>INVENTORY

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!

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.

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.

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 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

The Colour Pink by Robert Street [Comp05]

IFDB page: The Colour Pink
Final placement: 6th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

The Colour Pink is one of those games that starts out with one premise and then wildly shifts gears into something else entirely. There’s nothing wrong with games like that. Heck, I even wrote one. But putting your players through a major shift incurs a responsibility, and that responsibility is to make it clear what is happening. You don’t have to do that immediately — it’s perfectly fine to let a mystery simmer and then have the solution coalesce, either slowly or quickly, at the very end or before that. But if you never explain what happened, your players are left sputtering, “Wait, but how come… what was the… why was everything, and then… WHAT???”

That was me at the end of The Colour Pink, a game which starts out sci-fi, then turns into fairy-tale/fantasy, then skids back to sci-fi at the last move (or doesn’t, depending on which ending you choose), but at no point makes it clear just what you’ve experienced. It seems like maybe you eat a hallucinogen, but apparently its effects can last forever, if you so choose? Oh, and the thing you eat has one set of effects immediately (and even some effects before you eat it, along the lines of compelling you to eat it… in some unexplained way) and then a different set of effects later? Unless the second part (the shift to fantasy) wasn’t a result of eating the thing at all, but is some other weird thing happening on the planet?

Also, there are missing people, and we never find out what happened to them. Did they turn into the animals that we meet in the fantasy land? Are they normal but we’re just experiencing them as animals? What is the War that the fantasy animals keep referencing? I guess there’s a wizard who does a thing to a princess, but what is that even about? Or is the princess not a person at all, but rather a hallucinatory projection of a missing item? There’s some whole thing at the sci-fi level about trying to create a (sci-fi) love potion, and what happens with that? Is it what causes us to be compelled to eat the hallucinatory (or whatever) food? Is the whole fantasy landscape a dream or something? Or are we sharing a dream with the missing people, and the PC is the only one who gets out? (In endings that exit it?) Why is everybody an animal except us?

Questions, questions, questions, and there are no answers forthcoming. I kept waiting for them, and they never arrived. This is a… I want to say “betrayal”, and that’s a highly charged word, so maybe it’s a little too much. It is a shirking of authorial responsibility. Now, I will own the fact that I played this game in two installments with about a two-month gap between them. Maybe my failure to understand what was going on is on me. But even in my first few moments with the game, I immediately found myself scrambling for answers, trying to get my bearings in the description of events. Here’s that introduction:

You are on an abandoned planet again. Not content with almost killing you the last time, the Captain has delegated you again to investigate another out-of-contact colony. Apparently you impressed him with your survival instincts, by evading thousands of insect-like creatures before the ship finally sent down enough people to wipe them out. Maybe your job description should just be renamed as the Expendable Explorer. Unfortunately, you have no choice but to obey the Captain’s orders.

An hour ago you were sent down into a thick jungle. When you made contact with the ship you found out that they had missed the clearing where you were supposed to land. The intervening hour was spent cutting through the energetic plant-life until you finally reached your destination.

Immediately following that, I wrote: Already confused. “When you made contact with the ship”… Wasn’t I sent down from the ship? I “found out that they missed the clearing” where I was supposed to land? Wouldn’t I have known that from the fact that I didn’t land in the clearing? What is my destination? The out-of-contact colony? Was that where the ship was supposed to land?

I mean, once each milieu settles in, there’s a bunch of running around and solving puzzles in a very familiar IF way, and taken on their own, they’re reasonably satisfying, but they’re a bit like ornaments hanging on an invisible Christmas tree. Sure, they’re fine and pretty, but nothing seems to connect them in any way, which makes everything feel arbitrary and baffling. Consequently, while I had fun at moments in the game, it kept accumulating narrative debt that it never paid off, so even with multiple endings available (and even a whole potential violent path, a la Undertale, that I never bothered to explore), I still felt kinda cheated when it was done.

Rating: 7.0

Vespers by Jason Devlin [Comp05]

IFDB page: Vespers
Final placement: 1st place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

I came to this game knowing it had won the 2005 IF Competition. That couldn’t be helped. I was detaching from the IF community in that year, after my kid was born in June, but I was still dialed in enough to know the name of the winning game. It just took me almost twenty years to actually play the thing, that’s all. Because I just looked at its IFDB page, I also know that it won a bunch of XYZZY Awards, and that it has achieved lasting respect, still making it onto a list of Top 50 all-time IF games in 2023.

Starting with that knowledge gave me a rather unfair (albeit unavoidable) set of biases. Playing an acclaimed game, at least for me, comes with a higher initial bar of expectations, and maybe a little less tolerance for mistakes. Lucky for me, Vespers delivers on its promise, and earns its kudos. The religious subject matter is pretty alien to me, and religious games have been offputting to me in the past, so I appreciated the author’s note that Vespers “isn’t a religious game: at least not in the sense of trying to convert anyone”, and that he himself is “not Christian and wasn’t raised Christian”. Another unfair set of biases on my part, I suppose, but those upfront announcements helped me relax my guard and put my trust in the game.

Once I did that, I found it a rich and immersive experience, albeit in a disturbing way. I don’t think I’ve seen a better use of quotation boxes, with the possible exception of Trinity, which pioneered them after all. I hope it’s not too spoilery to say that Vespers uses quote boxes as a way to showcase the PC’s internal dialogue, an inner voice which becomes increasingly askew from its moorings, and which we learn later may have been leaking out for quite some time.

Yes, we have an unreliable narrator here, and maybe even an entire unreliable milieu, in a way that’s again hard to talk about without being too spoilery. And yeah, it’s a 20-year-old game (nearly), but I still strive to keep these comp reviews spoiler-free, as they’re about discovery after all. I’m making an exception, though. Fair warning: mild spoilers follow for both Vespers and Photopia, because I think there’s a fruitful comparison there.

There’s a moment in Photopia when what you’ve witnessed in the beginning comes back around, but this time with loads more meaning attached, and an oppressive sense of fait accompli. There’s nothing you can do to change what happens — after all, you already saw it happen — and indeed one of the knocks on Photopia was an alleged lack of interactivity, given the unchangeable nature of its central event. But I would argue that the very real interactivity of that game attaches the player to the event, and to the characters affected by it, with much greater ease than a similarly plotted short story could. You may not always be in the driver’s seat, but events witnessed from the passenger seat can still have a very powerful effect.

Vespers doesn’t hop perspectives the way Photopia does, but it does start with a decision already made by the PC, and everything else in the game flows from that decision. As the game goes on, the consequences of that decision become more and more clear, and it is the PC’s job to reckon with those consequences as best he can, within his declared moral framework.

And here’s where the Catholic setting becomes phenomenally useful to the game’s project, because it turns out we are dealing with an original sin. In Vespers, the sin was committed by the PC, but before he was being controlled by the player. We must inherit the consequences of that sin, and proceed as a flawed man moving through a flawed world. It’s as if the game begins with “*** You have lost ***”, and then asks, “Now what?” Nevertheless, and also true to its theme, Vespers does offer the possibility of redemption, at least on a personal level, even if a tsunami of suffering has overtaken the world. The path to get to that redemption is a very narrow one, but I think that also rings true in a Medieval setting.

I found this a brilliant use of interactive fiction, verging on profound. I have a fundamental quibble with the “good” path (albeit one that might be addressed if I understood Catholic theology better), and I did find a few places where the language or the coding fell down, but overall it’s clearly a well-tested and well-crafted game, which has absolutely earned its place among the all-time great works of interactive fiction.

Rating: 9.8

Ninja II by Paul Panks as Dunric [Comp05]

IFDB page: Ninja II
Final placement: 36th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

So, like the other Panks game I played from this comp, Ninja II required me to fire up a DOSBox instance to get it working. However, unlike that other game, I found myself with very little patience for this one.

I’ve already written my rap on Panks, and what’s more, this game is almost identical to his entry from Comp04 — it has one additional “puzzle”, and those scare quotes belong there. (The puzzle, which is simultaneously ridiculously hard and stupidly easy, prompts you with “Dare you beat dragon?” and leaves you to determine exactly how that phrase works as a “clue”.)

Granted, I played the earlier version of Ninja 19 years ago, and remember virtually nothing from it (except that it’s bad), but I don’t need to revisit it. I’ve done my time. Plus, re-submitting a nearly identical game to your last year’s entry is obnoxious behavior, however you slice it.

Rating: 1.9

Beyond by Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi, and Alessandro Peretti [Comp05]

IFDB page: Beyond
Final placement: Tied for 2nd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here we are again: I couldn’t finish this game in two hours. I found it quite absorbing, and with 20 minutes left, I really debated whether to turn to the walkthrough or just play out my 20 minutes with a bit less dawdling around examining things, getting as far as I could. I picked the latter, but with 5 minutes left, I really wanted to know how the story turned out. So I peeked at the walkthrough, hoping to speed through to the end. NOPE! Turns out I was midway through chapter 4 of 7 (plus an epilogue) — just about halfway through, I reckon.

Back in the day I used to penalize games like this in my ratings, hoping to discourage people from this behavior. But it’s not like whatever I put here will deter people in, like, Comp06. Plus, as Michael Coyne taught me, authors have a strong motivation to enter their too-long games in the comp, and nothing I did as a reviewer could have changed that motivation anyway. And I’m obviously not trying to go through all these Comp05 games in six weeks — I started on these almost three years ago! So while I am still stopping after two hours to write a review, I’m not going to specifically take points off anymore, except to the extent that having to stop prematurely affected my enjoyment of the game. Heck, in some games stopping after two hours feels like a gift.

Stopping Beyond was disappointing, though, because I was deeply involved with its story, being pulled along at multiple levels. At the higher level, there’s a frame story, in which the PC is the spirit of an unborn child, exploring the reason why it wasn’t born. I was very wary when I encountered this premise, fearing that it would veer into an anti-choice polemic, but I needn’t have worried. Instead this concept brings us into a compelling murder mystery, in which we play a detective looking into the murder of a pregnant woman.

Really, I shouldn’t call the unborn spirit piece a frame story, because it returns after every chapter, in interludes where we see the murder scene as a ghost, or experience a bit of what life might have been like had the mother lived, or watch different scenarios of how that night might have gone, from a godlike remove. In the prologue, the game makes clear that the PC (and thereby the player) cannot affect her fate. She will never be born, and can only learn the circumstances surrounding that fact.

Thus the game takes place under a heavy layer of inevitability, similar to Photopia — a game to which Beyond pays a neat, subtle tribute by replicating one room and item description. And yet, also like Photopia, Beyond weaves a deeply compelling story around this unavoidable death. As the detective, we’re able to investigate the scene of the crime, talk to a wide variety of connected characters, and make clever observations that lead us closer and closer to solving the crime.

As any good mystery should, the plot takes several unexpected turns, and who knows how many more were in store, given that I was only halfway through the story when I reached my time limit? Not only is the plot well-crafted, but the presentation of the game is excellent as well. The whole thing renders in tan text on a black background, setting a nicely somber mood, and fantastic illustrations appear throughout the traversal, in that same color scheme. These illustrations might appear at the top of the text window, or on either side, and the game handles their appearance, persistence, and disappearance very smoothly, in a way that always enhances the story and never disrupts it.

The one Achilles heel in Beyond, I’m sorry to say, is that the game sometimes demonstrates a rather shaky command of English. Every so often there’s a mention of a baby “wrapped in white clothings”, or a character who says, “I have took the water”, or a phrase like, “I feel like I’m bringed away.” All things considered the errors aren’t overwhelming — certainly not the trainwreck that some broken English comp games turn out to be — but enough to throw me out of the story when they happen.

Nevertheless, this bothered me much less than it might have, and that’s down to the overall outstanding craft that was put into the game. It was one of those that I wish I could give more time, and maybe someday I will, but for now, I leave the story unfinished, but with admiration.

Rating: 9.3

On Optimism by Tim Lane [Comp05]

IFDB page: On Optimism
Final placement: 24th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Readers of these reviews know that brevity is… not my strong suit. However, I could review this game in one word, and that word would be: “Painful.” Because I am who I am, though, you get multiple paragraphs about how this game is painful in multiple ways.

First, it’s painful because it clearly comes from pain. This game’s world, its images, its themes — they all seem to be torn from an extravagantly suffering heart, attached to another deeply wounded person. There’s drug abuse, self-harm, buckets of tears, and I suspect it’s rooted in at least a few real events. As such, it’s a tough game to review, because I hardly want to be stomping on somebody’s feelings, even 19 years later. I hope that writing this game gave the author a bit of relief.

That said, its subject matter isn’t the only thing that makes this game painful, and here I just have to say, if you have tender feelings on behalf of the topic and the possible real-life connections, you may want to stop reading. Because this game was absolutely painful to read due to its absurdly overwrought, faux-poetic, and hyperdramatic language. Over and over again, the game reaches for profundity or eloquence, and lands comically short.

Here, have a sample picked at random:

Room of Your Joy My eyes scanned this room of your joy for minutes. They were searching for something that could not be found; for what this room must surely contain. But this is what they found: emptiness. A horribly large, vacant room was spread out before my eyes. A room that showed the depth of your sorrow, though it was called your joy. But as my eyes perused the room longer they found that there was but one small relic left in this room: a frame about the size of a sheet of a paper plastered on the far wall. Otherwise, vacancy could have been this room's name.

Oh man. I don’t think I need to take this apart piece by piece in order to show the ridiculousness of it, so let’s just focus on one thing: the weird personification of the PC’s eyes. They seemingly act on their own, leaving absolutely no agency for the actual character. The eyes scan the room. The eyes are searching for something. They don’t find it. The room is spread out before them. They peruse it longer. It’s all eyes, no “I”.

This mannerism repeats throughout the entire game, most often to ludicrous effect. We get lines like, “To the surprise of my eyes, the statue moved”, and, “My eyes once again received the strange privelege [sic] of sight”, and “In front of my eyes lay an opening begging to be traveled.” It’s not limited to the PC either, as the game pops out gems like, “Those great faucets you call eyes,” and “the pumps we call eyes.”

Nor are the eyes singled out for this bizarre treatment. This game never says, “I pressed the button” when it could instead say, “I moved forward and applied the weight of my body upon the remote’s only button.” And oh, the heart references! Most of the game takes place inside a metaphorical (and sometimes a bit oddly literal) heart, and the poetry (oh yeah, there’s poetry) refers to hearts relentlessly. At one point, when it was waxing tragic about a heart that will “forget to pump blood through my core,” I couldn’t help but flash on Andrew Plotkin’s classic review opener for Symetry:

This is terribly, terribly unfair. I’m really sorry. But I just started laughing hysterically, and it’s not what the author intended. In the middle of an intense ending sequence, I read the line:

‘My blood pumper is wronged!’

I just lost it. It’s a very ‘Eye of Argon’ sort of line.

That’s pretty much the story with this game’s prose. You’re not supposed to laugh, but it honestly can’t be avoided.

There’s another level of pain in this game, and that is its painful design. Several times in my playthrough, I had to turn to the hints (which were clear and thorough, and for whose inclusion I’m grateful), only to find that the command necessary to resolve my conundrum felt like a truly random thing I would never have thought to do. It’s not surprising, I guess, that a game living entirely in an allegorical, metaphorical, and dreamlike landscape would have logical non sequiturs in it, but no fair trying to make other people guess at them.

That’s enough. I appreciated those hints, as I said, and there’s a moment where the game ends but you’re given the chance to go back to a crucial decision point. I thought that was a cool innovation, one I’d enjoy seeing in other games. Overall, though, my memories of this game will always be full of pain. And just a little hilarity.

Rating: 3.7

Really Late Reviews #2: Riven [misc]

As I continue my project of trying to play and review the tall pile of game CDs sitting next to my computer, I start to get an idea of how the pile got so tall in the first place. I finished the first review (of The Space Bar) late in January 2001, and now I find myself in April only just finishing the second. Somehow real life keeps getting in the way. Well, that and writing text games. Let this be a lesson to you, kids. (Though just what the lesson is, I’m not sure.)

The idea behind these “Really Late Reviews” isn’t to help people decide whether or not to buy a particular game — in the vast majority of cases, the games probably aren’t available anymore except through auction sites and dusty bargain bins. Even Riven, one of the biggest hits ever, is no longer in print, though it’s not too hard to find. Instead, these reviews try to focus on what does and doesn’t work in a specific game with an eye towards good and bad design decisions in general for adventure games.

The scrutiny is perhaps especially appropriate in this case, since Myst and Riven were such humongous hits that they had to be doing something right for somebody. The fact that they’ve both received such tremendous backlash from some hardcore adventure gamers is, to me, just more evidence of this fact. The tone of many of those complaints always reminded me of the irritation felt by longtime fans of groups like U2 and Nirvana after those groups got big, annoyance that their hip and private playground had suddenly been invaded by the unwashed masses.

It’s not that I thought that all the criticisms of Myst were baseless — on the contrary, I was just as annoyed by its anticlimactic ending and its sometimes pointless puzzles as anybody. But the vehemence of those objections always felt a bit out of place to me. I will say, though, that I’ve always been struck by the irony of Myst‘s emphasis on books, and the same is true for Riven. Here we have the adventure games that, more than any single other, took players’ hands off the keyboard and placed emphasis totally on mouse interaction, yet their central metaphor is of books as transportation devices.

In fact, when one of those books opens and we see that the pages are in fact blank, and in place of the text is an animated graphic, we might realize that there, conveniently displayed before us, is the Myst aesthetic: gorgeous art on the simplest background, divorced from (con)text as much as possible. For an old text adventurer like me, there was something amusing about the fact that the games had such a worshipful attitude towards books and pages, while eschewing actual words almost completely. I say almost because the games can’t quite manage to avoid presenting text, and consequently end up hitting players with giant swaths of it at once. But more about that later.

Of course, the point has been made before that this very ejection of text in favor of art was one of the keys to Myst‘s success, and it’s a point I find persuasive. I know that while playing Riven, I enjoyed how easy it was to find one breathtaking vista after another, even before any puzzles had been solved, with only a few mouse-clicks. That simplicity is a solid virtue, and the fact that almost anybody could figure out the interface within 60 seconds had to have helped the game’s popularity. Simplicity and dazzle are a powerful combination, and Riven has both in spades — it’s no wonder that so many other games have copied its interface.

But as easy as that interface was to use, I found it frustrating at points. For one thing, the fact that Riven‘s graphics were so detailed, with so many subtle areas of light and shadow, meant that in any given screen, there were several features that might yield results when clicked upon. Consequently, I found myself doing a lot of random clicking in a great many places. It’s not that this approach is difficult, but it does get rather tedious, especially when only one out of oh, say 75 of those clicks actually accomplished anything. Another problem with the Riven hunt-the-hotspot interface is that for unspecified areas of many screens, clicking would actually advance the PC forward, while clicking elsewhere would have no effect. Numerous were the times when I’d have to backtrack because I’d moved forward without wanting to.

The answer to these problems would have been just a little more cursor differentiation. Riven already has this feature for some areas. For example, when the cursor would turn into finger pointing right, clicking would turn the PC 90 degrees to the right. When the cursor becomes a grabbing hand, you know it’s possible to click and drag the feature beneath it. If only it had lit up on other (non-draggable) hotspots and evinced some difference between forward motion and no effect, I could have been saved a lot of pointless clicking. These features seem so obvious that I wondered whether they had been omitted in the name of making the game more challenging. If so, they certainly served their purpose, but increased challenge of that sort doesn’t make a game any more fun, just more numbing.

But even when I’d feel myself sliding into a stupor from all the fruitless clicking, Riven would always reawaken me with its phenomenal art. This game is known for its graphics, and rightly so — even its fiercest critics may allow that it’s “pretty.” I’ll say more than that: it’s stunning. The level of detail in rocks, plants, and skies made them feel indelibly real, and the effect was aided by all the tiny touches that were put in just to enhance the game’s feeling of presence. In a forest, tiny fireflies (or are they dust motes) swirl around you, for no other reason than to deepen the aura of enchantment. Water shimmers and refracts brighter and darker colors up at you, creating a remarkably mimetic effect.

From time to time you’ll see other people, always shying away from you and warning their companions of your presence like timid prairie dogs. The other thing that just knocked me out about some of the graphics in Riven was their choice of colors and level of color saturation. When an elevator descends from the ceiling, it isn’t just gold, it’s GOLD. When the pathway from that elevator leads to a huge viewport on the ocean, it’s hard not to be awed by the intense BLUEness of that panorama.

Riven‘s puzzles partook of a similar intensity and attention to detail, and there were plenty of neat ones. I won’t discuss them in too much detail, since I don’t want to spoil the game for those who might still seek it out, but I will say that the game often rewards sophisticated spatial thinking, and that the solutions often require bringing together disparate pieces of information in crafty and revelatory ways.

In fact, my main criticism of the puzzles is that sometimes they go one step too far in this direction. In one instance, several things clicked together at once in my brain and I realized that I had figured out a puzzle that was cunning and delicious, but when I went to solve it, I found it unyielding. Turns out that the game had established a pattern of clues in four out of five sub-parts of the puzzle, but had broken that pattern in the fifth part, presumably to make things more challenging. My frustration arose from the fact that where I had once felt clever for teasing out the underlying motif, I now felt cheated out of the solution I’d earned, for no compelling reason. The pattern-matching was a bit of a stretch already, and when the pattern was arbitrarily broken, the puzzle started to feel a little unfair to me. Other problems occurred in one or two combination locks whose solutions didn’t quite make enough sense, including one in particular that I had to try over and over until it worked, even though previous attempts with the same combination had failed.

This last may have been a technical problem, and if so, it was one of the few bugs I encountered in Riven. There were little problems here and there, usually having to do with the cursor changing shape erroneously, sometimes making me wonder if I was missing additional screens because of an error in the navigation routines. Besides the art, the game’s other really outstanding technical achievement was in its sound. I recently bought a new computer with a powerful soundcard and speaker set, and Riven took the fullest advantage of these. The music was understated and evocative, and the foreground sound effects achieved a remarkable level of verisimilitude. But even when these weren’t playing, the game kept up a steady stream of ambient background noises — chirping birds and insects in a forest, lapping waves at the seashore, echoing droplets of water underground, and so on.

These sounds blended seamlessly into each other and did a lovely job of completing the sense-picture started by the graphics. On the other hand, a five-second foreground sound effect that’s enchanting the first time through becomes really annoying the fifth time. Riven provided the option to skip transition animations, thank goodness, but omitted any such feature for sound effects, with the result that I sometimes had to stop a quick run through already-explored areas just so I could let a sound play yet again.

However, this interruption wasn’t as inconvenient as the numerous occasions when Riven would ask me to swap among its five CDs. I have two CD-ROM drives in my current machine, and I still felt like I was constantly disk-swapping, especially as I got further into the game and was doing a lot of hopping from one area to another. I’ve read that a Riven DVD was released which eliminates this problem, and if you’re still looking for the game, I’d highly recommend pursuing this option — the game casts such a lovely spell that I wanted it broken as little as possible.

Prisons are a recurring motif in Riven. In fact, at the beginning of the game you’re given a “prison book” that you’re supposed to use to capture the Bad Guy, but as soon as you’re transported into the game, you find yourself in an actual prison (you know, with bars), where the book gets stolen from you. On the way to retrieving it, you’ll explore a number of different cages and cells, and in fact you’ll be imprisoned yourself when the book is returned to you. All this incarceration felt like an appropriate theme, because it nicely symbolized my relationship to the plot.

I think it’s fair to say that Riven‘s story is very poorly paced. At the beginning of the game you’re given a number of teasers (and references that seem inexplicable if you haven’t played Myst and/or read the tie-in novels recently, which was exactly my situation) and then thrown immediately into the standard lovely-but-abandoned landscape. From there, it’ll be a loooong time until you get more story. Oh sure, there’ll be hints and evocative little clues of what’s going on, but I found myself wishing for more narrative throughout the game, instead of the endless wandering, button-pushing, and lever-throwing that I got instead. This feeling was not alleviated when I finally stumbled across one of the game’s several plot-advancing journals. These journals are uniformly massive, page after page of spidery handwritten text that provides plenty of plot detail and background information (more than enough, in fact) along with some well-placed puzzle hints.

The problem with these things is that they take a long time to read, and whenever I’d find one I’d sigh, realizing that my next half-hour or so would be spent slogging through a sea of text. Trapped in this stumbling rhythm, I began to feel like a starving detainee (albeit one with a very large cell in which to pace), begging piteously for a few more scraps of plot, please, and instead given massive meals every six days.

In the end, I decided that I wasn’t playing Riven for its story, and allowed myself to sink more deeply into its lovely graphics, sounds, and puzzles like a warm bath. I came out feeling refreshed and contented, more or less happy for the time I’d spent with the game.