This is the first time I've taken notes on games I've played in IFComp, and it's the first time I've voted! I'm using Jacqueline Lott's rubric for my scores. These reviews are in order of play. My plan is to try to play a dozen or so mediumish games over the next month, and a few shorter ones. (There are six weeks for competition judging, but I'm going to be moving during the last two, which means that I probably won't be playing much, if at all.)
The IFComp 2017 home page can be found here.
With so many entries this year, I'm applying some basic filtering criteria to which games I'm going to play: I'm only playing parser-based games that are designed to run in interpreters that are easily available for Linux. (This second criterion rules out works written in ALAN, ADRIFT, and Quest, some of which I might be able to get running with some effort and time. But I'd rather put this effort and time into interacting with games written by people who aren't making a development decision that includes a belief, however tangential to the main part of their development decision-making process, however subconscious, that they're OK with a development system that cuts off or mandates a lot of extra work some potential interactors, including me. This criterion sometimes also rules out Windows executables, if they don't work well under Wine. When it comes right down to it, I'd rather be trying to figure out how to wrap the dragon's chain around the post than trying to figure out which version of a Windows 'terp happens to work well under Wine.) I'm going to try to get through as many games that fit those criteria as I can during the month of October. Since that's still a lot of games (24), I'm prioritizing games based on how interesting their description sounds to me.
None of this is meant to suggest that there are certain inherently right or wrong ways to develop IF; all I'm saying is that there are works I'm more and less likely to enjoy interacting with, and I want to spend my time on things I actually enjoy. I'm more likely to judge them fairly and sympathetically, anyway.
In any case, given all of that, here's my list of longish games I'd very much like to play through: Swigian, Tuuli, The Wizard Sniffer, The Owl Consults, A Castle of Thread, A Beauty Cold and Austere, A Walk in the Park, Future Threads, and 1958: Dancing with Fear. (These works are my priority: I'll play through as many of these games as possible before I move.)
Here is my list of longish games I'd willingly play through, given enough time, before I move: Word of the Day (description doesn't really grab me, but it might turn out to be deeper than the description suggests), Measureless to Man (the concept is intriguing, but the description is trying hard enough to be mysterious that I can't tell if I'll like it), Goodbye Cruel Squirrel (might be fun if the implementation is clever), Ultimate Escape Room (premise might be thin, but if it's well-done, it could be a good romp), Escape from Terra (sounds like it might be my kind of game, but with this many games to choose from, clumsy description verbiage makes me bump it down in my list of priorities). Works at this level are a secondary priority.
Here is my list of shortish (or length-unspecified) games I'd play through after moving if I wind up with a spare hour: Rainbow Bridge, The Richard Mines, The Wand, 8 Shoes on the Shelves, Grue., and Inevitable. (These are a tertiary priority for me, though some may get played even ahead of secondary priority
games if I wind up with a spare chunk of time here or there.)
Here are games I'm unlikely to play through unless my life goes substantially differently than I expect over the next month and a half: The Cube in the Cavern, Antiquest, One Way Out, and Haunted P.
And here is a list of games I almost certainly won't play through because they don't meet the criteria already specified.
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; they're all honest reactions to the game as it was actually submitted to the Comp. If you 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, and 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 not to be wheedled or cajoled.
Thinly implemented. This seems to be intentional, for effect; but for my taste, it was taken too far, and it made the game feel rather dull. There are quite a few rooms—61, in fact, by my count—but few of them are more than set-dressing or locations to move quickly through. There are a few objects, each of which exists purely as a solution to a single (very easy) puzzle; each is used up by being used: your spear breaks, the shield sinks, etc. The plot feels like the most underdeveloped element of the work: it's virtually nonexistent in the work itself, and what little bit there is requires a fair amount of interpretive work to reconstruct. That isn't inherently a problem: I like a good plot that I have to reconstruct. It's just that here there's not much payoff for doing so.
The minimalist description strategy tries hard to look like it's trying to do something other than get the author out of the work of writing descriptions, but I don't buy it: again, it doesn't seem to pay off in any meaningful way. While there's nothing fundamentally wrong with minimalism, merely stripping out everything enjoyable about text is not in itself a goal that contributes to pleasure experienced while playing through a work of IF. Indeed, there's precious little play here at all: since the descriptions have basically been stripped from the objects as well as the rooms, and since everything is pretty thinly implemented, and since there's rarely more than one meaningful course of action to take at the same time, the game winds up just being a series of repetitive almost-exactly-the-same descriptions as the interactor moves through the very linear plot. If the player's going to be tied up in a car and driven through a landscape, it should at least be an interesting landscape.
I have the feeling that much of this is intended to be authentic
to early premodern tribal Germanic culture à la Beowulf, which it references; I am not an expert in this culture, of course. But what I do know is that purely nominal descriptions appearing only in grammatically simple (i.e., non-compound) sentences is not even characteristic of Beowulf, a poem with much more sophisticated linguistic constructs than those quoted from the game below (which are very fair and quite representative samples). And there's no characterization work being done here: the character moves around the landscape, taking any of a small number of actions because there's nothing else to do. Virtually none of the actions are clearly motivated until the end, when a sort of blanket motivation for the whole plot can be inferred; but it's thin and unsatisfying.
There are also some coding errors:
Inside of the Mead-Hall
The mead-hall is dark and dusty.You can see an opponent here.
none.
(What is that none
doing there?)
Here's an example of implementation so thin it's threadbare:
Cave Pool
Water drips into a pool. A deep hole is here.A chain goes into the hole. It has a hook. You can put something on it.
Looking north, you see the Tunnel; looking east, you see the Limestone Cave.
> examine deep hole
The deep hole? That is what it is.> examine chain
The hook? That is what it is.
All parser responses to examine [noun]
are (without exception, as far as I could tell) The [full name of the noun]? That is what it is.
This is condescending to the player: the player asked for a description precisely because s/he wanted to know more about it. Giving an identity statement in that circumstance is just one step away from giving the player a middle finger. And note that the chain described in the (highly minimalist, as they all are) room description is just aliased to the bit that's necessary for solving the puzzle.
Speaking of puzzles: they're all easy, and they're all boring: surprisingly often, the work makes sure they're not even puzzles, because often you'll stumble across an item that turns out to be a puzzle solution and the work immediately tells you what to do with it.
Here's another implementation problem with a vehicle:
> u
The boat cannot go up.> out
You get out of the boat.Shallow Waters
You can see a boat (empty) here.Looking east, you see the Coastline; looking up, you see the Cliff.
> u
You need the boat.
Did the author intend for me to get the message that I need to be in the boat before I go up, or did s/he just write a check moving
rule in Inform without considering that the player might be trying to move otherwise than in a cardinal direction?
Here's a writing error where the author didn't bother to account for the fact that prepositional phrases can be used as descriptions of location in English, but rarely take an article when that happens:
Looking east, you see the Outside House; looking west, you see the Foothill.
> e
Outside House
You are outside one of their houses. It is very small.Looking east, you see the Inside House; looking west, you see the Footpath.
> e
Inside House
You are in the small house.You can see a fresh snack here.
Looking west, you see the Outside House.
All in all, there's just nothing here for me to like: no character development, no character revelation, no craftsmanship in implementation, no plot, no puzzles, no reality-simulation—or, at least, none of these things is done in a way that shows that the author cares about the player's experience. What am I supposed to get out of this work? I don't know.
EDIT, much later: the author has written a postmortem suggesting that it was an experiment to see how a thin, long, bug-free (well, it's fairly close) game places. This tied for 21st out of 79, so: not too bad.
Another I implemented some objects; I implemented some rooms; it's all pretty thin
game. There's no useful hinting aside from one hint given by a statue, so I wondered around for an hour in ten rooms trying every action I could think of on each of the objects. The thinness of the implementation also means that half-right solutions or solutions that are on the right track don't provide enough information to figure out what the actual solution is. My transcript looks like one long collection of Inform's standard library responses. Maybe this is all somehow in accordance with real room-escape scenarios; I don't know.
The thinness and bugginess of the implementation also prevented me from moving onwards: once I'd put the paper down on a supporter or in a container, it was impossible to retrieve it again (you see no such thing
messages in response to mentioning the paper even when it's clearly described as being in the room). I assume I need the paper to move on, but by the time I'd figured out that I can't retrieve it from the container where it was, I'd already overwritten my save file, and I find I'm not willing to engage in even a short replay to get it again.
The author has declined to provide a walkthrough, saying I really just wanted to see if anyone could beat the escape room for real (which a couple of gritty people have already done in the first couple of days), and it's not easy to determine that if you release a walkthrough.
But I'm not intrigued enough to keep bashing my head against the wall in an extended game of guess-the-verb-across-the-whole-landscape so that I can provide the author with some data on this. As there seems to be no overarching plot, no character development, no hints available in- or out-of-game, and no writing interesting enough to keep me engaged, I'm not playing through again to work around the paper existence problem; I'm just giving up on this one. Perhaps the best thing I could say here is that I'm not the target audience.
I do appreciate that it's a game virtualizing a real-world scenario that instantiates IF tropes, and I realize that this goes some way toward uniting this miscellaneous collection of settings and objects, but that's not enough to keep me interested. I just don't give enough of a shit to keep trying every possible action on every possible object, including objects whose existence I have to infer or be told about in other locations.
Samples of writing problems:
moist, fragrant soil out of which sprout copious amounts of ferns.
copious amounts of ferns? It's a poor structure driven by lazy and unimaginative writing. What was it Orwell said about a pre-fabricated hen-house?)
One word comes to mind upon entering this room: Pepto-Bismol
upon enteringthought if you look again after spending several turns in the room.)
a choked, guttural voice emits from the mouth of the statue
emitsmeans: to let something escape. The author has inverted the subject and object here.)
Antique, wicker planters line all four sides of this room.
antique. Commas, on the other hand, are only for coequal adjectives.)
Fun, well-developed little scenario about the coming of age of a Finnish witch. Dramatic tension is high and pacing is generally good (although the path forward could occasionally be signposted just a little bit more clearly). Characterization for the PC and main NPC (and one dead NPC) are quite good for a piece this length, and the setting is also very well-developed. Everyone likes a protagonist who's a determined young woman—the young Strong Female Character is one of the better recurring tropes in IF, I think—and this piece does a wonderful job of not only characterizing, but showing character development.
There are places where the implementation is thin, or alternate paths could be better supported. To take one example: at the end, it's perfectly clear that the game expects you to examine the corpses before talking to the chief, but there's no indication that this is what you should do, nor does the implementation change its reporting to reflect this. There are also places, especially in conversation, where the randomized atmospheric elements are distracting. Or, here's another bit:
> ask women about goat
[Use TALK TO to interact with characters.]> talk to women
You can't think of anything to say on that topic.
Awkward. (And that topic
is a weird thing to complain about after the game explicitly says that I can't specify a topic and must use TALK TO instead. The implementation details are showing, I suspect.) Basically, though, implementing TALK TO as the only option for conversation works well in this game, and the conversations are quite well written—as is everything in this game, in fact.
A small quibble: having room names not consistently be in title case seems to be why my installation of Trizbort isn't automapping well. (But perhaps this is related to my continuing use of Trizbort 1.2.1 because later versions don't seem to run at all under Wine in Linux.) I don't expect the authors to support every miscellaneous tool, of course; but one reason for using writing to standards is that many tools depend on them, and so departing from them always has more unintended consequences than the author intends.
All in all, this was a lot of fun: a whole lot is packed into five locations and ten usable objects. Best game I've played so far in this comp, though that list is still pretty short.
Characterization is quite good: the duncey douchebag prince and his ostensibly positive-thinking sidekick are a great duo, and the pragmatic protagonist is both a good foil to them and a very well done PC. All of the characters are painted convincingly and with a good eye for detail (the goblins really stood out for me, though there are several other very good examples). The metacritical approach to IF tropes (Some puzzles are old, others are broken, and they are all terribly cliché. […] These puzzles are already where they belong
) is often hilarious. In fact, much of the writing is deeply funny: the Guitar Hero
joke springs to mind, for instance, though there are many many other very funny bits of writing.
The backstory is well-developed and revealed gradually (though I suspected the surprise reveal perhaps long before the game hinted directly at it); it too is thoughtful and funny. The puzzles are also wonderful: trapping the dragon, releasing the imprisoned heroes and then finding them again, putting out the fire, getting Leonhart and Tuck into various areas, getting into the vending machine…. Every single one is a delight, and well-hinted by the game's excellent hint system.
The implementation is excellent, too: access is controlled effectively, and the shape of the map is elegant and balanced (this counts for a lot for me at the upper scoring tiers, actually), and the objects and characters behave appropriately and as expected. There are no glaring errors anywhere that I could find.
The writing is generally quite good, too—funny, well-paced, and engaging—though there are a few exceptions where it's awkward. Two consecutive paragraphs that illustrate both the good and the bad:
Ser Leonhart is a knight, which is to say he is the quintessential man. If asked about his countenance, the good people of the kingdom would tell you the gods, in their quest for perfection, carved him out of the very lands he swore an oath to protect. They would say his eyes shimmer like the crystal blue sea beneath a radiant sun; his hair, amber and billowy, cascades from his noble brow like lush, wind-lashed fields of grain before the autumn harvest; his jaw is strong, defined and unyielding like the great walls that guard the borders against the demi-human hordes; and his massive suit of platemail leaves little doubt as to the robustness of the regions beneath.
Yet to you he is a rather average fellow, with ruddy skin, a mop of blond hair and a long nose. No matter how hard you try, you are unable to gaze upon him with such admiration, and you wonder if it ought to do with being an ordinary pig.
The elevated diction in the first paragraph is wonderful: pompous and bombastic in exactly the way that a parody needs. But such admiration
is clumsy, and what does if it ought to do with
even mean?
Too, I tend to think that the IF convention of giving names to locations, and printing the names of each location at the top of a room description, is a good thing, and is a convention that I wish this game had followed: there are enough locations that it would be helpful to have that mental aid in tracking the geography. Helpful for me, anyway. (Yes, it appears in the status bar. But not only does this break my automapping software, it requires an awful lot of flicking my eyes back and forth, and breaks the conceptual unity between the room and its description.) And I think that the inconsistent approach to exit descriptions—always in the status line; sometimes in the room description, too—would better be smoothed out.
Another minor quibble: given its status as a proverb, I would like to see a game that sets up an opportunity to SMELL ROSES have a better response to that action.
But I loved this: it was fantastic in many ways. I gave it a 9 at the two-hour mark but kept playing it afterwards. I may come back and bump this up to 10 after playing some more entries and seeing how they come out.
Mephistophelesby Thomas Mack, Nick Mathewson, and Cidney Hamilton. Rating: /10.
The basic premise is good, and there is again the enjoyable experience of discovering self-aware jokes about tired IF tropes:
Line 1> x rug
A garish rug at odds with the rest of the plain room.Line 1> move rug
There are no cunningly concealed trapdoors underneath, though I suppose that sort of thing is passé now.
The writing is engaging and amusing throughout (despite occasional typos or other grammar problems), though I think it occasionally feels flat, mostly by not finding enough places to rise above single-dimensionality. (This is admittedy a tough line to walk when parodying, or even engaging playfully with, a set of genre tropes, and, again, it's mostly quite good.) Characters are developed well in one dimension, but that's a reasonable choice for what is, after all, a superhero piece. And the plot development was excellent: the revelations at the end were a lot of fun, of course, but there were lots of smaller-scale revelations throughout.
All in all, this is a very well-done piece. The dual-character concept is developed in a strong and enjoyable manner, and the multiple perspectives add depth to each character, too. The puzzles are well implemented and fun, though I think there are places where they could have been better hinted. What I wound up left wanting in several ways was more: more ship to explore, more things for Amelia to eat, more irradiated areas for Dirk, more character development, more clients for the Owl and more lines on his phone. (What if there were a third client taking care of something on the ground that intersects with the Mephistopheles missions in some way? And maybe a fourth client? How far can the concept be extended without stretching it to the breaking point?)
I would absolutely play through another Owl Consults
game.
I wanted to like this work more than I actually did like it. I wound up dicking around with it for quite a while without really getting pulled in, even though I have plenty of math for the regions I was able to access—I got the sieve of Eratosthenes and Pascal's triangle puzzles right off the bat, for instance. The writing was engaging and free of grammatical errors, and the puzzles I encountered were fair and thoughtful. NPCs I encountered were implemented well and served their functions without being obvious pieces of clockwork, too.
But my real problems with the game had to do with the connecting story. Though it's not the author's fault, I kind of hate the it's all a dream
trope nearly anywhere I run across it, and discovering that the game is a dream several minutes in is, for me, off-putting. I suspect that the dream-setting is more an excuse to tie together unrelated characters and items (Achilles, The Count from Sesame Street, a coin puzzle, a globe, an infinitely long line in Euclidean space …) than it was a good idea on its own. That is to say, the connecting story and the world it occurs in are not sufficiently well-motivated to tie together the puzzles, and so the rest of the game just feels like a pretext for a series of puzzles that aren't closely related to each other or sufficiently motivated.
I think that puzzle arrangement and construction was another weakness here (or, at least, an instance of suboptimal design; or, at least, a sign that the game is just not for me). I wound up poking through the hints a lot when I couldn't figure out how to solve a puzzle, and it looks like the puzzles are …
None of these are deal-breakers on their own; nor is it necessarily the case that all of them together make a game terrible; but it does tend to indicate that it's not the kind of game I'm likely to discover that I love as I play it. (I might note, too, that if I'm jumping to the hints as quickly as I did with this game, it indicates I'm not all that engaged by the game in the first place.) All in all, the experience of wandering around wondering where the hell I'm going to find something I can use as a lever is just not all that fun for me, post-Trinity. Again, this is not a comment about what IF should be,
but rather a comment about what kind of game I'm likely to enjoy and want to continue playing.
So I don't know. It is a nice concept, and there were things I enjoyed about it; but I think it's another of those I'm not its intended audience
games despite being a non-math person who worked through part of college as a math tutor. I didn't finish it; unlike some of the other games I've played for this comp, I kept finding my attention distracted as I switched back to just check in on a social network really quickly. It's got a lot going for it; it just needs, I think, more plot and characterization, something that really motivates the puzzles. Without that, it's a thinly veiled puzzlefest. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but neither is it something that really revs my engine. I guess I just need more story under the puzzles for me to be excited about the puzzles.
I think it has potential, and maybe I'll go back and play it through more after the comp is over, but right now I'm just not engaged enough to keep going. I would like to play the author's next game, though.
All right, one more quick game before bed. This one's kind of a cute concept, and although the relationship between Demeter and Gabriel is rather generic, it is in fact nice to see an unequivocally happy relationship portrayed in fiction from time to time. And the story does a good job of capturing that I can't believe this person feels that way about me
feeling in a good relationship, too. (But, again, it would have been nice to know more about the characters and their relationship: getting their back-story would be great, for instance … maybe Demeter could skillfully allude to it when providing hints?) And it really is a rather well-executed two-room puzzle game.
Nevertheless there were places where the implementation was pretty thin:
> x me
You glance down at yourself to appraise your appearance. Demeter is a little more fashion-forward than you are, and you’ve been a little conscious of that since you started dating him, but you’re pretty pleased with the olive green parka and the pair of jeans you wore today.> i
You are carrying nothing.> remove parka
You aren’t wearing the parka.
Similarly:
> sit
(on the scepter)
That’s not something you can sit down on.
Is that really the best assumption for the parser to make, given that there's an empty and inviting-looking armchair right there?
There are other comparatively small problems: Demeter reacting to the PC when the PC performs actions outside, for instance, or incongruities in characterization, such as this one:
> talk to demeter
What is it? Do you have something that's violet?you ask apprehensively as Demeter rummages through his bag that he pulled out from somewhere.
Hold on, hold on… here it is!He pulls out a small wrapped box and hands it to you. You take it from him.> x box
The box is covered in a sleek black wrapping paper, tied together by a ribbon whose color is unmistakably violet.
Didn't I already get a present from you?
It's not from me,he says.It showed up on, like, the day after Christmas, just on the doorstep outside. I put it away for safekeeping and completely forgot about it until now. Um, there was a tag on it that might have fallen off… But anyway, it's from your brother.
Oh, of course,you groan.My brother has always had a knack for getting me the most timely gifts.> open box
You probably shouldn't take the time to unwrap the box now. It'll probably be best to just finish what you have to do and get going.
This seems incongruous: I've just performed some actions forty or fifty times trying to find all seven of the colors, and the game has let me engage in a fair amount of non-problem-solving exploration and interaction with Demeter; surely I can take less than a minute to unwrap a late Christmas gift from my brother. There is a narrative motivation for delaying opening the box until the epilogue, but it's not a realistic in-world motivation for the character. And it's kind of too bad that this is structured as (basically) a find-the-keys game: I feel like some other overarching puzzle structure would have allowed for more relationship development. Too, I was stuck for over half an hour on finding something green; I generally find infer the existence of objects that aren't mentioned in the room description
to be a super-annoying game feature unless it's handled really well, and the hint system could have been more helpful here. (There seems to have only been one hint for green, and yeah, I'd already guessed I was probably looking for a plant, so telling me to do so really wasn't that helpful.) I would have liked, too, to get some information about the mission that calls Gabriel away: it's the motivation for the entire plot, after all, but the end of the game skips over it entirely and moves on to the gift from Gabriel's brother. (Angels have brothers?)
But all in all, this was a fun, lighthearted little puzzle game. I just wish it had more richness in implementation and characterization, is all.
Nicely written small exploratory game. There doesn't seem to be an overall goal, so I wonder whether this really is just an introduction or other fragment, or if it's just that the signals the game sends the player about completion (score, how many objects have a known purpose, etc.) are intentionally misleading, which might be part of the construction of a hypothetical plot.
Or maybe I'm trying too hard. The walkthrough suggests that by the time I started wondering what else there is to do, I'd found most of it; so I'm just assuming this is a small reflective essay/toybox.
Anyway, on that level, I liked it; exploring the map was fun, and there are a few good interactions and minor puzzles. It wasn't amazing, but it was thoughtful and basically solid. There was real characterization sketched out in quick strokes here, too; good city-life vignettes, and nice insights into the PC woven into virtually everything.
There were minor issues with writing here and there, and there are places where it's rather clumsy; I think the fact that the narrator is being characterized as socially awkward ameliorates some, but not all, of that writing clumsiness. There were also a few (comparatively small) implementation problems here and there, though nothing that really broke the game.
Small, and it has its rough edges, but it did a pretty solid job at what it set out to do. I liked it.
Well, it's immediately obvious that this is another game that alters its textual format just enough to defeat my automapping software. What it gets from this decision other than the smugness of being subtly different with a new prompt and slightly different spacing rules I can't see, though. And the immediate impression given by a long series of apparently declarative sentences with no punctuation at all aside from the full stops at the end of every single sentence, even if it asks a question, is immediately both dull and jarring. (This isn't an American-vs.-British-English complaint. This is a holy shit, at least use punctuation at the British standard level and vary your goddam sentence structure from time to time
complaint.) Here's a sample:
In the woods nearby, hidden deep within them, is your one hope of escape. A beacon for detecting craft from other planets. Now, at last, it has picked up something. For a long time now, you’ve been skyping your mate Al in the colonies AKA America. The two of you have joked about the beacon yonks ago and the both of you are the only ones privy to your hopes and dreams of exiting this miserable excuse of a planet. There is a problem however. Can he get to you or will you have to board the saucer and pick him up before the idiot people of this wretched place destroy the planet. Before you do anything else, you need to contact him.
There are so many other typos and writing problems:
It’s It’s just like a large cigar box.
You’ll have to come for me when you contact the saucer and then you need to come for me.
You bastard! That was my bloody fawking Mate!.
Some of the gang escape You know they’ll turn up later.
Too, I thought we were past the point where the parser berated the user for failing to open and unlock things instead of just going ahead and implicitly doing so itself. Are we really still trying that hard to force the player to think about the tiny subcomponents of each task in the name of realism
? Do we really still think that that's what realism
is? And if realism
really is the motivation for needing to do these things, why are there constant interactions like this one?
: skype al
You click on the skype icon and call up the Skype program. You check to see if Al is on line. You find out he is and give him a call.Al says:
Mike. My truck’s been ruined by a bunch of asshole criminals and I’m stranded here. You’ll have to come for me when you contact the saucer and then you need to come for me. Please get this done ASAP.: put laptop in sack
You’ve already done that.
Was I really Skyping Al while the laptop was in the sack? Come to think of it, do blind users typically use their Macintoshes by clicking on icons? (There are plenty of other little things that violate the Mike is blind
premise in just the first few minutes of gameplay.)
And there are plenty of things that need to be debugged:
: listen to beacon box
*** Run-time problem P10: Since the beacon box is not allowed the property
listened, it is against the rules to try to use it.You hear a beeping coming from the west of you.
Weirdly, this seems not to count as getting a signal
in a plot-advancing way:
: turn on box
You’ve already turned it on.That’s already on.
: w
Until you get a signal you’re not going anywhere.Until you get a signal you’re not going anywhere.
Or perhaps that's not weird: the 'terp is complaining that an attribute can't be assigned to an object, but apparently tracking that attribute is the way the game is trying to tell whether the plot is ready to advance. Or perhaps we're stuck in guess-the-verb land again, where the implementor has not bothered to put in synonyms because he just checked through his own playthrough sequence and didn't get enough beta testing done. (Being told many things twice, sometimes in the exact same words both times, is hardly conducive to an immersive experience, either.)
There are plenty of other problems with incredibly thin implementation in ways that break the bounds of realism:
: out
You leave the safety and comfort of your humble flat.Outside Your Flat
You are outside your flat, There is a small garden is all around you. Outside an open gate lies a path leading to your bug-out cabin in a heavily wooded forest. It’s damn dangerous at the best of times trying to go there as there’s gangs of druggies and bloody football hooligans just waiting to prey on folks like you, They see you as easy pickings. And unfortunately the gang has shown up.: shoot gang
You let loose with your flamethrower There’s a gut wrenching scream,
You bastard! That was my bloody fawking Mate!.The man charges full tilt at you. Your flamethrower turns the thug into a mass of un-recgonizable hamburger. Some of the gang escape You know they’ll turn up later. It’s time to get a signal and follow it.
: l
Outside Your FlatYou are outside your flat, There is a small garden is all around you. Outside an open gate lies a path leading to your bug-out cabin in a heavily wooded forest. It’s damn dangerous at the best of times trying to go there as there’s gangs of druggies and bloody football hooligans just waiting to prey on folks like you, They see you as easy pickings. And unfortunately the gang has shown up.
: shoot gang
You let loose with your flamethrower There’s a gut wrenching scream,
You bastard! That was my bloody fawking Mate!.The man charges full tilt at you. Your flamethrower turns the thug into a mass of un-recgonizable hamburger. Some of the gang escape You know they’ll turn up later. It’s time to get a signal and follow it.
: g
You let loose with your flamethrower There’s a gut wrenching scream,
You bastard! That was my bloody fawking Mate!.The man charges full tilt at you. Your flamethrower turns the thug into a mass of un-recgonizable hamburger. Some of the gang escape You know they’ll turn up later. It’s time to get a signal and follow it.
: g
You let loose with your flamethrower There’s a gut wrenching scream,
You bastard! That was my bloody fawking Mate!.The man charges full tilt at you. Your flamethrower turns the thug into a mass of un-recgonizable hamburger. Some of the gang escape You know they’ll turn up later. It’s time to get a signal and follow it.
Weirdly, you can keep typing G as often as you want to keep getting the exact same scene. (And I've got to say that mentioning how the blind protagonist knows that some of the gang is escaping would be a better show-don't-tell technique than just saying that they're escaping. How does Mike know?)
Another problem the game has with basic mechanics has to do with exit listings: it does a very poor job of indicating where you can move. Ostensibly, typing EXITS ON will start listing the exits (and, in my opinion, requiring that is in itself an annoyance), but this isn't always (ever?) true: In the Outside Your Flat
location, for instance, the only description of what next moves are available is Outside an open gate lies a path leading to your bug-out cabin in a heavily wooded forest.
This is annoying: out doesn't work as a command, but it's the only direction hinted at in the text, so there's nothing to do but guess which directions you can move. (It seems to me, too, that though the PC in play at this time is Mike, a blind man, he would, realistically, likely be able to move around the outside of his own home better than the player put into Mike's position can.)
Unfortunately, this occurs right at a time when player is expected to just attack strangers as a necessary next move, so trying to figure out which direction to move results in instant death and a smug and player-hostile message indicating that the undo command had been silently disabled and the player can go fuck him- or herself:
: n
Until you get a signal you’re not going anywhere.You neglected to shoot the gang and it’s GAME OVER MAN!
This is one of the places where you can’t UNDO. You need to restore a save game. Hope you’ve got one handy or you’re S.O.L.
*** The End ***
I'm just giving up here on a buggy and actively player-hostile game, because after twenty minutes of play the review I've been producing is more of an expanded beta-testing report. No fun for me. Yes, there's a walkthrough and maps provided, but … I'm just not engaged enough at this point to be willing to play through the game's bullshit. (And I tend to think that just following a walkthrough in IF isn't really playing and engaging with it fully.)
Not optimistic in the beginning: getting in requires the magic command push tree, which is not hinted in any way, and several other attempted interactions with the tree provide no feedback at all. Sigh. If I'm going to go to the walkthrough to get the game started, … anyway, let's see how it goes from here.
Despite that, this turned into kind of a fun little game sometimes, despite a large number of bits where the writing and design were rather clumsy: the concept was kind of fun, and the setting was developed adequately (though sparsely), and the puzzles were engaging.
But, speaking of writing, here are some of my least favorite writing bits, nitpicky as some of them are:
A rusting, barbed wire fence, blocks the way north.(There are two separate comma problems in the first five words of this sentence. This is to say nothing of the (arguably, but probably) missing hyphen in that same amount of text.)
North of Bathroom is Staff Room.(All right, I'll say it: ARTICLE USAGE MATTERS (so does capitalization) because getting it right means letting your player stay immersed in the game. Getting it wrong jerks the player out of that immersion. If you give a shit about player experience, get it right.)
you can here buzzing(Really? Can I really here buzzing?)
I know, there are plenty of people who don't know the arcana of punctuation in American English (or any other version, for that matter) and who believe that anyone who expects decent grammar is trying to cramp their creativity
or some other horseshit, but the fact of the matter is that having decent grammar skills is a surprisingly good predictor of (a) being able to understand how other people will see the text that the writer has produced, and (b) giving a shit about other people's experience of that work. This game could have used a proofreader.
There are also some implementation problems throughout, here and there; though most are minor, many are annoying. For another, this is another game where whatever benefit I get as a reader from the creativity
involved in slightly different linebreaking algorithms is nowhere near a fair trade-off for the amount of extra work I have to do to map a game manually.
Another annoyance: this particular game, alone of any that I've played in Gargoyle, silently stopped transcribing to the transcript while I was playing. That means that I played through and then discovered I didn't have a transcript, which is annoying: I want the game to do what I tell it to do, and failing silently is a terrible idea.
> x gunk
The gunk appears to be moldy charred papers. Apparently, the toilet was used to burn incriminating documents.> get papers
You can’t see any such thing.> get gunk
As you reluctantly pick up the charred papers, they disintegrate leaving you with a paperclip.
There's a dependent clause at the end of that very last sentence. Also, since I'm told the gunk
is papers, I should be able to use papers
as a synonym for gunk.
> put coin in box
It doesn’t fit…after several fruitless attempts you give up.> x box
In the small metal box is a small round recess.> put coin in recess
Pumps hum away in the distance.
Two things here. First, I would like to have that last bit be just a bit more direct about the coin working as a fuse: this would help to satisfy Graham Nelson's the player should understand why a solution solves a puzzle
rule. (It was not previously clear that the recess
was a socket for a fuse: this should have been clear to the PC, I would think, and is thus worth relaying on to the player.) Second, and perhaps more complicated: it seems that the problem is the player needs to understand that the coin needs to be used as a fuse and indicate that directly. But It doesn't fit
is not useful feedback, because of course the coin fits in the box: otherwise, it wouldn't be possible to put it in the socket that's inside the box. The feedback to the first command isn't helpful, because it makes it look like the actual solution is impossible. Too, it does a bad job of hinting what the player should actually be doing, because the it doesn't fit
only makes sense if the player already knows what s/he is trying to do.
To put it another way: there's absolutely no reason to believe that the PC can't fit the coin into the fuse box itself unless the PC is trying to put it into the socket, but that's exactly what this sequence of commands suggests.
This is another game that could have used more characterization and plot: there's a lot of missed potential here, I think, for suspense and PC development. Though I've focused on the writing because it's what most irks me and because it's probably the quickest thing to fix, it's not the missed opportunity that most directly cries out for attention.
Immediate annoyance: Overly limited verb set. My first command resulted in That’s not a command I recognize. (Type HELP for command info.)
I then typed HELP; it provided a list of twelve legal verbs. Alas, SCRIPT is not in there, and I'm having a hard time thinking what it is exactly that the game gains from disabling extradiegetic verbs like, for instance, SCRIPT. Since there's no easy way for me to play Glulxe games in a terminal, I can't work around that in the way that I could with a Z-code game, so … no transcript for me, I guess. Being able to keep a transcript is a relatively central part of my experience of a game, in part because I need to be able to review text I've seen before, and partly because it enables the use of mapping software that does most of the mapping labor for me.
I don't know, it's just that … disabling scripting seems profoundly heavy-handed and patronizing. (Both of those things are still true if it's unintentional, though in slightly different ways.) I don't want someone telling me how I'm allowed
to experience his game; I also don't want someone to thoughtlessly wave a magic wand that disables alternative interaction methodologies without having a damn good idea of what kinds of activities are being disallowed.
Since the IFComp Rules for Judges say that it's unfair to submit ratings for games unless the voting judge has made a good-faith effort to play, as intended, every game that they submit ratings for
, and since I take as intended
to mean […] by the author,
I'm just moving on here without rating. DiBianca is entitled to his own beliefs about how the player should
interact with the game; I'm just exercising my right to move along if the terms the software sets for interaction with it don't make me want to play it.
Too bad, sounds like it might be a fun game. Oh well.
The work's basic concept—limited knowledge of future events, which changes as you take in-game actions—is a lot of fun, and is basically very well executed. (There are things I'd like to go back and play with after the comp is over: are there other magical spells that can be cast, for instance?) The game also does well with a map with few (only 10) rooms and making the most of each location. The work also manages to convey a sense of urgency through the italic-type future-tense declarations about what is going to happen, given the actions that have been taken so far. (And, again, this is a clever and well-executed concept.)
Even though this was a very well-done game in many ways, there were things I would have liked to see worked out in more detail. One is characterization: what is the nature of the PC, and why is Kayla important? Providing some backstory here would have enriched the game a lot, I think. (There are other ways that backstory could profitably be enriched, too: who are the invaders? how did Kayla come to be alone except for an alien protector? what are the other books on the shelf?) And it would have been helpful to provide a clearer outline of what sub-tasks needed to be accomplished: not just save Kayla
, but also find Kayla shelter
, place traps
, … etc. Just a little bit of extra hinting would have gone a long way here.
This is a rather puzzly game. That's not a complaint, but I think that some of the puzzles could have used a bit more guidance in-game, because one or two of them seemed only to be solvable by trying every verb on every combination of items: put ash on Kayla is something I never would have thought of if I weren't already looking at the walkthrough because of an earlier puzzle I couldn't figure out. (All in all, though, the writing tends to gently nudge the player in the right direction pretty well; it's just that there are about two different places where the puzzles are under-hinted.) Another fairly small quibble: it's possible to lock yourself into getting an immediate ending before seeing everything the game has to offer, because one way to trigger an ending is to go to see Kayla once enough (but not all) puzzles have been solved. But at least one puzzle solution, according to the walkthrough, requires starting by visiting Kayla, so that one needs to be done early to be done at all. I would have preferred only being able to end the game by entering the obelisk.
But all in all, this was a fun concept that was put together well. There are ways that it could have been a more satisfying piece of work, but it's quite solid as it stands.
Sigh. Another game where automapping (mostly) fails because of irregular spacing and/or capitalization. Oh well. At least in this case, the game is pretty amazing.
All in all, this was great: the writing was gorgeous throughout (despite some minor hiccups here and there), and the progressive character-building through flashbacks was also excellent. The backstory was thoughtful and interesting, and every flashback cast the whole story into a new light. This is probably the best-plotted game I've played so far. The gradual weaving together or racial, gender, sexual, and class concerns was quite adept, too. I leaned on the walkthrough quite a bit here, but that was primarily because I didn't want to slow down or stop getting new plot development. The movie-based structure is wonderful, though, and works very well for structuring the game, which really does feel quite a bit like a jazz-infused mid-50s detective movie set on a Caribbean island.
Despite how good the writing is overall, there are some minor phrasing and grammar problems here and there:
You open the clutch purse, revealing invitation.
the corridor is silent except for the muted sounds coming the party.
You already have all you wanted from him. Let’s not to mess with him any more, lest he discovers his key is missing.
The safe! Whatever is inside has costed lots of suffering, some lives… and might still claim yours.
More substantially, my only real complaint is that I would like to see the multiple-endings freedom translate into a more open-ended freedom where the plot is not quite so much on rails: I want just a little more theoretical leeway in what can be done. But, again, the PC is very well developed, much more so than any other PC I've seen in the comp; the game definitely has some of the best NPCs I've seen in the comp this year, too.
Definitely one of my favorite games in the comp this year. Really wonderful gem. Fun as fuck to play.
The concept of being a grue is a fun one, and in some ways it is very well-executed: there's a lot of work that's been put into disabling visual-based cues that are usually so prevalent in IF (and this game really does do a lot of work to make us realize just how visual Inform's standard library is—and, for that matter, how visual humans usually are). But there are some irritations with these mechanics, too: most notably, there are problems with the player/PC interaction that aren't tackled in a satisfying way. The standard experience of conventional IF is that darkness is disorienting to the PC, and so it is here; but the PC here is a creature fully adapted to living its entire life in darkness, and I think that there's a lot of ways in which the experience of being a grue could be smoother for the player. For one thing, working out a way in which compass directions translate more consistently and predictably into grue movement would pay off here: none of the ten standard compass directions gets you out of the layer, for instance; you have to use OUT for that (which is annoying: surely the exit is in a compass direction, and the game later recognizes compass directions on other occasions, so it might as well do so here). On the other hand, directions are apparently not reversible? I can go OUT to leave the Lair, but can't go back IN. (Highly incongruous: surely a creature fully adapted to darkness knows how to get into its own lair, especially since you know at the very beginning of the game that it's definitely been there at least once.) Also, I can go DOWN into the pit, but not back UP.
Similarly, some of the puzzles seem random and arbitrary, and death comes easily in some places without being clued. When trying to get the adventurer into the pit, SMELL ADVENTURER results in death, but TASTE ADVENT gets the adventurer to fall in. There's no good reason for this to be the case, even though there's a narrative explanation that can be teased out of comparing the two responses. This often reduces the game to a save often, try everything
state, which is too bad: I quite like the possibilities in the concept, and (as I said before) in a lot of ways it's basically well executed; I think that it really just needs to be better hinted a lot of the time to avoid some of the guess-the-verb problems it falls into.
Speaking of which, the final sequence of two commands needed to finish the game is pretty guess-the-verb-y, and I think that a little hinting at the beginning would go a long way toward making that a more solvable puzzle (I checked the IntFiction.org forums looking for hints and finally just read the walkthrough linked there to figure out how to finish the game. Another minor quibble: the response of grues to light is not canon-correct; the PC can be instantly destroyed by the adventurer lighting a match, but in Spellbreaker (and Sorcerer?) you can light up a grue itself with the frotz spell, and the beast runs away, terrified and tearing its own fur, but not turning instantly to ash; similarly, there are grues near a bioluminescent pool in Spellbreaker that are apparently more light-resistant than this PC. (Perhaps the PC is especially light-sensitive, even for a grue? This could be a fun disability to develop into part of the PC's character in an expanded version. Which I'd quite like to see.) Nevertheless, there is a fair amount of authorial effort put into linking the game into the tropes established by the Zork-universe games: responses to LURK and SLAVER are good, for instance.
So there's definitely room for polishing on this one, but it was a clever set of mostly-not-too-difficult puzzles built on a fun concept. I liked it.
Hmmm, another from Extra Mayonnaise, whoever s/he is. Wonder if there'll be a revelation after the comp is over.
Fun simulation, basically well implemented (and written in Inform 6, and copyright 2004? and a version 5 Z-code file? is someone pulling an old project off the shelf?). There are some fun puzzles (climbing the birdbath, and getting out of the garage, for instance), though the crossing-the-street puzzle should really be clued better: it requires repeatedly examining an object whose existence has to be inferred with no clue that repeatedly performing that action will have any payoff. And getting back through the maze is difficult and not clued at all, as far as I can see; I'm glad I blundered across a solution at random (or, rather, with the first systematic thing I tried). The basic premise of the game is rather silly, but even given that, the NPCs are kind of thin here (why do the red squirrels just stand around looking angry near the end?); so is the PC, for that matter. Flat characters worked better in A Walk in the Park than they do here, I think, though that doesn't prevent this from also being a fun … well, walk in the park, anyway.
Some minor writing errors that bothered me:
the red squirrel tribe who are hording the great supply of acorns from us
the girl is obviously shaken judging by the sheer number of explitives she has uttered to herself since exiting the car.
Overall, I liked it: good and puzzly; not too hard; fun; does a good job with its premise. A quick game that I finished in a little over an hour.
Really guess-the-verb-y: I must have tried eight or ten variations on MOVE ANTENNA before I actually tried MOVE ANTENNA, and none of the similar commands even bothered to indicate I was on the right track. (FIX ANTENNA? TOUCH ANTENNA TO METAL DESK? ROTATE ANTENNA? UNSCREW ANTENNA? Nada useful for all of them, plus several others.) Similarly, the how do I avoid my fate?
puzzle isn't really clued at all, and so that makes two puzzles, total, in a very short game, neither of which is really supportive of player solutions by anyone who didn't write the game.
This is too bad, because the game has potential; the basic idea is good. But it boils down to trying every possible action until something works out. Too, it ends abruptly: you escape one problem and the game is over. It feels like a cheap ending: what happens next? It's a chapter ending, not a story ending, but there's nothing afterwards. Too bad, because it could have been built into something fun instead of a two-room game with six objects and two puzzles.
Other places where the game failed to shine: there's no real (N)PC development of any kind. The three sentences in the comp description turn out to be a set of non sequiturs, even though I'd initially gone into the game assuming that that arrangement of sentences would eventually make sense. (Not only are they non sequiturs, they are non sequiturs because none of them actually translates into game terms in any meaningful way.) There is no setting development. There is no real development of the time-travel concept, which is a letdown: there's a fairly strong tradition of future-self-cooperation games throughout IF.
Maybe this is just a game meant to be submitted to IntroComp?
The why am I drifting here in space in a ship with dead people?
quasi-amnesia premise is a bit tired but does a good job of setting up dramatic tension at the beginning of the game.
Narrative is remarkably developed and very dense: this is game is a real pleasure to read and play. There's a great deal of interesting work going on in terms of the player/PC interaction: there is a good deal of initial sympathy for the PC, both because she is attempting to survive through a catastrophe that is not her fault and because she is also the victim of discrimination and bullying because of her race; yet the PC's expressed motivations and concerns at the end of the piece increasingly cause much of that sympathy to be withdrawn by the end of the story. This is a powerful and complex interaction that displaces a number of SF IF tropes, and I'd like to see more of it, frankly. (I also wish that the ending had made more of this transformation.)
The story is, however, very much on rails, and to the extent that there are puzzles, they merely unlock another pearl on the narrative string. But it's a good, engaging story: characters, even the dead ones, are richly and deeply developed; the progressive revelations throughout the story pay off pretty well, all in all, especially as the narrative threads get woven together: race, sabotage, discrimination, resistance, sexuality are all handled in quite a capable sci-fi manner. (On the other hand, I didn't think that the narrative about sexuality tied in to the rest of the plot in an organic way: though maybe I'm just missing something or should take another look on a subsequent playthrough.) The story also manages to build and sustain tension quite well throughout. (Though the ending is not as satisfying as I would have liked, given how much suspense the narrative built up. In all fairness, I myself am not sure what more I would have liked to see; it's just that the actual ending left me feeling unfulfilled, even if it did wrap up plot threads.)
There are some downsides, one of which is that there are occasional annoying writing problems:
This is very unusual for an Inner Worlder but, you still could not describe him as friendly.Small, oblong and matt silver in colourBut, otherwise his features are what you would expect and he has the classic features.is know by both sides asYou would love such a private space, rather than have to mix with the Inner Worlders. (What's wrong with syntactical parallelism, boy? Why not start 'er off with a nice bit of syntactical parallelism?)
You remember overhearing somewhere, that Wort is Tont Laancer’s sister.Housing the power of the vessel, the Bio-drive, it is a long oblong chamber running south.Too, the end-of-game task leading to at least one ending is really annoying, as it essentially requires re-traversal of the entire map while collecting items that have been seen but not collected before. There's also at least one persistently annoying bug that didn't show up until I'd been playing for well over two hours (and therefore, per the IFComp rules, it didn't affect my score): it's apparently possible to run out of
… not time, but the time that the game is able to track. So, here's a transcript selection:
> power on vending machine
The vessel is obviously without power, so it will not be possible to power on the vending machine.*** Run-time problem P22: Attempt to look up a non-existent row in the table ‘Table of Earth-Times’.
> time
The current time is “976 - 53:55 - 99:50.” It is hour 33 or Adulen on your world.It is around 00:15pm Earth time.
> s
Dorm Station
Containing five bunks in a row for the off-duty crew it is always hot and sweaty in here. The metal door (open) leads west into the main passageway. The door (open) leads north to the Refresh Station.Fourth Engineer Waalker is lying face up on the fourth bunk.
You can see an escaped prisoners report here.
*** Run-time problem P22: Attempt to look up a non-existent row in the table ‘Table of Earth-Times’.
> time
The current time is “976 - 53:55 - 99:52.” It is hour 33 or Adulen on your world.It is around 00:15pm Earth time.
That recurring run-time problem message is annoying, and it recurs, once it starts, at the end of every single extradiegetic command for quite a while; and it looks like Earth time has stopped advancing (no surprise, given the content of the message), whereas the various alien times continue to advance. I suppose the author may never have thought I would be as thick-headed as to need as much time as I've taken, so it seems likely to me that the game never got playtested for this long. Soon after that message does stop, another (*** Run-time problem P22: Attempt to look up a non-existent row in the table ‘Table of Mirus-Times’.
) begins.
I gave the game an eight after two hours of play (basically, I would like to see more of an open field in more of the game for a higher score, plus I'd like to see more attention to writing polish), but kept playing: the story is quite engaging. The multiple endings worked well (it seems that there are several I have not yet found, if a quick after-the-end-of-the-game glance at the walkthrough is any indication).
Maybe I'm an idiot, but I absolutely cannot figure out what the title is supposed to signify: neither the word castle
nor the word thread
appears anywhere in my game transcripts. This seems to be a kind of microcosm for the game as a whole, which feels like one long string of missed opportunities: the basic concept is interesting, and there's the skeleton of a good game if it were fleshed out, but there's an awful lot of failings here. For one thing, the writing is profoundly dull, following the model of simple declarative sentences that are modified by a dependent clause. Usually the dependent clause is at the end, though it is sometimes omitted entirely. I like a wordy piece of IF (I just reviewed Word of the Day quite positively, didn't I?), but the repetitious clunking of similarly structured sentences usually of a similar length put me to sleep here: it took me four days to spend two hours interacting with the game because I had several days where I found I'd rather unpack books from boxes onto shelves than get back to the game sitting open on my laptop. Descriptions are flat and uninspired, and, apparently as often as not, the adjective modifying a noun merely states what material an object is made of. Never does a description leap to life and become vivid and compelling; in fact, virtually every paragraph is a slog because there's no structure to it; it's a series of declarations with no work done connecting the independent facts recorded therein. That is to say, there are a lot of places where the idea that it's a narrative breaks down more or less entirely.
Events also occur and are triggered apparently entirely without narrative motivation: I cannot imagine completing this work without a walkthrough. To take one example: there's a sequence in act 2 that requires finding a thug who doesn't appear until after a certain upstairs location has been reached. But there's no logical reason for this, and there's no in-game indication, as far as I can see, that anything in this (fairly distant from the player) alleyway has changed; the only way for the player to trigger this sequence, if the player is not also the game author, is to explore everything until the triggering location is stumbled on, then continue exploring everything that's already been explored. That is to say, the game rewards neither close reading nor puzzle-solving; the sole PC virtue rewarded by the game is dumb persistence. This is perhaps a virtue in (some parts of) real life
, but it makes for a fucking dull game. (Questions that seem to have no real answer in the narrative in response to this incident: Why can the player not climb up to the second floor until the thug has been dealt with? Why does the specific item required to deal with the thug work in the way that it does, and how is the player supposed to know that the one opaque hint earlier in the game applies to this one situation? Why does the thug not appear until that upstairs location has been reached? Why does the author not give any indication that something changed outside in the alley? The rationale for these things seems not to be player-hostile, but rather based on a poor model of how someone other than the author might play through the game.) On a broader but related level, the various elements of the plot don't seem to be put together in any way: there are three acts, each basically entirely separate from the others, and the ending, though it provides a lot of new information, doesn't reintegrate the elements of the plot together into a cohesive whole. It's just a dump of more or less unrelated new information about the game world.
There is also a slew of basic writing errors, and a number of mildly to moderately irritating coding errors. Here is one of my least favorite:
> ask about rock
Which do you mean, the small glowstone, the strange rock, the large dark object or the strange rock?> strange
Which do you mean, the strange rock or the strange rock?> strange rock
Which do you mean, the strange rock or the strange rock?
Given that the strange rock
is the focal point of the game, and this set of conversational options appears when talking to each of several NPCs arranged around the location where the rock is at the end of the game, I take it that all four or so NPCs had something illuminating to say; but now I'll never know what it was, because it's not possible to disambiguate when asking the NPCs what they think and know about it. There are also plenty of guess the magic phrase that you have to type to make the plot advance
moments in the game.
Speaking of NPCs, there's very little effective characterization of NPCs (or the PC) here; the characters are all flat tropes from pulp fantasy (the musclebound warrior. the clever and physically weak protagonist who has to rely on his noggin. the alewife with a heart of gold), and there's no real characterization that takes place during the narrative; even the stereotypes never spring to life, the way that they did in The Wizard Sniffer or The Owl Consults. Which is too bad, because, again, the basic idea for the game, and the skeleton of the game's structure, has potential, but I keep picturing the author sitting around making excuses for the game's weaknesses by pointing out that the worst of published pulp fantasy is no better.
All in all, there were things I liked here; but they were buried under a mass of under-implementation, soggy writing, and clichés. (But I'd like to play another game from this author next year if the implementation work is done.)
EDIT, 26 November 2019, in the interest of fairness and transparency: Marshall Tenner Winter has written a blog post that may be intended to respond to this particular review, although I suspect that it is really a response to my my 2019 review of his 2019 IFComp game. He himself declined to clarify what he was talking about in a private message. In any case, that response is linked and (briefly) discussed at the end of that review.
Sigh. Had to go to the walkthrough to get out of the initial trapped
scenario, and it's another only-the-exact-verb-the-author-was-thinking-of-works problem. (rotate prongs works, prongs
being a part of a part of a thing you see when you look around in the initial location; but similar commands, like pull prongs, do nothing. Also, rotate is not a verb I would naturally apply to an object of that size.) Again, I can't figure out the significance of the title, though at least I have located the title objects in the game this time.
There are moments of nice, vivid writing here, but all in all, I don't know what this is supposed to be: there's something about war, and then a four-room exploration with miscellaneous objects, many of which are unimplemented. Looking at the game's discussion on the intfiction.org forums suggested that the magic verb remember, not hinted in-game anywhere I can find, might do something; but all of the remember commands I tried just prefixed the object's examine response text with a predictable You envision [object name].
string. There seems to be no hinting about how to achieve alternate endings, just as there's no hint about what your actual
mission is (the PC starts the game with false orders
in his pocket) until you've managed to accomplish it.
So, again, it feels like there's a nutshell of a good idea here, but it's hardly been fleshed out at all above the I implemented some objects and some rooms
level. Sigh. Another should-be-IntroComp game, maybe?
… along with a quick rationale for each of those decisions.
More often than not, this means one or more of the following things: there's no (good, easily available) Linux interpreter for the system that the work of IF was developed for, the Windows 'terp doesn't play well under Wine, and/or the 'terp is not free or otherwise comes with (to me) unacceptable requirements.
Many games meeting this criteria have already been eliminated by being web-only.