#
ISSUE #56 - November 16, 2009

SPAG
The Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games
ISSUE #56
Edited by Jimmy Maher
November 16, 2009
SPAG #56 is copyright (c) 2009 by Jimmy Maher.
Authors of reviews and articles retain the rights to their contributions.
All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine with the traditional 'at' sign.
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 Cathedral
Textfyre'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.
Back to Table of Contents

Thank you for helping to keep text adventures alive!