Month: September 2020

Death To My Enemies by Jon Blask as Roody Yogurt [Comp99]

IFDB page: Death To My Enemies
Final placement: 29th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

I guess this is another ifMUD in-joke game. I make this guess partly based on my interpretation of the included readme file, which suggests that the majority of the author’s support came from MUD denizens, and partly on the fact that I recognize a very few references in the game, like “Eeagh!” and “Awwwk, want cork nut!”, as being from the MUD. I already talked about this kind of game in my review of Pass The Banana, so I won’t rehash all that here. I will say that the ifMUD in-joke game is rapidly climbing my list of least favorite competition entry genres. Right now it’s hovering just below the simulated-house and learning-Inform genres. I don’t know, I guess it’s funny if you’re in on the joke (though maybe not — not being in on the joke, I wouldn’t know one way or another), but to me it’s just really boring. There were some jokes that didn’t feel like they required outside knowledge, but I didn’t find them very funny. In addition, I can only believe that the solution to the game is another kind of in-joke, because I can’t see any logical way that players could come up with it on their own. This makes Death a slightly worse offender than Pass The Banana — at least the latter game was solvable for a MUD outsider. For outsiders to solve this one, they’d have to engage in quite a bit of random guessing, and spend a lot of time trying to do things with barely implemented red herrings. Being such an outsider, this is what I did for about 15 minutes before I gave up and looked at the walkthrough. I didn’t have fun.

Add to these flaws the fact that Death has quite a few spelling and grammar errors, and some really ugly formatting (the game seems to have an aversion to blank lines). Also factor in that the readme suggests that the game makes heavy use of “WHO IS ” and “WHAT IS “, but the game almost never seems to recognize such questions, responding instead with another irritating nonsensical reference. Did I mention that the solution doesn’t make sense either? Let’s not forget the fact that the game offers several objects to play with, but most of them don’t offer the slightest trace of interactivity. There’s a bottle that’s “not something you can open.” There’s an eggplant that’s “plainly inedible.” There’s a dustbuster that’s “not something you can switch.” The list goes on. Anyway, put all these things together and you’ve got one pretty tedious interactive experience on your hands.

The author announces that he plans to put out a “hopefully less buggy version of the game” after the competition is over. This is a good idea, of course, but I think that even after such a version emerges, it will only appeal to a limited audience. Basically, if you hang out on ifMUD a lot, you might enjoy it. If, on the other hand, you’re like me… you probably won’t.

Rating: 2.0

Hunter, In Darkness by Andrew Plotkin as Dave Ahl, Jr. [Comp99]

IFDB page: Hunter, in Darkness
Final placement: 8th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

[Several sections of this review could be considered plot spoilers when viewed from the proper angle. You have been warned.]

Actually, Wumpus and Wumpus II are in ‘More Basic Computer Games.’ Which
has 84 games, and is indeed by David H. Ahl. Wumpus rules. All IFers
should play it. Indeed, play it before the competition so that you have
a sense of our collective roots. Then marvel at where we’ve come.”
— Adam Thornton, 9/18/99

Hmmm. I didn’t follow this advice, but I remember Hunt the Wumpus. It’s a classic computer game, but pretty primitive. It involves locating a target within a grid of rooms, avoiding deathtraps and teleportation traps (the latter of which was adapted for a clever, though irritating, tribute in Zork I). It is almost nothing like Hunter, In Darkness. And yet… And yet one wonders why Adam was exhorting us so enthusiastically to play this game, preferably before the competition. I suppose we’ll find out our answer soon enough. In the meantime, let’s examine the game before us. It is a marvelous game, gritty and atmospheric with writing and coding savvy to spare. It is a true “cave crawl”, with much of the action involving literally crawling through sections of a remarkable cave, rife with tight passages, underground pools, and dangerous rock formations. And it is also an update of Hunt the Wumpus… sort of. As in the original game, you play a hunter, armed with a crossbow and five bolts. You can smell your prey from several rooms away, and must struggle with dangerous pits and threatening bats. But that is where the similarity ends. Where Wumpus was bare, even abstract in its depiction of the cave, Hunter is rich with description. In fact, the levels of description can run so deep that the detail of the game becomes almost dizzying, as in the following example:

>L
Narrow Ledge
This ledge is barely two feet wide at most. You try not to feel like
it's angled slightly outward. The pit stretches above and below you; but
you can see no way to climb from here, either way.

A rope hangs across the pit, a gentle arc well above your head.

>X PIT BELOW
You can make out the pit floor. It's only two or three body-lengths
down; but the stone formations directly below you look vicious.

>X FORMATIONS
Sharp spires rise directly below you -- some chance result of dripping
minerals and flowing water. If you try to descend farther, you'll slip
and probably fall into them.

I have a terminology I’ve made up to talk about this sort of thing. In this terminology, first-level nouns are those nouns that are mentioned in room descriptions. Second-level nouns are those nouns mentioned in the descriptions of the first-level nouns. Third-level nouns are in the second-level noun descriptions, and so on. The deeper these levels go, the more detailed and immersive the textual world. Most text adventures don’t even fully cover the first-level nouns, but Hunter does, and often many of the deeper levels as well. The result is a cave environment that feels hauntingly, sometimes terrifyingly, real. I have crawled through a few caves in my life, all of which were much safer (thankfully!) than the cave depicted in Hunter; the game matched my experience quite accurately, adroitly capturing the spelunker’s combination of awe and fear.

Along with being extremely well written, Hunter is also brilliantly designed and implemented. I went through the game several times and not only did I find no bugs whatsoever, I also discovered that the game very cleverly allows multiple routes to the same puzzles. There aren’t many puzzles in the game, but those that exist are very good indeed, and quite original. They belong to that rare breed of puzzle that is perfectly integrated with the story and the environment, and is a great pleasure to solve because it requires lateral thinking within a very logical framework. I didn’t find any multiple solutions to them, though seeing the care with which this game was designed, I wouldn’t be surprised if some existed. In addition, there is at least one point at which I think you can make the game unsolvable, but the situation only comes up because almost every logical action is implemented. I kept finding myself surprised at just how many actions were accounted for. Even those that were disallowed were often disallowed with a message that was specific to the particular circumstances of the PC, and that sometimes gave a clue as to how to proceed. As impressive as all this was, I was even more wowed by the way that the game subtly arranges itself so that it appears to allow a very wide scope of action, but in fact moves the PC through a specific plot. I can think of several junctures where multiple choices are possible, all of which lead, very logically, to the same point. This is a game that clearly took great care with its design, extending the illusion of freedom a long way while maintaining a fairly specific structure.

Also, several rooms have initial descriptions which describe the experience of arriving in the room, and the features that are most salient at first. Once this description has been displayed, further looks at the room will stabilize into a more settled description, one which takes details into account and bears reading multiple times. Attention to detail like this just permeates the game, and makes it one of the most engrossing competition entries I’ve ever had the good fortune to play. Its origins do sometimes undercut it a bit, such as when the fearsome beast is first revealed as a Wumpus — the comical tone of the name jars against the serious and deadly atmosphere of the rest of the game. However, the contrast between the original Hunt the Wumpus and this game is amazing. It’s like the difference between a limerick and a Stephen King novel. Follow Adam’s advice — play Hunt the Wumpus (there are several versions available on the web) and then try Hunter, In Darkness. You too will marvel at where we’ve come.

Rating: 9.8

[Postscript from 2020: In response to my epigraph at the top, Andrew Plotkin wrote: “If you *didn’t* see that post, by the way, it’s because Adam cancelled it almost immediately.

He was a beta-tester, but he posted that on his own, without consulting me
first. I more or less blew my top at him, and he apologized and killed the
post.

I spent the next weeks worried sick that it might have Ruined The Effect
for some hapless player. Fortunately, the whole mess turned out to be
trivial next to the lack-of-walkthrough problem. Heh.”]

Chaos by Shay Caron [Comp99]

IFDB page: Chaos
Final placement: 19th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Most interactive fiction games use the second person voice, and make it clear from the outset that this is their mode. Think of “You are standing in an open field west of a white house,” or “You are Primo Varicella.” Chaos appears to follow in this tradition, describing a character named Captain Chaos but using the second person form of address several times in asides like “You know what I mean” or “you guessed it.” Admittedly, the “I” in the first phrase throws a bit of a spanner into the works, and a player might well have cause to wonder who the “I” is that’s apparently speaking. The parser? The author? Some sort of in-game narrator? For me, though, it went by so fast that I allowed myself to suspend that question. From the introduction, I presumed I was Captain Chaos’ sidekick, there to help him with a sudden power failure on his jerry-built hovercraft. But then I typed in my first command, and this is how it went:

> I

Chaos has a Evil Overlord list.

What? But what’s in my inventory? After a few commands, I slowly began to understand that the game was responding to my commands as if they were guiding Captain Chaos himself, then describing the results referring to the Captain in the third person — “Chaos walks south”, “He picks up the screwdriver,” etc. What’s more, from time to time the Captain Chaos character will offer some commentary on the command chosen, relating tangential or backstory facts about the parts of the environment he encounters while being guided by the player’s commands. The more of this that goes on, the more prominent one question becomes: Who is the PC of this game? Apparently the introduction was addressing me — me the player, not some avatar within the story with whom I am expected to identify. And who is Captain Chaos addressing with his asides? Again, it’s the player. In a real sense, the player is the PC in Chaos. You, the player, control Captain Chaos with your commands, but he is aware of your presence, at least enough to make the occasional remark to you. And if all that’s not complicated enough, wait until he finds (or you find, or something) the technology that allows him to control another entity remotely.

This is all rather haphazardly done in this particular game, as evidenced by my confusion at the first few prompts. I found myself bumping into unexpected forms of address, and having to puzzle out exactly what was supposed to be happening, or at least what it seemed like was supposed to be happening. Moreover, many of the questions raised by these narrative choices, such as those I mentioned about the use of “I” in the introduction, are just never answered. In fact, there is no announcement of any kind — subtle, blatant, or otherwise — that Chaos will overturn a fundamental IF convention, and the result is a rather jarring feeling of displacement. The creation of this feeling doesn’t really seem to serve the story, at least not in any specific way I could determine.

Nonetheless, I found it quite interesting. I was reminded of other competition games which have fiddled with the narrative voice, such as Christopher Huang’s Muse and Graham Nelson’s Tempest. Both of these games took a slightly different approach, having the parser itself take on a character, speaking to the player in the first person and executing the player’s commands as if they were that character’s own actions. Tempest even complicated matters further by explaining that its player’s role is as “the magical will” of Shakespeare’s Prospero, guiding Ariel (the parser’s character) through the various scenes of the play. These tactics have a bit of a distancing effect on the player, setting identification at one remove and shifting the action from the player character to the parser character. Chaos, though it explains nothing of its strategy, actually creates one further remove by allowing neither a player character nor a parser character but another character altogether to be the focus of the action. Yet when this third character (third person, you might even say) speaks outward in the second person voice, it addresses the player (in a “Dear reader” sort of way) and brings the game and player closer together than almost any other IF I’ve seen.

Orchestrated strategically and used creatively, these techniques could make for a masterful, groundbreaking work of IF. Chaos isn’t that work, but its experimentation does open up some very interesting, and mostly unexplored, territory. Beside this, the plot of the game seems quite inconsequential. There’s a ship to be repaired, and various puzzles to solve, some required and some optional. These puzzles are decent, and the writing is passable, and although there are a number of coding problems, the game is at least finishable. It’s a bit of a throwaway, though, a mediocre competition entry except for the unique approach it takes, almost offhandedly, to forms of address in IF. I enjoyed thinking about Chaos more than I enjoyed playing it, but if the author’s next game explores the techniques employed here in a consistent, systematic, and clear way, the result will be well worth a few false starts.

Rating: 6.6