't remember how I discovered it, since I am obviously far too young
and handsome to have encountered the game in its original
era. But
one day, my directionless Internet escapades stumbled across The Great
Underground Empire, and I was enthralled. It was random,
silly,
treasure-hunting goodness, the perfect salve for my exploration
itch. A quick trigger finger was unnecessary, thank goodness,
and
for once, my creative vocabulary came in handy, because that parser
certainly wasn't doing me any favors. I will never forget that
experience.
But folks. Honestly. No more
Zork-era tribute
games. Please. The
Thy Dungeonman
series did it best; the rest I've experienced are amateurish and
dull. Think outside the box, for Lord Flathead's
sake. Case
in point:
Yon
Astounding Castle
takes all the tropes of the genre, removes their charm, and then makes
it as inaccessible as possible for the unfamiliar, modern player.
I
started out hopeful. The tutorial was a decent, if fairly
standard, introduction to the genre. The amusing cover art was
a
nostalgic callback to the simpler times of computerized
gaming. The title is read aloud by everyone's favorite
intentionally unrealistic computer voice, a la Stephen
Hawking. But it quickly dawns on you just how much improperly
used
old English this game relies on, presumably for laughs. The
kind
of turkey-leg-vendor-at-the-Renaissance-Fair medieval humor you would
use if you were slightly tipsy and joking with your friends, lots of
"yon"s and words ending in "-eth". Certainly not historically
accurate, but not even cutely mangled, as
Thy Dungeonman
does so well. The author's comedic precision is roughly
equivalent
to a shotgun aiming for a penny on top of a bulk-store jar of
mayonnaise at one-and-a-half paces.
I can't overstate how
unreadable this game is. The word "ye" is used interchangeably
for
"you", "your", and "the", and is often jarringly shoved into a sentence
five or six times. For some reason, the author finds it
hilarious
to
incessantly vacillate
on
the simple naming of objects, such as saying "You see here a table or
some table-like object" or- I kid you not- referring to "travelers
and/or traveler-type people and/or objects." Even the
walkthrough
gave me a headache, when I inevitably had to use it or risk inflicting
blunt-force trauma on my innocent laptop. Note to authors: A
good
walkthrough is
not
a
repetitive and abbreviated list of the fewest possible commands it
takes to win with a complete lack of specific game context. It
should be a massage, a relaxing experience prior to returning to the
harsh world, or in this case, the frustrating game.
The story,
naturally, is non-existent. You have no name, background, or
goal
except the acquisition of treasure, nor does your environment or the
people you encounter. In this, at least, it accurately
emulates
Zork's
one flaw, the one we all forgive because it was so fun the first
time. You are just plunked down in front of a castle, and
never
even really told to explore it. Exploring is just what you do
in
IF, right? So why bother filling in the
details? People are
smart, they'll create their own backstory. And no one wants
multi-dimensional characterization, anyway- let's face it, people are
stupid. The old guy is hungry. You find some
oatmeal. Give it to him. We don't need to know why
he's
hanging around a dusty basement surrounded by poisoned
spikes. He
just is. Man Vs. Oatmeal- that's one of the classic conflict
archetypes, so by no means elaborate on that.
One or two
good jokes float intact amongst the mess. Something about "ye
grandma could probably beateth ye up with one hand tied behind her
walker", and oh! That sequence of room names which all rhyme
in a
chucklicious way. I hope you enjoy those monkeyshines, player;
you'll be rereading them constantly as you trek back and forth through
the same rooms, because the in-game teleport feature meant to lance
that proverbial zit or zit-type thing is
completely glitched. I
guess they didn't have beta-testers back in the day of Tiberius
Thingamus, the alleged original game scribe. Or at least none
without leprosy and the annoying tendency to each require different
conversation parsing just to wring out the one scripted piece of
dialog they contain: ">ASK BETA-TESTER ABOUT
GLITCHING". "The beta-tester smiles vacantly and teleports his
oatmeal into his cranium, rendering him useless, and also dead."
Zork is
dead, people.
All
dead. Stop going through its pockets for loose
change. (See
what I did there? I made a reference to a niche movie instead
of
making my review strong enough to stand on its own without stealing the
successful parts of someone else's much-beloved work of
fiction. What an ass I am.)
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
zork,
buried chaos |
| Author: |
bloodbath
|
| Author Email: |
bloodbath1000 SP@G googlemail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Juhana Leinonen
|
| Reviewer Email: |
juhana.if SP@G nitku.net |
The author of
zork,
buried chaos
really hates capital letters. Maybe they picked on him (or her) in
school, or maybe they like to loiter under his window in the middle of
the night and call him names. We'll never know. All we know is that he
has gone even as far as to override the autogenerated banner to tell us
that his choice of development system is "inform 7." The author is not
very fond of proofreading, either. Either that or "northwestt" and
"souoth" are some Zorkian directions I've not heard of before.
The
game is Zork-themed only by the title and some familiar-named items
that you see nothing special about. You walk around a caved-in
underground dungeon solving trivial puzzles. There's no plot or story
involved and the game has the unmistakable look and feel of someone's
first practice work.
The game has a maze, but it's not that
bad. It has only three rooms plus the exit. I got stuck once when the
game said that all the room's exits were blocked, when one of them in
fact wasn't. That exit took me to a room that said there's an exit to
the east, but I couldn't go that way. The walkthrough didn't offer any
alternative routes so it seems like the game is so broken that it can't
be finished.
As it now is there's not much to recommend to
anybody. With decent amount of work, a storyline, and coherent,
interesting puzzles the game could over time evolve into something
worth playing.
Back to Table of
Contents
IntroComp
2009
Reviews
[The IntroComp is,
as most of you undoubtedly know, an annual competition for
introductions or "trailers" for planned longer games. The idea here is
that the author gets to preview the IF audience's reaction to her
premise and approach before putting in the countless hours (months...
years...) required to write a lengthy work of IF. IntroComp authors who
complete the full version of their entry within a year even receive a
bit of a cash reward.
This year's IntroComp consisted of just three entries, with the winner
being
Obituary
by Drew Mochak and Johnny Rivera. And now I'll turn things
over to Valentine Kopteltsev for his impressions of all three
introductions. -JM]
It's the first time I'm reviewing IntroComp entries, and it must be
said I
was totally unprepared for the fact they needed quite different
evaluation
criteria than finished games. To summarize it, I'd just say, instead of
assessing how good the intros actually are, one has to weigh up how
much they
make her want playing the complete work. (And yes, after playing all
three entries, I searched the contest web site
thoroughly, wandering whether "Kill a woman" was this year Introcomp's
featured theme, but couldn't find any indication of it.)
Below are the reviews in alphabetical order.
Back to Table of Contents
| Title: |
Gossip
|
| Author: |
Hugo Labrande
|
| Author Email: |
mulehollandaise SP@G msn.com
|
| Release Date: |
August 31, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 6) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru |
I have to
warn you beforehand -- this review is going to be a harsh one.
However, it's not (only) because I have so much joy in dancing on
others'
games' bones but (also) because I can recognize the author's potential
and
the efforts he put into his work, and believe he can apply them more
effectively than wasting them on a project doomed to failure from the
very
start.
In Gossip, you play the part of a
journalist working for a gossip
magazine. Ironically, the game's first disappointment is the writing.
It's
not exactly bad -- rather, it's dull and nondescript. I don't know
whether
the original French text reads more vivid (the IntroComp version of
Gossip is a translation); the English one, however,
only succeeds in
passing the feeling the life of a tabloid reporter isn't all cream and
sugar
and excitement. This is basically OK, and probably realistic too, but
there
is one snag: no less than 90 percent of the players are going be bored
to
death before the intro is over.
Walking hand in hand with the lack of inspiration is another
text-related
sin: prolixity. For instance, the author doesn't just spend several
paragraphs telling us how special the magazine our protagonist is
working for
is; he does it twice. I hate repeating commonplaces, but here, I'm just
bound
to remember an old IF truism: show, don't tell!
But even more discouraging than the overwhelmingly large masses of text
is
the mundane gameplay. The introduction consists more or less of two
puzzles,
of which the first one is of the "track down a randomly moving object
in a maze" type; certainly not too exciting, but at least uncomplicated
and short enough to be passable. The second one, however, goes way over
the top,
since it requires tracking down a whole number of arbitrary moving NPCs
and
talking to them about random topics (OK, it's not that
random, since
there is a "hint machine" that is able -- in most cases -- to
inform you which subject should be relevant to whom; still, on several
occasions one has to act by trial and error). The player has to spend
no less
than a couple of dozens turns to get through it! This killed the rest
of my
willingness to play the full game that had lasted so far. The final
scene,
which seemed to be copied off from a B-rated mystery, wasn't able to
revive
it.
The last nail in the coffin of my playing fun where the stereotyped
dummies
that served as a substitute for NPCs. It starts with your editor,
Sammy, who "doesn't really know" anything even about his famous
almost-namesake, Sami Hyypia. How typical!;)
Jokes aside, see, the game clearly was intended to be centered on
interaction
with other people. Thus, there are only two ways two attract and retain
the
players' interest: either making this interaction more fun and less
tedious
or shifting the focus somewhat, deliberately limiting the interaction
and concentrating on other puzzles instead (say, figuring out how to
squeeze the information out of the aforementioned "hint machine" could
be a nice puzzle if set up properly). Random asking, even with a wide
scope of
available conversation topics (and it is wide enough in Gossip)
isn't
a device that can provide for satisfactory playability, especially in
the
long run.
Now, you mustn't think I'm so fond of thrashing other people's work,
even if
it's slapdash. In case of Gossip, it's even harder
for me, because
it is fairly well-polished (there are a few minor glitches, but I won't
even mention them here, since they don't really represent a problem).
It's
obvious that the author is a very able programmer, and that he tried
hard to
produce good work. The more a pity is it to see such a solid piece of
software failing so miserably as a game.
Finally, we're getting to the constructive part of my review. What
would be my
suggestions to the author? Well, giving advice is always a risky thing,
especially if one doesn't know of crucial project details (in
particular,
how far development advanced), but I think that thinking the entire
game
concept over one more time, and maybe cooperating with someone who
could help
with catchier writing wouldn't harm. One way or another, to gain any
promotional value, the intro part should be redone completely.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Obituary
|
| Author: |
Drew Mochak and Johnny Rivera
|
| Author Email: |
amockery SP@G gmail.com,
vamping SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
August 31, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru |
Obituary
certainly manages to stun the player from the beginning --
for instance, by showering him with a torrent of mysterious events;
things
and scenes change rapidly, like in a kaleidoscope. Maybe even too
rapidly --
at least, I couldn't help but think at some point that the authors were
going
to have a hard time sorting everything out and tying up all loose ends.
However, this is a supposition that only can be confirmed or disproved
by the
complete game. For an intro, this is a perfectly fine thing to do -- if
anything, it made me keen to see how the authors will master this task.
The game is pretty verbose too, but the writing was splendid,
so it read
at a drought. I also liked the approach to the presentation of the
player
character very much -- the authors gave her a lot of personality from
the
very start, yet almost no background, obviously planning to dole it out
little by little as the story progresses (in fact, they started with it
by
the end of the intro). A very strong move, which certainly will help
intriguing the players.
There is little more to be said about Obituary
-- it's all
atmosphere and writing. There barely are any puzzles; come to think of
it,
one even has to admit it isn't very interactive -- a large part of the
action
goes to cut-scenes, and the rest is shameless railroading. However, I
didn't
mind being railroaded at all, except for a few minor quibble (for
instance,
at one occasion I believed that, since one can't reach the mansion,
trying to
reach the adjoining stalls instead should be a perfectly legitimate
choice,
but the game thought better of it).
All in all, I'm not surprised Obituary was
the winner. That's a
completely well-deserved success.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Selves
|
| Author: |
J'onn Roger
|
| Author Email: |
j.onnroger SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
August 31, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru |
I'm certainly not a soothsayer, but I think that of all three entries,
Selves has the least chances to experience a
release. My impression
was that, while the authors of the other two games were pre-planning
their
work carefully, Mr. Roger was writing under the impression of a strong
emotion or idea, which he was eager to express without caring for
details too
much. It's seriously underimplemented: it's the shortest entry, its
world is
barren, there isn't much to do, and the descriptions are terse --
sometimes
to a point they become unhelpful (for instance, at one point I had to
find my
way out of a room by trial and error, since the exit directions weren't
mentioned). There also were a few technical problems (mostly not
implemented
actions/synonyms). Finally, this is the only game I'm not sure I was
able to
complete (I ended up in an empty room with nothing to do, but it might
have
been a part of the author's plan; one can't tell, since there is no
walkthrough available).
And yet, with all the aforementioned issues and technical
inferiority to
the
both other competitors, this entry doesn't completely fail as a trailer
in
my eyes. While the Obituary intro raised very high
expectations
regarding the full version, and that of Gossip
rather put me off,
Selves left me not knowing what to expect. On one
hand, if the full
game was of the same quality as the intro, it hardly could be
enjoyable. On
the other hand, there are reasonably high chances that if the author
doesn't
lose interest to this project and brings it to a release, he'll also
take
some time to polish it up.
Back to Table of
Contents
Other
Game
Reviews
| Title: |
Acheton
|
| Author: |
Jon Thackray, David Seal, and Jonathan Partington
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
1978
|
| System: |
MS-DOS executable |
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Richard Bos |
| Reviewer Email: |
richardlbos SP@G gmail.com
|
In the beginning, the story goes, there was Advent, and then
there was Zork,
and from those the adventure game grew. Except, of course, that it's
not entirely that way. Advent
was the first, but there were several games roughly
contemporaneous with Zork.
One of the more significant of those games was Acheton.
Its main importance today lies in starting off the Phoenix series of
games, which led to Graham Nelson getting involved in the whole
business, and we all know what grew out of that. It is also noteworthy
for being then the largest adventure in existence - and there still
aren't many larger today.
So, it's venerable, but how does it stand up to time's
criticism? Well,
by and large, pretty decently. Of course, you can forget about the
plot. There is one, in theory, but what it boils down to is this: solve
puzzles, so that you can collect all the treasures. Given that it was
written by mathematicians at Cambridge University, and its main
audience was presumably their colleagues, it is also no surprise that
it is rotten hard and on occasion requires not just lateral but
downright contorted thought. So, it's a humongous, arcane treasure
hunt. But it's a well-written one, and for the right player - and yours
truly is - a very enjoyable one, at that.
For starters, and perhaps most noticeably and importantly, the
text
sparkles throughout. The geography is lively and feels real, perhaps
not quite as much so as Advent
but better than Zork.
The descriptions are not long, but where needed they're written with
zest. This is even more true for the events that happen along the way,
both essential and accidental. Try blowing the horn, repeatedly, and
see if you can not think of The Muppet Show.
The
map, too, is well put together. Sure, it's a random collection of
areas, and sure, you'll find treasures lying around here, there and
everywhere. That is inherent in the genre. But you won't find many
other objects where they patently don't belong - the coat is in the
cloakroom, not in the hall of mirrors. Also, the geography is
artificial, but not random. You can see the sea from the desert, and
vice versa, but you won't stumble from one into the other into the ice
passages into the enchanted forest in four moves. There's a sense of
space, of this being a constructed setting, yes, but constructed on a
plan.
On the player's side, there is a parser which, though
limited, is mostly a pleasure to work with. "Get all" is provided for,
and so is "drop all but lamp". OTOH, undo does not exist, and more
nefariously, what we would now call meta-commands take a turn, as does
erroneous input. In a game as tight as this, that can cost you the
game. On the positive side again, there is a built-in help function. I
do not know, though, how much of this is original and how much was
added later; the version I played was the Topologika MS-DOS one
available from the IF Archive.
Perhaps the most obvious
limitation to today's players is that pronouns are not provided for.
You can't THROW AXE AT DWARF; but then, neither do you need to. Puzzles
are mostly not about manipulating objects, but about gaining and
interpreting information about your environment. This is perhaps where
it is most clear that Acheton
was written by mathematicians - and higher mathematicians, at that.
There are no puzzles that involve adding numbers, but there is more
than one puzzle that centers around thinking about what a certain
pattern means. The result is that Acheton
feels remarkably modern, at times - while being distinctly
old-fashioned at others.
Of course, there are the crusty old features, but even there Acheton
is not as outdated as its age might seem to indicate. There is a lamp
that needs to be conserved, but one feature of the game (which I'm not
going to betray here) means that you need to be somewhat careful, but
needn't worry too much about it. There is a maze - no, there are mazes,
but only one is of the "tedious" kind, and even that is
well-constructed. There's a compass-confusing room. There's a monster
that needs to be fed to pass. But it's all done with such panache that
I, at least, was willing to forgive all those in a game that was
written when those features weren't yet crusty and old.
Perhaps the one thing which will turn a modern player off most
is Acheton's
harshness and difficulty; on occasion one can justifiably call it
unfair. There are several puzzles that hang on split-second - read:
single-move - timing, and when typing NQ instead of NW kills you off,
that can be annoying. And then there is one area (spoiler, highlight to
read: Hades, where
you enter by getting killed and choosing
not to be reincarnated, and leave by typing either DANTE or ANON.
The former would be unacceptable in an easier game, but you will
die more than once trying to solve Acheton, and any player who doesn't
choose not to be reincarnated, just to see what happens, and then
explores his surroundings, is not worth his brass lamp. The latter
depends on noting a quotation that is only obviously a clue after the
fact.)
where the entrance is justifiable exactly because of the difficulty of
the game, but the exit is in my opinion not clued nearly well enough.
On the other hand, the Balrog puzzle is beautifully judged, both the
way in and the way back.
In the end, then, this is a game which is a product of its
time, but a very well built, enjoyable product of its time. It is
unashamedly a puzzle-fest, and it is unashamedly ball-breakingly
difficult. Some of today's authors might be ashamed of those traits;
one gets the idea that the Phoenix authors thought they were rather
something to be proud of. In the case of Acheton,
they were correct. This game will not appeal to those IF players who
want to see story and character development, and for whom the puzzles
are merely a distraction from the plot. But for those of us who do like
a hard-core puzzle game every now and then, this is still, after all
these years, one of the better offerings in that genre.
Back to
Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Bryant Collection
|
| Author: |
Gregory Weir
|
| Author Email: |
Gregory.Weir SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
April 1, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net
|
The IF community has quite a lengthy history of April Fool's
Day pranks and jokes of one sort or another. This year's main offender
was Gregory Weir's
The
Bryant Collection,
a set of interactive vignettes Weir claimed to have discovered in "an
old strongbox" he purchased at a yard sale. Written in the 1960's, the
stories were essentially computerless-IF: a single player would direct
the actions of her storyworld avatar by stating "commands" to a human
gamemaster who would manage the storyworld and describe to the player
what happened in response (presumably without all of the parsing and
NPC AI problems we still wrestle with even today). The author of these
storyworlds, the previously unknown Laura Bryant, thus anticipated not
only IF but the whole field of interactive storytelling years before
Adventure and even
Dungeons and Dragons.
It's a lovely story; it's also, of course, complete bunk. Luckily,
Weir's computerized "adaptations" of Bryant's stories are worthy of
attention in their own right.
The Bryant Collection,
then, is a collection of five brief, unconnected vignettes. You begin
as Weir himself, discovering the strongbox and (once home with it)
looking inside. Reading the notes for one of Bryant's storyworlds then
sends you into that world; when done there, you return to Weir's living
room to (if you like) choose another vignette to experience.
Each
of the storyworlds is little more than the barest fragment, often more
notable for what goes unsaid than for what is, but Weir's writing
is strong, possessed of a light touch and subtle eye for
detail
that gives the scenes a certain emotional heft in spite of their
brevity. In one, you appear to be a school boy casually settling down
to enjoy the end of the world; in another, you are Eve herself,
engaging in negotiations with a certain well-known Serpent; in a third,
you have just graduated from college, and are returning home for a
brief stay with your family before getting on with life in the Real
World; a fourth is a weary airport post-breakup scene. Of course, the
former two scenes are more seemingly momentous than the latter two; yet
all are handled with a deft touch that gives them a subtle weight.
Indeed, I found the personal stories more moving than the
grander
canvasses.
The other vignette is so different from the rest as
to feel like a non sequitur: an elaborate Tower of Hanoi
puzzle.
While the other vignettes demand essentially nothing of you but your
participation, this one is all about the ludic challenge. And it's a
good challenge at that, difficult but understandable, and not
impossible to solve. I'm quite sure I spent more time on this vignette
than all the other combined, but I have no complaints about it per se;
I quite enjoyed it, even if I'm not quite certain why it's here.
Long after its background story was revealed as a hoax,
The Bryant Collection remains
well worth your time. In fact, I think that Weir's decision to release
it as an April Fool's prank rather than a legitimately serious work only
disrespects it. But he is certainly entitled to treat his work
as
he will. I hope he will continue to write IF; we could use more of his
kind of subtle writing talent.
Back to
Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Acheton
|
| Author: |
Jon Thackray, David Seal, and Jonathan Partington
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
1978
|
| System: |
MS-DOS executable |
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Richard Bos |
| Reviewer Email: |
richardlbos SP@G gmail.com
|
In the beginning, the story goes, there was
Advent, and then
there was
Zork,
and from those the adventure game grew. Except, of course, that it's
not entirely that way.
Advent
was the first, but there were several games roughly
contemporaneous with
Zork.
One of the more significant of those games was
Acheton.
Its main importance today lies in starting off the Phoenix series of
games, which led to Graham Nelson getting involved in the whole
business, and we all know what grew out of that. It is also noteworthy
for being then the largest adventure in existence - and there still
aren't many larger today.
So, it's venerable, but how does it stand up to time's
criticism? Well,
by and large, pretty decently. Of course, you can forget about the
plot. There is one, in theory, but what it boils down to is this: solve
puzzles, so that you can collect all the treasures. Given that it was
written by mathematicians at Cambridge University, and its main
audience was presumably their colleagues, it is also no surprise that
it is rotten hard and on occasion requires not just lateral but
downright contorted thought. So, it's a humungous, arcane treasure
hunt. But it's a well-written one, and for the right player - and yours
truly is - a very enjoyable one, at that.
For starters, and perhaps most noticeably and importantly, the
text
sparkles throughout. The geography is lively and feels real, perhaps
not quite as much so as Advent
but better than Zork.
The descriptions are not long, but where needed they're written with
zest. This is even more true for the events that happen along the way,
both essential and accidental. Try blowing the horn, repeatedly, and
see if you can not think of The Muppet Show.
The
map, too, is well put together. Sure, it's a random collection of
areas, and sure, you'll find treasures lying around here, there and
everywhere. That is inherent in the genre. But you won't find many
other objects where they patently don't belong - the coat is in the
cloakroom, not in the hall of mirrors. Also, the geography is
artificial, but not random. You can see the sea from the desert, and
vice versa, but you won't stumble from one into the other into the ice
passages into the enchanted forest in four moves. There's a sense of
space, of this being a constructed setting, yes, but constructed on a
plan.
On the player's side, there is a parser which, though
limited, is mostly a pleasure to work with. "Get all" is provided for,
and so is "drop all but lamp". OTOH, undo does not exist, and more
nefariously, what we would now call meta-commands take a turn, as does
erroneous input. In a game as tight as this, that can cost you the
game. On the positive side again, there is a built-in help function. I
do not know, though, how much of this is original and how much was
added later; the version I played was the Topologika MS-DOS one
available from the IF Archive.
Perhaps the most obvious
limitation to today's players is that pronouns are not provided for.
You can't THROW AXE AT DWARF; but then, neither do you need to. Puzzles
are mostly not about manipulating objects, but about gaining and
interpreting information about your environment. This is perhaps where
it is most clear that Acheton
was written by mathematicians - and higher mathematicians, at that.
There are no puzzles that involve adding numbers, but there is more
than one puzzle that centres around thinking about what a certain
pattern means. The result is that Acheton
feels remarkably modern, at times - while being distinctly
old-fashioned at others.
Of course, there are the crusty old features, but even there Acheton
is not as outdated as its age might seem to indicate. There is a lamp
that needs to be conserved, but one feature of the game (which I'm not
going to betray here) means that you need to be somewhat careful, but
needn't worry too much about it. There is a maze - no, there are mazes,
but only one is of the "tedious" kind, and even that is
well-constructed. There's a compass-confusing room. There's a monster
that needs to be fed to pass. But it's all done with such panache that
I, at least, was willing to forgive all those in a game that was
written when those features weren't yet crusty and old.
Perhaps the one thing which will turn a modern player off most
is Acheton's
harshness and difficulty; on occasion one can justifiably call it
unfair. There are several puzzles that hang on split-second - read:
single-move - timing, and when typing NQ instead of NW kills you off,
that can be annoying. And then there is one area (spoiler, highlight to
read: Hades, where
you enter by getting killed and choosing
not to be reincarnated, and leave by typing either DANTE or ANON.
The former would be unacceptable in an easier game, but you will
die more than once trying to solve Acheton, and any player who doesn't
choose not to be reincarnated, just to see what happens, and then
explores his surroundings, is not worth his brass lamp. The latter
depends on noting a quotation that is only obviously a clue after the
fact.)
where the entrance is justifiable exactly because of the difficulty of
the game, but the exit is in my opinion not clued nearly well enough.
On the other hand, the Balrog puzzle is beautifully judged, both the
way in and the way back.
In the end, then, this is a game which is a product of its
time, but a very well built, enjoyable product of its time. It is
unashamedly a puzzle-fest, and it is unashamedly ball-breakingly
difficult. Some of today's authors might be ashamed of those traits;
one gets the idea that the Phoenix authors thought they were rather
something to be proud of. In the case of Acheton,
they were correct. This game will not appeal to those IF players who
want to see story and character development, and for whom the puzzles
are merely a distraction from the plot. But for those of us who do like
a hard-core puzzle game every now and then, this is still, after all
these years, one of the better offerings in that genre.
Back to
Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Cacophony
|
| Author: |
Owen Parish
|
| Author Email: |
doubleprism SP@G hotmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
July 25, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 3
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net
|
As
Cacophony begins,
you find yourself in a rather unhygienic kitchen:
The
stench of offal hangs in the air.The walls drip with fresh blood. An
ugly table supports plates and a massive assortment of cutlery. This is
not an environment that encourages rational thought.
Things
don't get too much clearer during the remainder of this fairly lengthy
game. Yes, this is yet another work of Meaningfully Surreal IF, yet
another Exploration of the Physical Embodiment of a Tormented PC's
Mental State. As is typical of the type, there are plenty of suggestion
and luridly (over)written imagery here, but very little concrete
information. We are left to Draw Our Own Conclusions. Sigh. It's an
approach I find both intellectually lazy and subtly disingenuous.
Normally, an author who has crafted an incoherent, illogical storyworld
for her game has no defense against criticism for her shoddy
worldbuilding. If she embraces the Surreal Approach, however, she can
now reply to her critics that they simply fail to see the Deeper
Meaning. Well, I don't buy that under most circumstances, and I
certainly don't buy it here.
So,
Cacophony rather
resoundingly failed to endear itself to me right from its opening. And
as I played on, I found much more to criticize beyond its questionable
aesthetic.
Cacophony seems
determined to reduce its player to the same level of gibbering torment
as its PC. Its geography is fairly large, and spread over different
areas which you can move among only in by fiddly means. You are plunged
into this morass with no real guidance as to what your goals are or
what is expected of you, and presented with a pile of puzzles that
willfully violate every law of IF puzzle design. The whole collection
is here: read the author's mind puzzles, undo and restore puzzles,
unmotivated action puzzles, a bit of guess the verb, etc. The game's
attitude toward its player is one of vaguely passive aggressive
hostility
. Solving
this thing
on one's own -- I turned to the walkthrough quite early -- strikes me
as an exercise in masochism. It's not that I'm entirely opposed to
difficult games, but more that I require a certain faith in the
coherence and logic of their design and their storyworlds -- in short,
a certain level of trust -- to tackle them.
Cacophony
-- and here we return to the Surreal Problem again -- resoundingly
fails to inspire said trust. Its storyworld, its writing, its rather
minimal implementation all actively work against said trust. This is,
indeed, "not an environment that encourages rational thought."
But
some folks working in a group apparently have finished this without
touching the walkthrough, so it is possible. There are even three
different endings to be had, although none of them will exactly provide
that light bulb moment. If you are a fan of ultra-old school
IF, a
person willing to approach a game as a war to be won by any means
necessary, and if you have a large reserve of patience, you might want
to give
Cacophony
a go. I once had some of that can-do adventurer spirit myself, but it's
been fading more and more as the years go by.
Cacophony reminds
me why.
Back to
Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Finding the Mouse
|
| Author: |
James Dessart
|
| Author Email: |
skwirl42 SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
August 14, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net
|
Saying that
Finding the
Mouse is slight is a bit like saying that the Beatles
were fairly significant in the history of rock music. And unlike the
other playable-in-under-ten-minutes game I review in this issue,
The Nemean Lion,
Finding the Mouse is
also bereft of new fuel for theoretical discussion. It is exactly what
it bills itself as: an ultra-short one-puzzle game in which you need to
find your mouse so you can get back to surfing the Internet.
How one can lose one's mouse in the first place I don't know. As my
wife will describe to anyone who cares to inquire at gleeful length and
with copious examples, I'm pretty much capable of losing anything that
isn't physically attached to me -- and yet even I've never managed to
lose my mouse. It is, after all, of use in only one place, and
doesn't tend to migrate around the room like, say, a remote control.
But then, judging by the solution to the puzzle, Mr. Dessart's mouse
appears to be some sort of surreal hybrid between a piece of computer
equipment and the living kind that is so attractive to cats.
I don't really want to criticize this game too harshly. Mr. Dessart
didn't enter it into any competitions, and never represented it as
anything more that what it is, that being the "my first Inform 7 game"
everyone has to start with. Heck, he even had the thing beta-tested,
which is more than I can say for plenty of would-be IF Shakespeares.
Well, that line at the end about not needing text adventures now that
you have access to the Internet does rankle a bit, but I'll mix my
metaphors and allow him a bit more rope before I haul out the pitchfork.
Back to
Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The Nemean Lion
|
| Author: |
"Anonymous"
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
August, 2009
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 6) |
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net
|
As the art and science of modern IF has progressed, it has
become generally established wisdom that games should relieve their
players of tedious tasks as much as possible. (As opposed to
old
games and the old school throwbacks we still see (too) many of, which
positively revel in the tedious.) Inventory limits and hunger and sleep
timers are now passé, for instance. We even apply this approach to
obviously necessary actions; for instance, a properly polished game is
now expected to automatically open doors for the player if she fails to
do so herself when traveling. But exactly how far should we take this
logic? That's the question asked by
The Nemean Lion,
an "anonymous joke game" -- albeit an anonymous joke game that just
happens to have appeared on well-known IF author Adam Cadre's personal
site. (I make no assertions about the author's identity, but leave you
to draw your own conclusions.)
You play the legendary Heracles,
and begin outside the cave of the Nemean Lion. You must of course kill
the lion and return with his skin to King Eurystheus as one of your
Seven Labors. If you innocently approach the task in the step-by-step
fashion typical of IF,
The
Nemean Lion might
take you five to ten minutes to play, and you will likely be left with
the impression of a thoroughly slight and uninteresting game.
It
becomes more interesting, though, if as your first command you simply
type SKIN LION:
(cut the lion's pelt with the lion's own claws)
(first strangling the lion)
(first stunning the lion with the club)
(first entering the cave)
(first scaring the lion into the cave)
(first blocking the cave exit with the rock)
The
Nemean lion's pelt proves to have one vulnerability: to the lion's own
claws! You remove the skin, and with that, your first labor is complete.
Ah,
now we see what "anonymous" is doing here! In general terms it's not an
entirely new idea; at least a few games in the past have, for instance,
implemented WIN GAME as an allowable command. It does, though, raise
some thoughts about the nature of IF's interactions, interactions which
have typically worked on a much more granular level than the
interactions in some other forms of interactive storytelling. Would it
be possible to craft a parser that operated on the level of broader
actions, a parser where we could type INVADE PERSIA or MARRY ANNA? Is
doing so a key to moving away from the obsession with the physical
environment of their storyworlds that marks virtually all IF even
today? Conversely, can a game at some point become
too accommodating
to its player, to the point that said player begins to wonder why she
is needed here in the first place? These are heady questions
indeed, whose answers are of course immediately complicated by our
still oh-so-stringent technical limitations. And there is no "one size
fits all" answer to these questions; what is an
appropriate level of abstraction in one work may be inappropriate in
another. Their prompting by this "joke game" is no trivial achievement,
and makes it worthy of a few minutes of your time and perhaps
considerably more of your thought.
Back to
Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Sam Fortune
-- Private Investigator
|
| Author: |
Steve Blanding
|
| Author Email: |
steve SP@G housefullofgames.com
|
| Release Date: |
May 10, 2009
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net
|
In 2006, a quite good little film hit the theaters. It was called
Infamous, and
featured a strong cast portraying the events surrounding the writing of
Truman Capote's landmark "nonfiction novel"
In Cold Blood.
Unfortunately for
Infamous,
Capote, an
even better film dealing with the exact same subject, had appeared just
the previous year, and was still busily collecting a whole pile of
trophies and kudos even as
Infamous
had its own premiere. Thus was
Infamous doomed to
become a footnote to Hollywood history: the "other" Truman Capote movie
of the mid-2000's. Steve Blanding's
Sam Fortune -- Private
Investigator seems destined to a similar fate, for it
appeared almost simultaneously with Jon Ingold's remarkable
Make It Good,
a
landmark release which uses interactivity in an original way for a
final effect I don't ever recall experiencing before.
Suffice to say that
Sam Fortune,
the "other" hardboiled private detective game of 2009, does not excite
my inner IF theorist in the same way. It is, however, a nice little
game in its own right.
Sam Fortune is
an homage to the radio serials of the 1930's, as becomes immediately
clear when it opens with a brief advertisement for the program's
sponsor, Muskrat Cigarettes, which "four out of five doctors recommend
for their patients who smoke." (Ah, those were the days!) This frame is
in fact the cleverest aspect of the game. The story is divided into a
series of acts interspersed with more brief commercials, and getting
yourself killed only results in the following:
Just then your mother reaches over and shuts off the radio.
"Honestly, Junior. I don't know why you bother filling your head with
all those silly detective stories. Now get off to bed."
The story you are evidently listening to remains steadfastly true to
its genre, replete with hard-drinking detectives (well, one -- that's
you!), a damsel in distress (or is she a femme fatale?), tough-talking
Italian mobsters, and even an effete and vaguely slimy French maitre
de. To complain that these characters are all thin-as-paper
stereotypes, and even slightly offensive ones at that, is to rather
miss the point of the whole exercise. Likewise for complaining about
lines like "I'd been conversing with my witty friends Jack and Daniel."
The story pretty much runs on rails. There are challenges to overcome,
but they are contained within a series of small, linear scenes.
Sometimes you can blunder around indefinitely until you head upon the
right action to advance the plot. Other times, failing to do the right
thing within a certain amount of turns will get you killed or thrown
into jail for a crime you didn't commit, and it's UNDO or RESTORE time.
Conversations are, as is typical for this type of game, handled with a
TALK TO verb and a series of menu choices. Again, here it is generally
a matter of either plowing through all of the menu choices to learn
everything you can from a certain character or choosing the one
response that won't lead to disaster.
Sam Fortune,
then, is sharply restrained by its technical limitations, but it's also
a lot of fun if you are willing to surrender to its genre.
Implementation is a bit sketchy, and the game as a whole is rife with
rough edges, but there is a certain soul about this one that too many
other games lack. Its puzzles are not too tough, although you will
likely die or be jailed once or twice and so will want to keep save
files handy. You likely won't remember a thing about it a month from
now, but the plot rolls along at a nice place. It's not going to
challenge for an XYZZY or possibly even be remembered five years from
now, but it's more than sufficient for a rainy evening. Hopefully
mother won't send you to bed before it's over.
Back to
Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Shelter
from the Storm
|
| Author: |
Eric Eve
|
| Author Email: |
eric.eve SP@G
hmc.ox.ac.uk |
| Release Date: |
May 31, 2009
|
| System: |
TADS 3 |
| Version: |
1.1
|
| Reviewer: |
David Monath |
| Reviewer Email: |
dmonath SP@G gmail.com
|
A little more fiction in your
interaction.
Shelter
is a finely-penned
period work which opens with the player dismally stranded in the rain
somewhere
on Salisbury Plain, England, during World War II. While most
famous for being the site of
Stonehenge, the region also houses the Ministry of Defence’s
Army Training Estate, Salisbury Plain, which, while never specified, is
most
likely the player character’s primary objective,
being his first duty assignment as a newly minted King’s
lieutenant. Alas, night falls, clouds
gather and break, fate intervenes, and a solitary Victorian manor lies
amidst
countless miles of countryside.
Neither the aging German
housekeeper
nor the family in residence may be what they appear, and the opening
and
midgame are fully driven by the player’s
anticipated curiosity. There are
contradictory tales and mysterious noises aplenty, and nothing can be
taken for
granted, especially in time of war. Why
is Mr. Croxley so secretive, is the beautiful girl really his daughter,
and who
can explain the mysterious chain of tragedies which has befallen them
of late...?
There are two points of
note with
regard to the interface, the first which lies at the intersection of
technique
and prose. One can choose the narrative
person and tense the story unfolds under (first through third, past or
present),
which may seem at first like a gimmick, and maybe it is on some level,
but on
replaying the game, the identity and voice have an unexpectedly
profound effect
on one’s emotional and perceptive
participation in the story, and fortunately for the success of the
story, Mr.
Eve has done a superb job of consistently and transparently varying the
voice.
Second, conversations are
primarily handled
in a topic-suggestion style, rendering prompts such as “(You
think that you should either tell her about the telephone or
complain.)”
which are to be replied to by entering a command or even just a key
word. These keywords (or, similarly, showing/giving
an object to a character) often trigger several paragraphs of dialog
or
action. This works well for a game in
which unfolding the story takes precedence over maintaining an absolute
illusion of freedom, not that the illusion suffers unduly once one’s
settled in; this conversation style may actually serve to enhance
immersion by
protecting the reader from undue mechanical engagement with a command
line, while
allowing for richer prose from the author than a litany of parsed
call-and-response.
Unfortunately, the
conversation system
also stands out for being uncharacteristically buggy. The
majority of the time, keywords and
commands from the conversation prompt will function exactly as
intended, but
there are not infrequent failures which do in fact jar one out of the
story.
Only a puzzle or two exists
in Shelter;
virtually all of the gameplay consists of exploration/examination, and
either
asking characters about topics or showing them items. The only
way to become stuck is to have
missed a description or a line of inquiry. Mr. Eve has
implemented a two-tiered hint system utilizing the
appropriate verbs “think”
and “think harder,”
which provide excellent general guidance but may not help if you’ve
overlooked a particular detail.
Shelter from the Storm
features a rich
setting which genuinely feels of its time, and compelling
characters. There
are few works of fiction, interactive
or otherwise, better suited to a warm fire and a steaming mug of cocoa.
Back to
Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Spaceship!
|
| Author: |
The
Guardian Gamesblog Community
|
| Author Email: |
gamesblog-wikigame-group SP@G googlegroups.com
|
| Release Date: |
September 30, 2009
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 2
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net
|
I wasn't really expecting much from
Spaceship!, as its
development was filled with things I've come to regard as warning
signs. First of all, it's a collaborative effort, a patchwork of bits
and pieces contributed by many writers and coders. I'm not entirely
sold on this Web 2.0 model of content creation, at least in the context
of a story or game, and previous works of IF built under this model
have generally only bolstered my skepticism. The remarkable
Alabaster
aside, most have read and played like incoherent, Mad Libs-style
rambles more fun for their authors than their players. (Yes, IF
Whispers games, I'm thinking of you!) Secondly, the people behind
Spaceship! are not
regular IF community contributers at all, but rather a group from
The Guardian newspaper's
online community who decided it might be fun to make a text adventure.
Such endeavors, well-intentioned as they may be, generally fall afoul
of every beginning IF designer's mistake in the book while always,
inevitably, wallowing in nostalgia for Scott Adams or Infocom rather
than engaging with the last twenty years' work in IF. I'm immensely
pleased, however, to be able to say that
Spaceship! defies
every one of my stereotypes and expectations. This is a solid,
substantial, well-put together game, one that's far better than it
ought to be.
You play the rather hapless captain of a run-down spaceship. As the
game begins, an unfortunately series of events have left you alone on
your ship with a hole in the cargo hold and malfunctioning engines
and power
generator. You can't even get your cabin door open; the fuse has blown.
If you solve that problem, you'll just find that the bridge has also
locked you out and the life pod that could be your ticket out of this
mess won't launch, all thanks to an overzealous security system. Your
mission, then, is to fix your spaceship before you run out of air in
the spacesuit that is the only thing keeping you alive.
Disasters in space have been a staple of IF for plenty of years, but
Spaceship! stands
out for a number of reasons. Most spaceborne IF tends to be either hard
as nails science fiction or wacky comedy;
Spaceship!,
however, lives somewhere in between these extremes. There is plenty of
humor here, particularly in the PC's reminiscences about his misfit
crew, and some of the solutions to your problems are rather ridiculous,
but the game mostly refrains from outright absurdity. And
while the inevitable Douglas Adams and Infocom references are present,
they are least kept somewhat restrained and subtle (well, subtle by the
usual standards, anyway). Janitor Bot Bryan, an obvious homage to
Planetfall's Floyd
and the only other (slightly) sentient being aboard the ship, is in
fact almost as charming as his inspiration.
The game is filled with lots of genuinely good writing, writing that
manages to be entertaining and amusing without constantly feeling like
it's trying way too hard. It's never obvious that so many cooks were in
the kitchen to make this one; if I hadn't known otherwise, I would have
assumed the entire game to be the work of a single talented writer.
That's truly a remarkable achievement.
Of course,
Spaceship! has
puzzles -- plenty of them, in fact. If the authors made a mistake with
them, it's in making them too easy. At times I felt like the game moved
beyond gentle nudges to outright telling me what to do in situations
where I would rather have been allowed to work out the solutions on my
own. Certainly I was never stumped for any length of time. Perhaps its
authors were trying to make the game accessible to those with no
previous IF experience. Regardless, in the end this sin is a relatively
mild one in the IF cosmology; certainly I prefer this flaw to the more
egregious (and common) one of making puzzles that are too opaque for
their own good. These puzzles
are
generally fun to solve, mostly involving combining and
using items in an inventory that grows quite lengthy by game's
end. In light of this,
Spaceship!
conveniently displays your inventory constantly in a
separate window; the game's just friendly like that.
Spaceship! certainly
doesn't probe at the limits of IF in any sense. For all its good
qualities, it's also after all yet another collection of object puzzles
set in a conveniently deserted environment. Yet its craft is strong,
and there's a surprising amount of it; expect to spend a good three or
four hours getting your ship into (reasonably) spaceworthy condition
again. There are some bugs and typos here, enough that I'd like to see
it get another release, but nothing hugely egregious, and certainly
nothing game-threatening. Just as I suspect Emily Short to have been
the driving force that made
Alabaster
as good as it is,
Spaceship!
project leader Aleks Krotoski deserves much credit for
making such a strong final product from so many disparate bits and
pieces. It's great to see a new group of people engage with IF in such
a successful way, and it's great to have another strong, substantial
release in a year that's been blessed with a quite a number of them
already.
Back to
Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Unscientific
Fiction
|
| Author: |
Tom Tervoort
|
| Author Email: |
tomtervoort SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
August 3, 2009
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 2
|
| Reviewer: |
Duncan Bowsman |
| Reviewer Email: |
bowsmand SP@G msu.edu
|
I
don’t know how I would feel about a recommendation on this
one. I
wanted to like it, but it seemed to me that
every time Unscientific
Fiction did
something right, it turned around and did another set of things
wrong. Eventually
every time it did hit on something
like comedy, the most I could get out of it was a sort of forced
smile. Everything
else in the way— much of it not
integrated into the story, but parroted from others, plus some
tediously
fidgety puzzle bits— stole the power of the game’s mirth from my
playthrough. I think it could have been better if the
author had relied more on the power of his own imagination rather than
borrowing from others. I’m not going to
get into spelling errors, except to say that there was one case where a
spelling error threw me off because I had to misspell an object in
order to
interact with it properly.
The
first location felt comically nonsensical enough (we start, for reasons
unknown, locked in a cell with purple carpet). The first
puzzle went smoothly enough; in fact, it felt like a natural
test of the environment to try putting into the toilet (a container)
the only
other object around (which was something that did not belong in a
toilet). Good fun there. But after my brains get
sucked out by this
alien thing, I ended up stuck in “Darkness.” Uh-oh.
There’s
no description there other than “…” After a moment, I get this
hint that I should be able to try doing
something non-physical, which is curious because I’ve already been able
to LOOK, which is certainly
physical. I tried to WAIT, which I’m pretty sure isn’t
physical, but that didn’t work. Turns
out the player has to THINK. The problem I had with that
(aside from
thinking being a physical activity, but hey we’re supposed to be
unscientific,
I suppose) is that I didn’t believe THINK
was implemented.
Not
every game uses THINK, though I
wouldn’t exactly call it “non-standard.” There’s a difference
between “non-standard” and “unexpected,”
though. I might just be extrapolating
from my own experience here, but if I type THINK
while I’m still in the cell I get a default response (“What a good
idea!”),
which would lead me to think, “Oh, default. Guess that verb
isn’t implemented.”
For
a
more extreme example, I have a friend that I sometimes force to play IF
games. He’s “used to playing” old IF that is
underimplemented. Because of that, he
often assumes even basic things like EXAMINE
to be totally useless, so he sees something, assumes it’s
unimplemented, and
never makes progress in anything. My
point here is that an author might do well to call some attention to
what is
and isn’t implemented in an adventure. Infocom tried verb
lists… I don’t think that’s such a bad idea.
That
aside, the chapter that follows that interlude in darkness is one giant
dream
sequence that doesn’t add anything to the rest of the game. If
anything, I found the “mushroom trip”
distracting. It— and the rest of the
game thereafter, for that matter— is filled with memes ranging from Smurfs to Super Mario Brothers
to “All Your Base”
that have no relation to the game itself. It’s possible to
make the game unwinnable by dropping a particular item
inside a building— if you leave your only way back in is by
UNDOING. If
you save outside, with the item inside,
you cannot win. Plus you need to take a
hat that someone is already wearing, though there’s no clue suggesting
this is
necessary or even possible. Generally if I try to take
something from
someone in an interactive fiction while they are actively wearing it,
it’s not
possible— a little clue would have gone a long way there and in some
other
puzzles.
But
there are no hints or help or even an about section, so the only
recourse for a
stuck player is the walkthrough. The
walkthrough, though, will taunt players that use it, suggesting mere
examination of the environment ought to have been sufficient enough to
guide
the player through the game. It also
contains one command that, when entered, prompts a response from
another
character along the lines of, “Hey, how come you’re using the
walkthrough? Stupid cheater, ha ha.” Then you
die. Death
has no consequence in the game though, just UNDO after dying, but it
did have a consequence with me as a
player— I got annoyed. The walkthrough
also had a part where it said I should just TAKE ALL DISHES, though
that command only took 1 (one) dish. So, I had to take all 52
dishes individually.
The
inclusion of grues and a maze of “twisty, little passages, all alike”
made me
groan, even if the maze wasn’t really a maze. I wonder if some
authors know they don’t need to pay homage to Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure
in order to write a successful interactive
fiction? At any rate, overt reference
might be the wrong way to pay homage. Imagine if every side
scroller paid homage to Super
Mario Brothers by tossing Goombas in
somewhere. What
if every novel had a servant named
Friday? Really, it’s enough for a side
scroller that its characters use a similar format, it’s enough that the
form of
the novel thrives, and it’s enough of a nod to Zork and Adventure that
the character navigates around using compass directions and can’t see
anything
in the dark.
Later
I picked up a crowbar and the game told me I no longer needed to fear
headcrabs. This sort of casting out into
external references, constantly exposing metalepses without even
attempting
recapture, broke any unique atmosphere the game managed to build
up. Here
I repeat my sentiment that the author
should take more confidence in the power of his own potent imagination,
rather
than pilfering meaninglessly from other texts.
Unscientific Fiction
did
have its memorable moments for me, though. I thought Lucy’s,
“OH MY MYSTERIOUS FORCE THAT MAINTAINS THE ORDER OF
ALL PARTICLES IN THE UNIVERSE!” was pretty quotable... I just haven’t
found the
occasion to say it. I also enjoyed being
given a little creative control over the game, when I got to name the
food that
scared the aliens so much (I went with “sandwiches”). The
recurrence of that food object in
unlikely descriptions provided some much-needed, textually intrinsic
humor, and
was probably the best gag of the game. Still, I would feel
weird rating this game highly.
Back to
Table of
Contents
SPAG Specifics
The following is
not
a conventional review, but rather an in-depth discussions of
design.
As such, it
contains
spoilers, and is recommended reading for
after you have
completed the game in question.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The King of Shreds and
Patches |
| Author: |
Jimmy Maher
|
| Author Email: |
maher SP@G filfre.net
|
| Release Date: |
July 15, 2009
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 13
|
| Reviewer: |
Victor Gijsbers |
| Reviewer Email: |
victor SP@G lilith.gotdns.org
|
I - Introduction
"A wandering monster I,
A king of shreds and patches,
Of ballads, songs and snatches,
And frantic lullaby!
My catalogue is long,
Through every passion ranging,
And to your humours changing
I tune my maddening song!
I tune my maddening song!"
Thus I imagine the horrid King's entrance aria in the musical version
of
The King of Shreds and Patches, Jimmy Maher's
first interactive fiction. Of course, Shakespeare is older than Gilbert
and Sullivan, but because my acquaintance with
The Mikado
antedates my first reading of
Hamlet, it always
seems to me as if the melancholy prince is punning on Gilbert.
Shakespeare surely would approve, and I think Maher will as well, since
his King is a singer to rival the sirens.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. I want to start this analysis of
Maher's excellent game by placing it within the history of interactive
fiction, for I believe it is a near-perfect example of an important
design ideal. After that, my two main concerns will be with the piece's
horrific content and the Lovecraftian nature of that content in
particular; and with Maher's puzzle design. We will continually keep in
mind the question whether and how these aspects of
The King
of Shreds and Patches help it become the type of game I claim
it is and wants to be.
II - The second consensus
The King of Shreds and Patches, or
King
from now on, is a very good example of what I will call "the second
ideal". This is exactly the kind of new and confusing terminology that
literary critics coin in order to feel important and be cited more
often--but which sometimes turns out to have analytic value. So lets
indulge me and hope for the best.
With an "ideal", I mean a widely shared idea of what a great piece of
interactive fiction is like. In order to be an ideal, many people, both
players and authors, must recognize it as a measure of excellence, as
something that a good game might want to achieve. Such an ideal need
not be exclusive, in the same way that as readers we may have standards
for great detective fiction, for great tragic plays, and so on, without
believing that one of these standards is
the
standard against which all fiction must be measured. A successful
artistic community will almost always have one or more recognized
ideals, plus people experimenting in order to find new ones.
Historically, the first ideal of the interactive fiction community was
that of the tough puzzle game. Ideally, a tough puzzle game does have a
good story, marvelous writing, integration of puzzles and setting, and
so on, but what is most important is that it creates a series of
challenges that the player can really sink her teeth in. The puzzles
must be solvable by a smart and tenacious player, but only with effort:
they must not be easy. They must take time to solve. The player expects
to get stuck often, and will be disappointed if she doesn't. If the
game is any good, she'll keep on thinking about possible solutions at
work or at school, eager to try them out as soon as she gets home. Once
found, the solutions must make sense.
This first ideal of interactive fiction is the ideal of the Infocom
games, and of much "early modern" interactive fiction, such as
Curses
and
So Far.
The second ideal that has emerged in the interactive fiction community
is that of the continually engaging, linear or quasi-linear narrative
interspersed with well-integrated puzzles. Most of the virtues of the
first ideal are also virtues of the second ideal, but what is of
paramount importance is that the story keeps going, that the flow is
not interrupted. Playing interactive fiction is like reading a book,
and reading a successful work is like reading a page turner.
Thus, the player must never get stuck, at least not for more than a few
minutes. Puzzles are still the most important and meaningful manner of
interaction with the game, but their aim has become very different from
what it was in the first ideal. Puzzles must now present a slight
challenge to the player, just enough to give her a sense of
accomplishment when she solves them and to make her feel involved in
the story, but not enough to stop her steady progress through the
story. The puzzles are still essential to the gaming experience--take
them out and the sense of interactivity would be greatly diminished and
the work would suffer mightily as a result--but the author also has a
story to tell that requires fast and steady pacing.
Many games created in the last decade strive for this second ideal, and
most that do not have at least taken inspiration from it. Jimmy Maher's
King is a near-perfect example. Here we have a true
page turner, a well-told horror story of considerable length that we
are eager to explore; and we get puzzles thrown in our way that we will
always solve within minutes and that create exactly the sense of being
involved in the action that they are meant to.
King
is not supposed to be a tough puzzle game where we stare at the screen
for hours as we attempt to get into Joseph's house; indeed, it would be
fatal to the tension created by the quickly unfolding narrative if we
did.
King is an attempt to conform exactly to the second ideal,
and is therefore not an experimental piece. It does not attempt to
explore new ways of story-telling, new types of gameplay in interactive
fiction, new connections between story and game. It is no
Blue
Lacuna, to name one recent and impressive example. But as a
long and substantial work that attempts to conform to the second ideal,
it is still something of a novelty: few if any works combine
King's
many-hour playing time with the aesthetic of the second ideal. The game
is, for instance, much closer to this ideal than its illustrious
thematic predecessor
Anchorhead, which features
puzzles of much greater difficulty and provides far fewer aids to keep
the player on track.
We will talk about the puzzles at length in a later section, but let us
say something more now about the ways in which
King
ensures that the story keeps moving. Two major helpful features of the
game are, first, the map of London, and, second, the list of goals that
pops up in response to the "think" command. The map and the goals work
together in perfect unison: the goals tell us where to go and what to
do there, while the map tells us how to get there. This means that we
always have something to do: we know where the new possibilities for
exploration are, and we can easily move to that place. It is the
equivalent of the "quest pointer" in many graphical RPGs, and it is
perfect for a game that aspires to the second ideal--we may hope that
map and list of goals will become standard in future games. (Games that
do not aspire to the second ideal may not be able to use such systems.
Adventure
ought not to have either.
Blue Lacuna would greatly
benefit from a map, but a list of goals would be simply impossible.)
Another, less successful design choice that keeps
King
moving and on track is its heavy reliance on topic-based conversation,
where the topics are all listed by the "topics" command. This certainly
ensures that we get all the information we need, and it does removes a
major potential source of stuckness. But it turns conversing into a
mechanical task, a mowing of the lawn, and the sheer number of
conversation topics make some parts of the game feel as chores. It is a
compliment to Maher's writing that most of the conversation is fun, but
at some point we really want to tell John Dee to
stop talking...
That said, the problem is mostly one of pacing.
King's
conversation system is compatible with the second ideal, but the scenes
should be relatively short and separated by sequences with more player
agency--that is, puzzle solving.
We now turn to a discussion of
King as Lovecraftian
horror.
III - Lovecraftian horror
Lovecraftian horror is a strange genre, because its very premises set
the writer up for failure. For what is its essence? Lovecraft took the
Gothic tale of terror and pushed it towards transcendence--a dark,
anti-humanistic transcendence. Perhaps it is said most clearly in the
first sentences of his famous
The Call of Cthulhu:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the
inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a
placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and
it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each
straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but
some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up
such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position
therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from
the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
One can immediately see why this vision is attractive to the reader and
the writer of horror: where the Gothic tale was always only an escape
from the rationality of our daily lives, never to be taken quite
seriously, the Lovecraftian tale presents itself as a full-fledged
alternative to rationalism. Yes, your science seems useful... but! You
believe you understand the universe... but! With Lovecraft, horror
gains a metaphysical import which it had hitherto lacked.
So why do I claim it sets the writer up for failure? Because those
things and beings that are so alien that mere knowledge of them makes
us insane, cannot be represented, cannot be captured in language--and
of course it is precisely the writer's job to put his subject matter in
language. At the end of a Lovecraftian tale, when the horror finally
appears in person, the writer has only three basic options. First, he
can try to describe the monster, as an "awful squid-head with writhing
feelers" for instance. Second, he can describe the effect of seeing the
monster on human beings: "Of the six men who never reached the ship, he
thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant." Third, he
can tell (rather than show) us that the horror transcends human
categories: "The Thing cannot be described... there is no language for
such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch
contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order." Or he can do
some combination of the three, as Lovecraft did in
The Call
of Cthulhu, from which all these citations were taken.
But each of these three possibilities is a failure. If the thing is
described, we laugh. Writhing feelers? It's only a giant squid! Are we
supposed to believe in the metaphysical import of giant squids, and
science's inability to deal with them? If we are told that the people
around the horror go mad, we rightly ask
why they
go mad. What happens to them? What do they see? In what sense is this
thing
not just a giant squid? If, finally, the
writer tells us that the horror cannot be put into words, he merely
admits his own failure as a writer. Thus, we have a trilemma from which
no escape is possible--and Lovecraft himself is among those who fail to
escape, as is shown by passages like this one: "The Thing cannot be
described... there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and
immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force,
and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled." A mountain stumbled?
Did it trip over its own foothills, or what? The image evokes laughter
rather than terror.
Being a tale of Lovecraftian horror,
King suffers
from the problem inherent in the genre. The losing endings where the
protagonist goes insane or has his soul ripped out and consumed by an
Elder Horror (and there are several of these), fail to convince. They
do not fit within the fictional world. That is of course precisely
their point, but it is at the same time the reason the point cannot be
made. We are not asked to believe in the slow descent into madness of
Macbeth, nor in the gradually appearing nihilistic insanity of King
Lear, nor even in the charicatural bloody madness of Aaron the Moor,
no, we are asked to believe in the instantaneous reduction of reason to
gibbering insanity--and we do not and can not believe in it. (And can
we believe in it in the presence of Shakespeare? Couldn't one argue
that no form of horror is farther from the Bard's consciousness than
Lovecraftian horror, since Lovecraft's visions--if they can be called
such--entail no less than the dissolution of that consciousness? But
such questions cannot be answered here.)
King also features episodes where the King of Shreds and
Patches and the even greater demon Hastur (not, I believe, identified
by name in the game, but called such in the original scenario) are
manifested physically. Here Lovecraft's unfortunate obsession with
tentacles is emulated. Emily Short
complains
that "unspeakable horrors become speakable and in the process turn out
more banal than their earlier manifestations".
But this banality is not merely a weakness.
King is
strongest as a horror game precisely when the physical, rather than the
mental or spiritual, survival of the protagonist is at stake. We are
tense and worried when we are sitting in a quickly sinking boat, when
we are scaling high walls with little equipment and less skill, when a
thug is about to shoot us down at point blank range, when a horde of
angry cultists appears ready to tear us limb from limb, when a mad
composer tries to claw out our eyes, and, yes, when a tentacled being
bodily pursues us through the desolate house of one of our enemies. At
these moments we are convinced of the danger, and we strive mightily to
think of the commands that will deliver us from evil. In this game, the
horror is best when physical, is most convincing when we can interact
with it and attempt to escape from it
as players,
and Maher knows it. His puzzles in general, but his timed puzzles in
particular, have to do with physical dangers; the most terrifying parts
of the tale coinciding with the tensest gameplay. The opportunities to
go stark raving mad, on the other hand, are merely there as optional
exploration, something we might want to savor as the whim takes us.
A note about the form of the plot. Lovecraftian horror often takes the
form of an investigation that only slowly reveals whatever
insanity-inducing things are going on. More often than not, this takes
the form of the protagonist exploring forbidden texts which reveal the
activities of an evil cult bent on summoning a monstrous being. Indeed,
this is in a single sentence the plot of
King. And
it is a kind of plot that can be easily adapted to interactive fiction:
exploring unknown surroundings and discovering hidden things has been
part of IF since
Adventure, and a textual medium is
obviously the best medium in which to present written clues.
But even more importantly, Lovecraftian horror lends itself incredibly
well to games that aspire to the second ideal. Recall that the second
ideal involves a linear or quasi-linear plot, where the player always
knows, in broad terms, what she has to do next in order to make the
plot advance. As a plot, an investigation with clues is perfect: every
clue is an opportunity for the author to tell the player where to go
next, even as he advances the storyline. On top of that, Lovecraftian
horror is all about the relative ignorance and powerlessness of the
protagonist: he is in the dark about what is really happening, and he
could not do much about anything even if he knew. The result is that
the opportunities for action that suggest themselves to the player are
few, which is exactly what you want as author if you wish to present a
linear or quasi-linear plot. It is easy to keep the player on the
predetermined track when the world does the bidding of vast formless
things that shift the scenery to and fro.
Still -- might not these same effects be attained in genres of horror
that escape the Lovecraftian problem of representing the
unrepresentable? Very probably, and I hope that future authors will
explore the possibilities.
In the course of this section, we have seen that
King
takes some of its weaknesses
and some of its
strengths from the genre to which it belongs; and we also have seen
that it is strongest when it steps out of this genre and enters the
realm of physical danger. These physical scenes are where most of the
action--and I mean action for the player, that is, puzzle
solving--takes place. So in order to complete the discussion, we must
now talk about the game's puzzle design.
IV - Puzzles
Second-ideal games like
King must have puzzles that
pose some challenge, but not too much: the player must be able to
reliably solve them within minutes. Ten minutes is not a problem, if it
happens only once or twice during the course of the game; but if the
player gets stuck for half an hour, her experience will suffer from it.
Now this may appear to be a very hard design problem, much harder than
making the difficult puzzles of the first ideal. In fact, walking the
line between the trivial and the difficult is not harder than walking
the line between the easy and the impossible. For both types of puzzles
the most important thing is to have a good team of beta-testers, and to
adjust the difficulty of the puzzles based on their feedback.
So one
can rely on beta-testing as a way of
ensuring that the puzzles have the right difficulty--but Maher is far
shrewder than that.
King's puzzle design is
actually quite sophisticated, not so much when it comes to the
individual puzzles (which range from the very standard to the
pleasingly inventive), but when it comes to how all the puzzles in the
game hang together. What Maher uses to great effect is
repetition:
putting the character, and therefore the player, in situations that are
like earlier situations and that call for the same solution. Let me
illustrate that by describing four scenarios that are instantiated more
than once in
King.
First scenario: "There must be something interesting here, but it is
not readily apparent." Solution: examine everything, and press anything
strange-looking, look under things that are askew, and so on.
Second scenario: "I cannot reach X, or I don't have the leverage to
open it with my hands." Solution: use your walking stick to reach or
push X.
Third scenario: "I need to bodily go to a place I cannot reach."
Solution: throw your hook and rope, then climb.
Fourth scenario: "Someone is threatening me." Solution: shoot him with
the pistol.
An amazing number of
King's puzzles fall within
these four scenarios. The effect of this repetition is that although we
still perceive the situation as a puzzle, and still need to make the
mental leap to the solution, this leap becomes easier to make as the
game progresses. Near the end of
King, we as
puzzle-solving players have become proficient rope-climbers, proficient
stick-wielders and proficient pistol-shooters.
And this is the brilliant touch: so has the protagonist. What was once
a major exertion has now become routine for him, as we are explicitly
told when we use the rope and hook to climb into Barker's house. By
this coming together of increasing player skill and character skill,
Maher achieves several things at once: he has taught the player to be
an efficient puzzle solvers, which makes sure that the story can go on
without interruption; he has achieved a greater identification of
player and character; and he has implemented something that acts as and
gives all the satisfaction of a leveling up mechanism. It it perhaps
the strongest design decision in the entire game.
It is true that not every puzzle in
King is one of
a repeating kind. There are the two machine-puzzles--getting to
understand the pistol and the printing press--which reward knowledge
and logical thinking, and serve to remind us that we are in Elizabethan
England. There is the fascinating sound puzzle, which left me eager for
more exploration of the possibilities of sound in interactive fiction.
And finally there is the puzzle with the boat, which is perhaps the
most frustrating and least appealing in the game, and would have worked
far better if a graphical representation of the situation had been
available. (And although I am no rowing expert, I wonder about its
accuracy. A one-man rowing boat with a rudder? Surely one would
normally steer with the oars?) The existence on such non-repeating
puzzles is perhaps for the best. The repeating puzzles assure that the
smooth story flow is maintained without the player needing to look at
the hints too often, while the non-repeating puzzles add variety to
what might otherwise run the risk of being too, well, repetitive.
Through the high-level design element of repetition,
King's
puzzle design furthers the goals of the game author, namely, to achieve
smooth story flow and make a game that achieves the second ideal.
V - Conclusion
What, at the end of our discussion, do we still need to say about
The
King of Shreds and Patches? I have often claimed that what
interactive fiction needs most of all are longer games, and
King
is one of several recent attempts to give us such a longer game. I
believe its length pays off. First,
King achieves a
flow and pacing of the story that shorter works simply do not have the
room to accommodate: lots of exposition, several twists and turns, a
slow increase of the tension until we arrive at kidnapping and finally
the sorcerous show-down. In this respect,
King is
very satisfying. Second, the repetition of classes of puzzles that
makes the game so effective is only possible in a longer game. In a
short game, the repetitions would follow so fast upon each other that
they would be merely irritating; only a work of
King's
length can contain several repeating patterns and have room left for
the odd non-repeating puzzle here and there.
For these reasons--and although it shares to some extent the weakness
of all Lovecraftian horror; and although its pacing is not always
perfect, especially where conversations are concerned; and although it
takes a very traditional approach to interactive storytelling--, for
these reasons
The King of Shreds and Patches is an
important work. If Maher's game cannot convince someone that the second
ideal is worth striving for, she will never be convinced.
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