Well, this is the first year I've tried to systematically play any games for the Spring Thing. As is my wont, I'm getting started late in the game, so I think I'll just grab a few parser games before the festival ends on 6 May.
Given that, here's my list of games I'd like to play through:
These reviews are not primarily intended for authors of games, for the reasons that Sam Kabo Ashwell has explained. Some reviews are quite direct about my reactions to the games, and my reactions to pieces of IF are occasionally negative. I don't tone down my reactions to save authors' feelings; if the game is flawed, I say so, and if the flaws have a serious impact on my ability to engage with and enjoy the game, then I may have highly negative reactions to the game for exactly that reason. Authors are of course welcome to write whatever they'd like, whether I think it's good or not; but, by entering it into IFComp, they are asking for judgment on it, and my judgment, partial and biased as it may be, is what these reviews include. All of these are honest reactions to the game as it was actually submitted to the Comp. If you, author, have questions or want me to elaborate on something I said, please let me know! Similarly, if I've said something that is factually incorrect, or that is profoundly off-base, I'd appreciate hearing about that, too.
That being said, the game needs to stand on its own. I'm talking about the game itself, as it was actually published; and that may have very little to do with the author's vision for what the game could be, or should have been, or with the author's view of her- or himself as a game author. None of that is relevant to the review; the review is about my own experience of the game. I do try to engage with each game on its own terms, and I try to be explicit about my own preferences. Some games are just not for me. I try to be clear about that, too. I'm happy to elaborate and discuss, but I'm not willing to be wheedled or cajoled.
All of the reviews below are spoilery. You may want to avoid reading them if you're still planning on playing the game. Or you may decide that you can appreciate a text even if you know some of its details ahead of time.
That's up to you.
Basically well implemented, but kind of sparse. The room and item descriptions are mostly quite bare: sometimes this works to convey the atmosphere of loneliness on the space station, but it seems like someone who's spent zir entire life on a map that can be modeled in a little over 20 rooms would be likely to have the kinds of emotions and memories that might creep into the narration a bit more. The backstory is interesting, and I want more of it: what was the culture of this Year of the Flood-like space colony? One of the reasons that the middle book of Margaret Atwood's trilogy worked as well as it did is that it spent a lot of time answering that particular question.
The underlying structure—a classic IF puzzlefest—was basically handled well, though there were unexpected moments of difficulty: trying to figure out just what do to with the eraser, for instance, was pretty guess-the-verby, even after I noticed that the eraser works at describing a changing state fairly prominently. Similarly, trying to figure out how to get the communicator working was fiddly. Both of these would have benefitted from a little better signposting and/or alternate solutions. (In many cases, too, the HINT command was actively misleading, even if unintentionally so: during the eraser puzzle, HELP only told me that I had all the items I needed to solve the puzzle, which was really not enough of a nudge; when trying to figure out how to repair the pump, HELP told me I needed to find more modules, which was not actually correct: I had already found the module I needed; during the attempt to get the communicator working, HELP just told me that I needed to connect the communicator to a working audio unit, even after I'd done so and powered the unit with a working power module.)
Little typos and grammar errors here and there, though I no longer want to go back through my transcript to find them. Sigh. I should have been taking these notes during play.
At a higher level, though, I wanted a little ... I dunno, something more from the puzzles, which often are just wandering around trying to match objects to other objects. Which is fine, but I think some sort of larger frame would have helped; again, I think that there were missed opportunities to develop the back story, the culture of the space station, the religious beliefs of the colonists, the PC zirself, etc. There's a lot of things that would have added a lot to the game, even in small quantities.
But there was a lot to like, too. The map design is symmetrical, functional, and beautiful: there's not a lot of circular maps in IF that are this elegant. And the PC is basically well constructed and believable; I just wanted more from zir. And the puzzles, though occasionally difficult, are basically fair. I'm hoping to see something else from Insel in the future.
Self-aware and sometimes cleverly reflexive, though there's really no plot and the implementation is in places very, very thin. There's little opportunity for alternate pathways and guess-the-verbiness abounds (though this last problem is ameliorated by the fact that there's such a sparsely implemented world in the first place). Plenty of items are mentioned without being implemented, and those items that are implemented are often implemented in insufficiently flexible ways (the tic-tac-toe-playing computer being perhaps the best example).
Other quibbles: the last room in the maze has a NORTH exit that's mentioned in the room description, but not implemented. The game never rises above a random description of objects and becomes a story with a plot. The PC is insufficiently developed. Puzzle solutions are often essentially unmotivated and random, though (again) the sparseness of the world helps ameliorate that.
I dunno, it's just not for me. Mystery IF has never really been my thing. There's a basic disconnect, for me, between reading a mystery novel and playing through a piece of mystery IF: there always seems to be something too guess-the-verby, or otherwise too read-the-author's-mindy. Yes, a big chunk of the point of the traditional hermeneutic detective story is to follow along and solve the mystery for oneself, and there are complex rules about what contitutes fairness
for the author in terms of what has to be shown, however misdirected, and aobut how that misdirection can occur. But this act of misdirection, it seems, is almost always at odds with the basic struggles with which parser IF still, well, struggles: the kind of hinting and assistance that even competent players need in order to get through the game is totally absent, or of much reduced scope, in mystery IF. It's a special case of Graham Nelson's observation that the reader of a traditional novel need not worry about suddenly discovering that pages 63 to the end have been glued together.
Much of which may just be to say that I should play more mystery IF, because I'm insufficiently familiar with its tropes and what counts as a clue. (I've never even played the Infocom mysteries!) But the necessity of trying absolutely everything possible in every game until I start to become familiar with the genre's tropes is an excruciating prospect: a kind of meta-lawnmowing that would be dull and protracted. Games like this, where there's just very little helpful feedback and most non-productive responses do character-building but no hinting tend to reinforce that for me.
So I guess it's just not for me. Moving on. I'll check back once in a while to see if there's a walkthrough listed on IFDB.
Homebrew IF system, looks good in some ways on first exposure. Let's leave a space up top for quibbles and complaints before I even start playing.
Quibbles and complaints:
save.dat in the current directory.I'll be walking around here between locations. If you want me to stay, say '
Fred, wait'. [...]
Hit ENTER to continueprompts take anything you may have typed before the ENTER and, after the ENTER, process it as a new command.
Other gripes that are not necessarily about XVAN:
> x water
Which water do you mean?
The water tap or the water?> water
Which water do you mean?
The water tap or the water?
Fred leaves the roomwith (e.g.)
Fred leaves the room to the southeast.