IFDB page: Hello Sword
Final placement: 30th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition
There are two separate Hello Sword games in the Comp05 download: hs_ita and hs_eng, which apparently signify the Italian and English versions of the game. Yet, when I fired up hs_eng, the first full screen of text was a quote box, all in Italian. I thought maybe I’d accidentally clicked the wrong file, but then the quote got translated into English… sort of. Here’s the “translated” version:
And me, I’m who live at this point on my counted days,
who have dull dreams, who have fear, also I…
And me, I’m who go away just with these hands
to dyke the limits between the truth and the unreality…
To “dyke the limits”? Uh-oh. Then we get some introductory text that’s all, “You hasn’t the will-power”, and “today is one of the most hottest day of the month”, and “Altough that”, and “The guilty of all?”, and “read the note that Julius leaved.” Yeah, it’s immediately apparent that this review will be getting the “broken english” tag.
The English is so broken, in fact, that I quickly began thinking that maybe I could approach the game like For A Change — something whose language is so barely comprehensible that it melts your brain a little bit, but whose askew diction can be fun in itself. And there are moments where that is true! There’s a room description that includes the sentence, “A little square from that branch off four roads, which conduct to the four cardinal ways.” That feels a little bit like the “mobiles” of For A Change. Or how about this one?
Independence Street
In this street there are a lot of buildings, that – though impede the transit of the wind – almost guarantee a little shade. In this road, in addiction to the great number of houses, there are also a pub when you often spend your evenings and a stationer’s shop where you bought pens and pencils in times of low school.
“The transit of the wind” and “times of low school” are almost poetic in their brokenness. On the other hand, “in addiction to the great number” could work wonderfully if the substitution actually added anything, but alas, it remains only comical and sad. And that’s where my sympathetic strategy breaks down. See, Dan Schmidt knew exactly what he was doing when he broke the English of For A Change, and the linguistic changes worked towards the game’s overall artistic goals. Not so here. Instead, the author pleads innocence in the INFO text, similar to Chronicle Play Torn:
I’m absolutely acquainted with the great number of errors and incomprehensible expressions that crowded this adventure (by the way, I ask you to signal them to me), but I hope you at least appreciate the huge effort I made for you.
Sorry, but: NOPE! I sure don’t, because that effort did not result in anything good. As I said in the CPT review, I want to read good stories, not understandable excuses. And here’s the other problem: even setting aside the many, many, many language problems (the “signaling” of which would comprise hours and hours of work), this is not just a game in broken English. It’s a broken game in broken English.
There are guess-the-verb situations, pretty much impossible to pass without a walkthrough. (A better-written game might have laden the prose with clues that would trigger the correct verb, but this is not that game.) There are far-fetched solutions that the game itself keeps trying to discourage until they work. There’s the old Hitchhiker’s Guide trick of descriptions lying to you until you interrogate them repeatedly.
And finally — well, not finally, more like halfway through, but it works like a finale — the walkthrough itself fails. Even typing in commands literally from the walkthrough, even correcting those walkthrough commands that the game itself can’t parse (like “south-west”), I came upon a situation where the PC got thrown in jail and my game ended no matter what. And when that happened, dear reader, I was done.
Rating: 2.9