Hello Sword by Andrea Rezzonico [Comp05]

IFDB page: Hello Sword
Final placement: 30th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

There are two separate Hello Sword games in the Comp05 download: hs_ita and hs_eng, which apparently signify the Italian and English versions of the game. Yet, when I fired up hs_eng, the first full screen of text was a quote box, all in Italian. I thought maybe I’d accidentally clicked the wrong file, but then the quote got translated into English… sort of. Here’s the “translated” version:

And me, I’m who live at this point on my counted days,
who have dull dreams, who have fear, also I…
And me, I’m who go away just with these hands
to dyke the limits between the truth and the unreality…

To “dyke the limits”? Uh-oh. Then we get some introductory text that’s all, “You hasn’t the will-power”, and “today is one of the most hottest day of the month”, and “Altough that”, and “The guilty of all?”, and “read the note that Julius leaved.” Yeah, it’s immediately apparent that this review will be getting the “broken english” tag.

The English is so broken, in fact, that I quickly began thinking that maybe I could approach the game like For A Change — something whose language is so barely comprehensible that it melts your brain a little bit, but whose askew diction can be fun in itself. And there are moments where that is true! There’s a room description that includes the sentence, “A little square from that branch off four roads, which conduct to the four cardinal ways.” That feels a little bit like the “mobiles” of For A Change. Or how about this one?

Independence Street
In this street there are a lot of buildings, that – though impede the transit of the wind – almost guarantee a little shade. In this road, in addiction to the great number of houses, there are also a pub when you often spend your evenings and a stationer’s shop where you bought pens and pencils in times of low school.

“The transit of the wind” and “times of low school” are almost poetic in their brokenness. On the other hand, “in addiction to the great number” could work wonderfully if the substitution actually added anything, but alas, it remains only comical and sad. And that’s where my sympathetic strategy breaks down. See, Dan Schmidt knew exactly what he was doing when he broke the English of For A Change, and the linguistic changes worked towards the game’s overall artistic goals. Not so here. Instead, the author pleads innocence in the INFO text, similar to Chronicle Play Torn:

I’m absolutely acquainted with the great number of errors and incomprehensible expressions that crowded this adventure (by the way, I ask you to signal them to me), but I hope you at least appreciate the huge effort I made for you.

Sorry, but: NOPE! I sure don’t, because that effort did not result in anything good. As I said in the CPT review, I want to read good stories, not understandable excuses. And here’s the other problem: even setting aside the many, many, many language problems (the “signaling” of which would comprise hours and hours of work), this is not just a game in broken English. It’s a broken game in broken English.

There are guess-the-verb situations, pretty much impossible to pass without a walkthrough. (A better-written game might have laden the prose with clues that would trigger the correct verb, but this is not that game.) There are far-fetched solutions that the game itself keeps trying to discourage until they work. There’s the old Hitchhiker’s Guide trick of descriptions lying to you until you interrogate them repeatedly.

And finally — well, not finally, more like halfway through, but it works like a finale — the walkthrough itself fails. Even typing in commands literally from the walkthrough, even correcting those walkthrough commands that the game itself can’t parse (like “south-west”), I came upon a situation where the PC got thrown in jail and my game ended no matter what. And when that happened, dear reader, I was done.

Rating: 2.9

Glass by Emily Short [misc]

[This review appeared in issue #45 of SPAG. The issue was published on July 17, 2006.]

I’ve barely begun to explore the capabilities of Inform 7 (I7), partly because its appearance has rekindled my interest in actually playing IF. In that vein, I continue to explore the games that were released with I7 as “Worked Examples”. Having made my way through Bronze, Emily Short’s adaptation of Beauty And The Beast, I came next to Glass, in which she similarly adapts Cinderella. Actually, perhaps “similarly” isn’t the right word here — where Bronze was all about landscape and puzzles, Glass resides on the other side of the spectrum, focusing entirely on character and conversation.

There are other differences, too. Although both works are meant primarily as example I7 code, Bronze feels like a full-fledged game, while Glass plays much more like a demo, or perhaps an experimental comp entry. That isn’t to say that there aren’t interesting ideas embedded in Glass — there are, and I plan to discuss them — but the experience of playing it feels altogether more slight than solving Bronze. Not only is it simply a smaller game, it also demands less interaction from the player; “Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z” is a valid walkthrough, though perhaps not to the best ending.

Those endings are important. Like some other short replay-cycle games, Glass layers on story elements by making less-than-optimal endings the most easily reachable. There aren’t a terribly large number of endings (another factor making the game feel a bit thin), but it’s unlikely that most players will reach the best ending first. Along the way, they’ll learn more about the motivations of each character, and in fact more about some hidden details of the game’s main scene.

This information in turn adds meaning to the rest of the paths to be found in the game. It’s a variation on the “accretive PC” model of knowledge I discussed in my review of Lock & Key on IF-Review. The difference is that the news gained through these sub-optimal endings doesn’t so much help the player better direct the PC or better solve the game, but it does lend additional drama to the other branches of the story. I suppose this game gives us accretive NPCs more than an accretive PC.

However, there are some tricks at work with PC knowledge, too. The player/PC knowledge divide is one of the thornier fundamental problems of IF — a player new to the game will almost inevitably know less about the character and game-world than the PC does, and both the game and the player often start out by scrambling to narrow the gap. There are some workarounds for this, amnesia being the more traditional and popular, while accretive PCs are a more recent innovation.

Glass has found another: base your game on a story with which the vast majority of your audience is already familiar. Bronze was an imaginative variation on Beauty and The Beast, but it neither shed a great deal of light on the original tale nor did it require much information about that tale from the player. Our familiarity with the base story helps us get up to speed on who the PC is, but it isn’t otherwise exploited. However, in Glass, the player must bring to bear knowledge from outside the game in order to reach the best ending. For anyone familiar with most any version the fairy tale, this gambit should work well, though perhaps not right away. Still, it’s an ingenious way of bridging the information gap between player and PC — I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of this strategy before. I suppose there are only a limited number of stories with which authors can assume widespread audience familiarity, and an even smaller number of those that aren’t still under copyright.

With this bridge in place, then, Glass is free to disconcert us a bit as well. For one thing, the player character has some rather surprising qualities (and that’s all I’ll say…), which are left for players to discover rather than being announced upfront. Not only that, the game’s take on the Cinderella tale is less than traditional. In keeping with many modern treatments of fairy tales, its approach to the story’s villains is a little more sympathetic, and its portrayal of the heroes is a little more ambivalent. I would have expected Emily Short to bring some subversive ideas to any fairy tale she touched, and she doesn’t disappoint here.

One more note: in the article I wrote for the long-awaited IF Theory book, I mentioned that it was hard for me to imagine how the basic component of landscape could be extracted from interactive fiction, since as soon as the first room description appears, the game introduces a concept of geographical location. Well, Glass is the game that breaks that model — it has no room descriptions whatsoever. That doesn’t mean it’s without a landscape, though. It’s just that instead of presenting a landscape of Place, Glass instead gives us a landscape of Concept. The NPCs traverse a conversational terrain with particular goals in mind, and at every prompt the PC can try to steer that travel to influence its destination. It’s a compact territory, but well worth exploring.

Finding Martin by G.K. Wennstrom [misc]

[This review appeared in issue #45 of SPAG. The issue was published on July 17, 2006.]

In an era of bite-sized IF, Finding Martin is a 12-course meal. Actually, it’s more like one of those progressive dinners, where you go from one house to the next, a different course at each house, for a total of 12 courses in the evening. Except it’s more like going to one of those every night for two weeks.

Seriously, this game is HUGE. This is the kind of game where you might find an item with ten different modes, many of which can be used to adjust the item to one of its 720 different settings (and some of which do other things entirely), settings which are split into twelve different themed sections, many of which give hints, some of which give red herrings, and some of which perform game functions. I am not exaggerating. And that’s just one item out of dozens and dozens you’ll find in this game way way way before you get anywhere near finding Martin himself.

If you love yourself a big, juicy puzzlefest, Finding Martin is cause for celebration. It’s several times larger and more complex than anything Infocom ever attempted, and it’s generally quite well-implemented. I encountered a number of glitches in my journey through the game, but they were all minor — typos, missing synonyms, and underimplemented parsing mostly. There are a few logic errors here and there, but nothing game-crashing, and in fact very little that even caused me any trouble with a puzzle. Moreover, these problem areas are a very small percentage of the game itself, and this is a game that implements some highly complex behavior. A few errors here and there are quite forgivable in a game this ambitious in scope.

As for the puzzles themselves, the news is again mostly good. Most of the challenges are logical, and some are quite clever indeed. In particular, there’s a puzzle (or maybe it would be more accurate to call it a suite of puzzles) toward the end of the game that is astoundingly intricate and deeply satisfying, the kind of a puzzle that would make up the entirety of another game.

It’s a time-travel scenario that takes the groundwork laid by Sorcerer and expands it by an order of magnitude, asking you to consider the relations between a number of different time-slices as well as to coordinate the actions of multiple past selves with the actions of your current self in order to bypass certain barriers. However, well before you reach that puzzle you’ll have made your way through a large number of obstacles that should scratch any inveterate puzzler’s itch.

Not only that, the puzzles frequently build on each other, and most of the goals require several components to achieve. Finding Martin‘s world can feel astonishingly layered and convoluted. I frequently found that the discovery of a new item or command would add new dimensions to the pieces of the game I’d already uncovered, and that their interactions would open up new avenues for exploration.

Of course, the flip side to this is that such a discovery would often compel me to explore the game’s giant world yet again, trying the new key to see if it would unlock any heretofore unseen doors. At time, the gameworld feels like an obsessive-compulsive’s paradise, but at least most of the interactions seem logical once they’ve been found.

Unfortunately, not all the puzzles manage to meet the same high standards. There are a number of read-the-author’s-mind stumpers spread throughout the game. Some of these just require induction stretched absurdly far, but for several others I still have no idea how I was supposed to come up with the solution.

There’s another category, too: puzzles whose solution required some kind of cultural referent which I lacked, a la Zork II‘s baseball puzzle. Finding Martin‘s pedigree consists mostly of geek lore like Monty Python and Douglas Adams, and that stuff I’ve got covered, but a couple of puzzles require knowledge of Asian customs that I only learned from the walkthrough.

On the flip side of read-the-author’s-mind are “puzzles” whose solution is entirely arbitrary but so heavily clued that the game pretty much just tells you what it is. Imagine a dark room with a description along these lines: “It’s impossible to see anything in this room — this must be what a cinnamon roll feels like when it’s in the oven!” And lo and behold, you just happen to find a cinnamon roll later in the game, so when you bring it into the dark room and eat it, the cinnamon-oriented olfactory sensors in the walls detect it and turn on the lights, just as they’ve been programmed to do by the house’s exceedingly eccentric and patient owner. That example isn’t from the game, but there are several puzzles in there that are cut from the same cloth.

The substandard puzzles are a minority, and they certainly aren’t enough to ruin the game, but my advice is: don’t be afraid to bust out the walkthrough. Yes, sometimes you may find that a perfectly logical solution was staring you in the face, but other times you’ll be relieved to just take the rather farfetched solution and move on with your life. Happily, the author is kind enough to provide a walkthrough on her web page that is broken up into 5-point clusters so as not to give away too much at once.

However, if I may offer one more piece of advice: download the full walkthrough from that page and tuck it away somewhere on your hard drive. Otherwise, you may find yourself, as I did, stuck two-thirds of the way through the game and panicking because the author’s site has gone down. Luckily for me, the page came back up the next day and I found some cached bits on Yahoo in the meantime, but I could have saved a good deal of time and stress if I’d just had the full walkthrough to fall back on.

Finally, take heed of the author’s advice in the intro text: save your game a LOT. There were quite a number of times I found myself returning to an earlier savegame because I was trapped without a necessary item, or I wanted to undo something I’d done a bit improperly a few hundred moves earlier. Actually, that brings me to one of my chief gripes about Finding Martin: it sets a few arbitrary limits, ostensibly in the name of realism but functionally just to irritate the player. Chief among these is an inventory limit. Let’s face it: this is not a game that holds realism particularly dear. Many of its puzzles consist of caprice and whimsy, and its entire plot is metaphysical to say the least. However, for some reason it decided that the player should only be able to carry a limited number of objects, and it failed to provide any kind of bottomless sack-type object to circumvent this limit.

Not only that, there’s a puzzle component that steals items when they’re dropped on the ground. Even more confoundingly, commands like PUT ALL ON TABLE are met with the response, “One thing at a time, please.” And of course, there are many many journeys to pocket worlds whose obstacles require that the player has brought a particular item. Frequent were the times I cursed at this game for the way it forced me into numbingly dull inventory management tasks when I wanted to be having fun instead. Also, there are several instances of the game being pointlessly obtuse, along these lines:

>READ BIG BOOK
First you'd need to open it.

Come on. This is 2006 — we know by now that READ implies OPEN. Such obstructionist world-modeling benefits nobody.

I’m not sure if responses like this one and the response to PUT ALL are TADS default behavior. I do know that I sometimes wished this game had been written in Inform, so that I could get certain pieces of the Inform default functionality. Besides the lack of a sack_object, I was jonesing hard for an OBJECTS verb that would let me see all the items in the game I’d found up to that point. Similarly, a FULLSCORE command that told me all the puzzles I’d solved so far would have been most welcome, especially given how many times I had to restore back to an earlier saved game. Finally, having just played Bronze, I really missed conveniences like GO TO that allow me to traverse the game world without rattling off memorized directions to the parser.

Okay, I’ve been complaining for a while, which makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy the game. That’s not true — overall I had plenty of fun. It’s just a similar feeling to what I had when playing Once And Future, another enormous old-school puzzlefest. Like OAF, Finding Martin provides lots of opportunities to feel that satisfying click as logical components snap together, but forces a little too much tedium on the player after that click has happened.

It’s the figuring-out that’s the fun part of a puzzle, not the follow-through of putting twenty pieces in just the right place once you know where they’re supposed to go. Several of this game’s puzzles would have been much more fun if they’d provided some way of automating that follow-through once the player has demonstrated understanding of the basic concept.

Enough about the puzzles anyway. What about the story? Well, actually, the story is pretty much MIA for the first third or so of the game. We begin with a reasonably compelling premise: your brilliant but peculiar friend Martin has disappeared, and his family has asked you to explore his house in hopes of finding him. Why you and not, say, the police? Well, it seems that you may just be close enough to Martin’s highly bizarre mindset to understand how to find him when the police wouldn’t even be able to get in the door. Strong echoes of Hollywood Hijinx abound as you poke through rooms laden with fascinating devices and hidden exits, but there’s not much more story to be had for a while.

Finally, the game begins doling out plot in awkward lumps, but about two-thirds of the way through, these lumps smooth out and the story begins to tie together as more and more interconnections between Martin’s family and friends, as well as his past, present, and future, reveal themselves. By the time I was rolling toward the endgame, I had felt genuinely moved several times. In fact, a couple of times Finding Martin hits a real IF sweet spot, where the solution to a puzzle not only advances the story but carries strong emotional content about the PC’s role in the other characters’ lives. I recall one moment in particular that gave me goosebumps, as I figured out how something I had done in a past time-travel scenario had affected the future, and how someone in that past had sent a message forward in time to me.

Remember how I mentioned the game’s geeky pedigree? There are a number of references woven throughout the story that are pulled straight from the geek handbook: Star Trek meets Hitchhiker’s meets Tolkien. Some of these made me smile, and some made me squirm. At times I felt like saying, “Yes, yes, I get it. You like Monty Python.” Also, the writing around these references can sometimes feel a bit flat and ingratiating, as when the PC encounters a used paperback:

>x novel
It's a book by Douglas Adams, entitled "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish". Apparently this is the fourth book in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy. It occurs to you that publishing the fourth book of a trilogy must be the toungue-in-cheek behavior of someone with a fantastic imagination and an audacious taste for the bizarre.

Ho ho ho. Nothing like belaboring that “fourth book in the trilogy” joke. I get it — you like Douglas Adams. Also, “tongue”.

Aside from that, though, the writing worked well. Most of the time it was transparent, but there were some clever twists and turns throughout, as well as a few good jokes. Having finished this game at last, and finally found Martin, I have to express my admiration. It must have been an unbelievable amount of work to put together a game of this size and scope, and for the most part it’s done really well. If you’re hungry for puzzles, Finding Martin should keep you fed for several weeks. Even if you’re not a puzzler, grab a walkthrough and explore this game — there are pleasures here for many tastes.

Damnatio Memoriae by Emily Short [misc]

[This review appeared in issue #47 of SPAG, in the “SPAG Specifics” sections. Note: that means there are SPOILERS AHEAD. The issue was published on January 16, 2007.]

Damnatio Memoriae is a tiny game, but it’s got plenty of quality. There are a few multiple-solution puzzles and the skeleton of a story built around an “accretive PC” model, where a winning playthrough only comes from the lessons taught by a few losing iterations. The writing is reasonably good, as one might expect from Emily Short, and the setting puts her considerable knowledge of ancient Rome to use. It takes hardly any time to play, and repays exploration with a surprising depth of implementation.

All that said, I think I made two mistakes in approaching DM. One was assuming that because it shares a universe with Savoir-Faire, the details of its magic system would be identical to that game. The other mistake was forgetting that this game’s raison d’etre is to be example code for Inform 7, not necessarily to be a complete and satisfying game in itself. Consequently, I found myself feeling disappointed by finding only anticlimactic, abrupt endings, and so turned to the walkthrough after winning but still feeling unsatisfied. From there, I became confused and frustrated by the way this game’s magic differed from that of S-F. These factors combined to make my playing experience less than fun.

It didn’t help that the first winning ending I reached was, I think, buggily incomplete. There was a “time’s up” message and a “You have won” message, but no connective material between them, which of course felt bare and anticlimactic. I’m assuming this was a bug, but there were a number of places in the game where logical connections felt missing. For instance, in a branch where I had killed Clemens, left him in the study, and ducked outside, I thought I’d hide under a pile of hay. Here’s what happened:

>hide
What do you want to hide under?

>hay
Without some decoy, they'll certainly look hard enough to find you.

What, the corpse of my doppelganger up in the study isn’t enough of a decoy?

I chalk these lacunae up to the fact that the point here is not to create a perfect, polished game but rather to demonstrate Inform 7 rules within the context of a nominally game-like structure. Also, despite the fact that this game is tiny, the number of possible interactions between objects makes for a plethora of implementation details, so it’s natural that without extensive beta-testing (as a full-fledged game would have received), some would be missed. As I said, I mistakenly entered the game with the wrong expectation about that, and in any case, I feel like I’m beginning to cross over into the uncouth practice of airing bugs in a review rather than privately to the author, so let me move on to a different topic: the functional differences between this game’s magic system and that of Savoir-Faire.

I had never played S-F to completion, so I prefaced my approach to this game by playing through its larger cousin. Savoir-Faire is a marvelous game, with an internally consistent magic system of linking and reverse linking that enables both its puzzles and its story. However, the logic of linking in Damnatio Memoriae parts ways with S-F in several areas, so I found it a disadvantage to have S-F so fresh in my memory as I played DM.

For one thing, Savoir-Faire disallows linking anything to the PC, saying, “Linking yourself is generally considered a very bad idea.” In DM, however, linking the PC is an important tool. This hurdle is easily cleared, but it leaves the player to figure out how linkages between people operate, and their operations are in fact rather counterintuitive. On top of this, DM also adds a new kind of linkage: slave linkage. The differences between the three types of links can be subtle indeed. Consider these three messages:

>link clemens to me
(first unlinking Clemens)
You build a mutually-effective link between Clemens and yourself.

>reverse link clemens to me
You reverse link Clemens to yourself (son of Julia and Agrippa, who died before you were born). While one of you lives, so does the other.

>slave link clemens to me
You build the link, enslaving Clemens to yourself. It is an expedient Augustus has been using for years: now any attempt upon your life will instead kill your slave.

On the face of it, these messages would seem to indicate that the regular link allows you to control Clemens, the reverse link causes harm to both when anything is inflicted on either, while the slave link transfers that harm from you to Clemens. However, a simple link doesn’t allow you to control Clemens. Instead, a regular link behaves in the way I expected a reverse link to act, and vice versa.

The other significant difference between S-F‘s linking and that in DM is that DM is much less consistent about disallowing linkages. In Savoir-Faire, you could depend on the fact that unless two objects had some sort of common quality, they could not be linked. Damnatio Memoriae is a little more capricious:

>link window to pitcher
The window is insufficiently similar to the painted glass pitcher of water for the two to be linked.

>link letter to pitcher
You build a mutually-effective link between the old letter and the painted glass pitcher of water.

I was able to understand the first result a bit more when I realized belatedly that there’s probably no glass in the window, but that still doesn’t explain how I can link the pitcher to a letter. Similarly:

>link pitcher to clemens
This would work better if the painted glass pitcher of water were a person.

>link vase to clemens
You build a mutually-effective link between the vase and Clemens.

I’m not sure how much these inconsistencies would have bothered me if I hadn’t just played Savoir-Faire, but that game sets a standard that Damnatio Memoriae fails to meet. Consequently, I felt a lot of annoyance at seeing solutions in the walkthrough that never would have occurred to me, since I was expecting DM‘s magic system to be more like that of S-F.

This is a whole lot of kvetching over a sample game, and in a way, it’s a nice problem to have: Emily’s work, even other samples like Bronze, is of such impeccable quality that I’ve begun to hold even her slightest output to what may be a ridiculously high standard. When a game like Damnatio Memoriae fails to meet that standard, I’m more disappointed than I would be in another author’s work, and linking (sorry) this game to one of her real masterpieces only aggravated the problem.

I guess all this is to say that I’d love to see other games set in the various historical periods of the Lavori d’Aracne universe, but I hope they’re created as games rather than as samples. That way, the focus can be on story and craft, rather than on teaching the features of a system. That’s my selfish desire as a player, mind you — no doubt when I’m working on learning Inform 7 I’ll wish just the opposite.

Coloratura by Lynnea Glasser [XYZZY]

[I was invited to review the games nominated for Best Individual PC in the 2013 XYZZY Awards. As it turned out, there was only one game nominated.]

Lynnea Glasser’s Coloratura has made XYZZY Award history. It is the first nominee ever to win its category before the second round of voting, by being the sole nominee in its category, Best Individual PC. Mind you, it isn’t the sole 2013 game that qualified for the category — obviously, the other games had player characters. It’s just that Coloratura‘s PC is so good that no other game from the year could muster more than a single vote to compete with it. It was the overwhelming choice, and for good reason. It’s great.

So what’s so great about it? Well, for one thing, the Aqueosity has an unusual point of view, as you might guess from its name. It is essentially an alien life form, and the game does a wonderful job of making it clear just how alien indeed. Now, non-human PCs are nothing new in IF. The trick goes back at least to Miron Schmidt’s 1996 game Ralph (in which the PC is a dog), and probably earlier than that. You can find a whole list of such games at IFDB.

What’s special about the Aqueosity is that not only is it non-human, it is wholly original to this game. In games where you play something like a dog, or a vampire, or an elf, sure the POV is inhuman, but it is still familiar — we’ve got a pre-existing rubric within which to understand it. The Aqueosity is a monster (though of course it doesn’t see itself as such), but it’s like no monster we’ve ever seen before — its closest archetype I can think of is The Blob, and even that isn’t very close at all. So from the first moment of the game, we must struggle to understand just what it is we’re dealing with on a fundamental level. That’s a time-honored tradition in written SF, but it’s used to particularly powerful effect here in the interactive context, where we must not only learn to understand the Aqueosity, we must learn to be the Aqueosity.

This process involves figuring out just what the creature can do, and here we come to another of Coloratura‘s strengths: the expanded capabilities of its PC. It’s always fun to play a character who can influence the world in unusual ways, whether by magic or gizmos or superpowers or whatever, and even more fun when those abilities unlock gradually over the course of the game. Coloratura does a masterful job of uniting character discovery with power discovery, so that learning more about the Aqueosity’s skills and traits lets us comprehend the character better, and vice versa.

The fact that the game curtails some very standard IF tropes (“INVENTORY” gets the response, “This body cannot carry things.”) forces players almost immediately to begin trying to explore more unfamiliar concepts for affecting the environment. Doing so starts uncovering some capacities we’re not used to having in IF, the first of which is probably the most shocking: the PC can kill with a thought. (If in fact “thought” is the right word for whatever goes on when the Aqueosity severs a human’s ties with “the physical.”) As Glasser points out in her author’s notes, having this mass murder occur at the beginning of the game, as a necessary component of progressing, highlights not only the PC’s inhuman capabilities but also its utter remove from human concepts of morality.

The gelatinous PC can also travel through very small spaces, which opens up travel capabilities beyond those of the humans inhabiting the ship. It seems to be highly acidic as well, at least in reaction with some substances… including human flesh. I could never quite suss out what things it would melt and what things it wouldn’t, but in any case its Aqueous acidity is crucial not only to certain puzzle solutions but also to the sense of horror in the story, as the Aqueosity physically disfigures objects and people.

The creep factor increases further when we find that the PC is capable not just of physical influence, but mental influence as well. The game does a lovely job of introducing the “COLOR” verb at an opportune time, and in doing so unfolds the PC in a whole new dimension. At the same time, the power is so perfectly in tune with the game’s theme and milieu (not to mention its title, which gave a very satisfying click at this disclosure) that it feels completely natural and inevitable. Of course the Aqueosity can not only hear the colors of emotion, it can sing them too, and of course that singing would influence the beings nearby. Glasser wisely (and unavoidably) prevents this power from working in most instances, but seeing the list of colors made me feel possibilities gleefully expanding, and I loved solving the puzzles that hinge on this ability.

I can’t speak of puzzles without mentioning the meat monster, which won another of Coloratura‘s bouquet of awards, for Best Individual Puzzle. This is a beautiful puzzle in lots of ways, but I’ll try to confine myself to those relating to my category. First, the cueing is just fantastic, introducing the PC’s penultimate superpower ever so smoothly:

Colder Room
The madness in this room is soul-wrenching. How the Blind Ones could live with this atrocity is unfathomable. Fleshy chunks of the formerly-alive sit in frozen stacks, trapped in disunity. Your own situation is frustrating, but this is a true, horrific travesty. You need to help this, heal this, fix this: you can't idle while such suffering exists.

>COLOR CHUNKS WHITE
The meat is too disjointed to color. It needs to be combined first.

>COMBINE CHUNKS
You smooth your body over the meat packages, physically and metaphysically conducting unity and understanding and cohesion. As you weave together the previously disparate notes, the black gives way to confusion, then curiosity, and then slowly to joy and happiness at its newfound Song. The Newsong greenly bubbles into gleeful thankfulness.

This is a textbook example of how to introduce new verbs without putting the player through a single moment of guess-the-verb frustration. I’d gotten here by exploiting a power I knew — crawling through small spaces — and when I then tried to use another power, the game gave me a stepladder to try something new, and rewarded me generously when I did so.

Even better, when I did struggle, the game was there to catch me. The meat monster puzzle introduces the PC’s final power, that of controlling other beings. This power is crucial for the final act of the game, and the logic that invokes it here is flawless. However, although the game tried to give me a similar cue (“…it only continues to beg you for help. It striates insitence [sic] that you take control, that you fix everything.”), I failed to catch on. Rather than letting me flounder for too long, the game finally just taught me what it wanted me to do:

In a desperate act of submission, the Newsong binds its aura to yours, giving you complete control of its mind and body. You surprise at the bond: your bodies remain divorced, but your minds move in perfect synch. You tug curiously at its simplistic flesh-structures, feeling the creature’s immense weight. You can make it do whatever you want.

As it had done many times before, Coloratura gave me a thrill by opening yet another capability of the PC, and it did so without a trace of contrivance, as the act of a newborn fighting for its life.

A newborn. The Aqueosity’s utter horror and revulsion at the concept of a freezer full of meat, and the way it experiences that environment (“Fleshy chunks of the formerly-alive sit in frozen stacks, trapped in disunity”) brilliantly puts our sympathies on its side, and against our own kind. The joy and gratitude it hears in the Newsong’s voice put the monstrous PC into the role of loving mother, and yet we can also understand perfectly, superimposed upon this picture, the utter shock and horror of the humans aboard the ship, as an inexplicably animate mass of meat suddenly bursts out of the freezer and into the kitchen.

Coloratura makes that kind of move over and over, to enormous effect. It’s my favorite aspect of the game, and it couldn’t be done without the finely crafted PC. See, there are some things IF is great at conveying — special perspectives and special powers are among those. You know what IF is not very good at conveying, though? Dramatic irony. When the audience controls the character, it’s very difficult to pull off an effect where the character knows less than the audience. When we watch Hamlet stab the arras behind which Polonius is hiding, we too feel the stab of tragedy at his unwitting accident. But if Hamlet were an IF PC, how would the author achieve this effect? She could hide the knowledge of Polonius’ location from the PC, but doing so would drain Hamlet’s action of dramatic irony. She could allow the stabbing not to occur, but that would derail the entire plot. Or she could eliminate interactivity around that moment, in which case we’re pretty much back to watching a play.

I’ve never seen a game solve this puzzle, but Coloratura takes an ingenious route to get there. By creating a character which is both horrifying and sympathetic, and making that character our viewpoint onto an otherwise stock and familiar human environment, the game manages to give us more knowledge than the PC, so that we can understand its actions, necessary for its own survival, in the context of the deaths, maimings, and mind control it inflicts on the human crew. That crew is shown to be scientists, not villains of any kind, and so they have our sympathy too, not to mention the built-in sympathy they get by sharing our DNA. Thus we can feel the full tragedy of unwitting destruction as the story unfolds. That is the most impressive artistry of all in this very, very impressive game.

Thoughts on the 2015 Interactive Fiction Competition [Comp15]

[I originally published this over on my main blog, >SUPERVERBOSE, before >INVENTORY existed. In the spirit of getting all my IF stuff in one place, I’m republishing it here.]

The Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp) started in 1995, and for its first ten years, I was a very active participant. I entered the comp 4 different times (1996, 2001, 2002, 2004) and wrote hundreds of reviews. I reviewed pretty much every game submitted to the comp from 1996-2004, with a few scattered exceptions (stuff I’d tested, languages I don’t speak, troll games, etc.)

Then, for the next 10 years, I didn’t vote in the comp at all. Not coincidentally, my son Dante was born in 2005. Once that happened, the time I used to set aside for IF got drastically curtailed, and I pretty much slipped into frozen caveman state. I’ve dipped my toe in a few times, writing reviews of various comp games that were nominated for various XYZZY Awards, but for the most part I’ve remained quite disconnected from the IFComp at large.

As Dante gets older, though, he becomes more independent and my time opens up again. So this year I decided to take a shot at reviewing some IFComp games. However, I discovered rather quickly that the IFComp of today is drastically different from the one I left behind in 2005.

I followed my usual comp reviewing method, which is to let some program dial up a random order and play through the games it selects. My time is still a lot more limited than it used to be, so out of 53 games, I ended up playing 9. Of those 9, the composition was thus:

By way of contrast, of the 33 games I reviewed in 2004, 2 were homebrew and the rest were parser-driven. None were CYOA. The 2015 comp, in my experience, has a completely different quality than the 1995-2004 comps had. The definition of “interactive fiction” has opened wide, wide enough to admit even so-called games whose idea of interactivity is basically “click here to turn the page.”

Logo for the 2015 IF Comp

Now, at this point I should make a couple of things clear. First, I understand that non-parser IF games participated in the first 10 years of the comp. A CYOA game called Desert Heat comes to mind, which at the time seemed like a surprising experiment. Those comps had their share of minimally interactive games too, most of which were roundly panned. There was Ian Finley’s Life On Beal Street, whose interactivity was pretty much “Would you like to read the next paragraph? (Y/N)”. There was Harry Hardjono’s Human Resources Stories, a fake job-interview quiz from somebody who was clearly really angry at employers. There was the infamous (to me) A Moment Of Hope, which pretty much totally ignored whatever you’d type in many scenes, just steamrolling on with whatever story it wanted to tell. Heck, even Photopia, one of the most acclaimed comp games of all time, drew its share of criticism for a perceived lack of interactivity.

So yeah, I get that 1995-2004 wasn’t some kind of perfect golden age where every game was a great IF experience (though I hasten to say that Photopia is a really, really great IF experience). Anyway, trust me when I say that I remember the bad times. The second thing I should make clear is that I enjoy CYOA well enough for what it is. It’s a neat little narrative trick. I had a good time with CYOA books as a kid, and can still have a ball with a well-written CYOA work. But stacked up against full-blown parser games which offer a constant sense of openness and possibility, multiple-choice is just pretty boring by comparison. I find myself so indifferent about the choices presented that I just roll a die to pick one, so that I can get on to the next bit of story.

So I reacted with dismay at the suddenly flipped proportions of the comp’s 2015 games, at least as presented to me in random order. Where in 2000 “Desert Heat” was an odd curiosity, here it was the parser game that was the outlier! I felt like I’d come to a film festival, but that in most of the theaters, I’d instead be handed a coffee table book. I mean, coffee table books are cool. Some of them are spectacular! But for me they’re not as much fun as movies, and it’s a bit of a disappointment to get one instead of a movie.

I rated the comp games the way I always do: based on how much I enjoyed the experience. And the fact is, I don’t enjoy CYOA games as much as parser games, so even the ones I liked a lot could only get an 8 or so. Also, unlike parser games, CYOA games are extremely difficult to transcript while they’re happening, which really drains my ability and inclination to review them. So I won’t review them, but I will provide the list of responses I wrote while playing. CYOA and lists, a match made in heaven! (Fair warning that those lists may contain spoilers — I wasn’t trying to be careful about that.)

Here then, for whatever they may be worth, my “reviews” of 9 2015 IFComp games:

I THINK THE WAVES ARE WATCHING ME by Bob McCabe

I downloaded this Windows executable, and despite my trepidation about running .exe files from unknown people on my machine, I ran it, hoping that the IFComp gods had ruled out any viruses. I got a DOS-looking window, with some DOS-looking text:

I Think The Waves Are Watching Me.
By Bob McCabe.

Build: 106

(G)etting Started.
(P)lay the Game.
(S)ecrets I've unlocked.
(C)redits/Thanks.

Then I typed “g”. Then “G”. Then “P”. Nothing happened, any of these times. I typed “Play the game”. I typed “Help”. I typed “Helloooooooooo?”. Each time, after hitting enter, my words disappeared, with no other effect. Then I closed the window.

I guess this isn’t really a review, but it does explain why I gave the game a 1.

Rating: 1.0

SWITCHEROO by Mark C. Marino & family

  • Engaging, appealing, well-implemented. Smooth and beautiful.
  • Surprisingly a combat card game is an alternative to the story?
  • Some weirdness: “Born a slave on a plantation, Jazmine became a hero when she escaped through the Underground Railroad to a Midwestern whistle-stop town. Later, she was railroaded into selling her story to a motion picture company who fast-tracked the film into theaters. Ironically, she would become an R&B legend best known for her performances on a popular dance show with a train theme.” So she lived how long?
  • Funny: “Shazbot! You use the Electric Slidekick!” Lots of great humor — take-off on Percy Jackson with dentistry substituted. “Lightning teeth”.
  • Interesting — not sure how the math is working, but the card game feels like it’s a bit slanted to prevent the player from losing.
  • Once the story begins, much of the interactivity starts to consist of “show the next part”
  • Whoa – wheelchair boy into able girl.
  • Scale of girly fictional types – Hermione, Dorothy, Little Prince
  • Possibly adopted by “Mr. and Mrs. Sheephead.” Upon clicking mention of California Sheephead: “Ah, I’m glad you were curious. The California Sheephead is a salt water fish, found off the coast of California. It has the unusual property of all the fish being born female and then, given certain circumstances, like when she gets sick of all the long lines at bathrooms, changing into a male.”
  • Mostly writing is smooth. Found first error after about 15 mins: “They were amazed at how much Denise could eat at the burger place after their just a short adventure.”
  • Doll in wheelchair. Moving. “The only word he could think of was: home”.
  • Ending choice, also moving.
  • I wish there was a way to “undo”

Rating: 7.7

NOWHERE NEAR SINGLE by kaleidofish

  • “Because the only way to show you’re serious about someone is to only be with them,” Sarai says sarcastically. [Hmmm.]
  • You’d rather be homeless than have awkwardness in your relationship? You must live somewhere warm. And safe.
  • “Hey, Jerri…” Sarai starts. “Since you don’t have a bed, you can sleep on my side of the bed. I’ll take the couch.” [I thought I had my own room. Wish there was scrollback on this. Oh hey, the back button. That’ll work. So yeah, “Her apartment has two bedrooms. You have yours to yourself.” I have a bedroom but no bed? And Sarai is offering to put me in bed with Nayeli? That is awkward.]
  • It must have taken some stamina to make up 100 fake pop girl star names.
  • From kiss on the forehead to Jerri saying “Yeah. I keep thinking that any day now they’ll finalize what image they want to have, but I think there’s been some setbacks.” Feels like a page is missing.
  • “You heat up leftovers from the fridge and go to your room. Yeah, the one with the wooden floor and no furniture.” [That explanation would have been helpful earlier.]
  • “Tonight’s aout you and me, and no one else.” [Typo]
  • “A large screen television sits on top of dark mohagony drawers.” [Another. Writing is pretty spot-on, but not flawless.]
  • Oh, nice effect on revising the words of advice to gay youth.
  • It never seems to occur to camgirl to just get a regular job.

Rating: 7.4

ONAAR by Robert DeFord

I have to admit, at this point I was pretty excited just to not be picking from a menu for my interactivity. That context probably improved my reaction to Onaar over how I might have rated it in a previous comp. However, it’s also true that Onaar is pretty fun at the beginning. The story starts fast-paced, with the PC needing to escape impending danger. A few commands and a cutscene later, and you’re into a whole different environment. From there it’s the usual challenge of exploring the landscape and figuring out the plot. Sadly for me, these fun activities were accompanied by a couple of less fun activities: managing a hunger timer and a decreasing health timer. The latter of these was caused by a poison bite, but it was also less bothersome, as the antidote can be found and the timer stopped. The hunger thing, on the other hand, is a peeve of mine in IF games unless it’s serving some very interesting purpose. No such purpose is to be found in Onaar — it’s just the usual inconvenience which doesn’t engage the mind or enrich the story. Oh well, at least there’s no sleep timer.

I would soon discover that the mechanical aspects of the game are by far its dominant theme, well ahead of anything like story or puzzles. My first clue was in the PC’s self-narration:

As you stand on the sand dripping wet, you remember Father Marrow’s advice to become an apprentice alchemist. “Well Father,” you say under your breath. “It looks like I’m not off to a good start, but I can at least make it a little side quest to report those marauders to the authorities when I get to someplace civilized.”

“I can at least make it a little side quest?” Does the PC know he’s in a game? As it turns out, yes, but not in any kind of interrogative postmodern way — rather just a casual consciousness, as if this is how everyone naturally approaches reality. In Onaar, it really is how everybody approaches reality, as a passing traveler revealed when giving advice:

“Say, you don’t look so good. I’ll bet you have at least one malady. You really ought to be checking your stats more often. Those maladies will kill you if you don’t treat them in time.”

“You really ought to be checking your stats more often?” I found this very jarring, and rather unusual. Generally in IF, the mathy aspects of the simulation are pushed well under the surface, revealed only in the tone and urgency of messages, e.g. “You’re starting to feel faint from hunger.” Onaar is much closer to a CRPG experience in which various numerical stats (health, strength, mana, etc.) are right up front for the player to watch. This is fine too, but even in a typical RPG session (be it mediated by computers or people), there is an observed separation between what the players perceive and what the characters perceive. While all the stats, saving throws, and so forth are available to the player’s knowledge, from the character’s point of view it’s more or less “did I succeed at what I just tried?” Only in the land of parody would another character say something like, “Well, thanks to your Charisma stat of 17, you’ve convinced me of your point of view!” Or for that matter, “You really ought to be checking your stats more often.” Yet Onaar is completely straight-faced.

This kind of naked machinery is on display throughout the game. Various numerical stats are listed after objects, tasks list what stats are needed to perform them, and so forth. It’s weird, but I got used to it. Once the dramatic beginning was over, I found myself with a steep learning curve, figuring out all the intricate rules of this very intricate gameworld. That slowed the narrative pace down considerably, but eventually I got on track with what turned out to be a tutorial for the game’s primary mechanic of alchemy. That mechanic itself turns out to be quite involved, with requirements to gather ingredients from far and wide, take them through a number of magical steps, etc. The procedural quality of this ended up generating some drama in my playthrough as I was dealing with a (different, second) poison timer and only barely managed to synthesize the cure before my health ran out. For the most part, though, all these fiddly rules just made me tired. It’s obvious that an incredible amount of detail and care has gone into this game, and in fact it is an ideal game for somebody who really enjoys putting together complicated recipes from a detailed list of ingredients. The scales are weighted away from lateral thinking and emotional engagement, and towards grinding repetitive tasks. I’m not so much that kind of player, but I didn’t mind stepping into that mindset for a couple of hours, if for no other reason than even this CRPG routine still felt like so much richer an interactive experience than CYOA multiple choice. Of course, after those two hours I was nowhere close to finishing the game, and I doubt I’ll go back to it, but I appreciated being there as a reminder of how the comp used to feel.

Rating: 8.1

KANE COUNTY by Michael Sterling and Tina Orisney

  • “You tap on the break and hold the wheel straight.” – not an auspicious beginning
  • “Choose a class” – again, exposed game machinery
  • ARGH, back button restarts the game. Very reviewer unfriendly.
  • “On the other hand, if climb on top of a nearby hill” – then Tonto see you!
  • Some things strangely don’t lead to choices: ” There are three ways to get up it: follow a gravel wash, trace a well-worn track along an old, torn-down barb-wire fence, or go up directly and push through some junipers and shrubs.” but the only link is “Continue”. Oh, I see, the choice comes a bit later.
  • “You open the bottle and drink.” Why is this called interactive, again?
  • “but you might find some other use for it later on. Gain a Boat Part.” Oh, and uh, spoiler alert.
  • “This might be a good time to use one of your food items…” Not that I’m going to give you the option to do so.
  • “Look at the other area or chose a site.” 1, misspelling, and 2, this is one link that is presenting as two options.
  • “Make a fire – requires a digging tool” – why offer me an option you know I can’t pick?
  • CYOAs like this feel so arbitrary — you’re more or less choosing blind each time. And there’s no “undo”.

Rating: 4.9

LAID OFF FROM THE SYNESTHESIA FACTORY by Katherine Morayati

I was relieved and encouraged when I saw Katherine Morayati’s name. I had played some of Broken Legs and enjoyed it. So I kicked open that Glulx interpreter ready for some true text adventuring at last. Then I read the help info, because that’s how I roll, and saw this “About The Author” blurb:

Katherine Morayati is a music writer by day and by night and an interactive fiction person the rest of the time. She is the editor-in-chief of SPAG and the author of Broken Legs, which took second place in the 2009 Interactive Fiction Competition. This is nothing like that.

Slightly ominous, but I’m sure she just means it’s a totally different tone or genre or something. After all, she says clearly elsewhere in that help info, “Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory is a work of parser interactive fiction.”

Except, after trying to “play” it, I figured out that no, it isn’t, either, and in fact the biggest difference between this and Broken Legs is that Broken Legs is an IF game, whereas this is more akin to a text generating machine that can sometimes be prodded to respond to various keywords, but is also quite happy to do its own thing no matter what you type. In fact, on my first playthrough, the PC ended up by a lake and I tried to type “swim”, except my fat fingers typed “seim” instead. Despite my nonsensical input, the game went ahead telling the story: “I decide he isn’t coming and head back to my car. With every mile marker I resolve to turn back, or turn off and find the nearest bar, or turn off and crash…”, so on and so forth, THE END. Seriously, “*** The End ***”. “Seim” was the final command of the game, causing it to spit out a bunch of final-ish text and stop. Next prompt I got was the old “Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT or UNDO the last command?” Undo, obviously. Except that the game replied: “The use of ‘undo’ is forbidden in this game.” Well then, I riposted, perhaps if you wish to disable “undo” in your game you ought not prompt me to type it in? Except, you know, far less calm and polite.

So, just as I was set up by the overall CYOA-ness of this comp to enjoy Onaar more than I might have, I was set up to be much more frustrated by Laid Off than I might have otherwise been. After that first, disastrous playthrough, I wrapped my head around the fact that this game is much more The Space Under The Window than Spider And Web. I tried again, this time just typing keywords and letting the game take me where it wanted. I enjoyed the experience a lot more that second time. The writing and overall concept of this game is a bit impenetrable, on purpose I think, but it still pulls off some lovely turns of phrase, articulating complex concepts: “What you are: A trim, functional paragon of a woman in lifelong battle with a disheveled unraveled omnidirectional grab of a girl.”; “What Brian is: deflatingly human when you’re with him, horribly beguiling when you’re not.” I’m grateful to have played it — I just wish it had been the spice to a better meal.

Rating: 6.3

TAGHAIRM by Chandler Groover

  • “Turn the page” style interactivity
  • Creepy. Creepy may not be a very tough emotional note to hit.
  • Oh ugh animal abuse.
  • Hm, timing matters. Throws off my randomizer. But then again my participation was pretty detached after the beginning.
  • All in all, pretty horrible. Felt like I was in a Milgram experiment.

Rating: 1.7

THE WAR OF THE WILLOWS by Adam Bredenberg

Running Python 3.4, I get a title card, 4 ominous seeming verses, and then this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\Paul\Dropbox\IF\IFComp2015\willows\PLAY.py", line 26, in
story.start()
File "./stories\ds_willows_1.py", line 1525, in start
game = intro()
File "./stories\ds_willows_1.py", line 82, in intro
raw_input()
NameError: name 'raw_input' is not defined

Oh well.

Rating: 1.0

THE MAN WHO KILLED TIME by Claudia Doppioslash

  • Oh dear. Another unpromising beginning, this time even before the game starts: “Notes: – English is not my first language. – While I was writing it, I realised its nature is more that of a non-branching story, but I wanted to have an entry at IFComp and I could use the feedback anyway, so here it is.”
  • A bit hard to read. Also “Responsability” – you don’t have to be a native english speaker to use spellcheck.
  • This is a tough slog.
  • This is 100% “turn the page” interactivity so far, 10 minutes in.
  • “on the whole it looked like it might be an appropriately assistantely time to show up.” Hoo boy.
  • OMG, a choice! A yes/no choice, but that’s as good as it gets so far.
  • “In fact he had a, not unfounded, feeling that he already was in this over his ears. Or at least a future self of his was.” I wonder if this actually makes some kind of coherent sense to someone somewhere.
  • Parts of this are compelling. The English plus the intricacy of the theme make it hard for me to hang on, and the interactivity is pretty much the same as a book. But as a story, with a good editor, I might enjoy it.
  • “He didn’t want to realise he was alone, to risk relinquish the mode of being under scrutiny. Because if he did, then he nothing would stop him from doing that. He must not let his eye wanted to the cabinet. Yet as he the thought first entered him, it kept growing in his mind, as it usually did and does.” …Annnnd you lost me again.
  • One of the few choices turns into a non-choice.
  • Whuh? Ends altoghether when it feels like it’s about to step out of the prologue.

Rating: 2.9

Now, in fairness, it turns out that the random selector may have done me wrong. Looking at the results, it appears that none of the games I played landed in the top 25% of the final standings. And in fact, only Nowhere Near Single and Onaar were in the top 20 games. Moreover, the top 3 games (and 7 of the top 10) were parser-driven, so it’s not as though IFComp has fully turned into CYOAComp. For that matter, perhaps some of those highly placing CYOA games could have given me a much different impression of how immersive and enjoyable that medium can be.

Until next year, though, I’m probably going to seek out the parser games, and leave the rest be. It’s possible that being an IFComp judge is better left to people with enough time for IF that they don’t mind spending much of it frustrated. That used to be me, but it isn’t anymore.

Three Games by Steph Cherrywell [misc]

[I originally published this over on my main blog, >SUPERVERBOSE, before >INVENTORY existed. In the spirit of getting all my IF stuff in one place, I’m republishing it here.]

In 2019, Steph Cherrywell became only the second person in the 25-year history of the Interactive Fiction (IF) Competition to win it twice. The other person to have done so is writing this post. So I was inspired to check out Cherrywell’s work, and managed to find some time over the holiday break to revisit my old IF-reviewing ways.

Now, I should make clear that I’m no longer keeping up with the IF world overall, so I haven’t been reading other reviews of her work, or of anybody’s work for that matter. I’ve played very few games from the last 15 years, so something that seems new and exciting to me might be old hat to people who’ve kept up. My perspective is basically that of a former expert who’s done little more than toe-dipping since 2005. With those disclaimers out of the way, let’s jump in!

Cover art for Brain Guzzlers From Beyond

Brain Guzzlers From Beyond

Brain Guzzlers was Cherrywell’s first comp winner, from 2015, so it seemed like a reasonable place to start. Plus, for my next Watchmen essay I’m researching a bunch of background on 1950s sci-fi movies, and Brain Guzzlers looked like an affectionate parody of ’50s sci-fi, so I was predisposed to dig it.

And dig it I did, though I quickly learned that the game wasn’t exactly parodying ’50s sci-fi movies, which generally involve earnest scientists and square-jawed military types grappling with monsters, aliens, giant bugs, or giant alien bug monsters. This game’s tone is closer to Firesign Theater’s “High School Madness” sketch — a broad exaggeration of ’50s teenage tropes as seen in Leave It To Beaver and Archie comics. (Malt Shop Archie, that is. Not Sex Archie.) Cherrywell crashes the ’50s teen universe into the ’50s sci-fi universe, and comedy ensues, with a subversive edge provided by details like mixed-race NPCs, homoerotic undertones, and the ’50s-defying female action lead.

That comedic tone is Brain Guzzlers From Beyond‘s greatest strength — you can’t go three sentences without running into some delightful turn of phrase, well-crafted joke, or witty perspective. Take, for example, this description of a “Modernist Living Room”: “This circular room is ultramodern, like something from twenty years in the future. The sleek, smart-looking furniture is a symphony in avocado, orange, and mustard-yellow.” Or this description of the Drive-In: “You’re standing in the drive-in on the edge of town, where all the coolest teens come to ignore movies. To the north is Make-Out Mountain, and flanking it are a number of less controversial mountains.” Those mountains? “There’s Propriety Peak, and Constance Crag, and Mount Homework.”

The whole thing is a great deal of fun to read, and pretty fun to play too, thanks in part to Cherrywell’s smooth fusion of parser and choice structures. The game follows a familiar pattern of using the parser for exploration and multiple choice for conversations, and that works well, especially with Cherrywell’s charming illustrations of each character to flavor the dialogue. But she takes the structure a little further by rendering the action scenes via choices too.

Action scenes, though they can be done quite well, are rather difficult in parser IF, because there’s always the chance that some confused response or failure to understand input will deflate the pace and tension. Cherrywell makes sure this doesn’t happen by flipping her action sequences into a structure where input is limited and can’t be misunderstood, but still preserves a sensation of choice with options like:

1) Swing around and punch that monster square in the snoot!
2) Scream for help and try to pull away.

Another ingenious use of choice comes right at the outset of the game, in which the player is asked a series of questions. The game’s conceit is that you’re taking a quiz from a teen magazine, but in fact what you’re doing is defining the PC. Those choices affect gameplay in both superficial and substantial ways — everything from altering the “X ME” description to bypassing a puzzle entirely.

The tone and writing were my favorite parts of playing Brain Guzzlers From Beyond, but they weren’t flawless. There were a surprising number of typos right in the beginning, which gave me an uneasy feeling: “corresponding your choice” rather than “corresponding to your choice”; “absense of stars”; “your were practically almost sort of his girlfriend”. But either the game got better as it went along, or I just stopped noticing because the experience was so absorbing. Either way, it’s laudable, and in fact may have even been more fun for exceeding my wary expectations.

Brain Guzzlers combines fun writing with clever structures, but I can’t leave out its puzzles. Time after time, this game made me feel smart by presenting puzzles with just the right amount of clueing and lateral thinking, always perfectly in tune with the light and breezy feel of the story and setting. It rewards thorough exploration and leads players right up to the gap that they need to jump across, without building a paved bridge there.

My favorite puzzle of the game was the RPS cannon, and I was pleased to see that it also won the 2015 Best Individual Puzzle XYZZY Award. I confess that I didn’t solve this puzzle on my own, but seeing the solution made me wish I had. All the clues were there, I just didn’t put them together.

All in all, playing Brain Guzzlers From Beyond made it easy to see why the game won the 2015 IF Competition, and made me eager to play the follow-up. So that’s what I did.

Cover art for Zozzled

Zozzled

Zozzled was Cherrywell’s 2019 IF Comp winner, and where Brain Guzzlers was a funny pastiche of 1950s tropes, Zozzled is a hilarious pastiche of 1920s tropes. It becomes clear when playing these two games consecutively that Cherrywell is in fact a master of pastiche. She scoops up a whole bunch of slang, stereotypes, and style, stringing them together in rat-a-tat fashion for a wonderfully enjoyable ride. The best comparison I can make for Zozzled‘s style is to Alan Moore’s pieces in the voice of Hildy Johnson at the end of some of the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen books. In other words, excellent.

Sure, she hits a bum note once in a while — using the term “sheba” for a woman is great once, cloying many times in a row — but overall, at pretty much every level, the writing in Zozzled is sharper than that of Brain Guzzlers, which is high praise. It’s quite a bit funnier, for one thing. Where Guzzlers frequently made me smile or chuckle, Zozzled had me laughing out loud. Some of my favorite examples:

The response to EXAMINE GLAD RAGS (because this game would never call a dress a dress if it could instead call the dress “glad rags.”):

If the right dress makes you feel like a million bucks, this little black number makes you feel like Rockefeller’s bank account. And much like Rockefeller’s bank account, it generates plenty of interest.

This description of a refrigerator:

This refrigerator, much like the old lady that time she chaperoned your senior year homecoming dance, is sitting in the corner, humming quietly and radiating bitter cold.

And finally, a great easter egg for Zork fans, in the description of some locked-away valuables:

Just a few odds and ends that guests have deposited – brass baubles, golden eggs, platinum bars, ivory torches, sapphire bracelets, that sort of thing.

It’s not just turns of phrase either — there’s a character who is described as “constitutionally incapable of telling the truth”, which the game then plays out literally to great comic effect. Not only is the wit superb, the story is more sophisticated too. Where Brain Guzzlers was pretty much “fight the sudden arbitrary menace by solving puzzles”, Zozzled sets up story beats in the beginning that pay off in the end, giving the puzzles a reason to exist that transcends “something bad and inexplicable happened here”, replacing it with an unexpected love story to which the PC is a witness.

So, if Cherrywell upped her writing game in Zozzled, how about her… game game? I’m sorry to say that the game aspects of Zozzled were a little weaker than those of Brain Guzzlers. Now, that doesn’t mean it was a weak game overall. I’m about to dive into criticizing a couple of its flaws, so I want to make clear that generally speaking, Zozzled is well-crafted — solid implementation, intriguing design, and reasonable puzzles. It takes the same approach as Brain Guzzlers, which is to say “breezy puzzle romp fusing parser and choice mechanics”, albeit without the illustrations. Its concept is equally solid, maybe even a little less checklisty, but it does stumble in a couple of places mechanically.

The first of these is the transition from introducing the ghost conceit to turning the player loose on the puzzly middle game. In a long choice-based sequence, Zozzled stages a conversation between the PC and an elevator operator named Kipper Fanucci (another Zorky reference, methinks.) That conversation does a lot of expository work, explaining that the hotel setting is haunted, and that Hazel the PC has the rare ability to see ghosts, at least once she’s wearing a pair of magical “cheaters”. Then it transitions from a conversation to a choice-based action sequence, except unlike in Brain Guzzlers, where the possible actions were rendered in prose, Zozzled phrases them in parserese, like so:

1) >ASK KIPPER ABOUT GHOST.
2) >KILL GHOST.
3) >TALK TO GHOST.

Eventually, this sequence reveals the way in which Hazel can exorcise ghostly presences, a command which nicely ties together her carefree flapper persona with her ghostbusting abilities. Moreover, once you exit the Kipper sequence, wearing the cheaters allows you to see ghostly presences in various places, with the spectral stuff rendered in bold, a cool and effective choice.

Except… now that you can see the ghosts, you can’t interact with them anymore! Try to EXAMINE GHOST and you’ll get tersely rebuffed: “(That’s not something you need to fiddle with.)” The entire ghost concept gets introduced via specific IF commands allowing the PC to interact with and contain a ghost. Then, immediately afterwards, there are a bunch of ghostly encounters in which the ghosts aren’t even implemented as game objects. Pretty unsatisfying.

Eventually, I figured out that you have to first solve the puzzle with which the ghost is associated before you can interact with it, which makes perfect sense but could be much better explained. If the answer to X GHOST had given a description indicating that the ghost was deeply embedded in its container and would have to be driven out before I could deal with it, that would have felt much less jarring and buggy.

Similarly, some solution-adjacent feedback would have also helped with the game’s most frustrating puzzle, the fruit bowl. Without spoiling anything, this puzzle has a solution which is logically sound and emotionally satisfying, but which requires quite an intuitive leap. Moreover, the solution requires the destruction of game objects, which goes pretty heavily against the grain of experienced IF players. As with the RPS cannon in Brain Guzzlers, I found myself turning to the hints, but unlike with the RPS cannon, I didn’t feel dumb for failing to solve it myself.

On the contrary, I saw that I came extremely close in a couple of different ways, but the game didn’t give me the feedback I needed to make that final leap. In fact, I would argue that the puzzle should be more tolerant of solutions that fit the spirit if not the letter of the intended answer. Luckily, this puzzle was an outlier. Others, such as the séance and the oyster, brought together actions that made perfect sense in context and worked beautifully with the tone.

Playing Zozzled right after Brain Guzzlers made it impossible not to compare the two, and what I found was that each game was very strong on its own, but each also had its strengths over the other — Zozzled its (even more) masterful writing, and Guzzlers its silky-smooth structure and puzzles. It turns out that Cherrywell has written one other Inform 7 game besides those two, so it was my third choice for this survey.

Cover art for Chlorophyll

Chlorophyll

Chlorophyll came out in 2015, the same year (amazingly) as Brain Guzzlers. Where Brain Guzzlers was Cherrywell’s entry into the main IFComp, Chlorophyll was for a Spring competition called ParserComp, a themed long-form game jam focused on traditional text adventure format, i.e. excluding choice-based mechanics. Consequently, Chlorophyll is pure parser, unlike Zozzled and Guzzlers.

And you know what? It turns out Cherrywell is still a hell of a writer, even when she’s not penning snappy dialogue for branching-path conversations. Chlorophyll really has no conversations — it hews closer to old-school IF by ensuring that the PC is on her own, navigating through a seemingly abandoned outpost, albeit one that bears unsettling evidence of violent disruption. Until the third act, her only encounters are with minimal-personality robots. Structurally, the game is deeply reminiscent of Planetfall, albeit without Floyd.

Except, instead of Planetfall, a more apt title might be… (I’m so sorry, I can’t seem to stop myself) Plantfall? See, in Chlorophyll, the PC is a sentient, walking plant, a la Groot, but with a better vocabulary. (Or, in the specific case of the PC, Teen Groot I guess.) She and her species depend on sunlight to produce nutrients (hence the title), and without it they slip quickly into unconscious torpor. In the first act of the game, this works out to a tight hunger timer, keeping the PC tethered closely to sunny areas and requiring her to find ways to light up more and more of the outpost with artificial sunlight. In these explorations, she also figures out that her goal is to power up the outpost so that it can restore sunlight to the whole planet — which happens to align perfectly with the 2015 ParserComp’s theme of “sunrise”.

Now normally, hunger timers are one of my major pet peeves in IF, but the one in Chlorophyll worked, for two reasons. First, rather than being an arbitrary limit imposed in the name of “realism”, this game’s hunger timer was a crucial character detail, one that drives the PC’s initial problem and that lends lots of tension to the first several sequences. Second, about a third of the way into the game the PC finds an object which obviates the timer altogether, so that it goes away permanently. Not only that, the mechanism that eliminates the hunger timer also has strong emotional resonance, lent further weight by the player’s relief at removing the constraint. More about that a bit later.

Unlike Zozzled and Guzzlers, there’s very little humor in Chlorophyll. Instead, Cherrywell creates a strong atmosphere of eeriness and foreboding. After playing those first two games, I was all the more impressed that Cherrywell has a whole other register, and is equally great at it. The SF concept was intriguing and logical, the setting evocatively described and sensibly constructed, and the mood of the whole game was just terrific, all the more so for not being another wacky pastiche of a bygone era.

The story was well-structured too, with sudden action at the beginning leading to a series of increasingly compelling discoveries. There are powerful, stomach-dropping moments as the PC discovers more and more effects of the antagonist’s presence, and a sensational climax and denouement.

The puzzles for the most part are solid, with a particularly expansive middle game, in which two entirely different different chains of puzzles (one for good behavior, one for bad) can be pursued, either of which unlocks the climax. I quibble a bit with one solution on the “good” track, as it involves the breaking of an object described as “unbreakable”, with no clear rationale that I can see for how that breaking makes sense. But no matter — that’s a pretty minor objection to what is overall an accomplished piece of craftsmanship.

I think my favorite part of Chlorophyll is its strong emotional core. Neither Zozzled nor Brain Guzzlers prepared me for this. While there’s a love story in Zozzled, Hazel (the PC) is just a bystander to it, really, with no particular emotional investment in anything. Bonnie, from Brain Guzzlers, witnesses a close friendship but is herself mainly either a cipher or a punchline. But Zo, the PC of Chlorophyll, begins the game enmeshed in an instantly familiar and warm mother-daughter relationship, so when her mother gets incapacitated, I found myself drawn in immediately.

Zo is an adolescent, who feels like she’s grown out of childish things but that her mother doesn’t recognize her abilities. Then she’s thrown into the adult role without that mother’s support, and must become the caretaker herself. That makes it all the more moving when Zo discovers evidence that her mother really does recognize Zo’s growth, emblematized in the new solar vest that deactivates the light-hunger timer. This is a wonderful example of using IF constructs to serve and strengthen the story — as we remove a game constraint, we also remove a mental constraint from the PC, allowing both more access to the world and more understanding of her place in it.

Similarly, when Zo finds her unconscious mother, and realizes the jeopardy that they are in from the antagonist, the moment lands harder than anything in Zozzled or Brain Guzzlers. Granted, nothing in those other two games was meant to land that hard, as a sudden emotional jolt would have really wrecked the mood, but having played those two games first, I was all the more surprised and transported by the weightiness of this one.

With these three games, Cherrywell has become one of my all-time favorite IF authors. I’m grateful to have spent my time on them, and I greatly look forward to whatever she releases next.

Really Late Reviews #3: Redjack – Revenge of the Brethren [misc]

[I wrote a few reviews of graphic adventure games in 2001, and Stephen Granade hosted them on the About.com interactive fiction site he ran at the time. I called them Really Late Reviews because, well, I wrote them long after the games in question had been released. About.com has gone so far down the Internet memory hole that I can no longer retrieve those reviews in the context of the site, so I’m taking their dates from the original text files on my hard drive. That means this review of Redjack: Revenge of the Brethren was written on July 18, 2001.]

So it came to pass that in January of 1999 I was wandering the aisles of a “Toys R Us”, after having exchanged a Christmas gift that didn’t suit my tastes. Those tastes being what they are, I found myself drawn to the computer game section of the store. There on the shelves was an adventure game called Redjack: Revenge of the Brethren, and something about the name rang a faint bell. Hadn’t I heard some good things about this game on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure? I thought so, and consequently I picked it up.

Okay, so I was a little crestfallen later, when I realized that the game I had been thinking of was Redguard, but as it turned out, my “To Play Someday” pile already had quite a few games on it, so I didn’t mind putting the game aside for a while. Now, as a part of my “Really Late Reviews” project, in which I play and review old adventure games with an eye towards learning more about good and bad game design, I’ve finally played through the game.

The verdict? Redjack is irritating in a lot of ways, but has tasty graphics and some pretty fun portions. Most of all, it’s an object lesson in the rewards and pitfalls of including action elements in an adventure game.

Redjack is a pirate game, and while some people are a sucker for this genre, I’m not one of them. I enjoyed the Monkey Island series, and Infocom’s Plundered Hearts, but “pirates” always seemed a rather narrow theme to me, and it’s an especially odd choice for an adventure game, given that any pirate adventure will inevitably draw comparisons to the aforementioned Monkey Island games, and almost as inevitably come up short. Redjack certainly does. To my mind, it’s better to choose settings and genres that haven’t already been thoroughly explored and dominated, if only so that players come to your game without preconceived notions or lofty comparisons.

My own experience of the game was affected adversely by misplaced expectations that Redjack‘s Nicholas Dove would be as interesting and funny a character as MI‘s Guybrush Threepwood. He isn’t, not by a long shot. What’s more, unlike Monkey Island‘s neatly tied narratives, Redjack never offers any explanation for the central question it raises: why is Nicholas Dove involved in the plot? And finally, the Monkey Island games, and LucasArts games in general, have taught me to expect (well, hope anyway) that adventure games will be designed well enough not to close themselves off for no good reason; Redjack disappointed me here, too, with an amazingly badly designed endgame.

Two equally plausible and compelling tasks are presented to the PC in this endgame, but there is only one right choice. Completing the “wrong” task makes it impossible to complete the other, which not only made no sense within the context of the story, but also completely destroyed my faith in the game’s design, right at the point that such faith was most critical. Listen up, designers: DON’T DO THIS.

Redjack wasn’t all nasty surprises, though. In fact, the plot held one or two twists that I found genuinely unexpected, and though these were leavened with a generous helping of cliché, I found I didn’t mind that too much either, since the clichés were so pleasurably pulpy. The story wanders around the Caribbean and the high seas to enjoyable effect, and there were a number of swashes that were lots of fun to buckle.

The puzzles, for the most part, were also fairly well-done. There was a recipe puzzle, though most of the ingredients for the recipe were available immediately to hand, which was a rather refreshing approach. There was a “mathematical sequence” puzzle (arrange things in a particular order while their placement exercises numerical effects on their layout), which was fun precisely because there was only one of them. However, most of Redjack‘s obstacles were not traditional adventure game puzzles, but instead action sequences, where the game’s usual interface evaporated, to be replaced with one of a variety of arcade-type mechanisms.

Now, let me make something clear: I have no problem with the concept of action/adventure hybrids. In fact, I’m rather a fan of blended genres in general. I saw Half-Life as sort of an action/adventure hybrid, with strong story and puzzles accompanying its more visceral thrills, and I loved that game. I’m currently quite addicted to Planescape:Torment, which is often held to be a kind of mutant child of CRPGs and text adventures. I’m no genre purist; I’m all for the various forms intermingling and colliding.

However (you had to know a “however” was coming), genre blending presents game designers and programmers with multiplied challenges. It’s hard enough to put together a solid story, engaging puzzles, interesting NPCs, and an intuitive interface. With an action/adventure, all these things aren’t enough — the action, too, must be gripping, with smooth response, clear feedback, and exciting mechanics. Redjack provides adventure elements of considerable quality, but falls down rather badly on its action elements.

This action comes in a variety of forms, all of which are quite primitive compared with modern action engines, or even old arcade ones. There’s a jumping “puzzle”, though unlike most of its ilk this one doesn’t involve split-second timing; there is a loose time-limit on how long the PC can be on most spots, but the jumping itself happens automatically — no fast fingers required. Instead, the player is tasked with crossing a dangerous area by jumping from one safe-spot to the next, and must assess which spots are too far away for jumping. Sound easy? Not when the area is presented with grainy, pixellated graphics that offer little in the way of depth representation.

There are a couple of “shooting-gallery” type puzzles, in which the player is presented with various moving, shooting targets, and must maneuver a crosshairs onto these to dispatch them. This has a lot of potential for fun, but that potential is wrecked by the game’s stuttering, jerky presentation of the action. I ran Redjack on a computer that far exceeded the game’s minimum requirements, but I was still plagued by hesitation and halting in most of the action sequences. This sort of thing is absolute poison to action gameplay. The most fun of all the action sequences was the cannons, for which the player has to compensate not only for moving targets, but for the trajectory of the projectiles. Yes, the jerkiness was still a problem in these sequences, but the absence of a counterattack lessened the frustration factor considerably. Also, ships hit with a cannonball exploded in very satisfying gouts of flame. Huh huh huh, huh huh huh.

The majority of the action sequences, though, were of the swordfighting variety. True to the rest of the game’s action tendencies, the swordfighting interface was clumsy, unresponsive, and erratic. The introductory portion of the game spends a significant amount of time and effort teaching this interface to the player, and this training is quite well-done. Unexpectedly, however, the training turns out to have little bearing on the game itself. Instead, most of the times Nicholas is in a swordfight, his opponent is virtually invincible, at least without recourse to some element technically outside the interface. The first time I was faced with this situation, and figured out how to solve it, was probably the best moment of the game for me. I was frustrated by my inability to defeat an opponent, and then I thought “What if I tried this?” and it worked — always a delicious feeling in an adventure game.

However, as that sort of situation came up over and over, I started to find it a little more frustrating. For one thing, many of the ways in which the game wanted me to behave where decidedly non-intuitive, and the responses to some of my actions made no sense. For another, it’s rather difficult to look outside the interface for possible solutions when an NPC is hammering away, a problem intensified by the game’s haphazard response times. And finally, the game’s reliance on adventureish solutions to actionish problems rendered its moments of actual action rather anticlimactic.

For me, it was a perfect illustration of the pros and cons of including action elements within an adventure game, or more specifically of changing interfaces during the course of a game. Redjack not only asked me to adjust to a new interface every couple of scenes, but also sporadically made that interface fairly useless, requiring some lateral thinking on my part. When this worked, the effect was beautiful, providing not just an action rush but a cerebral “Aha!” moment as well. However, the game didn’t provide enough of a logical framework, nor a smooth enough action interface, for the trick to work very often. More frequently, I found myself clicking away randomly at various spots on the screen, or growling at the primitive nature of the action mechanics, completely disengaged from the story and the game, and wishing I could go back to the game’s normal interface.

Not that said interface was without its problems. Redjack uses a 360-degree panning system, with considerable freedom to pan vertically as well, but there’s a catch. The panning behaves “inertially” — that is, as the game continues to pan in a particular direction, the panning picks up speed, and doesn’t halt immediately once the cursor is moved back to the center of the screen. The overall effect was a bit like being drunk, except without the euphoria. Needless to say, I stuck to keyboard navigation whenever possible, but there were a number of instances that required the use of the drunken mouse panning.

Adding to the panning difficulties was the fact that the bottom left corner of the screen contained the inventory interface, and whenever the mouse was placed there, all panning would halt quite abruptly. Thus, players always have to take extra care when panning left, lest their intentions be halted by the inventory displaying itself. On the plus side, this inventory required no management whatsoever, with items automagically disappearing once they are no longer useful. Redjack‘s method of object interaction takes a little getting used to — the game allows you to take an inventory item and stick it anywhere on screen, where it will stay through all panning and movement. It took me some time to recognize that this is pretty much never useful — if an inventory item is going to interact with something, it will do so immediately, and thus if it’s just “sticking” there, I’m on the wrong track. I would have preferred a little clearer feedback for this, like perhaps the inventory item being transferred back to the trunk when it is dropped in a non-useful spot.

One more technical comment, though it isn’t really about the interface: whenever Redjack loads a saved game, it goes through the process of transferring various files from the CD to the hard drive “to optimize game performance,” a process which can take as long as 60-90 seconds. People, this is silly. The files only need to be copied once, preferably at installation. Recopying them at every restore is not only a nuisance, it’s a completely pointless nuisance.

I mentioned that the beginning of Redjack contains an extensive section training the player on how to use the swordfighting interface. This training is an example of one of Redjack‘s best aspects: its use of NPCs as an in-game cueing mechanism. The game’s NPCs, while fairly broad stereotypes, are engaging and lively. Even better, they’re often a very useful source of hints and meta-game information, but that assistance is blended skillfully into the story. For example, that training sequence — Nicholas wants to join the crew of a pirate ship, but the Captain understandably wants him to learn how to hold his own in a fight first. So Nick finds a wayward pirate named Lyle, does him a favor, and in exchange Lyle teaches him how to fight.

Thus the player has an opportunity to learn the swordfighting interface, in a way that completely makes sense within the context of the story. In other sections of the game, Nick’s companions may offer puzzle hints, but only when asked. I was impressed with the slickness of this hint system — very rarely did a character point out the blindingly obvious, and when I felt genuinely stuck, my NPC companions often could offer a nudge that gave just enough information. Along with being a pretty snazzy hint system, this technique remedied a common problem with adventure games, that of NPCs who are supposedly intelligent and useful people but who completely fail to have any thoughts or insights about game situations.

The imperfection in the NPCs is their bizarre tendency to occasionally slide into anachronism or fourth-wall breaking. For instance, in that training sequence, Lyle says, “Ye stand right here while I open up my sack of whupass.” Now, I’m no student of the 18th century, but my instincts tell me that it’s a good bet no real pirate ever spoke the phrase “sack of whupass.” These kinds of obviously inappropriate references, while funny enough, threw me right out of the story without exception. In that same sequence, Lyle gives instructions like “use the left and right arrow keys on that keyboard thingy down there, and you’ll lean left or right.” The game is setting up a little confusion here: an in-game character is referring to meta-game mechanics, while trying to pretend he doesn’t really understand them because he’s an eighteenth century pirate? It doesn’t work. Also the voice-acting on the NPCs is generally pretty bad, though at least it’s done with a sense of energetic abandon.

These quibbles aside, the NPCs were one of my favorite things about the game. Another component that worked for me was the game’s graphics. These were appealingly cartoony, just a little more lifelike than the average Disney animated feature, with the occasional spectacular sky or artifact. There was a bit of strangeness with the panning — the graphics would get rather pixellated anytime they were in motion, snapping back into focus once the movement stopped. There were perspective problems, too, with the NPCs against the background, and occasionally I’d see a huge piece of someone’s head or arm blocking my view suddenly if they were in the wrong place relative to me.

Still, Redjack‘s world was a lot of fun to look at, and that goes for its cut-scenes as well. These scenes often had interesting camera angles or entertaining visual conventions (like the moving line on the map representing Nick’s travels.) I also liked the music fairly well, though it did tend to get a bit repetitive at times.

In short, I enjoyed the game most when it was at its most adventure-like. That’s not because I dislike action games, but because Redjack handled its action so ineptly. The lesson here is clear: if you’re going to include action in your adventure games, make sure that the action is just as compelling and fun as the adventure — otherwise you’ll end up with a game like Redjack, whose dashing adventure ultimately falls in defeat to the dull, heavy sword of its action.

The Sword of Malice by Anthony Panuccio [Comp05]

IFDB page: The Sword of Malice
Final placement: 28th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

The Sword of Malice is not a good game, but it is instructive, in that it provides several excellent examples of potential pitfalls that designers can and should avoid. So in the spirit of making these reviews useful, I’m going to look closely at one of those pitfalls to explain what makes it problematic. This is also the moment where I’d encourage the author to try again, but it’s been 19 years at this point, and the IF ship has clearly sailed for Anthony Panuccio.

So let’s talk about randomness. Randomness is one of my favorite things, personally, and it can be put to excellent use in an IF game — random atmospheric messages or NPC behavior, all the way up to random events that can significantly affect the story. But randomness can also be a major source of frustration when it’s misused, and a classic type of that misuse occurs in examining a volume of similar things. This comes up a couple of times in Sword, first in the pages of a diary. Try to read that diary, and here’s what happens:

>read journal
"Day 26 - ...the ritual was simplistic in nature. By simply touching the beast (the rest has been water smudged)..."

>g
"Day 5 - ...I have been caught. On my return trip from the faraway lands, the Altari caught me. Let's hope they do nothing they will regret..."

>g
"Day 5 - ...I have been caught. On my return trip from the faraway lands, the Altari caught me. Let's hope they do nothing they will regret..."

>g
"Day 26 - ...the ritual was simplistic in nature. By simply touching the beast (the rest has been water smudged)..."

>g
"Day 57 - ...the Altari have gone mad! For some reason they have begun ruthlessly torturing me all day and all night. For being such a righteous race that they claim to be, they certainly don't show it. They would seem more at home with some of 'our' prison guards...."

This is not how reading works! Sure, you don’t want to write an entire journal inside your IF game — that makes sense. But in no universe would somebody open a journal, read a couple of sentences on page 26, then flip to page 5 and do the same, then read the same part of page 5 again, then the same part of page 26 (especially if it was water-smudged and unreadable in the first place!), then part of page 57, and so on, randomly bopping around the journal. (I’m simplifying here by pretending each day takes up a page.)

As a player, it quickly becomes apparent that the game isn’t willing to play straight with me, and wants to instead act as though my character doesn’t know how to read good. That could be a character trait, of course, but you have to establish it much more clearly than this. In addition, knowing that the game is picking random entries opens up the possibility that there is key information I need to extract from the journal, but I may not be able to reach it, depending on how the dice fall.

Part of this issue could be addressed by removing entries from the pool of random pages once they’ve been read. But I would argue that even then, this method of reading just makes no sense, especially reading something chronologically arranged like a journal. Randomness doesn’t belong in this part of an IF game. If something makes sense in a sequence, provide it in a sequence.

This issue crops up again later in the game, when the PC is rummaging for supplies before going on a quest. There’s a roomful of potions, and searching them looks like this:

>x potions
Many potions fill one wall of the armoury. You scan the potions and find...

...a "Potion of Cursing". $#%!&$&(*$#*

>get potion
You can't see any such thing.

>get potion of cursing
You can't see any such thing.

>x potions
Many potions fill one wall of the armoury. You scan the potions and find...

...a "Potion of Equilibrium". Your balance isn't that bad.

>g
Many potions fill one wall of the armoury. You scan the potions and find...

...a "Potion of Indecisiveness". Hmmm...to take or not to take?

Oh, okay, so it’s just a bunch of jokes. Except, as I found out after concluding I can’t trust the game and therefore turning to the walkthrough, it isn’t! There is one potion in this random mishmash that is extremely helpful, but the rest aren’t even treated as valid objects. What’s more, though I don’t show it in this excerpt, they repeat just like the journal entries did.

In a way, this is even worse than the journal. It’s one thing to prevent me from methodically searching a book for information, but to prevent me from obtaining a useful item just because I don’t know how to search a pile of stuff and set the useless things aside? No. And the fact that the game doesn’t even treat the non-useful potions as implemented objects at all gives me the clear message that none of them will be useful, which turns out to be false. Designers, please don’t do this. Randomness isn’t completely out of place here, but a) treat objects as real, even if you’re not going to let me take them, and b) don’t repeat objects that the interaction has already established to be useless. Give me enough feedback to keep me searching.

There are many more object lessons (as it were) from The Sword of Malice, but treating them all at this level of depth would make this review much more of an effort than the game earns. (Arguably, it already is.) So I’ll just quickly list out a few more thoughts:

  • Move beyond Dungeons and Dragons. I love D&D — I’m a player and a big fan. But it is its own thing, an established set of mechanics, and your text adventure (short of going full Baldur’s Gate) will never be D&D. It’s not helped by lazy lifting like “wearing full plate armour and brandishing a large polearm” or “The skeleton has 9 hitpoints remaining.”
  • If you’re going to forbid something, give a good reason. Despite being an off-brand D&D simulator, this game will not allow you to pick up weapons, stating, “Swords, axes, polearms, and other various weapons are made available here for acquisition. For your quest, however, you do not need these weapons.” Same thing with armor. This despite the fact that later there is a full-on combat encounter with a skeleton, where I very much could have used those weapons and armor.
  • Have some moral awareness. From the game’s very first word (“War!”), it frames a moral universe in which horrible people are grasping for power, and the PC is one of those people, yet at no point does it seem to subvert that point of view at all, or show any awareness that this is a problematic way to proceed through the world. I read and listened to the history of the PC’s “race”, and said, “We sound like the bad guys.” I wish the game had known that too.

That’s enough. There’s value in playing and reviewing games like this, if only to clearly codify how to do better. But that doesn’t make them fun.

Rating: 5.2

Tough Beans by Sara Dee [Comp05]

IFDB page: Tough Beans
Final placement: 5th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Tough Beans has, hands down, the most powerful opening of any Comp05 game I’ve played yet. Here’s the first screen:

Lambkin. Babydoll. Princess.

In the large oval mirror above your dresser you watch a pale hand drag a bubblegum-pink brush downward through a section of fine blond hair. It is your hand. It is your hair.

You can’t feel anything.

WHOO! That alone knocked my socks off, and then it was followed by several more screens in the same tone, depicting a PC who has been “swaddled in epithets” (what a turn of phrase!) like the 3 words that start the game, but who is starting to emerge from her doll-like stupor. (And in that spirit, let’s note here that the PC does indeed have a name: Wendy.) In fact, as we discover gradually, pieces of her have been in rebellion for a long time, but today is the day it all breaks.

Man, did I love this premise, and for the most part, Tough Beans really delivers, with several cool techniques for enhancing its narrative power. There’s that stunning intro, with multiple screens of text, each one of which blanks out the last before finally giving way to the game proper. We’ve seen that before in IF, and it’s used very well here.

There are the introspective flashbacks tied to otherwise ordinary game actions, memories from childhood that deepen our understanding of Wendy and how she got into her current situation. Sometimes, those flashbacks show us those rebellious parts of her, parts which have been dutifully squelched in support of her conformist ambitions, but which roar up to support the destroyer that emerges. This, too, is not a new technique in IF, but Dee does a marvelous job with them, writing vignettes of memory that are not only compelling on their own, but which tie elegantly to both the specific action that prompted them and the overarching themes of the game.

Then there’s something I don’t remember ever seeing, but which made for a really potent effect when it worked. Upon Wendy entering a new location, Dee will often hijack the initial room description to instead provide a little cut-scene, before then allowing the room description to, well, describe the room. Here’s an example from early in the game:

Living Room
There is so much sunlight streaming in from the window over the sofa that you have to blink your eyes a few times before they are fully focused. When your vision is restored, you notice a red rubber chew toy peeking out from behind a pillow on the couch. Barkley! As if on cue, you hear a loud snuffling sound behind you. You turn around just in time to see Derek's beloved bull mastiff settle himself down in front of the entrance to the hallway. He proceeds to gnaw on his toy with gusto, completely ignoring you as usual...

Followed by a few more paragraphs setting up a puzzle. Look again, and we get:

Living Room
The living room, like the bedroom, is still a work in progress. All the necessaries are here, however: you've got a couch, a couple shelves to hold Derek's books, a TV, and plenty of sunlight. A colorful braided rug covers the floor.

This moment really worked for me. It acknowledged that I’d changed locations, but instead of being like another room in a colossal cave, the new location instead functioned like another beat in Wendy’s story. My focus was immediately drawn to figuring out what to do with Barkley (who is not only blocking Wendy’s way but also gnawing on her shoe… ick.) It was only after the first few obvious actions failed that I took stock of the room proper, a progression which felt strongly mimetic to how a person’s actual thought processes might work in such a scenario. There were other times when the technique didn’t flow so freely for me, and I found myself wishing I could see the room without having to LOOK a second time, but for the most part, I was happy to be swept through the story as I moved through the world.

The game isn’t pure narrative — there are definitely puzzles, one of which was enough of a doozy that it sent me to the walkthrough. But in employing a deft compositional hand between depicting Wendy’s interior and exterior worlds, Tough Beans got me strongly invested in navigating through her challenges.

I successfully managed to do so, at least after that little trip to the walkthrough, where I found out that my stuckness was due to neglecting the fact that the game frequently implements descriptions for second-level objects, and it turns out sometimes they’re important. However, I only finished the game with about half the points, and here’s where the final innovation lives. Tough Beans, we learn, awards points for solving puzzles, but just as often it does so for finding opportunities to fully realize the character. As the walkthrough puts it, points are awarded “in situations where Wendy shows some backbone, spunkiness, cleverness, etc.”

I would say it’s even a little more nuanced than that, as at least one point comes from behaving in an adult, responsible manner, though several others derive from being a hellion. In any case, the game was sized well enough that I’d found the non-optimal winning solution by about 80 minutes in, and could then spend my remaining 40 minutes finding opportunities to make Wendy an even stronger version of herself. It’s an ingenious idea to have the points, at least in part, function as a character-themed “Have You Tried…?” section.

This didn’t work perfectly. I think the point awarding could have been done a bit more consistently — 10 points is too few for all the potentially relevant opportunities in the game — and I wish the walkthrough had just come out and told me how to score the points rather than coyly hinting. Moreover, I really missed the inclusion of some features that do (I think) come natively with Inform, such as a Full Score breakdown and notifications when I scored a point.

Similarly, there are just a couple of little bugs and some places throughout where the prose stumbles, often by missing a word or a punctuation mark. Nonetheless, I spent the whole game rooting for Wendy and rooting for Tough Beans, and was happy to see them both succeed in the end, even if they weren’t flawless. In fact, as the game’s excellent characterization so effectively declares, flawlessness is most emphatically not the point.

Rating: 9.5