The readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction hold an annual competition for short works of interactive fiction. Anyone can enter a game, and anyone who doesn't enter can serve as a judge by playing and scoring as many entries as possible. 1999 is the competition's fifth year. If you haven't heard of the competition before, check out the 5th Annual IF Competition home page.
For this year's competition, I didn't have a chance to enter a game, so I instead tried to contribute by writing these reviews.
I played the games according to the contest judging rules, spending about two hours with each game. I played the TADS games first, to be sure I would minimally reach all of those if I ran out of time - fortunately, I had enough time to get through all of the TADS, Inform, Web, and Alan games. I played the TADS games in alphabetical order of title (actually, of .GAM file), then I moved on to the Inform, Web, and Alan games. The reviews appear in the order in which I played the games.
I was truly impressed by this year's games. Given the large number of entries, I rather expected numerous half-hearted efforts, but that wasn't the case at all. The level of quality is consistently high, and the games show a great variety of subject matter, style, and technique.
I wrote these reviews partly for other players, as suggestions about which games they might like to try, but even more for the authors, to provide some detailed feedback. I've been grateful for the reviews people have written of my own games, since different perspectives are so instructive, and I hope these reviews are similarly helpful to this year's authors.
My primary criterion in reviewing these games was simply how much I enjoyed them. I'm no expert on literary criticism or much of anything else in the arts, but over the years I've tried to understand my own likes and dislikes in IF and extract from these some principles of what, for me, makes a good game; I hope that as a result I can offer some useful advice about these games.
Because I tried so hard to explain why I didn't like certain things, rather than just saying so and leaving it at that, I fear that some of the reviews might sound unduly harsh. I hope that the authors will forgive me and try to find among my comments the constructive criticism I earnestly meant to offer. This year's authors contributed a wonderful set of games, and I congratulate and thank them all.
Mike Roberts
Palo Alto, California
November 1999
These are the games I played, listed in the order in which I played them. The number following each entry is the score I gave the game out of ten points.
At the start of 4 Seconds, the player character is a police investigator called to the scene of a disaster in an underground laboratory complex of some kind. As we survey the ruins of the lab, we find hints that we are in a science fiction story; this is soon confirmed when we find that our job is to travel into the mind of one of the participants in the events leading up to the disaster, to see the events through his eyes, using some unspecified telepathy technology.
There's a lot I liked about 4 Seconds. The narration maintained a consistent, serious tone and style, without the frequent sarcastic asides and one-liner jokes that most IF authors find irresistible. The establishment of and adherence to the player character's point of view is well done: the game reveals information in a deftly matter-of-fact way, never stopping to explain something in contemporary terms but giving the reader enough to piece things together anyway. Opening the story just after the main events serves as a nice hook by giving us lots of questions that we want answered.
The game ends with a number of plot elements left hanging. We never find out exactly what was going on at the lab, and what's happening with Dekker just before the end is unclear. We can draw our own conclusions with most of these, but one loose end bothers me: we never wake up as the original police investigator again. Perhaps Dekker killed the investigator, but in any case I am left wondering what purpose in the story the investigator served, other than giving the introduction its hook. Throughout the story I kept in mind that I was seeing things through the investigator's eyes, so the absence of any mention at the end robs the story of closure.
In the credits, the author apologizes that the game is buggy, and indeed it is. While the writing has good style and technique, it could use a couple of editing passes to clean up a fair number of mechanical errors, misspellings, and awkward phrasings. Formatting errors also show up every so often, particularly timed events that run together with the preceding text. A number of "ask" commands have no response at all.
The most problematic bugs, though, are the large number of objects that aren't mentioned at all in room descriptions, or that are mentioned but have completely different vocabulary. One room description mentions a "metal cabinet," but you must refer to this as a "locker"; another has a "metal door" which only knows the word "safe." A "silver cage" can only be called a "machine." There's a crucial escape hatch that, as far as I can see, is never mentioned anywhere, a similarly crucial chain whose presence isn't mentioned, and a "strange device" described in one room that doesn't seem to be present at all.
The game also suffers from a few guess-the-verb problems. When we must move an object, pushing or pulling it has no effect. We must "spray x on y"; we cannot "spray y with x" or "put x on y."
Most of our actions flow quite naturally, so that they don't really seem like puzzles. A few things are quite obscure, though.
Early on, I missed a crucial scene that seems to occur after a particular number has elapsed; I was in the wrong place when the scene occurred, so I missed it. Showing up at this scene wasn't meant to be a puzzle, so it should be harmless to provide some stronger guidance about where we need to go at the proper time; one of the other characters could find us and insist we accompany them there, for example, and the scene could be deferred until we show up.
At one point, we have to move a rack to expose something on the wall behind it. I have no idea how I was meant to figure that out. The only hint, such as it was, comes from a suggestion that the rack has been recently painted. It's not clear to me why this should suggest that something is behind the rack. Once I found from the walkthrough that I had to move the rack, I looked for hints about it, but there are none that I can see: looking behind the rack (before moving it) reveals nothing, nor does searching the rack, nor does examining the paint.
Another puzzle involves using liquid nitrogen to make metal brittle enough to shatter. This is one of those real-world solutions that I think needs to be hinted at strongly within the game world, for the usual reason that the game world is always an extremely tiny subset of the real world, and without hints we cannot possibly guess what the subset consists of. One of the other characters should have accidentally (or otherwise) shattered something with liquid nitrogen earlier in the game to demonstrate the principle for us.
A later puzzle was very similar to the liquid nitrogen puzzle, but this time consisted of cutting glass with a diamond. Again, there was nothing to hint that we needed to weaken the glass or that diamonds would have this property in the game world. The puzzle was much more constrained, in that virtually the only thing we could do at this point was break the glass, but it was still a bit obscure.
Most of the game's bugs will be simple to fix, and the more obscure puzzles can be improved greatly by a little hinting. I hope that the author releases a second version after the competition, since this game will be great once it's a little more polished.
Score: 7 (good writing and story, but seriously buggy)
A Moment of Hope puts a heavy emphasis on the fiction in interactive fiction: it is much more a story than a game. The story is engaging, the interactive experience is exceedingly transparent, and the technical details are highly polished.
The story is of an unrequited crush. The player character has made contact with the object of his affection (a character named Anna) through an internet service that purports to solve a traditional problem faced by a shy person with a crush: how to find out if the other person has any reciprocal interest without risking the embarrassment of admitting your interest if they have none.
The story conveys the player character's emotional roller coaster vividly. Almost too vividly: in the first scene I wasn't even sure that the player character was a well person, so distraught was he at the prospect of phoning Anna for the first time. The main character's elaborate theorizing and mood swings as he tries to figure out how to interpret Anna's actions seem painfully realistic.
The interactivity in the work is extremely transparent. Part of this is puzzle-free design, part is technique, and part is technical polish. The technical polish was especially evident in the ease with which I was able to find the verbs I needed: I didn't once have to rephrase a command.
Interestingly, this work isn't truly very interactive in the sense of allowing the player to control the way events unfold, but the design creates an effective illusion of interactivity. It is impressive that the game seems so interactive, and that the interactivity is so transparent, when in fact the author is guiding you down a fairly rigid path.
A number of the techniques were quite interesting and innovative.
One technique that the work uses to great effect is a gradual revelation of details in the setting. The initial setting (the main character's room) is quite rich, but the game doesn't immediately dump every detail on the player; instead, the game reveals details gradually as the player accomplishes things. This allows the game to guide the player's attention to things in a particular order; the effect is subtle, because it mimics the way we actually absorb our surroundings: we notice what we want to notice and lump everything else into the background.
Another technique the game uses is giving the player something simple to accomplish while the player character's mind is on other things. This isn't new - other games have used puzzles to keep the player busy while a conversation or other scene is taking place - but A Moment dispenses with the puzzles and takes advantage of simple activities, such as walking home through a park, as an opportunity to add commentary about what the main character is thinking and feeling.
The story's approach to time is unusual. In most IF, the passage of time is more or less continuous throughout the game. In A Moment, the story is divided into scenes, each separated a bit in time from the previous one. Part of absorbing each new setting is learning what has happened since the last scene. This is a technique often used in traditional linear fiction, and it works well in this game.
A Moment of Hope is an excellent example of how enjoyable and engaging a work of puzzle-free, linear IF can be.
Score: 9 (excellent interface, good writing, interesting story)
Life on Beal Street is a different sort of interactive fiction than we are accustomed to seeing in games using a text command interface. This work is closer to hypertext fiction than it is to traditional text adventures: the player interacts with the game not by entering arbitrary commands but rather by selecting from a list of options.
The story has the player character walking down the street to visit a new love interest. As we make progress down the street, we learn more about the character's background and personality.
The interactivity in this work is extremely limited. At each point, our only options are to continue down the street or turn back; turning back ends the game, so in effect our choices are to continue the game, or not.
The story has more variability than the limited interactivity would suggest. At each juncture, the game selects one of several possible paths at random.
According to the author's notes, the path the story takes at one point can affect what happens later, and seemingly insignificant events can have vast consequences. It is surprising, then, that all of the paths that the story can take lead to similar endings, even though they get there by different routes. Perhaps it was unintentional, but this gives the story an element of fate: each character's destiny seems essentially fixed, no matter what the character does along the way.
The writing in this work is good and the implementation solid. The game is an interesting experiment, but the lack of interactivity kept me from becoming very immersed. Once I figured out that it was mostly just a series of randomly chosen scenes, I simply exercised the random generator to see what the possibilities were.
Score: 6 (good writing, but not much to do)
It's impossible to review this game without giving away some major surprises, so if you haven't yet played it but think you might, you should stop reading now and return only after you finish the game. It's not puzzle solutions I'm worried about revealing - it's entire point of the story.
Bliss is, or at least appears to be, a light dungeon romp: you are the town hero, and your job is to kill the dragon that's been terrorizing your village. Before you can confront the dragon, though, you have to escape the evil wizard's dungeon, where you've been taken just as the story starts.
Pretty standard fare, but there are hints from the outset that things aren't exactly as they seem. The game's subtitle is the first sign: why would this rather clichéd fantasy story be labeled "an interactive harrowing"? Then we start having momentary visions, transporting us briefly to some different reality. I assumed these visions were somehow within the context of the fantasy setting: spells cast upon us by the evil wizard, perhaps? More subtle signs come in the form of incongruities in the setting: the wizard's castle's courtyard is inexplicably cheerful, and the author even calls this to our attention.
As I was playing through the game, though, what I noticed was the jarring contrast between the otherwise cheerful tone of the story and the gratuitous violence: virtually every puzzle involved killing someone. Unlike most games in this type of setting, where puzzles often involve finding a clever way around an antagonistic character, avoiding combat, this game's puzzles mostly required finding clever ways to kill the characters. In fact, most of the puzzles require us to kill characters in a sneaky manner, which is the antithesis of heroic combat.
Until I got to the end, then, I was all prepared to review the game as a standard fantasy romp. I would have said that the game was a nice implementation of well-worn material; that the plot was extremely linear but kept moving nicely; and that the puzzles were reasonably well done, although a couple were not very well motivated (it's not clear why you would want to go upstairs in the shop, for example, until you get there), and a few were fairly obscure. I would also have said that the repeated sneaky killings made the "hero" seem less than heroic, and were incongruous with the good-natured mood of the writing.
Upon reaching the end of the story and slaying the dragon (which is, once again, an unheroic killing: we simply cut the dragon's throat while it sleeps), we discover the true nature of the story: it has all been in the imagination of a child, who has been using the story to escape the reality of an abusive father. This reality persists for a few turns until we realize that it, too, is unreal: it's just a dream about our childhood; the real truth is that our player character is a mentally ill adult, and our quest to slay the dragon was actually a delusional interpretation of our escape from an asylum. In the police car on the way back to the asylum we see the real-world results of our rampage.
The end result is quite effective, and puts the indiscriminate killing of the fantasy story in its proper perspective. My only complaint is that the sudden twist ending was too abrupt; despite the early hints, and despite the uneasiness I felt with the moral qualities of the hero (which itself was a hint, I think), I did not develop quite enough of a sense of unreality to be fully primed for discovering the truth. Perhaps if some of the targets of our attacks had been even more neutral, making the violence even more gratuitous, I might have been more ready for the surprises at the end - not because I could have anticipated what was coming, but because I might have had more of a sense that something had to be coming.
Score: 8 (good implementation and writing, nice twist ending)
The writing in this game is great, and it is technically well done, but for me the puzzles were just too difficult.
Stone Cell has a very dark mood - life is hard in the work's medieval setting, and for the player character it just got a lot harder: as the story opens, we find ourselves being thrown into the dungeon. It seems that we have been given a life sentence, which is harsh enough, but the fact that the player character is a young girl, and that her crime seems trivial even within the story's context, makes it all the harsher. We soon find ourselves in a cell in the deepest bowels of the dungeon. We must find a way to escape our cell, and from there find a way to escape the castle.
This game's writing is excellent. The mood is somber, matching the plot, and stays in character with the period, both in terms of vocabulary and metaphor. I am no student of medieval life and so can't comment on the historical accuracy, but I was never jarred by a modern reference or other obvious anachronism.
Technically, the game is fairly polished. For the most part, described objects were present and vocabulary was ample. I was confused in a few places by the game's world model, such as when I was trying to refer to the main character's clothing, but I usually caught on after a little experimentation. There were also a few cases where I had trouble figuring out what verb or phrasing to use.
The game had an unusual approach to describing the map. Rather than incorporating the usual directional descriptions into a room's description, the game showed the available exit directions in the status line (where the score conventionally appears); room descriptions mentioned exits and other features in more relative terms rather than using compass directions. This allowed a more natural style for describing locations than the usual list of exits by direction, but in complex locations I found it difficult to relate the descriptive text to the exit list, and often had to chart out the map by traversing each direction.
What I didn't like so much about this game was the puzzles. For the most part, the puzzles were too difficult for me. Perhaps the author did this intentionally, to convey the despair of the main character locked in her prison cell and to create for the player a real sense of relief upon escaping. Perhaps the puzzles were intentionally unfair in analogy to the unfairness of the main character's life.
After I spent quite a long time making no progress escaping from the cell, I began to fear that I was not going to finish the game within the competition time limit, so I consulted the walk-through. Once I did, I could see that I would eventually have needed the walk-through anyway: solving many of the puzzles required intuitive leaps that I don't think I would have made on my own.
I'd like to be specific about why I found some of the puzzles unfair, so some spoilers follow; readers intending to play the game without hints should stop here.
The common feature that I found unfair in many of this game's puzzles is that so many of them require an intuitive leap that seems unreasonable. What the puzzles lacked was any sort of reason to have tried doing what you're meant to do, and no feedback from trying related things that would suggest the solution.
For example, at one point, we're meant to detach a handle from a pot. The game's response to taking the handle is "the handle is attached to the pot"; taking the pot elicits a response that we have no need to do that. So it would seem that we're wasting our time tinkering with the pot. (To an experienced player the fact that the handle seems to be represented in the game as a separate object at all is telling, but this is an inference about the game's implementation and is not knowledge within the context of the story: it's not something known to the player character, but only to the player.)
A few verbs applied to the handle elicit something closer to a hint: if we pull or push the handle, the game tells us we can't do that while the handle is attached. This is a good hint, which suggests we should detach the handle. So one might try "detach handle," but no luck; this only responds with the same message, that we can't do that while the handle is attached. "Detach handle from pot" is worse - it tells us some useless information about the pot.
So, how do we detach the handle? By bending it, repeatedly, until it breaks off from metal fatigue. This has an element of guess-the-verb: one might reasonably suppose that pushing or pulling the handle would do the same thing, but the only verb that seems to work is "bend." Furthermore, there is little to suggest that repeatedly bending the handle will have the desired effect; after bending the handle, it is described as being bent up. Bending it again is better: the handle is described as having a crease. This is good; we should have had some similar sort of feedback after the first bend. Another two bends, though, and the handle still has the crease; it's not clear that it's getting worse.
So, with a few more verbs and some better feedback once you start trying to bend the handle, this puzzle would become more reasonable. However, there is still the intuitive leap: why would it occur to us that metal fatigue is part of this game? Certainly it is a real-world phenomenon, but the handle is certainly the only metal object in the entire game that exhibits it. There are a million other real-world phenomena that could also break the handle, but they're not implemented; it is unfair of the author to pick one phenomenon and expect us to guess it. To make the puzzle fair, there must be some indication somewhere else in the game that metal fatigue is part of the game's world model.
Breaking off the metal handle is probably the simplest of the unreasonable intuitive leaps I found in the game. Some of the most difficult ones involved guessing at a character's reaction to something. For example, early in the game, there is an optional puzzle that involves hiding a small object on our person before being searched. (Before I get to the solution, I should mention that knowing there is a puzzle to be solved at all requires knowledge of the future: we must hide the object before we know that we are to be searched.)
The solution to this puzzle requires us to fake menstruation. I could find no reason that the main character would think to do this; it works because a character's reaction is advantageous to us. There is nothing that I could see that would have suggested that the character would respond this way; there is no feedback for our other attempts to hide the object that would help us. (This puzzle also has a guess-the-verb element, or maybe it's guess-the-body-part: we must "cut arm on nail" to draw blood, but "cut myself on nail" doesn't do the trick.)
Another puzzle near the end of the game requires us similarly to read a character's mind: we must wear a sheet so that one of the characters mistakes us for a ghost. It is not clear why we would want this to happen; the closest we get to a hint is that, when approach the character without the sheet, he tells us that our clothes are shabby, and then throws us back into the dungeon. This hint is poor in that using it requires "alternative universe" knowledge: we can only apply the hint by restoring an earlier game, since once we are thrown back in the dungeon we are effectively dead; thus the player can obtain the hint, but the player character cannot. In any case, it would not occur to me that wearing a sheet would look less shabby than farm clothes.
I hope I have not seemed to dwell excessively on negative comments, because I think this could be a very good game with some reworking of the puzzles; it has a strong story, excellent writing, and good implementation. My criticism of the puzzles is so lengthy because, first, some of the flaws in these puzzles are found in a lot of IF, and I felt there were instructive examples here for other authors; and second, I wanted to offer the author a few detailed suggestions for improving this game, since I think it could be quite strong after some revisions to the puzzles.
Score: 7 (good writing and implementation, but unreasonable puzzles)
This game is an amusing parody of superhero comics and movies. The main character is Captain Chaos, an evil genius. Chaos's immediate problem is that his airship has hit a tree and is about to crash; we must help Chaos repair the damage and land safely.
The game uses a third-person narrative form, and the main character occasionally talks directly to the player, similar to the LucasArts graphical adventures. The effect is great for a tongue-in-cheek game like this; having the main character acknowledge the presence of the player by talking directly to us makes the whole thing seem less serious. The main character's comments also let the main character have an explicitly separate personality from the player, so the player doesn't have to role-play for the main character's personality to come out.
The game's puzzles are mostly straightforward. The most interesting puzzle involves figuring out how to control a robot through a virtual reality-style control interface; this one required a little bit of insight to figure out how the control system worked. The other puzzles are mostly simple object-combination problems, but once you find the various parts scattered about (nothing is actually hidden) it's pretty clear how they're meant to be combined.
I encountered a few minor parser rough spots. For example, at one point there's an object that's described as having been unscrewed from another, but you can't "screw first on second"; you must "attach first to second" or "put first on second." In fact, the game actually distinguishes between "attach" and "put" in this case, which seems strange to me. In another case, there's a screw that's described as having come loose; you must "screw screw with screwdriver" (which is so repetitive it's almost amusing) but you can't "turn screw" or "tighten screw." For the most part, though, command syntax is natural.
A minor presentation suggestion for TADS authors using footnotes: you could use <A> tags to make footnotes into hyperlinks, so players can just click on the footnote rather than having to type "note 5." In HTML mode, you could also use <SUP> to use a superscript-style display, which would be slightly less intrusive into the text.
In the same spirit as the 100-item list, everything in the game is nicely fleshed out. Even though the game is small and simple to play, there's a lot to it, and it's a lot of fun.
Score: 6 (fun, good implementation, but not much to it)
"Surreal" games are, at worst, collections of random locations and characters, each included only for its puzzle value, held together by a tenuous framework. Sometimes these games are classified as surreal only because they're so random, and sometimes the author uses the surrealism as an excuse to avoid having to make things make any sense. Some of the very earliest text adventures fell into this category: locations with no conceivable connection were often juxtaposed, and pointless anachronisms abounded. And after the success of Myst, graphical adventure designers cranked out lots of bad surreal games; it's even arguable that Myst is one of them, although it at least made an effort to justify its contrived settings.
At their best, surreal games are just as self-consistent as realistic games, but take place in fantastic settings with their own rules: different laws of physics, perhaps, or different rules of social interaction. Brian Moriarty's Trinity was probably the first adventure to meet this standard, and to many people is still the best surreal adventure game ever written.
Erehwon is probably not going to unseat Trinity as the benchmark surreal adventure, but it's another fine example. The game takes place in a kind of meta-universe where different parallel universes can be connected according to complicated rules. The plot is minimal - you have to collect a number of objects so that you can take part in a role-playing game (which is, it turns out, a role-playing version of the text adventure). The setting, though, is varied and detailed, and richly imagined.
Erehwon is an unabashedly puzzle-oriented game. Most of its puzzles are reasonable and fair, although a good many are pretty tough. And there are lots of them; the game has five major puzzles, which involve collecting five objects, but each of these has a number of sub-puzzles that must be solved first. The number and difficulty of the puzzles makes the game daunting as a competition entry; within the time limit, I only managed to make it about two-thirds of the way through the game, even after making extensive use of hints.
Fortunately, the game has an excellent hint system. Hints are delivered incrementally, so it's possible to get a little bit of help and still feel like you did most of the work. The hint system is context-sensitive, and offers hints only on puzzles that are currently accessible, which avoids giving away upcoming events by showing topics too early.
This game is large, with lots of things to see and lots to do. It's also very ambitious in its mechanics; for example, it has a movement system that lets the player mix compass directions with relative movement. All of this works; the game is technically dazzling.
If it hadn't been for the hint system, I probably wouldn't have made much progress in the game, and I would have thought it was far too difficult. With the hint system, though, I thoroughly enjoyed the game's clever construction and detailed, imaginative world.
Score: 8 (clever and amusing, well-implemented)
In Exhibition, a famous young artist has just died, and a memorial showing of his paintings is taking place. We see the show through the eyes of four different guests at the gallery: the artist's wife, an art critic, a boy, and a college student. We can switch among the perspectives at any time. In looking at the art from the different perspectives, we see not only the paintings, but also portraits of the four guests, and ultimately of the artist.
This work uses some minimal graphics; in particular, we are shown a drawing of each character. Interestingly, there are no graphics of the paintings in the exhibit - this is exactly as it should be, though, because we have come to see the characters, not the paintings; and it is the character's impressions of the paintings that are revealing, not the paintings themselves.
All of the characters tell us a lot about themselves, but they tell us more, too. Two of the characters - the wife and the boy - know the artist personally, so their interpretations of the art are informed by their knowledge of the artist's personal life; they tell us a great deal about the artist, and even a little about one another. The critic doesn't know the artist personally but is well-versed in his work, so his viewpoint offers context that relates the paintings to one another in terms of the development of the artist's technique and themes; but his analysis is often technical and theoretical, and he sometimes misses the essence of a work as a result. The student doesn't know the artist, isn't familiar with the artist's works, and doesn't even know anything about art; her impressions are all made to fit her world view, and she barely sees the paintings themselves at all.
The weakest character for me is the college student, primarily because she had no direct connection to the artist or his art. The student's perspective reveals things only about the student; it is an outsider's viewpoint that fills in nothing about the artist or the other characters. The student also seems to me to lack depth; she is a caricature whose world view is rigid and simplistic. Part of the work's theme is that a piece of art means different things to each viewer, and the student perhaps demonstrates that sometimes we miss the art entirely and see only our own biases; but she seemed too blatant an example, especially compared to the subtlety of the other characters.
This game has simple mechanics but surprising depth and attention to detail. The different characters notice different things in the gallery, and practically everything has a unique interpretation for each character. The wife and the boy are especially interesting; they don't really tell us about the paintings, but rather about the artist's life while he was creating them, and from this we can piece together a portrait of the artist even though we never meet him directly.
I approached Exhibition by visiting the entire gallery from one character's perspective, then switching to a new character and starting over. It would also be possible to view one painting through each character's eyes in turn, then move on to the next painting; it would be interesting to experiment to see how this changes the experience.
Exhibition is an impressive work. I had a real sense of insight as the artist's life emerged from the bits and pieces, like a collage taking form; and while it is not a new notion that art is as much a creation of the beholder as of the artist, it serves as a wonderful basis for this fascinating character study.
Score: 9 (great concept, solid implementation, good writing)
This pleasant game involves a youngster who's spending a weekend at his maternal grandparents' farm. In the course of the game, we get to explore the farm and learn a little about our mother's childhood.
On the Farm has a series of puzzles, most of which are reasonably simple. The main character's grandmother and grandfather provide us with goals; some of these are simple and direct, and others require us to figure out some things about the characters.
The game has a hint system, which provides a few nudges but not outright solutions. I found the hint system especially useful for clarifying what exactly I should be trying to accomplish. The hint system made the game very well tuned for playability - the hints were just about perfect at pointing me in the right direction without giving anything away.
There is no score in this game. My guess is that the author didn't include a score because he wanted to emphasize the story component, but there were still enough puzzles, simple though they were, that I found myself wanting some sort of indication of my progress.
The author clearly spent a lot of effort on playability, because I generally had no problem figuring out how to phrase a particular command I wanted to attempt. The author helpfully provides a list of the less common verbs and phrasings that the game uses, which virtually eliminated find-the-verb problems for me. The only problem I had was that a few two-object verbs that should be symmetrical required a particular order ("attach x to y" would work but "attach y to x" wouldn't), but it was easy enough to try it the other way in these cases.
This game would make an excellent introductory game for new IF players - it's nicely written and is easy enough that most players won't ever feel frustrated but has enough puzzles that there's plenty to do. The story isn't very exciting but the game is pleasant enough.
Score: 7 (good implementation and design)
As Six Stories opens, we find ourselves stuck in a snow-storm on a mountain road with a dead car. We set out to find help, and soon come across a mountain cabin, deserted but seemingly recently tended. Upon sitting down for a moment's rest, we are transported into a strange dream-world; here, we encounter several characters, each with a story to tell. Each story takes the form of a folk story or myth.
This work takes a unique approach to using media in an adventure game. Although it can be played using only text, the game extensively uses graphics and sound; but this isn't an ordinary graphical adventure: its main use of sound is for spoken words. In the dream section (which occupies most of the game), each character's story is told by spoken narration, with an accompanying still picture.
Six Stories is primarily a story. It has only one puzzle in the usual sense, and that's a reasonably straightforward matter of combining several objects; everything else is simply a matter of exploration.
The sounds and graphics are of excellent technical quality. The voice characterizations are quite good - I've played blockbuster commercial games with voice acting not nearly as good as this. The style of the narration perfectly fits the storybook feel of the characters' tales. The graphics are digitized photos, but this is far from a random collection of snapshots; the pictures have a consistent look to them, and the author clearly took the photos specifically for this work.
Six Stories is an innovative use of the interactive medium, and a very enjoyable work. The extensive use of narration gives the game a mesmerizing quality that I've never encountered in interactive fiction before. The game is still interactive enough to keep one's attention, but it can be taken in almost passively.
Score: 8 (first-rate implementation, minimal interactivity)
Note: I did some testing on this game, so I didn't cast a vote
in the competition for it.
Many recent pieces of interactive fiction have taken the traditional user interface of a text adventure, but found ways to reduce their resemblance to games and instead emphasize story-telling. Strangers in the Night does almost the opposite: this is a game in the form of a text adventure.
In Strangers, the main character is a vampire living in the big city in modern times. Our goal is to drink enough human blood before sunrise. A number of rules limit our feeding: we can only take blood from a victim when we have the victim alone, and we can only take so much from a single person.
At first I was a little disappointed by the level of detail in the game: things are pretty much as they first appear, and examination of the setting is mostly unrewarded with more detailed parts of things to examine. Once I figured out that this was a game, though, I could see that the setting was not of great importance; I then saw the consistency of the detail level as a benefit, since I knew I wouldn't have to take a lot of time to inspect everything in each location.
Given that the early text adventures had a decided emphasis on solving puzzles, a work that is primarily a game might not seem innovative. This one is, though, because it is even more like a game than the early text adventures were. In particular, Strangers establishes a goal, and defines the process for pursuing the goal, then lets us work out how we're going to achieve it. The difference is that traditional text adventures didn't define a process of game play; instead, we had to figure out, by trial and error, deduction, or insight, the special command or combination of commands to solve each puzzle. In this sense, even though we think of them as games, traditional text adventures were more like interlocking-wire puzzles or math problems than they were like games.
Strangers is fairly easy to solve - I was able to find the required three victims with lots of time to spare. This might have been due to excessive caution on my part; at first I was concerned that the game was going to be tightly timed, so I restarted a couple of times after doing some early exploration, which allowed me to get to the first victim in a very small number of turns. The game is probably timed to allow lots of time for exploration without restarting, so playing straight through might create a greater sense of urgency.
I recommend to the author that he should incorporate the rules from the "readme" file directly into the game's introduction, so that players read the rules before starting the game. The rules are essential to understanding how to approach the game, and players are likely to be baffled if they miss the extra file, as I did for the first half hour or so I was playing.
Strangers isn't exactly the text adventure version of chess or backgammon, but it explores the interesting new territory of process-driven game play with a text adventure interface.
Score: 7 (interesting concept, good implementation, but not
very much to it)
This game is promising, but unfortunately a bug in the competition release makes it impossible to get very far. I can only comment on what is perhaps the first one-third or so of the game.
The Water Bird is a story based on the folklore of the Miwok, a Native American people. The story takes place in the time of the "First People," mythical ancient predecessors of the Miwok. A destructive giant is at large in the countryside, and the main character, a young Miwok boy, must help his village to survive.
The game seems well-researched; footnotes provide copious background information on life in a Miwok village. The footnotes are almost too complete; when a game provides footnotes I usually read them, but in this case I'd recommend skipping them the first time through the game, since they're a little overwhelming.
In what I was able to see of the game before encountering the bug that prevents further progress, the story progressed by exploring and gathering information, mostly by talking to other characters. I encountered a couple of situations that looked like puzzles, but I didn't manage to find solutions (it's possible that I needed to make it past the fatal bug point before I could solve those).
Several non-player characters are present; most are reasonably interactive through traditional ask/tell conversations, and a few have specific conversations that advance the story. Some of the conversations are impressively implemented - the way that we can relay information from the main character's brother to the shaman, for example, is very natural.
I hope that the author releases an updated version after the competition to correct the show-stopping bug in the first release, so that we can see the rest of the game.
Score: None (I didn't see enough to score it)
This disturbing study of a descent into madness is at once shocking and sublime. Yes, the symbolism is all here: candles in a dark-paneled room, a stage representing the subconscious mind with its flickering and fragile consciousness surrounded by the dark sea of the subconscious; the empty trophy case juxtaposed with the full junk closet, a devastating portrait of lost hope and failed dreams; a flaming skull alluding to nothing so much as Death caught in an inferno of alienation pervading modern civilization and ultimately consuming it; a monkey, a non-human animal so human in form as to mock our very identity as human, symbolic of our animal needs and the animal lurking, always lurking just beneath the surface of our rational facades; a robot, a machine in human form, the ultimate symbol of our dehumanization at the hands of our own cleverness; the plentiful seating, symbolizing man's inhumanity to his fellow man; and, of course, the banana, so strident in its symbolism that it paradoxically becomes subtle, like an angry couple at the supermarket whose loud, pointless bickering we try to pretend not to see.
But even such powerful symbolism would be empty without narrative, of which we find more than we can handle. We pass a banana, tentatively at first, experimenting: to the monkey, perhaps, or to the robot? And what about the flaming head? Soon we build confidence, just as the hero in the prototypical mythological framework gains confidence from early tests, and start passing bananas more aggressively. Before we know it we are in a banana-passing frenzy - bananas everywhere, coming, going, faster than we can keep track of, just as we lose track of things in our daily lives: this banana an overdue bill, this one a friend we've lost touch with, this one the wreckage of a marriage. And then it stops, suddenly, and we find to our shock that we have no more bananas - but, in a bitter indictment of western society's glorification of hoarded wealth, this is how we win: just as the Japanese gardener considers her garden complete only when she has removed everything that she can remove, this game is not complete until we have no more bananas.
Other games in this year's competition might have more plot, more puzzles, or more elaborate settings, but none have more bananas.
Score: 2 (there's nothing to it, but what's there works)
The protagonist, after a long night of drinking, wakes up to find himself in Hell. It seems that we've made a deal with the devil, though not exactly the canonical one; instead of simply trading our soul for the object of our desire, the devil has offered to grant us our wish free and clear if we can defeat each of his chief demons, the seven deadly sins. Furthermore, the setting isn't just Hell, it's the Mall of Hell, which is an infernal version of a typical suburban mall.
This is a very traditional puzzle game. Each of the personified deadly sins presents us with a puzzle, and a number of sub-puzzles are present as well. The puzzles are mostly clever but reasonable, and only one or two seemed obscure. (The one where you obtain the hammer was the most obscure one to me; I think a much more explicit hint from the Norm-demon is needed.) I was able to make progress at a pretty steady clip, which kept my interest all the way through.
This game doesn't have a lot of plot or character development, but it's a wonderful traditional text adventure. The puzzles are numerous, and they nearly all have the exact balance of difficulty and reasonableness that makes an adventure game fun - the solutions aren't obvious, but they're not hopelessly obscure either. This game is simply a lot of fun to play.
Score: 9 (great fun, good implementation)
In this very short game, the main character is a text adventure author, trying to write a game for the IF competition; but the entry deadline is only a few days away, the game under construction is nowhere near completed, and the author isn't getting anywhere on it. We've decided to stay up all night if necessary to make progress. Just as we're about to fall asleep, we have a dream about a Muse coming to visit us, and very shortly we find ourselves transported somewhere - another dream, perhaps - where we find the inspiration we need to start making progress again.
There's really only one puzzle in this game, and unfortunately it is of the guess-the-verb variety - the required verb isn't one of the basic verbs you find in any text adventure, and wasn't directly suggested anywhere, so you just have to guess to try it.
The setting is very small (essentially two locations) but reasonably thoroughly implemented. A particularly nice touch is that we can actually play the game within the game by typing on the computer - there's not a lot to it, but we can interact with it to a very surprising degree, even to the point of inspecting a few of the objects and doing a little traveling. Another interesting feature is that there are three separate fantasy sections; in a given run through the game we only reach one of these, but I was interested enough to replay the game twice more.
The author's notes indicate that the game was written mostly as an exercise, but there's enough detail to the game that it's worth a look.
Score: 5 (interesting, but not much to it, and the puzzle is
irritating)
For A Change is a very unusual game. Some might consider it surreal, although to me that requires some sort of intersection between the real and the imagined, and this game seems too distant from reality for that; perhaps unreal would be better.
It's difficult to describe this game, since part of the point is to figure out all the sorts of things I might want to describe about it. The game starts out with virtually no introduction, and then proceeds to describe things using an odd vocabulary and style that seems at first almost metaphorical but which we soon see is simply different. Wherever the game takes place, they don't speak English - although we can at least recognize a lot of the words.
I expect that some people will dislike the game because it is so deliberately obscure; the obscurity starts with the vocabulary, but extends to everything else. After playing for a while I wondered if the text had been generated by running some initially harmless English paragraphs through five or six iterations of machine translation (perhaps to Finnish, then to German, Chinese, Navaho, Japanese, and finally back to English), since it so resembled the odd prose one sometimes finds in translated instruction manuals for imported consumer electronics. But this isn't the case; the author intentionally invented a special vocabulary and wrote with a peculiar style.
The use of an invented vocabulary and style is a technique that has been explored before in science fiction. Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange used an enormous invented vocabulary, for example, and Iain M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn was partially written in a nearly impenetrable phonetic English with an equally difficult grammar, and had a fair amount of invented vocabulary to boot. And even when the vocabulary is fairly normal, science fiction authors sometimes drop the reader into a completely unfamiliar setting without explanation, writing the story as though the reader were a contemporary of the characters in the story, requiring the reader to piece together an understanding of the setting from context; Gene Wolfe's brilliant Book of the New Sun is an example. These immersive techniques make for challenging reading, but in the hands of a good author they can lead to deeply satisfying reading experiences, as the reader's bafflement in the early pages gives way to clarity and the picture comes into focus all at once. For A Change offers some of this, but for me the big picture never became evident: I gradually became familiar with the setting, but I never really understood it. And, while I became accustomed to the odd prose, it always seemed deliberately contrived to me; it never seemed an essential element of the setting or of the story. So, I'd consider the game only partially successful, but even partial success is impressive in pursuit of such lofty goals.
As a text adventure, the game is pretty good. The overarching puzzle is, of course, making sense of the game's strange text, but once one gets past this the puzzles are mostly reasonable and more or less of the familiar varieties. I had to consult the hints several times, but each time I found a helpful nudge in the right direction, and I didn't have the feeling with any puzzle that I would never have solved it without the hints. The integrated hints are designed well and I, at least, appreciated their inclusion.
Score: 8 (intriguing and well-implemented)
I have mixed feelings about this game. I really enjoyed the first half, but the second half takes such a weird turn that it almost seems like a different game. The real problem, though, is that bugs prevented me from finishing, so I missed any closing explanation that might have tied the game together.
The game starts off strong. The first scene is in a dance club, where the player character spends some time hitting on women. The writing here is great - it's clever, dynamic, and funny. The game uses a menu-driven conversation system, which works perfectly for this kind of scene - the conversations are able to develop the player character by having him converse in character rather than in generic terms. The non-player characters are cardboard figures, but the point seems to be to develop the player character's personality. The only thing that disappointed me is that the conversations don't have any context - there's no thread of conversation with a character, just a one-liner statement or question from the player, and the response from the character. Even so, the conversations in this section are quite engaging.
After hitting on a few women, we stumble into a brawl with an obnoxious character. (At least, it seems that fighting is the only way out here; if there are other solutions I didn't find them. This takes us to a lengthy, well-written cut scene.
We then find ourselves in the break room, where the "grave robbers and thieves hang out." It seems that the player character is a professional grave robber. We get an assignment to go rob a grave, then it's off to the cemetery.
Upon reaching the cemetery, we need to solve a puzzle to get past the graveyard fence. (It's not clear why the main character needs our help to invent a clever approach to getting into the graveyard, presumably having gotten in many times before.) This is the first thing in the game that felt to me like a puzzle, so it seemed out of place - even more so because the solution is so contrived, and so cartoonish.
After we reach cemetery, things take an abrupt turn to the supernatural. A security guard dissolves into a pile of chunks; a vaguely described monster appears out of a shed then vanishes, along with the shed, into a black mist; a strange woman is performing some kind of rite.
Apart from the abrupt shift in tone and subject matter, the game mechanics in this half are completely different than in the first half. The beginning of the game is almost entirely conversation. There's barely any conversation in the second half; even after seeing all these bizarre things, if we try to talk to our friend Keegan, the response is "You really have nothing to say right now."
Unfortunately, a bug at this point kept me from reaching the end - which is only a few moves away, judging by the walk-through. We once again encounter the character who picked a fight with us in the bar, and in order to progress we must kill this character; but the game didn't seem to have the character's object around at this point (although it did have the scripted actions for the character), so the parser wouldn't allow me attack, hence I couldn't get to the end of the game.
I'll be interested to see the ending of the game in the post-competition bug-fix release. Perhaps it will bring together the beginning and end to make them seem less unrelated.
Score: 5 (strong start but weak and buggy ending)
This superhero spoof starts out with an appropriately overwrought introduction, just ridiculous enough to let us know it's not serious. We play a hero who's just infiltrated the lair of an evil villain; in the process our sidekick has been killed. We must find the villain and kill him. That's about all there is to the plot, and the setting is quite small as well - just a few rooms on the way to the villain's control room, and a couple of puzzles to get past.
The game seems like it's intended to be taking place in a child's imagination, although this is never stated as such. The villain's lair is laid out like a house, as though we're playing a game in a friend's house.
The game has three puzzles. The first two involve making it to the control room; one is reasonable, although it requires a non-standard verb, and the other is pretty much unmotivated. The third puzzle involves killing the villain. This one has more flexibility - all of the solutions essentially the same, but different objects can be used - and is somewhat clued, although the only way to figure out which objects to use is trial and error; fortunately there aren't many objects in the game, though.
There's not a lot to this game, but the writing is decent and it's moderately entertaining.
Score: 5 (somewhat amusing but insubstantial)
I tried to give this game a fair chance, but I eventually gave up when it seemed clear that it was too buggy to get anywhere. Typing "inventory," for example, crashes WinFrotz.
One comment about the opening: there's an important conversation that we have to watch, but if we don't follow one of the characters through a series of rooms without any intervening commands, we miss the scene. Even worse, one of the rooms along the course is dark, so we can't even see which way the character departs and hence have to discover by trial and error what to do there.
Score: None (I couldn't get anywhere)
This is a wonderful game - one of the best in this year's competition.
With a sprawling plot that traverses a multitude of settings, this game is a little large for the competition, but it is immensely enjoyable. As the story opens, we find ourselves to be an author of science fiction books; we are at work on a new novel, which at the moment is not very far along. We are soon transported into a parallel universe populated by the characters we've invented in our stories.
This game is thoroughly plot-driven, and as a result it's highly linear, by which I mean that our course through the story is pretty much fixed: we don't have a lot of flexibility in choosing where to go or what to do next. Linearity is often bad, because we're forced to work on puzzles in a particular order, but in this case it works; there's so much to do, and the game relies so little on using puzzles to block progress, that the linearity never seems restrictive.
The game's use of puzzles is innovative in a very subtle way. Most games use puzzles to impede the player's progress. Halothane, in contrast, seems to let us decide how much time we want to spend solving puzzles. A good fraction of the puzzles are optional; I completed the game with only about two-thirds of the full score, and I'm pretty sure that many of the puzzles I did solve were optional. This created an interesting effect for me: at many points in the game, I knew exactly what I needed to do to advance to the next point in the plot, but I waited for a while so I could explore the current area more fully; I was nearly always rewarded with more discoveries when I stayed, and once I started to run out of ideas I could move on to the next scene. It's quite an accomplishment for the author to make a player want to stay around in one scene in an adventure when the path to the next scene is clear; it also makes the pacing nearly perfect, since the player can decide just how much to savor each scene, and just when to find out what happens next.
I suspect that many players will take issue with my description of this game as linear, and this is precisely what makes the game's design so ingenious. By making so many puzzles optional, the game creates a feeling of openness and freedom that few other games achieve - even games that are far less linear in their plot.
The amount of detail in the game is amazing, especially given how large the setting is. Most of the detail isn't just superfluous, either - everywhere we go, we find bits and pieces that add to the overall story.
Halothane is technically polished, well-written, and greatly entertaining, and achieves a level of playability that few adventure games have ever approached. It is one of this competition's best games.
Score: 10 (innovative design, excellent implementation)
This game is a twist on the "cave crawls" of the very earliest adventure games. The twist is that our journey through the cave is rendered in very realistic terms - especially the dangers. It's as though we were actually exploring Colossal Cave (or, more to the point, the caves of "Hunt the Wumpus," one of the first computer games ever written), and experienced all of the discomforts and injuries that we'd really encounter - falling into pits, climbing chimneys, crawling through tunnels we can barely fit into. It's a novel approach to the genre, but it makes the game almost depressing; as we get further we accumulate injuries, lose our gear, and generally seem to be hanging on by a thread.
I didn't make it very far in this game; it was just too much work. The map is sufficiently large and convoluted that it takes a while to explore, and I suppose I'm not sufficiently enamored of cave exploration to have felt motivated to map everything out.
The implementation and writing are both good. People who enjoy traditional puzzle-oriented games set in caves will probably like this one, although the mood is so somber and humorless that its appeal is markedly different from that of Adventure or Zork.
Score: 7 (interesting and well-implemented, but I didn't have
a lot of fun)
Jacks is a story of deadly political intrigue within a religious empire. We play a high-ranking official (possibly even the highest-ranking official; it's never made completely clear) in the church, visiting a local church, where we find unfolding a plot to kill us. We must avoid the assassins and expose the plot.
The game-play is mostly puzzle-driven, but the things we encounter provide details on the church and the player character's background. The game is fairly short and linear, with four or five main puzzles to solve and apparently only one path through the story.
The exact nature of the setting isn't ever made clear: clearly the story doesn't take place in contemporary times, so it could be in a foreign country, the future, the past, another planet, a parallel universe, or something else entirely. It's not essential that we know, but I was curious about the broader context.
The game's puzzles are mostly reasonable, although I had a verb problem with the first major one; the required phrasing wasn't something I would have thought to try, and alternative phrasings were accepted as syntactically valid but didn't produce the desired effect - this confused me for quite a while because I thought I was simply not on the right track. With the exception of the final puzzle, all of the puzzles are very nicely hinted; the last puzzle's solution seems to come out of the blue, although it can be solved by brute force, since there aren't that many possibilities to try.
The game awards a couple of points here and there merely for looking at things. I think the author probably did this to provide a sense of steady progress, but I found it very distracting. There's even a puzzle that's solved merely by looking at something. A related feature I didn't like is that several things that should be obvious in a room's description or an object's description are found only by inspecting something. This is fine when an additional level of detail is revealed by closer inspection, but in this game that balance was frequently not achieved: in many instances, inspecting one object reveals another object that really should have been at the same level of detail as the first one.
This is probably a personal bias, but I found the main character's solutions to everything to be unnecessarily violent. Perhaps the author is commenting on religion, or politics, or religious politics, or just drawing a portrait of this fictitious religion's politics. But the cold-blooded manner of the main character seems incongruous with the rest of the character's description as the innocent victim of a conspiracy, as well as the mostly light tone of the writing.
Score: 7 (good implementation, reasonable design and writing)
At the beginning of this game, we find ourselves at the bottom of a cliff, having somehow just survived a huge avalanche. The surrounding area is an isolated, idyllic mountain farm. We encounter the old couple who live on the farm, and learn that they're not ordinary people, but something out of a storybook.
Lomalow doesn't have any puzzles in the usual sense; instead, we must ask the characters we encounter about pretty much everything in the game. Their answers reveal the story's background to us, and the questions also provoke the characters to do things that advance the plot. Probably because there are no puzzles, the game doesn't have a lot of objects that can be manipulated; nonetheless, there's enough to explore that one can find plenty to do.
Since the game uses questions as the main plot mechanism, it's not possible to get stuck trying to solve a puzzle. However, I got stuck on a few occasions anyway, because I couldn't think of the next topic to ask about. Fortunately there's a hint system that suggests topics; unfortunately, in the version I played, the hint system has a bug that renders the hints useless - it dispenses advice of the form "ask about 14222" (presumably that's an internal object ID, rather than the object's name).
The writing isn't bad but suffers from an abundance of badly tortured sentences. The story is interesting, but the introduction of the fantastic element is very abrupt; I went from thinking the game was a simple forest simulation to knowing the entire rest of the story in a single command. This revelation occurred for me quite close to the beginning, which made the bulk of the game seem anticlimactic. The discovery of the game's secrets might have been more exciting if it had been more gradual.
Score: 7 (reasonably good implementation and design, some
weakness in story and writing)
In keeping with the tradition of Rybread Celsius games, L. U. D. I. T. E. is impervious to my attempts to make sense of it, or do much of anything with it. You are in a maze of twisty non-sequiturs, all alike.
Score: 1 (it seems pretty random to me)
This game fits roughly in the college game genre, although it's a little more specialized than most in that it's set in a music department. We play a music student who's trying to prepare for a big concert tonight; we must solve a number of problems before we're ready for the concert.
This is a light puzzle game. The puzzles are mostly logical and fairly simple, which makes for a nice snack-sized game.
There are a few minor rough spots technically. For example, some doors must be opened manually (rather than automatically when we try to travel through them); one of these is locked, but the key is obvious, so even this could easily have been made automatic without harming game play. In addition, lots of decoration objects that are mentioned in room descriptions aren't implemented.
The characters in the game are mostly unresponsive. A few of the puzzles involve giving a character something that he or she wants; some of these were unnecessarily difficult because it's so hard to hit upon the right question to ask to find out what the character wants. In these cases, the characters should give us some hint about what they want, even when we ask about random topics.
At the outset, our goals are not made very clear. Fortunately, several of the individual puzzles stand out enough on their own that it's easy to find something to do, even if we don't know exactly why we should do it, but it would be nice to have a better idea of what we're trying to accomplish overall.
Reaching the end-game is a bit obscure. When we've solved all of the other puzzles, a new location pops into existence; to reach the end-game we simply must stumble across the new location. This left me feeling stuck at the end, because I had no idea what the final goal was.
Despite these flaws, Music Education is still a fun short game.
Score: 7 (good implementation and writing,
some weakness in design)
This game is set in some past era, perhaps the eighteenth or nineteenth century. We play a sailor taking shore leave on a remote island. The island is inhabited by seemingly friendly natives, and our character is looking to pick up a girl. We succeed, or at least think so - but we soon find that our date is actually a werewolf.
This game is short and completely linear. It largely dispenses with exploration; almost every single move directly advances the plot substantially. The effect is almost like a multiple-choice game, although there's not any significant branching in the plot because the wrong choice almost always leads to immediate death.
The progression of the plot seems very hurried to me. Since almost every turn takes us to a major new juncture in the plot, there's no pause in the action. Equally significantly, some of the plot developments are ludicrously abrupt, particularly the captain's reaction to our story upon returning from the island.
The rapid pacing, unfortunately, prevents the game from being effective as a horror story. Part of what makes a horror story effective is the building suspense as the reader gradually comes to realize what's in store for the protagonist, before the protagonist understands but after it's too late to stop. This story jumps into things so quickly that there's no time for any suspense to develop.
The game has four or five puzzles, most of which are fair and reasonable. The last puzzle, though, can't be solved without first getting killed, since we need information from the death scene to know what to do; I don't like this kind of puzzle because it forces the game mechanics to intrude, destroying the illusion of a story.
The writing is good, and the game is enjoyable, despite being too rushed.
Score: 6 (interesting, but very short and not very interactive)
This is a science fiction spy story, somewhat in the spirit of some Japanese science fiction comics I've seen, but it's quite muddled. The end of the game has an interesting idea, but unfortunately the execution of the rest of the game is poor: the writing is full of spelling and technical errors, the story is weak, and the puzzles are essentially impossible.
I tried for a while to make it past the first scene, but I eventually gave up and consulted the walk-through that the author included with the game. The same thing happened for the next couple of scenes, at which point I could see that there would be no point in trying to solve the game myself: the puzzles essentially all require reading the author's mind. This game would have been much better rendered in the "choose your own adventure" style, with multiple choices offered at each juncture, since we could at least hit upon the correct combination of moves by exhaustive search.
At the end of the game, we learn the point of the story, and this turns out to be kind of interesting. I think it's meant to be a big plot twist; but it's delivered without any support from the rest of the story, so it's just an interesting idea and has no real impact.
Score: 4 (weak writing and design, some interesting ideas in
the story that aren't at all developed)
This game presents a cat's-eye view of the world. In the course of the story, we must manipulate our "provider" into feeding us, defeat a rival neighborhood cat, obtain some "soft food" (cat food from a can, rather than the "hard food" from a bag that we normally get), and save our provider's life after he has a heart attack.
A game written from the perspective of a cat runs the risk of being cloyingly cute, but this one manages to avoid excessive cuteness. This particular cat's viewpoint still seems rather anthropomorphized, but the author makes an earnest attempt to see and describe things as a cat might.
The plot meanders through a day in the life of the cat, so there's not a lot of overall direction to it. We start out with the clear goal of obtaining food, but after that's accomplished we're on our own to figure out the next step. Without any idea of where the plot is meant to go next, the only thing we can do is try to solve things that look like puzzles. I find this type of aimlessness frustrating in an adventure game, although in this case it might be a reasonable approximation of a cat's day.
The puzzles in this game are pretty obscure, and I found myself quickly resorting to the hints and to the walk-through. The puzzles are largely of the plot-sequence variety: there's a script of things that happens in the game, and each puzzle is to figure out the next thing in that script. The problem is that, without having seen the script before, I didn't feel I had any way of guessing what was meant to come next. Perhaps people that have cats (I don't) will have an easier time solving these puzzles than I did, but I'm skeptical that there are any real cats that are as good at mechanical puzzles as the cat-protagonist of this game.
The game's writing is good, and it manages to present a somewhat plausible non-human point of view. Keep the walk-through handy, though.
Score: 7 (good writing but unreasonable puzzle design)
Every so often, I'll recommend one of the recent IF games I've enjoyed to a friend who's into computer games, but not adventures so much as, say, real-time strategy games. They'll sometimes try the game I recommend, after which I usually hear one of two things. One: "Hey, that looked exactly like Zork! LOOK, GO NORTH, INVENTORY! I experienced nostalgia for exactly five seconds, but I saw everything those games could do a long time ago, so I quit immediately and deleted it from my hard disk." Two: "Hey, that wasn't nearly as good as Zork! Nothing again can ever, ever, ever hope to live up to the originals! I quit immediately and deleted it from my hard disk."
For those who count themselves in the latter camp, Thorfinn's Realm might be an entertaining diversion. This game is thoroughly in the style of Zork in particular, and lots of early games in general; it's a treasure hunt in a loosely medieval setting, full of anachronisms (partially justified here by a time-travel theme) and snide remarks.
Personally, I'm not too excited about this kind of game, partially because there's not a lot of development of the story or setting, but mostly because the challenges it presents aren't very interesting to me. The puzzles are typical of Zork-era treasure hunts, which didn't do a lot for me even at the time. The game has areas that amount to mazes, in that the connectivity between locations is all twisty and undescribed (in the forest near the beginning of the game, for example); resource management (keeping the flashlight charged); and objects that aren't mentioned in room descriptions, perhaps because the author thought they ought to be obvious.
Taken on its own terms, though, the game isn't bad; it seems to be a competent entry in its genre. The writing is decent, albeit a little too imitative of Zork's style, and some of the sarcastic responses are amusing. The game was built with Inform, so it benefits from a modern parser and user interface. Those who like the Scott Adams games and other early adventures will probably enjoy this game.
Score: 6 (somewhat amusing, but little development of setting
or story, and minimalist implementation)
Winter Wonderland is a storybook adventure. We play a young girl who lives on a farm in a past era. On our way back from a trip into the nearby village, we become lost in a fantastic, mystical winter setting filled with magical creatures.
This is a traditional exploration and puzzle-solving game. We don't have any particular goals, other than perhaps a vague sense that we should be getting home; normally I don't like this kind of aimlessness in a game, but in this case I didn't mind, perhaps because the puzzles were so nicely presented that I never felt at a loss for ideas about what to do next.
The setting and the story are happy and inviting. The game mechanics are also kind: it does not appear that our character can die or that the game can become unwinnable. I very much appreciate this approach to game design, not only for the frustration it avoids but because it puts the game mechanics in the background and allows us to become more immersed in the story.
Some of the puzzles in this game are very clever. Reaching the island in the ice floes stands out as one of the best travel puzzles I've seen, and as a wonderful puzzle in general; its basic mechanics are easy to understand, but it still requires a little thought to put everything together correctly. (One small thing that would have been nice, though, is a shortcut to bypass the ice floes after solving the puzzle. I had to traverse the ice floes three or four times, which got a bit tedious.)
The game has two mazes, and although both of them have tricks that save them from being egregious repeats of standard adventure mazes, they're both larger than they need to be. The ice floe maze would have been considerably less irritating if the safe paths had been evident, so that an exhaustive search of the possible directions wasn't required. The hedge maze should simply have been smaller; there's no reason it needed more than three or four locations, since the same disorientation trick it already uses could have been used much sooner. It speaks well of the rest of the game that I was having enough fun that I was willing to map these mazes, but it would have been nice if I hadn't needed to.
Reaching the end-game is a little obscure, because it requires that we go to a particular location after solving the last puzzle. I think that certain dependencies require that we solve a certain puzzle last, which puts us near the special end-game location, but it would have been better if we were forced to the right place at the right time, rather than being left to stumble there ourselves.
The attention to detail in the implementation is outstanding. Almost all of the objects mentioned in room descriptions can be manipulated to some extent, and a great many are responsive and helpful in some way.
The game is a little on the cute and sappy side, but not overwhelmingly so. The writing is good; the storybook style is consistently maintained and well done. Mostly, though, this is an enjoyable puzzle-solving game.
Score: 9 (great implementation, very nice design)
This extremely brief game is something of a parody of cave-hunt adventure games. The scenario is taken directly from the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where our whip-wielding hero is deep in a cave laden with booby-traps protecting a treasure, in this case the Jewelled Eye of Wossname. We must steal the treasure without getting killed by the trap.
There's an introductory scene that's ridiculously lengthy for such a short game, especially since it has virtually no bearing on the rest of the game. Perhaps that's part of the joke.
The game has roughly three puzzles, all of which are pretty tough. The first one requires that we search everything in sight (merely examining the crucial object doesn't reveal any reason we might want to search more closely). The second requires that we do something that is very slightly clued, but we have to do it at the right time - if we do it too early, we get a generic failure message, which led me to believe that I was simply on the wrong track entirely. The third requires that we use an item that, as far as I can tell, isn't mentioned anywhere; the only way to find it is to try a command like "get all" to make the parser list everything in the room. So, I found the puzzles pretty irritating; happily there were only the three.
The story (what little there is) is a parody, although it's tough to parody something that starts out as tongue-in-cheek as Indiana Jones. The most amusing thing to me was the scoring system, which is a bit of adventure-game humor: we start the game nearly at the end, so our starting score reflects a huge pile of past achievements that don't appear in the game. The FULL SCORE listing is hilarious.
There's not much to this game, but it has a few amusing moments.
Score: 5 (brief and amusing, but a little buggy,
and rather insubstantial)
Having just finished playing the roughly thirty TADS and Inform entries in this year's competition, I was rather looking forward to the change of pace this game promised. This is the first web-based game ever entered into the competition. We rec.arts.int-fiction regulars have never paid much attention to "hypertext fiction" - not out of dismissal or disdain, I think, but simply because we've been so busy exploring the seemingly endless potential of our more traditional format. This game, I thought, might provide a glimpse of the possibilities of this alternative approach. I prepared to give my typing fingers a rest and settle in for lots of reading and a little light mouse clicking.
Remembrance has good writing and a compelling story. The narrative follows a Canadian soldier through the First World War, shifting through different points of view, darting from the broader story of the war to the story of this one soldier. The plot is somewhat predictable, but it's well-written and the unusual narrative technique keeps it interesting.
The story is good, but the user interface is cumbersome. The author wanted to create something akin to a text adventure, I think; at each juncture, we are presented with a page of text, which ends with a pop-up list of two or three verbs (such as "get" or "read"). We select a verb, then the game usually prompts us to enter an object for the verb. In some cases a response appears in an alert dialog, and in other cases we go to the next page.
For me, this text adventure-like interface is annoying. The mechanics of the interface are unwieldy; each "command" requires too many steps, we have to switch between clicking and typing too often, and the pop-up alert dialogs are jarring. But the main problem is that, too often, it takes a lot of guesswork to figure out what to type in the input boxes. This game obviously doesn't conform to any of the usual conventions for text adventures, and doesn't tell us what its own rules are, so we're left to guess at what to do. In one scene, for example, we have to ask a character to read something to us; to do this we select the "ask" verb, then we must type "read" when presented with the question "What would you like to ask Benny?" It took me quite a while to figure out what to type here, since the question seems to solicit such a free-form response; this would have been much less confusing if the question had simply been phrased differently ("What would you like to ask Benny to do?"). In most cases, we get no feedback that helps us with our guesswork; typing something other than the required input usually produces a generic reply such as "Your action has no effect."
The story is completely linear, in the sense that only one command actually does anything at each juncture, so the interface simply did not need to be as complicated as it is. A simple set of links with the possible choices (including the verb and object) would have been much better.
I imagine that the author used the free-form entry system out of a desire to create more of an illusion of interactivity and freedom of action than a list of links would have suggested - the author might have thought that a fixed set of links would have made the limited set of choices too obvious. But as I've said before in the context of menu-driven dialog, the supposed illusion of interactivity and freedom of action exists only in the mind of the author - the player figures out very quickly that no actual freedom exists. To create a sense of freedom for the player, the game must actually understand and respond appropriately to the full range of commands that it purports to allow; when in fact a severely limited set of responses is allowed, it is far better for the player if the game simply enumerates the choices.
I'm probably overstating my annoyance with the user interface. The game is short, and there are only two or three places where the interface is especially intrusive; the rest of the time it didn't get in the way of the story, although it was still mechanically cumbersome.
Score: 6 (well-written if predictable, cumbersome interface)
This game is the musical version of The Lurking Horror - no, not Lurking Horror: The Musical, but a Lovecraftian tale with a cast of musicians. We play an aspiring musician who's come to the big city, trying to make a name for himself; but we haven't had any success, and we're on the verge of giving up and going home. On our last night in the city, we stumble into some weird events involving a mysterious band and a creepy dance club.
The first half of the game has enough puzzles to keep us occupied, but it doesn't manage to set much of a mood. We encounter a few characters and clues about some strange goings-on from years ago, obviously foreshadowing things to come in the game, but the setting and plot at this point are too ordinary to create any sense of dread. The second half does better at this; once we get into the club, we have a bizarre vision, and then we can start exploring the club's decrepit back passages.
The puzzles are mostly reasonable, although a few don't seem fair. One puzzle in particular - getting past a Lovecraftian monster - completely escaped me, even after consulting the walk-through and trying the solution. The parser also gets in a way in a few places, requiring unusual phrasings for one or two commands, but is mostly easy to deal with.
The game is nicely structured. We're limited to a few locations while we're solving the initial set of puzzles, after which more territory opens up. Throughout the game it's always reasonably clear what we should be trying to accomplish next, but the plot doesn't seem artificially linear. The middle portion progresses naturally toward the end-game - we know from nearly the start what we need to do, and the end-game begins as soon as we've accomplished everything.
The HeBGB Horror isn't especially horrifying, but it's an enjoyable mid-sized game and seems written mostly for laughs anyway. The ending is especially amusing - it flouts all of the conventions of the genre while taking a jab at the music industry.
Score: 7 (amusing, good implementation, a few design weaknesses)
This short game features King Arthur and Guinevere, but the plot is straight out of a 60's sitcom: Arthur wants to go out drinking with the boys, but Guinevere demands that he stay in for a quiet evening at home. We play Arthur, and our goal is to sneak out of the castle without Guinevere catching us. We can't just walk out the front door, but must find a stealthier solution.
The puzzles are all quite reasonable, although a couple of things could be improved. One puzzle requires explicitly searching an object that provides no encouraging feedback for other types of inspection; in general, I think that whenever we have to search something, "examine" and especially "look in" should at least give us some indication that closer inspection is required, and in most of these cases "look in" should do the same thing as "search." Another puzzle requires us to do something special to an object, but we can't do that special thing until after we've taken the object - attempting the action before taking the object leads us to believe we're trying the action on the wrong object.
There's not a lot to this game - just a handful of locations, and four or five small puzzles before we escape. The writing and storyline are intentionally silly, but not annoyingly so.
Score: 6 (decent implementation but not much to it)
If you're running Windows 95 or higher, or Windows NT 4 or higher, you can download a complete, automatic installer from ftp.gmd.de. Simply run this program to install all of the games and all of the interpreters - you won't need to download anything else.
If you have a Macintosh, the complete set is split into three archives:
For any other system, you can download all of the games in a single ZIP file from ftp.gmd.de. You can separately download all of the multi-media resource extensions in a single ZIP file from ftp.gmd.de. The multi-media resources are separated because the interpreters for most systems other than Windows and Macintosh can't currently use them, so people on other systems might prefer not to spend the time to download them. You will also need the game interpreters for your system; refer to the competition read-me file for information on downloading the interpreters.
You can download an individual game for any system by
following the link that accompanies the game's review. For TADS and
Inform games, the individual game files will work on any type of
computer, but you will need an interpreter for your system; refer to
the
competition read-me file for information on downloading the
interpreters.