Comp02, >INVENTORY, Page 3

Not Much Time by Tyson Ibele [Comp02]

IFDB page: Not Much Time
Final placement: 22nd place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Not Much Time falls into a familiar chasm, the chasm between what a game tells us we are and what it asks us to be. Ostensibly, you’re a dutiful niece or nephew who receives a distressing phone call from your aunt, implying that she is hurt or in some sort of danger. Filled with concern, you rush out to her farm to search for her, and it is there that the game begins. In the course of the search, you’ll come across many items with an air of privacy, including her mail, her journal, and her diary. (It’s unclear just what the difference is between these last two items.)

The personal items are generally hidden, though not always, and even their descriptions tend to be admonishments about privacy:

>x journal This is your Auntie's journal. But you probably shouldn't read it because it's rude to read other people's things.

Heeding this advice, I went through the game trying to respect those boundaries as much as I could. Of course, it was impossible to be too respectful, since she isn’t to be found in any terribly obvious place, but I didn’t feel too bad about things like borrowing a flashlight to explore a dark place or grabbing possibly-useful items like a spade or a pocketknife. The game’s landscape is fairly large, and by the time I figured out I was stuck, I had forgotten about my decision not to invade Auntie’s privacy, turned to the hints, and discovered that invading her privacy was exactly what I needed to do. What’s worse, there’s nothing in the game that particularly indicates which inappropriate action is the crucial one to advance the game state.

This is fiction and interactivity at each other’s throats. As a player, I tend to be drawn more to story than puzzles, and consequently I was trying to cooperate with the demands of the story, but the interactivity roadblocked me from proceeding through the story until I had broken character rather thoroughly. Of course, it could be argued that in my desperation to find my aunt, I could reasonably be driven to tearing open her belongings, but really, I think I’d just call the police first. If only her house had a phone — so few IF houses do.

That fundamental disconnect between story and game is only one of Not Much Time‘s problems. There’s another disconnect, too. It’s less important, and it’s understandably common in IF, but I’d like to see it become less so, which is why I bring it up; besides, this game has such a classic example of it:

>x grandfather clock This clock is a masterpiece. It suffered top quality craftmanship and it is a beautiful piece of work. The wood is stained the perfect color and its giant mechanism is a wonder to look at. You can't reason why the clock is in the kitchen and not the living room. There is a door on the front of the clock which is closed. >open clock I don't know how to open the grandfather clock. >open door It's locked. >unlock clock I don't know how to unlock the grandfather clock.

Here’s the thing: in language, there’s a metonymic connection between something like a grandfather clock and its door. When we say “open the clock”, what we mean on a more literal level is “open the door in the clock.” This sort of connection isn’t hard to implement in IF, it’s just hard to remember to implement. When it doesn’t work, though, the game’s momentum screeches to a stop as we figure out how to get the parser to understand what we mean. Another big speed bump is bizarre diction like “suffered top quality craftmanship.” Suffered? Also: craftsmanship.

I’ve spilled a lot of (metaphorical) ink on this game already, not because it’s a lot of fun, but because its flaws can illuminate some larger trends in IF overall. In point of fact, the game isn’t much fun, though it certainly isn’t as offputting as the author’s other entry, Concrete Paradise. There are numerous prose errors, some threadbare implementation, and many, many bucketsful of red herrings. The puzzles, while mostly logical, feel rather arbitrary, and (as discussed above) sometimes clash rather harshly with the story.

In addition, part of the game’s solution involves killing an animal — not in a good, Trinity-like, making-a-larger-point way, but in a rather pointless, unpleasant way. This game illustrates some of what not to do in IF, and while it has its good points, it was the negatives that stayed with me.

Rating: 5.6

The Granite Book by James Mitchelhill [Comp02]

IFDB page: The Granite Book
Final placement: 16th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Sometimes, rarely, I’ll read something, or see something, or hear something that is so foreign to me, so alien, that it’s hard to say whether I like it or not. It’s almost as if the question doesn’t pertain; the piece seems to come from another dimension altogether, and I’m hard-pressed to apply human rules of quality to it. However, if I have to form an opinion, that opinion will be a negative one — when I can’t relate to something in the slightest, that thing fails to appeal to me.

Case in point: The Granite Book. At no time during this game did I have any clear conception of what was supposed to be going on. At various points, I thought that the PC might be a king, a transient, a guy on a date, a psychopath, a spirit, or a troll. Perhaps he’s the itinerant ghost of an insane troll king, looking for love. I really have no idea.

Some of this confusion and dislocation comes from the game’s choice of voice: the entire thing is written in the first person plural, like so:

We weren’t sure, but jagged rocks emerging, staring into our face,
alone as we were in that obscure and emptied world, looked familiar,
greeted us again with laughter and the scrape of gravel inside
fissure.

I’ve only seen this verb tense used successfully in one place: the “royal we”, where kings and queens speak of themselves in the plural, because they are the living embodiments of their countries — hence my guess that perhaps the PC of this game is a king. It was the royal we that was used (although not in any simple way) in last year’s game The Isolato Incident, and in my review of that game I mentioned how I found it similar to Comp99’s For A Change, because both took ordinary descriptions and substituted out words, requiring the player to filter through strange language in order to make sense of the action.

The Granite Book, though, takes things one step further: not only are strange words in place of ordinary ones, but even the concepts those words represent seem to have no analogue in the real world, or even any fantasy world I’ve ever encountered. It’s not the royal we that’s at work in this game, but rather something much stranger.

For me, this was one remove too far. If nothing ever makes any sense, than I really don’t care about any of it — it just seems like a bunch of gibberish to me. As is probably apparent from the passage I quote above, verb tense is only the beginning of what makes this game opaque. From its tangled sentence structure to its nonsensical landscape and its thoroughly baffling end, the game’s perfect impenetrability never seems to crack. This sort of thing is bad enough in other kinds of art, but in IF the frustration it triggers is even more intense, because we’re supposed to take these frictionless descriptions and actually grasp them, put them to use.

I found I could make a little progress by examining second and third level nouns, but even then it was just a parroting trick, spitting back the words used by the game whenever they seemed important, not because I understood what they meant. I can imagine solving the game without the hints, if I was lucky enough to guess at the right interpretation of its descriptions, but I can’t imagine understanding it. I can’t exactly say that’s a defect in the game — who knows, maybe I’m just not bright enough to get it? But I can authoritatively say that I didn’t enjoy it.

Rating: 4.8

Augustine by Terrence V. Koch [Comp02]

IFDB page: Augustine
Final placement: 13th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Augustine is clearly a well-intentioned, sincere work of IF, and it’s clearly the product of a substantial amount of work. Just as obviously, it is the work of a novice author, and its flaws are hard to ignore. Consequently, my reactions to it were mixed. On the one hand, it’s got a fun story, interestingly grounded in the actual history of St. Augustine, Florida. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to reveal that the PC is an immortal from the 15th century, whose fate has been tied up with the city over the centuries. Unfolding through a combination of flashback and present-day narration, the plot describes the culmination of the PC’s eon-long quest to defeat his eternal nemesis and end the curse of his immortality.

Okay, so it’s a little derivative. But I liked it anyway, especially the connections between the walking tour of St. Augustine’s ghosts and the PC’s actual history. What in another work would feel like eye-rolling coincidences felt rather natural in this one — the PC is the one supernatural element in an otherwise mundane world, and it makes perfect sense that the superstitious stories of that world would accrue around his otherwise inexplicable activities. There were moments when it was quite fun to inhabit this character, and to traverse the city’s history through his eyes.

Unfortunately, there were a number of reasons why it was only moments of fun rather than fun the whole time. In the spirit of constructive criticism, I want to look at some of those problems. First, there are the simple mechanics of the prose. The text is infested with spelling errors, typos, grammar errors, and even the dreaded its/it’s error. Every time one of these came up, it took me out of the story — instead of feeling transported into history, I was thinking, “it’s the ‘distant past’, not the ‘distance past.'” Proofreading is more than a formality; it’s an essential element in making sure that your writing draws readers in rather than pushing them away. The same can be said of bugfixing. Sequences like this thoroughly deflate a story:

>parry (Kasil) You block Kasil's blade. However, his attack stops your progress and you must defend against Kasil strikes. Kasil backs you up against the railing. >thrust at kasil You thrust at Kasil as he steps aside. When he charges at you again you step aside and he misses you. This gives you the opportunity to slip away from the railing and maneuver behind Kasil. You swing, but he whips around and deflects your sword. The two of you continue to battle as Kasil backs away from you to the north. >slash at kasil Kasil isn't important.

Isn’t important? The guy I’m currently swordfighting with, who is currently trying to kill me with his “Kasil strikes”, isn’t important? Not to you, maybe. A minute after I got that response, I figured out that Kasil had actually moved to the north, and therefore was no longer in that location to be slashed at. But in that case, the response should be “Kasil isn’t here.” He’s certainly still important.

This is standard stuff; you could find it in a hundred different reviews of IF games. That’s because it matters — it’s often the difference between games that work and games that don’t. However, there’s a more subtle flaw at work in Augustine, one I’m not even sure I can articulate. It’s a sort of awkwardness to the storytelling. First, we get a prelude set in 1403, where a small boy (after some insta-death dead ends) evades brutal soldiers on a slash-and-burn raid. Then the scene shifts to a businessman in 2002, on a business trip to St. Augustine and strolling around the city’s attractions. Then, at what is more or less the end of the game’s first act, we learn that these two are the same person.

The reason this feels wrong, unfair, is that the prose in the 2002 section betrays almost no indication that this PC has known the city for three hundred years. Yes, upon close inspection, there are a couple of weirdnesses to be found, but mostly he seems to be just another tourist, seeing locales and objects in flat, untextured terms. Consequently, when the revelations came, I was left wondering whether the PC was having flashbacks of past lives, or had amnesia of his history, or something. Nope. It’s just that the writing unreasonably obscures what his historically informed responses to the landscape and people should be. It’s the lesson I wrote about in my article for the IF theory book: landscape creates character, whether you want it to or not. Rather than harnessing this effect, as the best IF games do, Augustine suffers by it.

Rating: 7.4

Evacuate by Jeff Rissman [Comp02]

IFDB page: Evacuate
Final placement: 19th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

I wanted to love this game. Oh man, did I want to love this game. And there’s really a lot to love, too. It’s got a classic storyline: you’re a passenger on a luxury starship which has been attacked, and having just returned to consciousness after everyone else has evacuated, you must find your way to safety. There’s also a great feel to Evacuate, a combination of writing and implementation that evoked Infocom for me more than any game since Comp2000’s YAGWAD. Room and object descriptions are very nicely judged, and some of the puzzle clueing is just superb.

In the course of my two hours with the game, I had several moments where I would look more closely at an object, or really notice a particular word for the first time, and a crucial piece of information would click into place. That feeling is such a pleasure, on a par with those times where inspiration would hit in a flash, I would try my idea, and it would work. Evacuate provided me with both those experiences, and although there are a few spelling mistakes here and there, after my first hour with the game I was feeling buoyant, sure I would finally be able to give a game in this comp a score in the high 9s.

Then came the second hour. Early in the second hour, I discovered the starvation timer. The game kills you after 400 moves if the PC hasn’t eaten yet. I hate this. It’s pointless, unrealistic, and really adds no challenge. But if food is readily available, or if the time limit is generous enough, a starvation puzzle alone isn’t enough to kill the fun of a good game. In Evacuate, the time limit was much too short, and food isn’t available until after you’ve done a bunch of stuff, most notably navigate the maze.

Yes, the maze. As mazes were falling out of fashion in adventure games, the genre went through a period where games would still include a maze, but there would be some special gimmick that would make the maze solvable outside the normal, painstaking methods. This wasn’t a bad compromise, since it retained the nostalgia appeal of an adventure game maze, but allowed an escape from the tedium of drop-and-map maze navigation. After a while, though, even gimmicked mazes became a cliché, and they fell out of fashion too. Evacuate goes the opposite direction, adding a gimmick to its maze that actually makes the maze harder rather than easier. Yes, there’s a way around this gimmick, but even when you’ve found that, you’re still in a maze puzzle.

I didn’t enjoy this, and I especially didn’t enjoy it when there are several things to accomplish in the maze, none of which involved any food. I’d be very impressed if anyone got past the hunger timer without hints or restoring/restarting at least a half-dozen times. When I finally looked at the walkthrough, I was gobsmacked at how much of the game I still needed to get through before I could get anywhere near the food, and that brings up another problem, which isn’t really a problem with Evacuate itself but did affect my experience: for me, this just was not a two-hour game. Even without the incessant restores and restarts brought about by the hunger puzzle, there’s just too much here to squeeze into a two-hour space.

The really amazing thing is that even after Evacuate squarely hit three of my biggest comp game peeves (starvation timer, maze, too big for 2 hours), I still want to give it something around an 8. That’s a testament to how much is outstanding in this game, how many wonderful moments it offers up in exchange for its annoying characteristics. It’s so close to greatness.

Just add a few more custom responses for sensible actions (prying something with a screwdriver, using a scarf as a rope.) Just remove the hunger puzzle (it’s entirely non-essential anyway). Just, at the very least, tone down the maze to eliminate the constant randomizing elements. Just release it outside the bounds of a structure that dictates a limit on playing time. If these things happened, Evacuate could be a cracking good piece of IF. Right now, for all its wonderful qualities, it falls tantalizingly, achingly short of the mark.

Rating: 7.9

Koan by Esa Peuha as Anonymous [Comp02]

IFDB page: Koan
Final placement: 35th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

In 1998, there was In The Spotlight, a tiny but enjoyable game whose entire purpose was to embody one clever puzzle. Then, last year, there was Schroedinger’s Cat, a less enjoyable (though competently produced) game whose sole reason for existence was to embody a completely baffling puzzle. Now we have Koan, a fairly irritating and badly programmed game that embodies one more-or-less nonsensical puzzle. Clearly, we’re on a downward slope here.

I don’t have any particular objection to the genre of one-puzzle games; as I said, I liked In The Spotlight well enough. However, when the entire game is a tiny environment based around one puzzle, that puzzle had better be well-implemented. As you might have guessed, this is not the case in Koan. Even setting aside the fact that most of the writing is nothing but placeholders (like the room whose description consists only of “This is the middle location in this game.”), there are several fundamental problems with the puzzle as it is coded. Example: you have to retrieve a clay pot from a high place, and there are several objects in the game that may help you retrieve it without damaging it. However, before I even saw any of those objects, the first thing I did was this:

>x pot This clay pot has a severe fracture. Other than that, the only noticable feature is the writing that says, "When intact, this pot will break the stone slab."

So the pot already has a severe fracture? Kind of takes away my motivation to try not to damage it. There’s nothing around to fix it with, either, which really makes me wonder how I’m supposed to make it intact. This is not the way to do a one-puzzle game. Also: noticeable.

As for the solution, I can’t say it really made much sense to me. From the game’s title, I take it that this puzzle and its answer are supposed to represent some kind of deep spiritual truth. Now granted, I’m not a Buddhist, but I failed to find any meaning in this game beyond “Well, that was surreal.” I dunno, maybe somebody else found it profound. To paraphrase Dennis Miller: of course, that’s just my opinion — I could be unenlightened.

Rating: 3.0

Hell: A Comedy Of Errors by John Evans [Comp02]

IFDB page: Hell: A Comedy Of Errors
Final placement: 23rd place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

So here we have the Fine-Tuned of Comp02. That is to say: Hell starts out with a great premise — you’re a newly-created demon, and your business is to go about torturing souls and extracting the maximum possible penance from them. There are some fun role-playing elements to choosing your form, your wings, your color, and so on. In fact, much of the game’s setup is RPGish in a good way — you can purchase various implements of torture (all rather lighthearted, e.g. “documentary crew” or “lizards with pointy sticks”) and carve out your own personal infernal landscape of punishment rooms. Getting penance from damned souls results in further credits for further purchases, and opens possibilities of further demonic avenues such as helpers and peddlers.

Hell then completely squanders the promise of this great setup by being so very incomplete. The documentation suggests that some souls give up more penance depending on their particular characteristics, but damned if pretty much every soul in the game doesn’t look exactly identical. So, inevitably, you run out of money and then wander around wondering what to do next. I get the sense that in the finished version, each soul will have its own personality, and the puzzle will be to match it up with the environments and tortures that best suit it. In the current version, it’s pretty much a crapshoot.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that I’m wrong about this. Maybe I’m missing some critical clue that would make it clear how to proceed. Given that the game provides neither hints nor walkthrough, it’s impossible to be sure that this isn’t the case. Nevertheless, what seems quite clear is that Hell doesn’t do what it says it will, and consequently I have no choice but to regard it as an unfinished game. Please don’t submit these to the comp.

Rating: 1.0

Rent-a-Spy by John Eriksson [Comp02]

IFDB page: Rent-a-Spy
Final placement: 15th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Actually, in terms of design, Rent-A-Spy is pretty good. If you think I sound surprised, you’re right, because in plenty of other areas, this game seems thrown together rather carelessly. For instance, it leaves the Inform debugging verbs turned on. Now, granted, ever since Inform started keeping them on by default, it takes a more conscious effort to avoid this problem, but on the other hand, Stephen Granade did send an email to all authors reminding them to turn these off, and explaining exactly how to do it. As he said in his message, “there’s nothing quite as fun as being able to purloin like a madman in a competition game.”

Consequently, seeing those verbs left on is usually a telltale sign of a bad game. There were other portents, too. The introduction is lumbered by some awkward writing, and the whole “rent-a-spy” premise feels shaky, an uneasy mix between the espionage and private eye genres. Also, the game is compiled to .z8, even though it’s only 140k (and that’s with strict mode left on!), which is really rather odd.

Having seen these signs at the beginning, my expectations for the rest of the game were rather low. Perhaps that’s why I felt so pleasantly surprised by the first puzzle, an interesting, realistic bit of infiltration, broken up into several believable steps. Several of the other puzzles felt pretty fresh to me, too. I especially enjoyed the way the PC must cover her tracks as she progresses in order to achieve the best ending. Opened doors must be closed, keys stolen must be returned to their original spot, documents are duplicated rather than filched, and so on. I thought this was a fun twist on the usual adventurer tendency to rummage through the landscape looking for treasure, leaving everything a shambles behind him.

Of course, many of these puzzles were quite thinly implemented. There were some extremely severe guess-the-verb problems, and plenty of other areas where clues were minimal or absent, and the environment too sparsely described. Consequently, lots of Rent-A-Spy‘s good ideas are badly obscured by its lack of polish.

I can’t help but wonder if this was a situation where the oncoming deadline prevented the game from being as complete as it could be. This is the very situation that Adam Cadre’s Spring Thing is meant to address, and I hope that for every unfinished game I’m seeing in this comp, there are two more whose authors are holding back in order to make sure that the games are as good as they can be before releasing them.

For this game, it’s too late to enter any more comps, but I still hope it sees a subsequent release. With some editing, further testing, and some premise doctoring (perhaps making the PC something like a reporter, which would be quite a bit more believable than a spy you can look up in the phone book), this could be a pretty enjoyable piece of IF. For now, it’s more an example of unfulfilled potential.

Rating: 6.1

Sun and Moon by David Brain [Comp02]

IFDB page: Sun And Moon
Final placement: 21st place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Sun And Moon is a strange beast. It certainly isn’t a text adventure, not even one of those multiple-choice web text adventures we’ve seen in previous competitions. Instead, it’s something altogether more interesting. After the manner of the ingenious online promotional campaign for Steven Spielberg’s movie A.I., Sun And Moon draws us into its story through a conglomeration of web sites — diaries by fictional characters, press releases by fictional companies, and so on. To a degree, this works pretty well. The weblog really looks like a weblog (it’s even on angelfire.com, pop-up ads and all), and the personal websites of the other characters are convincing too. They all mix links to actual sites with links that extend the fiction, thereby significantly blurring the boundary between the story and the world.

The game even provides email addresses for the characters. I tried writing to these to see if I’d at least get an autoresponse, but alas, it wasn’t to be. The company web site stretches credulity a bit, especially the “here’s where I’ll bitch about the boss, because I’m sure he’ll never read it” section — only the very confrontational or the very stupid would actually do such a thing on their own company’s website. Still, the overall effect of these narrative elements is absorbing; the fictional pieces of Sun And Moon are strong.

The interactivity is another matter. Certainly, there’s a degree of interactivity to following links from one web site to the next, but given that pretty much all the fictional content of those sites is just static text, that interactivity is only a shade greater than turning the pages of a book. Instead, Sun And Moon provides the vast majority of its interactivity in puzzles that bear almost no direct relationship to the story itself.

It seems that several of the characters in the story are puzzle enthusiasts (mazes and cryptic crosswords), and offer puzzles of their own creation via their web sites. Oh sure, some small element of the solution to these puzzles relates back to the story, but for the most part they are puzzles for their own sake. One could certainly argue that there are plenty of text adventures for which the same is true, and it’s interesting to think about where this game sits on the interactivity spectrum when compared to pure puzzle games like Color And Number. Nevertheless, it was my experience that the story and the interactivity in Sun And Moon sat alongside each other in ungainly halves, a narrative quite literally alongside a crossword, joined by tendrils that were tenuous at best.

Centaur works like this certainly add spice to in the ongoing debate about defining the term “interactive fiction.” In fact, I’m inclined to predict that Sun And Moon will spark a bit of a debate over just what sort of works belong in the competition. Personally, I wouldn’t bar works like this one from the comp — I’d rather have a wide definition of IF than a narrow one, and at several points in the game I was excited not just by its content but by the possibilities its form suggests. Then again, it doesn’t have all that much in common with a regular text adventure, and it almost seems unfair to rate it alongside TADS and Inform games.

So I’m in a quandary. On the one hand, my ratings tend to be based on how much I enjoyed the experience of a particular game, and I enjoyed the experience of Sun And Moon a fair amount. On the other hand, much of that pleasure wasn’t due to Sun And Moon itself, but rather because it introduced me to the fascinating form of cryptic crossword puzzles, and because it inspired me to think about what sort of stories might be created using these media. In addition, for me there is no way this game could have fit into two hours (though some portion of my time was devoted to teaching myself about cryptic crosswords), and consequently there’s a great deal of it I haven’t seen or solved.

What I did see provided an interesting story and some neat puzzles, but not what I would call an immersive fictional experience. Rather than being a fully realized piece of web IF itself, Sun And Moon feels more like a signpost to some very interesting territory ahead.

Rating: 7.3

Color and Number by Steven Kollmansberger [Comp02]

IFDB page: Color and Number
Final placement: 24th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Color And Number belongs to that genre of IF I’ve begun to call “pure puzzle games” — oh sure, it’s got a shred of plot, something about investigating a cult that worships colors or something, but that’s more or less overwith before the first move, and from that point forward, you’re pretty much in a pure puzzle landscape. And yes, those puzzles are keyed to a particular theme — you guessed it: colors and numbers. True to the precedent established in Comp01 games like Elements and Colours, the game even names itself after its puzzle theme.

About twenty minutes into this thing, I knew I didn’t have a prayer of finishing it in two hours, so I played until I hit the time limit and then stopped. Thus, in fairness, I don’t know whether the story makes a strong resurgence towards the end or anything, but even if it does, this game clearly belongs to the puzzles. Those puzzles are of the sort that prompts lots of note-taking, charting the correspondences between the various pieces the game teasingly doles out. I enjoyed several of these brain-twisters — they have a mathematical elegance, and some of the best ones suggest their solutions quite organically, which is a pleasure.

Others, though, are a little more imperfect. One puzzle in particular stumped me even though I had looked at all the hints for it, and I think there are several reasons for this. First, the feedback level was too low. The puzzle involved performing a string of actions, but without close investigation, the environment betrayed no particular indication about which actions were successful or useful. It’s not that this feedback was entirely absent, but it wasn’t prominent enough for me to even notice until long after I had looked at the answers.

Secondly, the sequence has a bug in it. It’s just a TADS error (one which oddly didn’t show up in my game transcripts, so I can’t quote it) — not enough to prevent the solution from working properly, but more than enough to drain my confidence in the puzzle’s correct implementation. Between that and the lack of feedback, it’s pretty clear how I ended up looking at hints, but even after I had seen them all, and ostensibly solved the puzzle, nothing happened.

I found out, through trawling Google for hint requests, that this was because I needed to do some other actions in an entirely unrelated area. This is not good puzzle design — at the very least, solving that portion should have yielded some noticeable change so that I could understand that my attempt had in fact worked, even if it wasn’t producing any useful revelations until its counterpart pieces were in place.

Critics like me talk a lot about how difficult it is to pull off combining an arresting story with interesting puzzles, but what’s becoming clearer is that even when IF eschews story altogether and focuses solely on puzzles, it presents considerable challenges to its creator. Little prose errors and formatting issues aren’t so noticeable in a work like this (unless they severely cloud meaning), but even tiny feedback or implementation errors can be devastating. Because there’s no story to distract us from game bugs, they loom very large indeed, and as soon as one crops up, it drastically affects the dynamic between player and game. Suddenly, a struggling player ceases to believe that he’s stuck because of his own inability to solve the puzzle, and starts to suspect that game defects are making the puzzle unsolvable, because after all, if bugs crop up in one place, they can be elsewhere too.

Infocom and its contemporaries had a big advantage in this area — if you bought a game off the shelf, knowing that the resources of a full-fledged company had been used to quality test it and that it had been reviewed by major publications, you could be relatively confident that whatever bugs still might lurk within it wouldn’t be enough to prevent you from solving its puzzles. No such assurances exist for an amateur, freeware IF comp game, and consequently pure puzzle games must be fanatically assiduous about debugging and testing. That’s not an easy mark to hit.

Rating: 6.7

Photograph by Steve Evans [Comp02]

IFDB page: Photograph: A Portrait Of Reflection
Final placement: 3rd place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

If “Steve Evans” isn’t a pseudonym, then what we have here is quite an auspicious debut indeed. Photograph is a carefully crafted tale, executed in prose that is both transparent and strong. Well-chosen symbols underpin the game’s unfolding story of a man obsessed with what he perceives to be the big mistake in his past. Normally, this sort of thing isn’t really my cup of tea — I have a pretty low tolerance threshold for characters maundering over their memories or floundering in bad relationships. I get impatient for them to just take some action, move on and claim the present day, and I certainly felt some of those twinges of annoyance as I tried to guide the PC of Photograph into a less passive approach to life. However, the game made two choices that helped considerably to redeem these problems.

First, although the PC is certainly stuck in his mental processes, the writing introduces some blessed complexity into its depiction of his life, making it clear that his obsessed interpretation of events isn’t the only available point of view on them. There are some really beautiful details in this game, and their shine helps to illuminate the PC as a passionate but fallible character rather than some objectively correct observer. The game’s other saving grace is in its choice to cast this story as interactive fiction. Something really appealed to me about an IF character who wishes for nothing more fervently than a SAVE and RESTORE function for his own life. Choices, and how we are shaped by them, really works for me as a theme in IF.

Photograph also uses some rather clever narrative techniques, though I don’t think they quite lived up to their potential in practice. The first of these is the addition of a CONSIDER verb (conveniently abbreviatable to “C”). Objects, and even concepts, can be CONSIDERed, and doing so may yield anything from a stock response, to some additional information, to a major advancement in the plot. I thought this was an interesting idea, but too often in Photograph, the CONSIDER verb became just another, more superfluous version of EXAMINE. I ended up CONSIDERing almost everything I could think of, on the off chance that it might yield something, but most of the time it didn’t. In fact, I soon discovered that “CONSDIDER <any old gibberish>” would still yield the stock response, which encourages rather than discourages flailing at nothing with this verb.

Moreover, it seems to me that examining things and considering them aren’t exactly mutually exclusive processes; in my own experience, anyway, when I’m examining something I’m almost always considering it simultaneously. Still, despite the simultaneity, I agree that there is a qualitative difference between physically looking at something and thinking about it — for one thing, the latter can be done even when the object isn’t available, and it also applies to abstract concepts in a way that EXAMINE just can’t. Consequently, I think that the CONSIDER verb does have potential in games that want to preserve this difference.

Perhaps one way to better integrate it, and to reduce lots of useless CONSIDERing, is to print the CONSIDER text (if any) the first time an object is examined, making that text repeatable by using the CONSIDER verb on its own. Then CONSIDER could be better devoted to its more appropriate uses (out of scope items and abstract concepts), since players could be certain that they’re not missing out on anything by not CONSIDERing everything in sight.

Photograph‘s other major deviation from standard IF is in its addition of further conversation verbs beyond ASK ABOUT and TALK ABOUT, such as MENTION X TO Y or DISCUSS X WITH Y. In the words of its help text, “if you think something should provide a sensible response even though the verb is not standard issue, then try it. If it doesn’t work, then please send me a bug report.” This is an extremely ambitious approach, and unsurprisingly, it fails. That isn’t necessarily cause for shame — I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an IF game that really succeeded at providing reasonable coverage for all the various ways in which conversational impulses can be expressed. When a game presents itself in such an open-ended way, it’s just waiting for players to trip it up with phrases like REMIND X OF Y or ASK X WHAT’S ON HER MIND.

I’m all for expanding the palette of conversational verbs available, but in my opinion, it’s far better to just lay out what verbs are implemented and then to make sure that those are implemented quite thoroughly. This approach helps the player avoid seeing a lot of unhelpful responses from a game that isn’t equipped to handle the full range of human articulation. Still, these blemishes aside, Photograph is a fine game — I hope it heralds the beginning of a bright career from an excellent new author.

Rating: 9.2