Shattered Memory by Akbarr [Comp01]

IFDB page: Shattered Memory
Final placement: DISQUALIFIED from the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition for not being an original work — it’s a translation of the Spanish language game Olvido Mortal.

The basic idea behind Shattered Memory is a sound one. The game starts off with an amnesiac PC waking up to an unfamiliar situation, and although this is one of the most hackneyed tricks in IF, the game comes up with a unique reason for it, which counts for a lot. The point of the whole exercise, predictably, is to find out why your memories are gone, and then resolve your situation once that reason is uncovered. Towards this end, the game provides a couple of special verbs: RECALL and SUMMARY. RECALL by itself may bring back some sort of recollection, but it may not; more often, RECALL <topic> is what’s necessary.

Even then, the things you can recall are few and far between (as it should be for an amnesiac), though sometimes you can remember more about the same topic once you’ve found out more on other fronts. SUMMARY provides a rundown of the various things you’ve been able to recall, and may provide some clues on its own. So as amnesia games go, this one isn’t too bad, doling out information at a reasonable pace and providing an interesting enough reason for the lack of memory. The game also provides a fairly useful conversation system, with SPEAK TO <npc> prompting a menu-based discussion while ASK <npc> ABOUT <topic> behaves in the expected way. A more problematic element is SAY TO NPC “<anything>”, which seems built for guess-the-magic-phrase puzzles, and indeed becomes just that at one or two points in the game. Still, so far so good, more or less.

The problem here, and it’s a considerable problem, is the writing. The prose feels like a bad translation from some other language, or perhaps like a writing sample from someone for whom English isn’t a first language. For example, after addressing an NPC with the SPEAK TO verb and selecting “Ask her if she knows you” from the menu, the game puts these words in the PC’s mouth: “Excuse me… Do you casually know who am I?” In one memory, he says, “I go down for having breakfast, Carmen is at the kitchen.” One half-expects the PC to whip out a phrasebook and carefully enunciate, “My hovercraft is full of eels.”

Unfortunately, everybody (including the game’s narrative voice) speaks in this sort of broken English. The game is reluctant to let you leave a queue because “you don’t know how important is what you are waiting for,” and says that you see “wealthy people together to beggars” in that queue. A guard asks, “do you think you’ve always acted the better you could?” In my favorite example, that same guard chides you, “If you had any good reason to leave yor place, you should have said it to me firstly.” He’s not yor frend!

There are probably people for whom mangled syntax, crippled spelling, and broken grammar don’t ruin a game, but I don’t think I’ll ever be one of them. In my opinion, if you’re not fluent in the language you’re using, you must have someone who is fluent proofread your game before you release it. You must fix all the errors that person finds, no matter how many there are. You wouldn’t expect a publisher to disseminate a novel, short story, or essay written so poorly, so why is it reasonable to expect gamers to enjoy a game with equally weak English? It’s basic logic: if an IF game is equal parts prose and programming, both must be bug-free before the game can be any good.

Rating: 4.6

Volcano Isle by Paul DeWitt [Comp01]

IFDB page: Volcano Isle
Final placement: 42nd place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’m hitting that point. It’s late in the judging period. I’m tired. I’ve just finished playing 47 other games, some of which were great but far too many of which were just sub-par. So I open up my 48th game, which has no introduction, no scene-setting, and apparently no real plot of any kind, instead dumping the PC unceremoniously on a beach with a boatload of inventory and no particular explanation about why it’s there. Most of this inventory is described as “It looks like an ordinary to me.”

There’s an ocean, but the game doesn’t know the word “ocean”. There’s a volcano, but the game doesn’t know the word “volcano”. Worse yet, I just did a long rant on sparseness in the previous review (of Crusade), so I can’t even use these problems as the theme of my review. Then the game prints, “The suspicious-looking individual enters the area from the north.” Wait. What suspicious-looking individual? Let’s talk for a moment about definite and indefinite articles in the context of first and subsequent mentions of an item or person. The indefinite article (“a” or “an”) should be used the first time a noun is mentioned, like so:

A suspicious-looking individual enters the area from the north.

Subsequent mentions can and should use the definite article (“the”), as in the following:

The suspicious-looking individual enters the area from the north.

Using the indefinite article all the time would imply that perhaps a different instance of the noun is at hand in each mention — in the case of this example, it would imply that the island might be crawling with suspicious-looking individuals. However, using the definite article each time, as this game does, is rather worse, because it insists that the noun has already been mentioned, as if the suspicious-looking individual has already been introduced (perhaps in the mysteriously absent introductory text) and that some kind of bug has prevented that mention from displaying. It is by such small omissions that sense erodes.

All that is to say: please forgive me if I seem a little impatient. It’s been a long comp, and has felt even longer than usual because I’m an entrant this year and thus have the added anxiety of worrying about how my own work is faring. Consequently, Volcano Isle, with its sparse implementation, mindreader puzzles, maze, and inventory limit, annoyed me greatly.

The game clearly wants to pay homage to Zork — that suspicious-looking individual carries a “vicious-looking stiletto”; there are various treasures to collect, and a place to deposit them; there’s a tree to climb, a rope to descend, and, of course, a maze. Unfortunately, the whole thing ended up feeling like an amateurish copy of something that was a) more than the sum of its parts because of quality implementation and writing, and b) interesting because it was doing some of these things for the first time rather than the 500th. Volcano Isle is neither. In addition, it is plagued by random messages that print every 25 turns or so in the form of “visions” supposedly experienced by the PC. There are probably two or three of these, and each is interesting the first time, then increasingly irritating on every repetition thereafter.

Just so I don’t trash the game entirely, let me point out one thing that I really liked a lot. The game puts the background color capability of HTML TADS to moderately creative use throughout, but by far the best is when the PC enters a pitch-black room. The background goes black and so does the text. The effect feels remarkably similar to what it’s really like to be in a pitch-black room — you know you’re doing something (like typing “turn on light”) and it’s having an effect, but you can’t see it happening. Then, when the action is successful, the evidence of activity is visible once more. I thought this was a pretty neat effect.

The game was also fairly free of bugs and writing errors, and has at least one entertaining puzzle. So it’s a partial success, I suppose — certainly far better than some of its competitors this year — but wasn’t what I needed to give me that burst of energy as the finish line appears.

Rating: 4.3

Crusade by John Gorenfeld [Comp01]

IFDB page: Crusade
Final placement: 23rd place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Crusade is funny. It’s original. It’s free of writing errors and bugs. It’s even got a number of nifty little verbs added in to fit its “faith-based hijinks” theme, verbs like FORGIVE and CONVERT and WORSHIP. It’s got an irreverent take on religion. It contains a couple of decent puzzles, including one that was so subtly done, I still have no idea how the game got me to type the correct verb, but type it I did, and was rewarded. One of these puzzles has two different solutions, one of which gives more points, though I have to say that the higher-point solution seemed by far the more obvious to me. There’s some fun political satire in here as well — pretty harmless, really, but good for a chuckle.

So why did this game leave me feeling so unsatisfied? I think the problem is sparseness. For all that Crusade does provide, there’s a distinct sense that the game has no real interest in creating an interactive environment, but instead wants the player to pretty much follow the walkthrough to hit the interesting parts, and encourages such behavior by making everything else really, really uninteresting. The problem was immediately apparent when I started the game with five items, each of which was described, “You see nothing special about the <item>”. There’s a mixed message here. Clearly, some of these items are in my inventory not because they’re useful, but because they establish character in some way. But their utter vacuousness undermines that purpose considerably, and makes the game feel boring as well. Even the new verbs seem to be implemented with the absolute minimum of effort:

>convert hermit
You're not very persuasive.

>forgive hermit
Forgiven.

>worship hermit
You drop to your knees with great reverence.

NPCs abound who only respond to one or two things, failing to even generate a stock reply for the rest. There are a few non-essential areas, but a great many times I found myself faced with flat, uninteresting library messages after attempting legitimate actions. I got the impression that the game just didn’t really care that much about being interactive.

That sort of attitude is poison to interactive fiction. I don’t so much mind linearity, if the line is fairly wide and provides lots of interesting stuff to look at on the way. This game, however, was reminiscent of its initial image: a long, thin line trailing its way through a trackless desert. Sure, it gets you somewhere eventually. But the trip is pretty dull.

Rating: 6.5

Silicon Castles by David Given as Jack Maet [Comp01]

IFDB page: Silicon Castles
Final placement: 32nd place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Silicon Castles clearly owes a debt to Andrew Plotkin’s Lists And Lists. Like that game, Castles prominently features a genie, one who boasts voluminous knowledge on one particular topic. Like Lists, Castles is a very impressive technical achievement. And like Lists, Castles isn’t really interested in being interactive fiction. Where Lists and Lists was an ingenious implementation of Scheme in the z-machine, Silicon Castles is an ingenious implementation of Chess in the z-machine.

I suppose it was inevitable — every year, a few more z-machine abuses come out, many of them raising the stakes for complexity and ambitiousness, and Silicon Castles may be the most ambitious yet. When a match is underway, the game neatly expands the status line window to display the board, a key to the ASCII codes in that display, a score, the game status, and what moves the genie is considering. Unlike Zugzwang, the PC is a chess player rather than a chess piece, and can type in moves as “move knight to C3” or just “move b1c3”. The genie has an adjustable setting for how many moves it can look ahead, and the game even has the option of setting up custom board layouts before play begins. It’s all very cleverly done.

Now, here’s something about me: I suck at chess. When it comes to computer chess games, well, I’m a great text adventure player. I can see, in an abstract sense, the beauty and elegance of it all, and in the right mood I can appreciate the intellectual rigor of chess problems, but for whatever reason, my turn of mind doesn’t lend itself to such strategic amusements. Consequently, I really don’t enjoy computer chess that much, and that held true for this game as well.

Moreover, even if I did enjoy computer chess, I don’t think the z-machine is a particularly good environment for it. A drag-and-drop mouse interface is about a thousand times easier and more logical than “move b1c3”, and while the little IF touches like the genie and the object descriptions are fun, they don’t do much to improve the clumsiness of the main experience. In fact, there are some problems with even the minimal IF content of this game — there’s not nearly enough cueing for the transition between IF and chess match, making that transition into a rather pointless puzzle.

Finally, there are some serious flaws to the chess section as well — I don’t think it’s completely functional. One of the command styles described by the game, “move <piece><space>”, as in “move nc3” (move knight to c3) doesn’t appear to work at all. In addition, although the game described how to perform castling, I couldn’t get it to respond to the command it suggested (“move O-O”). So although I was impressed as hell with Silicon Castles‘ technical achievements, I found it a rather unsatisfactory experience. As chess, it’s not bad, but its interface is clunky and it appears to be missing some critical functionality. As interactive fiction… well, it’s pretty much absent.

Rating: 7.2

Heroes by Sean Barrett [Comp01]

IFDB page: Heroes
Final placement: 3rd place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

The intersection of landscape and character in IF is a highly fertile one, and Heroes reaps a great harvest from it. Now, I should qualify this review with the statement that I wasn’t able to finish the game in two hours, and therefore missed what looked to me like it might be an additional payoff in the game’s structure. So in describing what I found in the game, I might not be telling the whole story about what’s there. With that caveat in mind, the game’s gimmick is this: set up a fairly simple landscape and a basic goal, then allow the player a choice of five viewpoint characters, each of which share the landscape and goal.

This structure makes Heroes a sort of five-games-in-one, where each subgame enhances and deepens the others, since one character might have an insight or knowledge about the situation that the others lack. In addition, seeing the game’s location through five pairs of eyes allows juxtapositions that simultaneously intensifies our understanding of the location and the character. For instance, a fairly basic area, as seen through the eyes of an adventurer, a thief, and an enchanter:

Temple Way
The grimy, ramshackle buildings of Oldtown dutifully try to reform
themselves as you progress east down Temple Way, but nothing besides
the temple itself makes any real pretense of belonging anywhere other
than Oldtown. Or rather, nothing besides the temple and Baron
Sedmon's nearby mansion.

Shadowy Road
Sturdy, functional buildings lie in and out of shadow on the road to
the temple square. Simple architecture, devoid of handholds; closely
spaced buildings, devoid of alleyways; uncut walls, devoid of
windows: the builders in this area knew how to encourage amateurs to
go elsewhere.

East-West Road
Randomly arranged paving stones form this street, proceeding east
towards a more attractive arrangement. The darkened buildings lean
sloppily over the edge of the street, reducing the energetic
potential of the strict east-west layout. West the road leads back
into the seething mess that is Oldtown.

I can’t say enough about how much I loved this. Because the characters are each limited to their own viewpoints, but we are able to see them all, the game gives us a far more complete and interesting picture of the area than any single viewpoint could provide. In addition, because we have seen the area through other eyes, we gain insight into the viewpoint character by noticing what that character does and doesn’t observe. Where the adventurer simply notices what ways are open for travel, the enchanter observes how those avenues impinge on a geometrically-oriented magic system; where the enchanter notices only the direction of the walls’ lines, the thief notices the lack of handholds and windows.

Some games have begun to explore this dynamic — Wishbringer and LASH displayed the changes of a landscape and the shifting meanings attendant to that change, while Being Andrew Plotkin gave us a variety of characters whose reactions to a particular area conflicted, to wonderful comic effect. Heroes takes the next step, opening up an endlessly fascinating vista.

Correspondingly, the game’s design also reflects a diversity of viewpoints. Each character has the same goal, but none of them will go about it in quite the same way. The adventurer’s method combines both NPC interaction and object manipulation, first learning what an NPC wants in order to stop being an obstacle, then obtaining that desideratum through various clever mechanical operations and trickery. The difference between this and the enchanter’s method is similar to the difference between the PC of the Zork series and the PC of the Enchanter series — instead of pushing, pulling, turning, and moving things, the mage casts spells that have different, but equally useful, effects. The thief utilizes shadows and rooftops, while the king depends almost completely on NPC interactions such as gossip and courtly intrigue.

It’s just a lovely idea, and for the most part, the game carries it off very well. In addition, several neat choices appear to prevent the game from ever becoming unwinnable, but not by preventing missteps on the part of the player. Instead, as it becomes clear that an action may have closed off the game, Heroes offers the player opportunities to undo the consequences of that action, or to take another shot at the crucial action. After playing so many games in this comp that really do close off without warning, it was a great joy to realize that in this game, I didn’t have to restart after all, especially since restarting would have meant starting each viewpoint story from the beginning.

With all this going for it, Heroes easily would have scored a 10 from me (by which I mean somewhere between 9.5 and 10.0) if not for a few problems. For one, a couple of the puzzles appear to lack sufficient information about their components, making it very tough to guess their solutions. At least one other had a solution that appeared to contradict some of the stated rules of the situation. In addition, there were a number of instances where I felt that the game failed to give me enough feedback about whether I was on the right or wrong track, or where a perfectly valid idea was unimplemented (even if just with a failure message that provided a clear reason for denying the action.)

Finally, and most problematic, one of the sections appeared to be broken in such a way as to allow its main puzzle to be bypassed entirely. Heroes is an ambitious project, and in some ways it’s not surprising that the game should still be pretty rough around the edges. Its problems prevent it from reaching the very top echelon of competition games, but what it does have to offer is dazzling indeed.

Rating: 9.4

an apple from nowhere by Brendan Barnwell as Steven Carbone [Comp01]

IFDB page: an apple from nowhere
Final placement: 37th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Last year’s comp gave us Stupid Kittens, which I called dadaist IF. an apple from nowhere (caps intentionally omitted, as they are in the game) is perhaps a cousin to that game. It’s avant-garde, certainly, but where Stupid Kittens‘ stream of non sequiturs was snide and aggressive, this game’s barrage of scenes feels more distinctly dreamlike, less a pointed attack than just the random firing of synapses, aggregating elements from life to stretch them and collide them.

The game skirts some taboo areas, drug use and pedophilia among them, but it seems to do so more out of an attempt to directly channel the subconscious than out of an explicit desire to shock. Perhaps I’m giving it too much credit — there is an awful lot of in-your-face subject matter here — but the dreamlike atmosphere felt genuine, if overly charged. Perhaps it’s the dream world of a somewhat mentally ill person.

The question it brings up for me is this: what happens to IF when logic is removed? There are plenty of bad games that lack logic unintentionally, and some of these can be as surreal as anything in apple, but they are unsatisfactory, because we can sense that their incongruencies are a bug rather than a feature. When the illogic is intentional, the IF prompt carries a different sort of subtext. Normally, the presence of interactivity tells us that the game wants to shape itself around our commands, and challenges us to enter into a dance with the text whereby we both lead and are led. When a game makes it clear that its responses to our commands may only be tangentially related to what we type, and may not be related at all, it has taken the lead in that dance and turned it into more of an amusement park ride. Now, amusement park rides can be a wonderful thing, and I’d even suggest that there is some room for exploring the ways in which participation can enhance surreality — Shade is an excellent example of this sort of thing done right.

apple, however, has a different agenda than Shade. At the core of Shade, there was still a story being told; all its unreal occurrences were very clearly included with a purpose in mind. In this game, such a purpose is harder to discern. It’s awfully brief, for one thing, so we don’t get much of a chance to make the connections that might lead to a story. For another, it jumps, Fusillade-style, through a variety of characters, settings, and even writing formats (a few scenes are written as a sort of interactive screenplay.) It was well-written enough, and certainly well implemented. There was very little interactivity, but that’s hardly the point in a piece like this.

Ultimately, I think it was apple‘s lack of cohesion that failed me. When I reached the end of this game, I blinked, and then I shrugged. Some people can look at a Pollock and see emotion made visible. Other people just see chaos. This game may be similar, and while I enjoy surreality and even randomness, I don’t think there’s much here that will be sticking with me.

Rating: 7.1

Goofy by Ricardo Dague [Comp01]

IFDB page: Goofy
Final placement: 46th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

In most competition games, a room that completely lacks a description is a bug. In a Ricardo Dague game, a room that completely lacks a description is… just another descriptionless room. I first encountered this minimalism in his Comp98 game Fifteen, whose main feature was a fifteen-puzzle and a couple of others. Goofy follows in that game’s footsteps by pretty much omitting the entire concept of room descriptions. A typical room looks like this:

First Floor, by desk
An exit is north.

This sort of thing just doesn’t really do it for me. That’s purely a matter of taste, I suppose, since there isn’t anything particularly wrong with omitting the room description, especially since the game isn’t really trying to tell a story. To me, it just feels like wandering around in somebody’s unfinished prototype. Your mileage may vary.

What would be good is if the few words that are present were properly proofread. Even with the dearth of prose in this game, I still ended up finding things like an “electrionic scale” or a mouse that spends its time “examing” the things around it. Prose problems aside, the game is implemented competently enough. The puzzles are mostly rudimentary, but sorta fun. I made the final puzzle harder than it needed to be, because I failed to find a crucial inventory item until I’d spent considerable frustration on the puzzle. After that, I solved the puzzle, though I never did quite figure out how I was supposed to do it without liberal use of UNDO.

The other noteworthy thing about this game is that it is implemented entirely as a Java applet. Consequently, its verb set is very limited, and save/restore is absent due to the lack of file I/O. Because of the nature of the game, these things aren’t as big of a problem as they might be. Goofy is a very small game, so although it was a pain in the neck to have to play it through rather than restoring, the process was relatively quick. Similarly, when the gameworld is as spartan as this one, not many verbs are required. Then again, such a bare-bones experience doesn’t produce much fun, at least not for me.

Rating: 5.0

Elements by John Evans [Comp01]

IFDB page: Elements
Final placement: 26th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Elements is another pure puzzle game, and now that I’m recognizing this subgenre of IF (see my review of Colours), I’m starting to come to a stronger understanding of just what that genre requires. For instance, a pure puzzle game must be constructed with only the most minimal attempt at a story, if any at all. Elements certainly fills the bill here, even mocking the idea of narrative by setting up a false one in the introduction, then immediately snatching it away. The pure puzzle game must also key many of its puzzles and landscape ingredients off a particular theme, and Elements fulfills this one as well, making its theme, predictably enough, the elements. Apparently, naming your game after its puzzle theme is another requirement, though perhaps that one’s optional. On these aspects, Elements is strong, but alas, although they are defining aspects of the genre, they aren’t the most important parts of a pure puzzle game.

More important than plotlessness and theme, for example, is solid implementation. In a story-heavy game, a few bugs don’t derail things as long as they don’t impinge on the plot. In a puzzle game, however, the player is relying on the game to provide a fair, unambiguous, and bug-free setup within which to work, and without this, even the best puzzles lose their charm almost immediately. On this count, Elements is laden with problems.

Despite the help text’s exhortation to “examine the scenery”, a great many scenery objects are completely unimplemented in this game, including some that good sense would indicate ought to at least have a description. For instance, there are carvings on the wall in one room — unimplemented. There are holes in the wall of another room — unimplemented. In a pure puzzle game, these things are just distractions.

More serious problems lurk here, too. There’s a room with no description at all. There’s a room whose description is flat-out wrong, gives away the solution to a puzzle, and makes that solution seem impossible, all at once. There are severe guess-the-verb issues in lots of places. Even the pointless inventory limit is one more needless frustration among many. A pure puzzle game with implementation failures like these is like a crossword puzzle whose black squares are misplaced in the grid.

So good implementation is a must, but a pure puzzle game could probably get by with a few minor bugs, so long as they don’t ruin the puzzles the way the bugs in Elements do. I would argue that the most important piece, the one overriding quality that a pure puzzle game must have in order to succeed, is good puzzle design. Sadly, Elements lacks this crucial factor as well. I suppose it’s just barely possible that someone might struggle through this game without recourse to hints, but I doubt such a person exists. They would need to be the sort who retains faith in a game despite very buggy implementation, and whose authorial telepathy is exceedingly strong. And even they certainly wouldn’t solve it in two hours.

I found that when I finally looked at the hints in bewilderment, my reaction was: “How in the hell was I supposed to guess that?” The game routinely demands highly unlikely actions without providing enough cueing towards those actions. For instance, certain objects in the game possess uncanny powers, though only in very specific contexts. No clue is given as to what these contexts are, and the rest of the time the objects are useless, except as treasure. In addition, there are instances where the most obvious solution is not only unimplemented, its lack of availability isn’t even given a perfunctory explanation. In one of the most egregious moments, putting one thing on another is a solution to a problem, despite the fact that the latter object’s default message remains “Putting things on the <object> would achieve nothing.”

Players cry foul at moments like this, and they are right. Oh, did I mention the game’s way too big for the competition? The game’s way too big for the competition. Just one more problem element to be found in Elements.

Rating: 3.6

Bane Of The Builders by Bogdan Baliuc [Comp01]

IFDB page: Bane of the Builders
Final placement: 28th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

In what is either a shameless rip-off or an unwitting duplication of the Heechee backstory behind the Gateway games (and novels), this game posits a “mysterious race known as the Builders [who] had left many traces and artifacts throughout the galaxy.” The game opens as a planet has been discovered that might yield the secret of the Builders’ demise, though it’s unclear how the simple existence of “an energy source” would promise such vital information. No doubt the answer could be supplied by the foremost expert on Builder civilization, a fellow known only as “the Professor.” (I was torn as to whether to picture him as the Professor from Futurama or the Professor from Gilligan’s Island.)

The PC’s role is that of a starship ensign who has become “quite friendly” with the Professor (though apparently not friendly enough to learn a first or last name), and who is sent down to accompany said Professor on his investigative mission in this Builder artifact. Now, it can fairly be said that this scenario is rather illogical — would a lowly ensign really be the only one to accompany a scientist on such an expedition, and if so, would he really be asked to wait around in the ship instead of providing armed support, and would he only start worrying after the Professor goes missing for almost a day?

However, such objections aside, I enjoyed the setup of this game. It felt pleasurably reminiscent of sci-fi juveniles from the 1940s and 50s, right down to the cheesy idioms uttered by the characters. (“Thank Space you’re here!”) I especially enjoyed how Star Trek and its clones have become so ingrained in the culture that when the game provided a blaster “set to kill”, I knew that “SET BLASTER TO STUN” would work, even though the game provided no explanation of the blaster’s settings. It worked. Unfortunately, letdowns occur throughout the game that prevent it from being a fun romp through Golden Age and TV sci-fi tropes.

The problem isn’t with the writing, which is pretty serviceable throughout, even earning extra points from me for using “its” and “it’s” correctly the entire time. The formatting is fine too, although it seems to miss a few blank lines here and there. The implementation, on the other hand, is a bit more deeply troubled. Several times, the game seemed to want to produce the effect of the room’s contents shifting in front of the PC’s eyes; the room description would print, then a line reading “The world around you suddenly shimmers and changes…”, encased with blank line or two on either side, and another room description would print. So far, so good.

Except that sometimes, the descriptions were identical. Other times, a third room description would print after the second one, with the “shimmer” line printing without blank lines preceding it. I doubt this was intentional — it’s a feature that needed more testing before the game’s release. Another serious problem is that in a climactic scene, the most important object is unimplemented. I was more than a little nonplussed to be told about a Nasty Evil Menace by the game, but to be told, “You can’t see any such thing” when I asked to examine the Menace.

The biggest problem, though, is the puzzles. First of all, there’s a maze. There’s no redeeming twist to make it interesting or better — in fact, the only twist makes it worse: the maze doesn’t use compass directions, instead relying (quite arbitrarily) on “left”, “right”, “forward”, and “back” instead. Consequently, you not only need to keep in mind where you are in the maze, you have to keep in mind which way you’re facing. This is the sort of thing that feels a lot more like work than fun to me in a game.

Perhaps even worse are a couple of authorial telepathy puzzles, which demand highly implausible or even nonsensical actions to solve, and offer no clues whatsoever as to these solutions. I’m not sure whether I object more the puzzle whose solution seems impossible based on its object’s description, or the one whose solution is just totally illogical. Either way, having them both in the same game is not a good thing. I have sympathy for people who struggle with puzzle design, because I’m one of them. But it’s better to have no puzzles at all than puzzles that aren’t any fun.

Rating: 5.2

You Were Doomed From The Start by Jeremy Carey-Dressler as Noob [Comp01]

IFDB page: You Were Doomed From the Start
Final placement: 51st place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

I hate to say it, but once I saw the author’s name, I knew the title couldn’t be more appropriate. Doomed is like a very stripped down, simplified version of The Last Just Cause, and is put forth by the author as “more of a ‘Example work’ to teach programmers how to program a Text-based game more that [sic] a full game.” This is too easy a target, so I’ll just say this: people interested in writing a text game should evaluate a few different games, perhaps sampling among the systems used in this competition, and decide which ones they’d most like their game to resemble.

In some ways, the fact that this game is even more primitive (amazing as that is) than TLJC, is actually a good thing. For one thing, the supremely irritating combat engine is absent, as are the zillions of rooms and nonsensical puzzles. On the other hand, they haven’t really been replaced with anything much. There are a few rooms to go through, a key in each one. Unlock the last room with all the keys, get the key from that room, and that’s it. The ending of this game is just as mocking and irritating as anything from TLJC, but at least it’s over quickly.

This game also shares with TLJC the hallmarks of nonsensical world design and in-jokey object descriptions. The fact that there are fewer of them counts for a little, but only a little.

Rating: 2.5