May 2021, >INVENTORY

Bio by David Linder [Comp03]

IFDB page: Bio
Final placement: 25th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

NOTE: I’m going to be spoiling the first puzzle, but don’t worry, you’d never have solved it without the walkthrough anyway.

Somebody please MST this game. It’s just so perfect for it — terrible but in very entertaining ways. Take, for instance, the first puzzle. You awaken inside your room in the scientific complex (yes, it’s a scientific complex game. I was so worried Comp03 wouldn’t have more than one!) to find gas seeping in under the door. What kind? Hard to tell when the game doesn’t know the word “gas”. There’s a bandage handy, but the bandage can’t be stuffed under the door (“I don’t see any door here.”), nor can it be worn on the face, mouth, or nose (because the game doesn’t know any of those words.) Simply entering WEAR BANDAGE yields the mystifying response, “You put the bandage on your arm and wrap it around the cut.” Cut? X ME shows no sign of injury — turns out that you acquire the cut much later in the game, but the bandage always assumes you have it already.

Anyway, back to the gas problem. Here’s the room description:

Your Room Your standing in your room or apartment (whichever you want to call it). It's about the size of a large bedroom, complete with all the furnishings. There's a small bed in the southwest corner with a nightstand next to it. On the other side of the room is a small TV. There is a dresser along the west wall. The exit lies to the north.

Rather than focus on the non-contraction in the first word, I’ll try to concentrate on the puzzle. “I don’t know the word ‘dresser'” tells us that the dresser isn’t implemented. The nightstand and bed are no help. Examining the TV gives us this very amusing response:

>x tv On the screen, you can see that it's a Fastlane rerun. Since it's your favorite episode, you watch for a few minutes.

The room is nearly filled with gas!

Man, the PC must really love that show! HOLD BREATH predictably fails. (“I don’t know the word ‘hold’.”) Oh, and just walking through the exit engulfs the PC in a cloud of lethal gas. Well, guess we’d better consult the walkthrough.

Hey, the first command in the walkthrough is OPEN ARMOIRE. Now, the question must be asked: WHAT FREAKING ARMOIRE?! It wouldn’t be this dresser, would it? No, of course not, since the game never refers to it as an armoire. The PC must just be so familiar with the armoire that he no longer notices it when he looks at the room, instead just thinking of it as “all the furnishings,” and therefore it is known only to those players who have read the walkthrough. Those lucky people can open it and find — how convenient! — a gas mask. No clothes or anything, but sure enough, this janitor is well-prepared for gas attacks, thanks to the gear he keeps inside the rustic antique that he’s somehow hauled into his onsite living quarters, which presumably are necessary due to the remoteness and/or secrecy of the scientific complex, 25 long miles away from the nearest town.

Later we find out that somebody else in the complex also has an armoire. Maybe this complex devotes itself equally to scientific discovery and antiquing. Anyhow, that entertaining exercise in puzzle-solving is entirely emblematic of the level of gameplay on offer in Bio, where slipshod coding, dreadful spelling, simplistic themes, juvenile imagery, and ghastly design all jostle for pride of place at each moment.

I dunno, though. Compared to some of the games in this comp, Bio just charms me a little. I mean, yeah, it’s sort of fascinated with blood and disease, and heaven knows it’s loaded with clichés, but it’s not outright nasty like Lardo was. And yeah, maybe its prose is in serious need of proofreading, but it’s nowhere near as dire as that of Amnesia. It’s at least nominally interactive, unlike RPG, and has a modicum of story, unlike Little Girl.

It’s the right size for the comp, and while it certainly lacks any sort of testing, it is finishable (with the walkthrough, anyway.) Don’t get me wrong, Bio is nothing like a good game, but it feels well-intentioned to me, more or less. I think it’s possible that some future work from this author may end up being pretty good. That’ll go some ways towards living down the hilarious MSTing of this game that simply must happen.

Rating: 3.5

Little Girl in the Big World by Peter Wendrich [Comp03]

IFDB page: Little girl in the big world
Final placement: 24th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

NOTE: Based on the readme file, the author wishes to keep the PC’s identity unspoiled for people who haven’t played the game. I don’t really see the reason for this, since the identity doesn’t really make a lot of sense, so I’m going to be spoiling it in this review. Consider yourself warned.

Little Girl In The Big World must be titled ironically, because the game’s world is anything but big. It’s just five rooms, three of which are pretty much bare. Not only that, the entire thing takes place in a standard house, and leaving the house (to go out into the big world) ends the game. I wish I could say that some interesting stuff at least happens in this little gameworld, but… not really. There’s no particular plot to speak of, and the whole thing can be finished in 20 minutes, easy.

The ABOUT text suggests that the game was written as “proof of concept of a new virtual machine,” and indeed it’s kind of cool, from a programming perspective, that this virtual machine (called StoryFactory) can work both as a Windows executable and as a JavaScript runtime inside a web browser. As a story, though, LGITBW offers very little.

Even from a coding viewpoint, the StoryFactory parser and world model has lots of serious problems, or perhaps just blatant deficiencies compared to established first-tier systems. It’s got a leg up on many homemade games in that its error messages are not snide, but they are sometimes unhelpful. For instance:

> get key [ I will get the rusty key ] That didn't work.

“That didn’t work” doesn’t really tell me enough of what I need to know, and it’s the game’s standard failure message. The text in brackets at least signals that my command was understood, but I need much more specific feedback when a command fails. Happily, the parser politely and willingly admits when it doesn’t understand something, and doesn’t ask any questions it isn’t prepared to answer (it doesn’t ask any questions at all), but its ability to understand input is quite minimal, it usually chokes on commands of three words or more, and it doesn’t seem to have any concept of pronouns at all. Oh, and there’s no SAVE or RESTORE functionality, which is a minor drag in this game and would be a major problem in a larger one.

As for the world model, a couple of its most serious flaws are its lack of basic IF concepts, such as inventory, and its irritating habit of only printing the room description after a LOOK command. Even at the very beginning of the game, or when the PC moves into new territory, StoryFactory doesn’t care to tell the player anything about the location. Add to these issues the fact that the prose is hampered by a considerable number of spelling and grammar problems (English isn’t the author’s first language, so it’s understandable but no less unsatisfactory) and you have a game whose implementation is seriously troubled.

LGITBW does have one interesting aspect, which is the fact that it has a strange sort of split PC. You play, apparently, a rat who is living with a little girl named Alice. However, most of the time Alice is with you, the parser will interpret your commands as orders to her, which she will usually carry out. You can specify the actor before the command in order to remove any ambiguity — I EAT THE CHEESE or ALICE EAT THE CHEESE. Now, because it’s a rat and a little girl, my personal inclination is to find this somewhat creepy, especially since Alice is so lifeless an NPC that she seems to behave as some sort of Stepford automaton, eerily under the sway of her pet rat’s will. I dunno, maybe it’s just too close to Halloween.

Anyway, creepiness aside, it’s a noble attempt to provide a team PC. Alice can do things the rat cannot, though the reverse isn’t true (not when it comes to anything useful, anyway.) There’s more ground to be broken in this area, and indeed I hope to break some of it, but LGITBW at least provides a signpost. Pity it does so ensconced in such a poor parser and inconsequential game.

Rating: 2.6

Rape, Pillage, Galore! by Kristian Kirsfeldt [Comp03]

IFDB page: Rape, Pillage, Galore!
Final placement: 30th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

Only the most generous of spirits could call this interactive fiction. I’m not one of those. I call it a random text generator, which only responds to two (or maybe three) commands.

The text it generates, in mock-medieval style, is one account after another of the adventures of “Sir Algebrah”, who wanders around killing some things and having sex with other things. That’s why the two commands RPG responds to are SLAY and LAY. If you enter any other command, or indeed no command at all, the program interprets your input as a “battle-cry” and then proceeds to print whatever it wants to.

It’s a reasonable, though wafer-thin, parody of fantasy CRPGs, and as such it’s entertaining for about 60 to 90 seconds. After that, it’s dull, and at no point is it any sort of interactive fiction.

Rating: 1.4

Temple of Kaos by Peter Gambles [Comp03]

IFDB page: Temple of Kaos
Final placement: 15th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

Much to my dismay, Temple Of Kaos has nothing to do with Maxwell Smart or Agent 99. I mean, sure, getting permission from whoever owns the rights to the show would probably be an insurmountable hurdle, but legal problems aside, wouldn’t Get Smart make a fantastic IF milieu? The Shoe Phone, the Cone Of Silence… I can just picture it. This Temple of KAOS, however, isn’t the stronghold of a nefarious organization of evil spies whose efforts must be thwarted by the agents of CONTROL, but rather a bizarre otherworld, where rules of time, space, and spelling (it’s called KAOS for no discernible reason) don’t apply.

Basically, the two salient features of this game are its disregard for making sense, and its propensity to express itself in verse, sometimes free, sometimes blank, and usually with end rhymes. As such, it’s a highly experimental game, and while I think both of the experiments fail in this instance, they illuminate some remarkable territory along the way.

Let’s tackle the nonsensical part first. In the ABOUT text, the author states that part of his intention with the game is to “interfere, out of sheer mischief, with some of the normal perceptions / causal relationships of IF space-time.” Mission accomplished, and in some parts of the game, the technique works well. The first section in particular contains a puzzle which utterly confounds standard expectations of how the world ought to work, but it’s possible to figure out the alternate system of reality at work in the puzzle, and thereby defeat it. The process of doing so is really fun, reminiscent of the flavor of The Gostak or For A Change. More specifically, the reason the puzzle works is that even though the PC’s actions don’t produce the expected results, they do produce some results, and from these results it’s possible to deduce what’s really going on. The same can’t be said of most of the other puzzles in the game.

Even for IF set in a much more mundane universe, feedback design is one of the toughest parts of puzzle creation — you don’t want to be so obvious that the puzzle becomes a non-puzzle, but your feedback also mustn’t be so obscure (or nonexistent) as to leave the player shaking her head in confusion even when the solution is revealed. Most of the puzzles in TOK err on the latter side of this line. I think that for every puzzle after the first one, I looked at the hints, and for most of them even the hints were insufficient. (Thankfully, the author provided a walkthrough.)

For some puzzles, the solution made a tortured kind of sense once I’d looked it up, but for many, I found myself just following the walkthrough’s instructions with a shrug. Sufficient feedback is very important in any IF puzzle, but in a world where the normal rules don’t apply, feedback becomes utterly crucial — how are we supposed to figure out the rules without the ability to gather any evidence about them? TOK usually (though not always) fails to provide enough feedback to make its puzzles solvable, which takes a lot of the fun out of playing.

What does provide some fun is the game’s tendency to present its room and object descriptions in a shaky kind of poetry. For instance, the first room description:

In the North Chamber

Chamber of the north, so empty, still, all noise grates Black as night the chest your thought awaits. The other chamber southward lies Cloaked in mystery's disguise.

Most, but not all, of the game’s verse rhymes like this — sometimes the lines lack rhyme or even consistent meter. Moreover, there’s a fair bit of prose mixed in, as conversation, library responses, or descriptions of action, and the presence of these rather ordinary bits of writing juxtaposed with the more elevated verses tends to drain the effectiveness of each. The other problem with the poetry is reminiscent of what happened in Graham Nelson‘s final game, The Tempest. That is, it’s tough enough to craft IF prose that communicates clearly and concisely, and that also provides enough information to the player, but to do so in verse is much, much harder. TOK‘s poetry isn’t at as great a disadvantage as The Tempest, which forced itself to use prewritten lines as room and object descriptions, but it can still be rather opaque.

Usually the lines aren’t pure gibberish, and they sometimes even manage to pack a few clues in, but nevertheless it does take some time to translate, for instance, “Black as night the chest your thought awaits” into “There’s a black chest here.” The poetry technique is ill-chosen in combination with the game’s nonsensical laws of time, space, and causality, since either one by itself is confusing enough but together they can be utterly impenetrable. However, TOK does give some glimpses of how compelling an IF game in pure verse could be, and of how fascinating it might be to play in a universe with a completely different set of basic rules. Play it for these glimpses, but don’t be afraid to reach for the walkthrough.

Rating: 6.5

A Paper Moon by Andrew Krywaniuk [Comp03]

IFDB page: A Paper Moon
Final placement: 12th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

A Paper Moon isn’t a very good game, but it provides some interesting talking points nonetheless. Before I get to those points, though, let me elaborate a bit on the “not very good” part. For one thing, it’s one of those games that goes out of its way to insult and belittle the PC. I don’t have a problem playing a flawed character, but games like this (other prominent examples are Zero Sum Game and Got ID?, not to mention the extreme case of this year’s The Fat Lardo And The Rubber Ducky) don’t have anything interesting to say about the character’s problems, turning instead to insults as a form of faux cleverness. It doesn’t work. For instance, when you come upon an altar in this game:

>x altar Like your heart, it is made of stone.

Huh? There isn’t anything in particular in the game that shows the character as cruel or heartless — instead, it’s apparently an attempt to be funny. The attempt fails. Another problem in this game is that both the writing and the coding, while not outright bad, are unpardonably sloppy. Things are coded to a reasonable depth, which is great, but bugs are all over the place, including some that seem to make puzzles unintentionally easy. Similarly, the writing does a basically acceptable job of describing everything important, and even pulls off a couple of good jokes, but punctuation is haphazard, especially when it comes to quotation marks, and there’s the occasional utter howler:

>think Your thinking is attrocious.

Yeah, well, so is your spelling. These problems are aspects of a larger issue, probably the biggest flaw in the game, which is that the whole thing — story, puzzles, prose, and everything — feels fairly half-assed. Disparate elements and genres are thrown together (like, say, a cave with a McDonald’s play area inside) with no attention whatsoever to consistency of plot or tone. Right down to the end, it feels like a story that’s being made up as it goes along.

Problems aside, one worthwhile thing that Paper Moon attempts is to tie most of its puzzles together with the theme of origami — most solutions require some sort of folded paper creation at one point or another. This connection provides a nice unifying thread for the game, but what’s more interesting to me is the fact that although the game provides an endless supply of folding paper, what it does not provide is any sort of list of the shapes into which it can be folded. Instead, it relies on “common knowledge” (which gets the scare quotes because, as various culturally specific puzzles have shown us, whether knowledge is common depends entirely on where and when you come from.)

I’ve never been an origami buff, and consequently have only the most basic information about it in my brain, but surprisingly enough, I didn’t have to turn to the hints for a single origami puzzle. Sure, a lot of the things I tried didn’t work, but enough of my ideas were implemented that I was able to feel quite clever about my solutions. This is a risky game design decision, because it’s almost inevitably destined to fail miserably for some considerable number of people, but when it does succeed, it provides great satisfaction, much better than the average IF inventory or mechanical puzzle. It’s a different level of accomplishment to craft a solution from your own knowledge rather than putting one together by combining or manipulating the obviously implemented elements in the game. Paper Moon employs that strategy multiple times, and for me each one paid off.

The other noteworthy, albeit less effective, feature of the game is its occasional use of unmentioned but implied scenery items as important puzzle components. The first time I can remember seeing this technique used is in Adam Cadre‘s I-0, where a car is a major game object, and even though things like the tires, trunk, seatbelts, and glovebox aren’t explicitly mentioned in the car’s description, they’re implemented and often important. Similarly, Paper Moon sometimes relies on our mental picture of things for some crucial items that need to be examined, even though those items may not be mentioned in the room or item description.

I think the reason that this method didn’t work very well in Paper Moon is that it was done only inconsistently. I-0 was reasonably careful to implement implied items throughout the game, but Paper Moon expects us to look for implied things when it’s chosen to include them, but doesn’t provide the solid coding and consistency of depth that would lead us to expect those implied items always to be there. Consequently, when I first looked at the walkthrough to figure out what I was missing, I was fairly indignant that the item hadn’t been mentioned, and only later on changed my mind and decided that the game was playing fair after all. A Paper Moon isn’t a game I’d really recommend to anyone, but for its brighter moments it makes an excellent example of some underexplored aspects of interactive fiction.

Rating: 6.2

Shadows On The Mirror by Chrysoula Tzavelas [Comp03]

IFDB page: shadows on the mirror
Final placement: 6th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

Every story is a slice of a larger story. That is to say: to some degree, beginnings and endings are just the arbitrary points that the storyteller has decided feel right as the story’s boundaries — stuff has happened before the beginning, and more stuff will happen after the ending. The idea, I think, is to provide a large enough slice that the story doesn’t crumble from its thinness, but not so large that it bores or overwhelms the reader (especially in a comp game, where the reader is working under a time limit.)

For me, Shadows On The Mirror sliced things a little too thin. I could sense that the game was the product of some thought. I glimpsed quite a bit of backstory through oblique references and offhand comments, and certainly the main event of the plot, such as it was, implied that a great deal had already happened offstage. There were also hints of some stuff that seemed pretty interesting and that I wanted to see more of — occult overtones, mysterious forces, an oddly powerful object or two, and some apparent PC superpowers. I didn’t get to see more of it, though. All I got were a few references, and after just a little bit of action, the game ended. Even after having seen a few endings, I felt frustrated, finished before I’d really begun.

As for what the game does provide, I think it’s pretty good overall. Shadows (sorry, for a Stevie Nicks fan like me, SOTM always means “Sisters Of The Moon”) is more or less a one-room game, but unlike most one-room games, the focus here is on character and conversation. The game uses an abridged version of a conversation approach pioneered by Emily Short: ASK and TELL abbreviated to “a” and “t”, with a special “topics” command that can provide a nudge to players who’ve run out of things to talk about. However, it makes what I consider to be a tactical error, in that it keeps many topics locked until a leading topic has been broached, or perhaps until a particular item has been examined.

There are a few problems I can think of with this strategy. First, when I attempt a topic and get one of the game’s default “no answer” messages, I take that response as a signal that the topic has not been implemented. I don’t expect it to be successful later on, so I probably won’t try it. Second, closing off some topics is particularly misguided in an extremely small game like this one. When I’m restarting often, I’m not really keeping track of which session has revealed which tidbits, and more than once I was flummoxed by getting a default response to a topic I knew I’d seen implemented. Finally, even if this were a larger game and even if I were able to constantly keep in mind that failure didn’t necessarily mean non-implementation, the “explicit branching” model used in Shadows forecloses the player’s ability to make intuitive connections.

To use an analogous example not from the game, say the NPC has a picture of apples on his wall, I ask him about apples, and he says, “Apples remind me of home.” My next thought might be to ask him about an orchard, but in this game’s model, he would just look away, not answer, or shrug. That doesn’t mean he can’t talk about orchards, but rather that the game wants me first to ask him about home, to which he’ll reply, “I spent lots of happy times climbing the trees in my Dad’s orchard,” and then it’ll let me ask about orchards. That’s wrong — give me the chance to make the leap myself.

I see I just said the game was pretty good, then went on a long discourse about one of its flaws, so let me turn now and praise Shadows for a moment. The game’s writing really worked for me — it described the scene vividly and with judicious use of metaphors. The NPC’s diction felt appropriately mysterious and foreboding, and I thought that many of the details were well-chosen to paint a picture of a PC whose life combines the ordinary and the extraordinary in a plausible way.

The implementation was reasonably deep, though it could have been deeper for such a small environment. The same goes for the NPC; he seemed to have some very basic emotional modeling, but the game didn’t provide verbs like THANK or APOLOGIZE to let me interact enough with that emotional state. Still, he was able to answer a generous set of topics, and I felt intrigued and tantalized by the answers he gave. At the end, though, I felt like I still hadn’t really gotten the point, which I suppose is another way of reiterating that the game just didn’t provide enough to feel satisfying. I guess the fact that I wanted a lot more of Shadows proves that what was there was a very good start.

Rating: 8.0

The Recruit by Mike Sousa [Comp03]

IFDB page: The Recruit
Final placement: 7th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

Some games just feel like they come from deep inside the IF community. Take The Recruit, for instance: how many comp games not only include words of mine, but also go out of their way to compliment my work? Not many, I can tell you from sad experience, but not only does Recruit include pretty much the entire transcript from the 2002 XYZZY Awards ceremony, but when Another Earth, Another Sky is mentioned, this NPC message appears:

“I love that game,” says Fred. “I can’t wait for the third installment!”

Thanks, Mike! Er… Fred! I’m working on it! Anyway, I suppose that to avoid the illusion that sucking up to the judge gets you a good review and score, I should say here that I thought Recruit stank, but I just can’t do that. It was a fun game, if slight, whose puzzles are the star attraction. In fact, more than anything, it feels like a love letter to IF.

The premise, such as it is, is that you’ve been recruited (with the offer of a $50 reward) as a tester for “Real Life Interactive Gaming Simulacra” — in other words, IF puzzles constructed and brought to life. That puts Recruit in the unique position of being an IF game pretending to be reality pretending to be an IF game. In any case, the whole thing is more or less a hook on which to hang a series of puzzles, each of which has its theme: light source, NPC, attention to detail, and so forth.

The game is much more imaginative than this thumbnail description makes it sound. Each of the puzzles felt fresh to me, and the fact that they were explicitly molded around familiar IF concepts made their uniqueness stand out all the more. They also felt pitched at just the right level of difficulty — enough to make me think creatively, but not so hard as to send me running in circles and finally running to the hints, at least not for long. More importantly, each of the puzzles has fun with the concept it embodies, which makes the game a particular pleasure for those of us who have endured many far drearier versions of the same things. I’m not sure how well the game would work for somebody who was new to IF — it might make a fine learning tool, but I have a feeling it would feel more frustrating than educational to somebody who didn’t share its frame of reference — but for me it was a kick.

A great deal of the fun comes from the game’s writing, and I noted with admiration as I played through the game just how much Sousa’s writing has improved since his debut game Above And Beyond. [I’m about to spoil something, though I have no idea why it’s a secret to begin with.] Then I found out in the afterword that in fact, much of the writing wasn’t his, but was in fact done by collaborators like Robb Sherwin, Jon Ingold, and J.D. Berry. Why Sousa doesn’t simply acknowledge these co-authors upfront is a bit of a mystery to me — maybe he just doesn’t want players distracted by going through the game trying to figure out who wrote what.

Anyway, like every Sousa game, Recruit is coded very well, though not as exquisitely deeply as some of his past works have been. It was certainly bug-free, in any case, and quite responsive to most of the things I wanted to try. It also provides a fun list of AMUSING things to try after you’ve finished the game, which is a touch I always appreciate. After finishing The Recruit, I found myself just smiling, and thinking, “Cool!” Like several of the other games in this comp, it was IF about IF, but this time about just how much fun IF can be. It doesn’t provide much in the way of atmosphere or emotion, but it does pack the pleasures of good writing and interesting, interconnected puzzles, and that’s enough for me.

Rating: 9.3

Slouching Towards Bedlam by Star Foster and Daniel Ravipinto [Comp03]

IFDB page: Slouching Towards Bedlam
Final placement: 1st place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

NOTE: Because STB is one of those games whose entire point is to figure out what’s going on, some parts of this review could be considered spoilers.

For me, Comp03 has been Homecoming Year. First Mikko Vuorinen, then Stefan Blixt, and now, of all people, Dan Ravipinto, whose great, ambitious game Tapestry made a huge splash in 1996 by using the IF medium to explore ethical choices, allowing multiple paths through the game without attempting to privilege any one path as the “proper” one. Ravipinto then proceeded to utterly disappear from the face of IF, seemingly never to return. All is not as it seems, however, for here he is again, having enlisted the aid of a friend to produce another game of multiple paths, this time set in a steampunk universe with Lovecraftian overtones.

All is not as it seems in STB either, which makes reviewing it rather difficult. As I say above, the point is to figure out what’s going on (and what you’d like to do about it), and what’s going on is really quite complicated, but at least part of it involves the IF interface itself. Integrating interface and story has long been an interest of mine, which played itself out somewhat in LASH‘s “remote robot” conceit; STB takes a rather different tack, finding a completely dissimilar and ingenious explanation within the plot for the PC’s inevitable amnesiac and kleptomaniac traits, as well as the ability to jump about in time via RESTART, RESTORE, UNDO, and the like. Even stranger, you encounter tales of others in the story who have those same unusual powers.

I only figured all this out gradually, and some of it I didn’t figure out at all, having turned to the hints in order to see the end of the game. Or rather, an end to the game. Like Tapestry, STB offers an array of choices while attempting not to prefer any of them over the others, and these choices lead not only to a variety of endings, but to significant differences in the entire third act of the game. Now, I suspect that most of us, having been raised with pulp narratives about saving a threatened humanity, will find ourselves striving towards a particular ending as the “right” one, but STB rather slyly requires some extremely distasteful acts to progress on that particular path, which balances things out somewhat.

In the end, I felt that there really were no good choices, and the idea of doing the least harm to the least number still depended distinctly on who was doing the counting. Still, ultimately most of us are likely to be loyal to our own species, and so just as with Tapestry, even though multiple paths were available, there was still one that felt much more right to me than the others. That’s the brilliance of these games, though. If The Erudition Chamber is like a “What Kind Of IF Player Are You?” quiz, then Slouching Towards Bedlam is more like a “What Kind Of Person Are You?” quiz.

I guess I’ve written a lot about this game, but not much yet about what I thought of it. Well, I liked it very much. The story really drew me in, and I love the way the plot flowed smoothly from puzzle to puzzle. Even though there was quite a bit of inevitable infodumping, the wonderfully intense atmosphere of the hospital and other parts of London kept my unflagging interest. In fact, there are some parts of the game — the opening scene, the first major signs of strangeness, and the case file, for example — that I found purely spellbinding. The writing, too, was strong, keeping a Victorian mood without descending much into caricature.

There was one problem with the prose, though — for its own reasons, the game chooses to express player action predominantly in the passive voice, avoiding the word “you” as much as it can. It transfers agency to outside objects wherever possible, but sometimes it must describe the PC doing something, and here it occasionally trips, with descriptions like this (very minor puzzle spoiler ahead):

>look under blotter Beneath the blotter is a small key, easily taken. It carries a small tag labeled '2D'.

“Easily taken” doesn’t tell me that the PC has picked up the key, just that it would be easy for the PC to do so. Nevertheless, a subsequent inventory check reveals that the PC has indeed taken the key. From time to time, STB‘s passive voice emphasis afflicts it with this sort of muddiness.

That quibble aside, the writing worked really well, and the coding was similarly solid — I found no bugs at all. In fact, between the game’s puzzlebox premise and its lack of flaws, I’ve found this review rather hard to write, so I’ll just close by saying this: play Slouching Towards Bedlam. Your time will be well-spent, and you may find that it remains with you in entirely unexpected ways.

Rating: 9.6

The Erudition Chamber by Daniel Freas [Comp03]

IFDB page: The Erudition Chamber
Final placement: 4th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

Even though puzzles with multiple solutions tend to get a lot of respect, we still don’t see all that many of them. That’s because creating an interesting puzzle with one solution is hard enough; creating one that can be solved in at least two different ways, each challenging and interesting, is that much more difficult. The task that The Erudition Chamber sets itself is harder still. This game lays out four different puzzles, each of which can be solved in any of four different ways. To add yet another layer of complexity to the picture, each of the four solutions belongs to a particular category of approach. There are the Warrior solutions (brute force), the Artisan solutions (clever jiggery-pokery with mechanisms), the Alchemist solutions (changing the form of the obstacle), and the Seer solutions (finding a way around the problem so as not to have to deal with it at all.)

This sort of thing is tough to do, and for the most part, EC pulls it off. I say “for the most part”, because there are still some flaws. For one thing, some of the puzzles seem designed to lend themselves much more naturally to one approach or the other — a puzzle designed by an Artisan, in the game’s terms, will still require even a Warrior to think a lot like an Artisan in order to solve it. Another imperfection is that sometimes, the categories aren’t really as distinct from one another as they should be, especially between Warriors and Alchemists. After all, breaking something and changing its form aren’t really always all that far apart.

Still, the game succeeds more often than it fails, and in some ways it felt like a fun, interactive “What Sort Of IF Player Are You?” quiz. I ended up 3 parts Artisan, 1 part Warrior, which may be a reflection of having played lots of IF. When I can see that a machine has been implemented, my inclination is to play around with that machine until it does the thing that it’s supposed to do, even if perhaps easier or more obvious solutions are available. I think that inclination may be the result of conditioning inflicted by dozens of Myst clones and their IF cousins. The Erudition Chamber is also reminiscent of Sean Barrett’s game Heroes, from Comp01, though from a significantly different angle. Where Heroes takes the player through the landscape several times in the role of different characters (Adventurer, Thief, Mage, etc.), and only lets us see what the particular character would notice, Erudition Chamber makes all aspects of the landscape available at once, and thus lets the PC create character on its own.

This game’s approach has the advantage of being more open-ended and available to mixed approaches, but the downside is that it is necessarily more bland than if it had been written with a more specific character in mind. In addition, there’s a frame story that doesn’t make a lot of sense and really adds nothing of value to the game. EC would have been better off chucking the whole time-manipulation and alternate history business, and focusing instead on the student as a novice who now must choose a path, or set of paths.

The other problem with the game is its writing, which needs a major round of proofreading. Spelling errors, for instance, are a pet peeve of mine, and games that have such errors in their very first room description (“Chisled stone steps”) annoy me even more. There are quite a few mistakes that could have been found simply by running the game’s text through a spell-checker, and there’s really no reason not to do this. Other problems, such as the numerous comma splices, would have been caught by the careful attention of a proofreader or editor.

Troubled prose like that always weakens a game for me, and it’s a pity, because this game is pretty strong in lots of other areas. I found no bugs, which always pleases me, especially in a comp game. It’s certainly a quantum leap in quality over Freas’ last work (Greyscale), and I feel encouraged that his next game may take the ingenuity shown by Erudition Chamber and combine it with the level of polish needed to make the gameplay experience as enjoyable as it should be.

Rating: 7.9

Hercules’ First Labor by Bob Brown [Comp03]

IFDB page: Hercules First Labor
Final placement: 26th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

For me, the comp game experience begins from the moment I read the game’s title and blurb in Comp03.z5. What that meant for Hercules’ First Labor was that I was out of sync with it from the beginning. Not from its title, which is fine, but from its blurb:

My introduction to computers was the Scott Adams series of adventures
with the simplistic Verb/Noun parser and this game is in that vein.

I know that there are these people who have lots of nostalgic feelings about Scott Adams games, but I’m not one of them. I’m an Infocom guy, and have been since the beginning of my involvement with IF. Consequently, Scott Adams games tend to feel like cave paintings when what I’m really looking for is Degas and Monet, or at least Jack Kirby. I come to IF more for the fiction than the interaction (though they’re both important, of course), and my favorite games all have excellent writing in common. So, predictably, I’m not a fan of room descriptions that look something like “I’m in a Hotel Room by Door.” The “simplistic Verb/Noun parser” also feels like a straitjacket to me, and it’s that much worse when I don’t have access to the metacommands I’m used to, like UNDO, AGAIN, and, well, SAVE.

So I’m really not in the target audience for this game. Now, that being said, HFL pulls off the Scott Adams feel quite well, and the fact that it’s apparently coded in JavaScript makes the whole Verb/Noun thing a little more understandable. The presentation is attractive in the browser window, and even though it was frustrating not to be able to generate a transcript of my game sessions, I found the split-windowed interface (one frame each for status line, room description, parser responses, and input) effective and intuitive. The parser worked tolerably well (with some problem inconsistencies between “read” and “look”), though “pretty well” for a two-word parser is still pretty darn poor by today’s standards. The bare-bones nature of the setting made the puzzles very straightforward indeed — just use the very few verbs at your disposal to interact with the handful of objects you encounter and you’ll be finishing the game in no time. The verb USE is your friend. Similarly, there’s not much to say about the writing, because there just isn’t much of it.

“Homemade” competition games tend to be notorious for having underimplemented parsers, and for lacking some of the basic functionality that we take for granted in games produced by top-tier development systems; the homemade games I’ve encountered so far in this comp are no exception. However, this time around, new approaches have tried to turn these shortcomings into advantages. The way Sweet Dreams did it was to throw out the parser altogether, replacing it with a low-res avatar in a graphical environment. Thus was the whole parser problem avoided entirely, and this approach worked for me. The homemade interface still had its bugs and frustrations, but I found Sweet Dreams to be one of the least irritating comp games ever made outside of a mainstream IF development system. (That’s not to damn it with faint praise — I liked it well enough.)

HFL avoids the problem in a different way, by setting the player’s expectations from the very beginning, and enlisting the aid of nostalgia to make its simplistic parser actually seem like a feature rather than a bug. I’ll bet that for people with fond memories of playing Scott Adams games, the trick works really well. For me, though, it felt like just another substandard homemade parser, albeit ameliorated a bit by the fact that its simplicity was matched by that of the environment. So, while I acknowledge it as a good try, HFL left me cold. It did inspire me to my first comp game anagram, though. (“SA flirt’s core blur, eh?”) That’s worth a little something.

Rating: 3.7