Comp04, >INVENTORY

Identity by Dave Bernazzani [Comp04]

IFDB page: Identity
Final placement: 15th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Man, what did I say about the doomed starships with the cryogenic pods? Just two reviews ago I was talking about how they’re the hot new comp game setting, and now here comes another one. Crazy zeitgeist. No doubt each of these authors is bummed to have somehow locked into the concept that’s freakishly dominating the comp this year, because the games are inevitably going to be compared to each other, and when there’s a comparison, somebody suffers. In this case, the game doing the most suffering will certainly be Getting Back To Sleep, but between the two remaining contenders, Identity and Splashdown, the contest is much closer.

They’re both implemented solidly enough to be quite playable, but then again they’re both plagued with numerous typos, formatting errors, and minor bugs. Neither one manages to do anything particularly original with the “crash survivor” plot, though both provide a series of relatively enjoyable (if rote) puzzles. In the end, though, I’m afraid I have to give the nod to Splashdown, because that game just seems to be a little more interested in telling a coherent story than Identity is. Splashdown‘s comparative richness of story and setting arises from fillips like its PDF feelie, but also from the choice of story elements like a more interesting origin for its craft’s demise.

One of the weakest points of Identity is actually one of its main points: the PC’s amnesia. Even setting aside the fact that the amnesiac IF PC is an exhausted cliché, there is no reason that I can see for this PC to be thus stricken. From the first 30 seconds of the game, we can piece together that the PC is a guy who was on a starship in cryogenic sleep, and that the starship has now crashed. After playing through the whole thing and encountering several scenes where the game tries to fill in more memories, what we know about the PC by the end is… that he’s a guy whose starship crashed.

In contrast to a game like Square Circle, where the revelation of the PC’s identity puts something at stake due to the memories and knowledge about him possessed by various characters in the game’s milieu, Identity‘s PC wanders around on a planet full of strangers who seem actively and unnaturally disinterested in who he is. His true name matters to no one, even himself, and thus concealment of it buys the story nothing. The game would have worked exactly the same way if the PC’s memories had been complete and intact at the beginning of the story, and I’m not sure why the game gives him amnesia at all, except to conform to some misguided notion that all good PC’s don’t know who they are.

Either that, or perhaps the original plan for the game included some subplot in which the character’s identity mattered, a subplot that may have been cut to meet the comp deadline. In this latter case, though, the amnesia should have been excised. It wouldn’t have been too hard — just the removal of a few extra bits of prose and a retitling.

I’m more inclined to suspect that the amnesia was introduced in order to conform to a sort of 80’s old-school blueprint, because the game itself feels like a direct descendant of some of the sub-Infocom work from that decade. Everything feels very mechanical, including the people and animals. For instance, there’s a yak in the game, but the writing does very little to evoke anything yak-like about it, and instead it behaves somewhat like a horse, somewhat like a cat, but mostly like a yak-shaped car whose ignition key must be obtained (naturally) by solving a puzzle.

This puzzle, like many of the puzzles in the game, involves observing what few things are implemented and figuring out how they might interact with each other in game-logic. Not natural logic, of course, or else the solution to the yak puzzle would have worked equally well in another puzzle with a virtually identical objective. This approach isn’t my favorite — I prefer the realism that’s come in with the best IF of the last decade. Still, it’s enjoyable enough for what it is, and one area in which this game deserves praise is in its handling of unexpected verbs.

For instance, as an antidote to amnesia I tried REMEMBER, and was quite pleased to see that the game handles it (albeit with a default response.) Elsewhere, I found myself in a chair with some safety straps I could fasten, and smiled when SECURE STRAPS worked as expected. This game has clearly been tested, and that counts for a lot with me. Unfortunately, the testing didn’t quite weed out all the bugs, both in coding and in prose mechanics, so another round is required. Identity isn’t an unpleasant way to spend an hour or so, but for me it felt mostly like a missed opportunity.

Rating: 7.8

Zero One by Edward Plant [Comp04]

IFDB page: Zero One
Final placement: 31st place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Because I am a whiny malcontent who is never satisfied, I’m beginning this review with another complaint about Alan‘s transcripting capability, or lack thereof. Last year, I moaned about the fact that Alan doesn’t offer a SCRIPT command, and therefore I was having to periodically copy and paste from the Glk scrollback window into a text editor in order to have a transcript for reference while I wrote my reviews. In response, a few friendly people informed me that if I start the Alan interpreter from the command line with a “-l” switch, it will indeed log a transcript.

This, though a little annoying, is happy news. I tested the method this year, and it works! Sort of. For no reason that I can ascertain, the transcripts are saved in an extremely goofy format, with one line per turn, a line that begins with output generated by the game, then lists the name of the current room, and ends with whatever I type at the prompt. Thus, the slightly more readable parts of the transcript look like this:

There is nothing special about the door.Cell> x walls
‘walls’? I don’t know that word.Cell> n
The door’s closed.Cell> open door
It’s locked.Cell> unlock door
You can’t unlock that!Cell> knock on door
You knock on the door.Cell> z

The less readable parts, which are predominant, occur when the game has anything substantial to say — they stretch off into the distance or wrap (depending on the text editor) to form a busy jumble of unformatted verbiage. Also, on a more minor point, I don’t get to choose the filename for the transcript, and Alan uses an inexplicably super-funky naming convention that gave my log files titles like “011100149966.log.” This transcripting capability is better than nothing, but the quality is still unacceptable. Come on, Alan. Transcripting is kind of a basic IF function, going way back to the 80s. Help a critic out.

Now with that screed out of the way, on to the game. I’m afraid that I don’t have many good things to say about it either. Zero One (or 01, as it likes to nickname itself) is an extremely silly game, cliche-hampered, lacking any sort of logical story, bug-ridden, and incomplete. If you were setting out to write a totally hackneyed IF game, what would be the starting location and situation of the PC? If you said “stricken with amnesia and locked in a cell,” you are today’s winner! That’s exactly the story with the PC of 01, but unlike, say, Square Circle, which builds an honest-to-gosh story around this situation, this game is totally uninterested in revealing the PC’s actual identity or the circumstances the led up to his incarceration.

Oh, it makes a couple of halfhearted gestures at explanation, but these are totally insufficient to actually build any real understanding, and besides, they’re totally overwhelmed by the weight of random events and situations. A good example is the kitchen drawer, in which you’ll find a dead fish along with the cutlery. Why? Aw, who cares? What bits of information do exist are burdened by a juvenile fascination with weapons and gore, like the pool of blood and splattered head that awaits the PC just outside his cell, or like this, after you find a handgun (complete with make and model info) and magazine of ammo:

> put magazine in beretta Lock and Load!

Bro-THER. Throw in a little queer-baiting, and you’ve got a game that just screams “12-year-old male.”

The game is good for a few unintentional laughs, though, due both to its harebrained shadow of a plot and to its buggy implementation. A great example is the doors to the prison, which are secured by a padlock that, to the game’s own surprise, can be unlocked with the first key you find (the bracketed comment is from me):

> unlock green door There is a padlock on the door and you don't have a key. [Actually, I do.]

> unlock green door with key The green door is now unlocked.

Sadly, this change just makes the game channel one of the maze rooms from Zork — going through the door will just loop you back into the current room. Oh, and I also managed to crash the interpreter entirely, though I’m not sure whether this was 01‘s fault or Alan’s. I write comments at the prompt as I go through the game, and after a particularly long line, the interpreter itself just up and shut down, much to my surprise. Luckily, I’d just saved my game, so I didn’t lose much.

Actually, I wouldn’t have lost much if I had just stopped right there and never opened the game again. The ending text insists that “ZERO ONE is not yet finished… Expect a return!”, but given the quality level of this game, that seems more like a threat than a promise.

Rating: 2.8

Splashdown by Paul J. Furio [Comp04]

IFDB page: Splashdown
Final placement: 8th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Apparently, malfunctioning slower-than-light starships with passengers in cryogenic sleep have replaced isolated scientific complexes as the go-to comp game setting this year. Of course, in fairness, we did have a scientific complex in All Things Devours, though it wasn’t underground or in Antarctica or anything. Oh, and I guess my own entry could be considered an “isolated scientific complex” game, sort of. Still, the malfunctioning starships are making a strong showing this year. Happily, Splashdown is leagues ahead of its competitor, Getting Back To Sleep, though they both feel rather too much like Planetfall knockoffs.

One refreshing difference is that at least Splashdown acknowledges its debt to Steve Meretzky, not to mention the fact that its implementation is (pardon the pun) light-years ahead of GBTS‘s creaky homebrew. The game even provides a nifty PDF feelie that rivals Infocom in quality. Nevertheless, there are times when Splashdown feels just too derivative, especially when it introduces a cute little robot companion who follows the PC around, spouting random funny dialogue and helping out with the occasional puzzle. Sound familiar?

Besides that, there’s the fact that the crux of the story really doesn’t make much sense. Apparently, the ship is heading off to colonize a distant planet, but something goes wrong, so its computer picks a random colonist to reanimate, in hopes that this person can address the problem. This random colonist is the PC, natch, and if it were me, the colonists would be doomed, because I certainly didn’t win the game my first time through. Isn’t this an unbelievably dumb disaster plan? Why in the world wouldn’t there be a designated person to reanimate in situations like this? Putting the fate of 500 (or maybe 300, depending on whether you believe the game or the hint files) people in the hands of some randomly selected dude isn’t a strategy I can see even the most dunderheaded government or corporation assaying.

That complaint aside, Splashdown presents an entertaining story and a believable setting. I particularly enjoyed figuring out the reason why the ship malfunctioned, a comic situation worthy of Meretzky. There are a nice variety of puzzles, and they’re blended pretty seamlessly into the story, which I greatly appreciate. Somehow, though, many of these puzzles felt rather counterintuitive to me. Looking back at my transcripts, I see a few different root causes for this problem. One issue is that the game’s description of certain objects doesn’t really jibe with my understanding of how those objects ought to work in real life. In particular, I don’t expect a spigot to do anything useful unless I turn a faucet or turn on a pump or something, and if I do so, I expect that spigot to start spouting whether or not it has anything attached to it. These assumptions played me false as I was flailing around Splashdown‘s ship, trying to figure out anything to do that would make any sense at all.

Another issue is that I had the sense that I was missing just a little bit of documentation. In one or two of the final puzzles, I only knew what I needed to do because the hints told me so, not because of anything in the game that gave me the clue. This may be down to a case of me being slow on the uptake, or it may be that the game makes a few too many assumptions about how familiar players are likely to be with its setting. Finally, in some situations, too few verb forms are implemented. Particularly on one of the initial puzzles, I grasped the concept of what needed to be done, and tried a few different ways of expressing it, only to be rebuffed each time. Consequently, when I saw the solution in the hints, I felt annoyed rather than relieved.

Actually, the lack of synonyms and alternate verbs plagued me outside of the puzzles as well. For instance, there are cryotubes in the game that can’t be called “tubes.” There is no good reason not to provide those sorts of synonyms. In addition, one section of the game requires a lot of talking to the computer, using syntax along the lines of COMPUTER, DISPLAY HELP SCREEN. You can’t call the computer COMP or anything like that, and you can’t just say, for example, DISPLAY HELP, or better yet, HELP. Given the number of times I had to type out commands like this, I was mighty annoyed at the lack of abbreviations after a while.

On the other hand, the implementation is almost comically rich in a couple of areas, particularly the cryotubes themselves. There are 125 of these implemented, each with its own personalized nameplate. I was so gobsmacked at this that I had to examine each one, and was rewarded with occasional jokes and geeky insider references. And so the ship’s systems gradually failed as I went around autistically reading nameplates, but I loved it. Despite the occasional moment of breathtaking implementation, though, Splashdown feels like it’s not quite out of beta yet. There are a considerable number of typos, and sloppy formatting is rampant, especially when it comes to the robot companion’s random dialogue. In addition, I encountered a few minor bugs and glitches here and there. I hope very much that the author takes reviews and feedback to heart and releases a post-comp edition of this game. With some polish, I think it could be a really fun Infocom-style ride.

Rating: 8.0

Ruined Robots by Nicholas, Natasha, and Gregory Dudek [Comp04]

IFDB page: Ruined Robots
Final placement: 34th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Okay, I’m not sure how to review this game without sounding like an ogre. Per the credits and a quick perusal of the web page, it looks like Ruined Robots was written by two kids and one adult, so I hardly want to come off like a big bully, but there’s just no getting around the fact that this game is terrible. Being charitable, it feels like a child’s drawing that’s been taken off the refrigerator and entered into a competition filled with talented painters and sketch artists. In one context, it’s something to be proud of, but in the other, it can’t be anything but bad. I mean, there are a couple of cool features — some of the ambient sounds are nice, and the little “common commands” toolbar could be useful to players with a different style from mine. But the crux of the game — the writing and the coding — is just really poor.

Detailed analysis of everything wrong with Ruined Robots would be belaboring the point, and though point-belaboring is one of my hobbies, I’ll try to steer clear of it this time, and instead just mention a few ways in which this game could be improved:

Get rid of the hunger timer. It is pointless. (By the way, what is it with TADS and hunger puzzles? Are they the default in the TADS library or something?)
Figure out what’s causing the freaky line of double-strikethrough letter Ys next to all the room titles, and fix that.
It’s = it is. Its = belonging to it.
Proofread in general. Pretend you’re turning it in for school and will get marked down for every English error or something.
Get your game beta-tested. If your testers can’t figure out the puzzles, decipher the prose, or finish the game without your help, fix whatever’s confusing them.
Try to have the puzzle-solving actions make sense. You can’t expect players to perform some random action you’ve given them no reason to try.
Speaking of randomness, cut it out with the million-and-one random objects that break mimesis and serve no purpose. If there’s a snowman on the lawn in the middle of spring, for instance, there’d better be a good and interesting reason for that. I don’t want to hear, “The snowman isn’t important.”

Finally, if you’re going to provide a walkthrough, please make sure it actually works to solve your game with. Otherwise, you’ll have judges who decide that your game is totally unplayable and deserves a 1.

Rating: 1.0

Order by John Evans [Comp04]

IFDB page: Order
Final placement: 24th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

At this point, I feel like I could really save myself a lot of time and energy by just writing up a template for reviews of John Evans games. The basic gist of the template would be “This game has some cool ideas and a lot of potential, but it’s not really finished and it seems untested, so it sucks.” Then I could just fill in the blanks with some specifics about the game, and be done. Evans has submitted games to the last five IF competitions, and they’ve all fit this mold, so why shouldn’t I just keep writing the same review over and over again? I kinda have to.

I mean, I guess they’re improving. The first couple (Castle Amnos and Elements) were way too big for the competition, and that problem got corrected. Unfortunately, it got corrected by switching to total unfinishability due to scores of heinous bugs. I gave a rating of 1.0 to Evans’ last couple of games because they were just totally incomplete. Order isn’t as bad as that. It’s the right size for the comp, and it is finishable. But it is still not finished. See, if you’ve got a command called BUGS that lists out the bugs in the game, your game’s not finished. Actually, one of the funnier parts of Order is that even the BUGS list is buggy, as some of the things listed actually do work (though plenty don’t.) Also, if a crucial puzzle in your game rests on a piece of scenery that you don’t mention anywhere, your game’s not finished. A tester would catch that. That’s, y’know, what testers are for. Use them.

Actually, beta-testing seems particularly critical for a game like Order, because the game revolves around coming up with actions quite spontaneously, and the better sample you have of what actions people are going to come up with, the better you’ll be able to implement them. (Here’s where I start filling in the “cool ideas” part of the template.) I love the basic concept of this game — you’re some kind of magical spirit, and you’ve been set a series of tasks by your summoner. So far, still pretty bland, and strongly reminiscent of J.D. Berry’s The Djinni Chronicles. But the nifty twist that Order puts on things is that you have a CREATE verb at your disposal, and you must use it to solve every puzzle.

So, for instance, you find yourself faced with a locked door, and must CREATE a key. Done right, this could be an amazingly powerful device, giving the game a feeling of almost limitless possibility. And indeed, there are times when Order feels like that. Of course, there are way more times that it’s disappointing, and not just because I was trying crazy commands like CREATE PHASER and CREATE WETSUIT. Lots of much more reasonable attempts aren’t implemented, and I can’t help but think that some beta-testing would have greatly improved the game’s range of options. Still, there are multiple solutions to each puzzle available from creating various objects, and that aspect of the game is really fun. Too bad the other parts are such a drag.

Oh, there is one more good part — the hint system. These hints are nicely implemented, InvisiClues style, and it’s a good thing too, because nobody is finishing this game without the hints. As I alluded earlier, there’s a critical puzzle in the game’s midsection that is simply not solvable without hints, because its main components aren’t mentioned anywhere. Remember Bio, from Comp03, the game that starts out with gas seeping into your room and you have to get a gas mask out of an armoire, except the only place that says anything about an armoire is the walkthrough? Pretty tough puzzle, right? Well, Order takes inspiration from it with a puzzle where you must perform an action on an orb encased in a steeple. Problem is, nowhere in any room or object description are the orb and steeple mentioned. There is a dome mentioned, but like many of the scenery objects in room descriptions, it’s not implemented. Actually, even for some of the objects that are implemented, the descriptions aren’t exactly superb:

>i You are carrying a set of white robes (being worn).

>x robes A set of white robes.

Ooo, spellbinding. So okay, I’ve almost got my template ready. The only thing left is to figure out how to wind it up. I’m leaning towards a plea for the future: please help your cool ideas reach their fullest potential by finishing and testing your games! Please! I may have to edit that part out though, as its refusal becomes more and more certain.

Rating: 4.9

Redeye by John Pitchers [Comp04]

IFDB page: Redeye
Final placement: 28th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Okay, before I launch in, let me just say this: Redeye seems like a well-intentioned game. It’s seriously burdened with problems, but it makes a reasonable attempt at story, writing, puzzles, and so forth. Moreover, it does one thing that I thought was really cool, which is to take advantage of my adventure game sensibilities for a crucial scene. The PC witnesses a shooting, and on examining the victim’s body, finds a gun. Because of my ingrained “pick everything up” IF habits, I added the gun to my inventory, and then went outside… to be greeted by the police, shouting at me to drop the gun. Oh yeah. Guess it’s not a good idea to pick up a gun right after a murder. Looks kinda suspicious. Of course, as it turns out, making that mistake is the only way the story can continue, which is not so good. Still, things like this help me believe that this game can be improved, and that authors can learn from its mistakes for the sake of future games.

In that spirit, then, allow me a few suggestions for how to make IF better than Redeye. First of all, put some thought into presentation. The first thing this game did was assault me with an “angry fruit salad” melange, blocks of text in no less than eight different colors. I found all these colors pointless and distracting — they add nothing to the game. Worse than this, the game set the background to black but somehow failed to set the color for the foreground text, and consequently I couldn’t see what I was typing, since it was black-on-black. Even the most minimal testing would have found this problem, which leads me to believe that the colors were changed at the last minute.

Presentation is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Another pointer is to proofread your grammar and spelling, and have some people who are good with words look at it, too. In particular, learn how apostrophes work. “The suns rays” doesn’t mean “the rays of the sun”, it refers to multiple suns and multiple rays. “Tell her your OK” doesn’t mean “tell her that you are okay”, it means “tell your okay to her.” “Your” means “belonging to you.” “You’re” is short for “you are.” Learn grammar or your writing will suck. While you’re at it, learn the difference between sentence fragments and complete sentences. Avoid the former, and cleave to the latter. Next: pick a voice and stick with it. Second-person voice is “you”, and first-person voice is “I.” Do not mix them, like so:

You have absolutely no idea where you are or how you got here…

Hmmm. Where is Arthur? I hope nothing has happened to him…

You open your eyes. Crikey. Where in hell am I? It looks like the
middle of the bloody desert!!

Crazy seesawing between voices like that makes no sense and is very annoying to read.

Well, that gets us through the intro. Now some tips for the game. First of all: please, please, PLEASE no hunger puzzles. They are just lame. They are especially, excruciatingly, super-duper lame when there is NO FOOD IN THE GAME! Secondly, please allow for reasonable actions. Plots on rails (and this one most certainly is one of those) are fine, but you have to find a good reason to turn down the player’s actions, not just fail to implement them. If the PC witnesses a murder, many players’ first instinct will be to CALL THE POLICE. “I don’t know the word ‘call'” is not a sufficient response to this.

To avoid problems like this, have your game tested by a number of people and enhance your code in recognition of the actions they attempt. I’d have thought that one was bloody obvious, given that the comp organizer sends out emails with specific instructions to do so, but perhaps not. Also, please implement descriptions for nouns mentioned in room and object descriptions. If I’m told I can see a highway, a store, and a hotel, I want to be able to examine them. I do not want to be told that the game doesn’t know those words. (Yes, that’s a lot of work. Writing good games is a lot of work.)

In addition, provide all the synonyms you use in your descriptions. For instance, if there’s a group of bikers alternately described as a “horde” and a “crowd”, X HORDE, X CROWD, and X BIKERS should all result in the same response. Implementing only one of them is… bad. Also, this thing:

>x urinal Which urinal do you mean, the toilet, or the toilet?

Please avoid that. On another note, recognize when you are cueing the player and respond accordingly. For instance:

>x motorcycles The motorcycles are predominantly Harley Davidsons. Low, sleek and highly modified. I wouldn't touch them if I were you.

>touch motorcycles Touching the harleys doesn't seem to have any effect.

That is anticlimactic and disappointing. Again, at least one tester probably would have caught this. Okay, there are certainly plenty more changes that would significantly improve the game, but that’s enough for now. Redeye is quite a poor game, but it’s quite a good cautionary example. If you play it, you’ll probably come up with your own list of what not to do in creating IF.

Rating: 4.0

Square Circle by Eric Eve [Comp04]

IFDB page: Square Circle
Final placement: 5th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’ve been an IF Comp judge for a long time now, and the autumn events of my last ten years are all tied up with comp games. I’m pretty much always playing an IF game on Halloween — I particularly remember the supremely un-spooky Mystery Manor. Similarly, I have a strong memory of playing and reviewing Castle Amnos on Election Day 2000. Now it’s November 4th, 2004, two days after an election whose results disappointed me very much, and the game that marks the occasion is Square Circle.

It’s fitting, really, because the game’s theme feels both political and timely. The PC awakens in a cell, his memory wiped clean (yes, it’s YAPCWA, Yet Another PC With Amnesia), imprisoned for no reason that he can remember. Further exploration reveals that in the PC’s world, criminal justice has adopted a Kafkaesque tone: criminals are defined as those people being punished for a crime, and therefore if you are in jail, you are by definition a criminal. With my government using a holding pen on foreign soil to detain alleged “enemy combatants” who have been charged with no crime and who have no access to due process, and with the authority behind this plan having been swept back into office by the popular will, the game feels eerily relevant.

The difference, of course, is that the Guantanamo prisoners won’t win their release with puzzle solutions, no matter how clever. Then again, the game’s “justice” system is meant to be based on pure rationalism (though of course it’s a through-the-looking-glass kind of rationalism), and nobody ever accused George Bush of being overly beholden to rationality. In any case, Square Circle ties its themes together quite neatly, with the emphasis on rationalism gone horribly awry reflected both in the PC’s imprisonment and in the paradoxical geometry puzzle that holds the key to his escape.

The game’s design is similarly good overall. The geometry theme carries over into the design of rooms and objects, with squares and circles repeating all over the place, not to mention cubes and spheres. The rhythmic echoing of these shapes helped me begin to wrap my mind around the game’s titular problem, and while I stumbled into the beginning of my solution by dumb luck, I was thrilled to figure the rest of it out by myself. I was even more surprised to discover that I hadn’t solved the game’s central puzzle, but in fact opened up a much larger vista of puzzle and story. Many of those puzzles had multiple solutions available, all of which made at least some sense. Options like that always make a game more fun.

The plot unfolded satisfyingly, teasingly doling out hints about the PC’s identity. By now, the amnesiac PC is a hoary cliche, but Square Circle felt a bit fresher than the average YAPCWA game by virtue of a couple of little plot twists. Unfortunately, one weaker puzzle undermined the game’s totalitarian feel by enlisting the elements as co-conspirators against the PC. It’s one thing when other people create a maddening environment for a character, but unless those people have a weather-control device, bringing something like the wind into the equation is a dirty trick.

The other serious issue with the game’s design has to do with one of its dead ends. I quite liked the way that Square Circle allows you to do utterly dumb things, and the consequence is generally instant death. However, there’s one path that puts you into an unwinnable situation which does not announce itself as unwinnable in any way, and in fact teasingly offers a repetition of the solvable opening scenario. I wasted precious time flailing around here before turning to the hints and finding that I needed to restart. I don’t care for this sort of design — if you’re going to end my game, just end it.

Speaking of that hint system, it was generally quite well-done. The hints were menu-based and Invisiclues-style, with enough contextual awareness to only offer hints on the problems currently facing the PC. I certainly leaned on the hints quite a bit, and found them quite adept at providing just enough nudge. Unfortunately, I did run into a problem at the very end of my game session, where I was faced with a roadblock and the game failed to offer me any hints about it. A couple of other glitches afflicted the game, too, including some typos, and a bit of freaky parsing:

>draw square around circle What do you want to draw that on?

>note What do you want to note?

>get note Noted.

What just happened? I still don’t know. On the other hand, the game pulls off some amazing parsing tricks when it gives the PC a marking pen and some paper. In his attempt to create a square circle (as demanded by the entity holding him prisoner), the PC can draw a square, and a circle. Even better than that, he can draw whatever he likes. For instance, the game responds to DRAW CARTOON with “You draw a cartoon on the note,” and from that point forward, CARTOON becomes a synonym for NOTE. I thought that this was really an amazingly cool bit of parser trickery.

Lots of other little conveniences were on hand as well, though I suspect many of the ones that reach for player-friendliness are already built into TADS 3. I particularly liked X WALLS, which provided an actual description for each wall of a room, creating a wonderfully complete feeling for the game’s world. In fact, some of the game’s description levels go intoxicatingly deep:

>x guardian The guardian is a lithe, athletic-looking man in his mid-thirties, with short fair hair and a hard, unsympathetic face. He’s dressed in a pale grey uniform [...]

>x grey It’s a drab, though reasonably smart, uniform consisting of pale grey trousers and a tunic of the same colour. The tunic has a pair of breast pockets, with a badge above the left one.

>x badge The badge bears the inscription NEW ENLIGHTENMENT PUNISHMENT SERVICE and depicts a set of prison gates and a sword.

>x sword The highly stylized sword is depicted hilt up and to the left, with its blade interlacing the prison gates.

Wow. I mean, wow. I just adore that kind of thing. I also love when that kind of largesse is applied to a game’s overall design, providing a nice long playing experience… except when the game gets entered in the comp. Square Circle suffers from being oversized for a comp game — not heinously so, but I think I was only about 75% through when the two-hour bell rang. So that’ll hurt its rating with me. Otherwise, though it’s a little unpolished in places, this game offers an intriguing scenario and some enjoyable puzzles, and I recommend it, especially if it sees a revised post-comp edition.

Rating: 8.1

Chronicle Play Torn by Penczer Atilla as “Algol” [Comp04]

IFDB page: Chronicle Play Torn
Final placement: 22nd place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

The readme for Chronicle Play Torn issues a warning:

Now a few comments about the dark side of the game: its testing was done in a hurry, it is very likely that you will find irritating bugs in the prose, and the working of the game.

I’m somewhat innocent in the former one; I’m from the non english speaker part of the world, and thus writing prose for me is like walking without light in an Infocom product: I never know, when does a grue find me (and if it does, I don’t even notice it).

This warning encapsulates both what’s good and what’s bad about the game. As even the readme demonstrates, the author’s English is far from perfect, and can frequently be a major roadblock to understanding. Even the title shows this — it feels like three words randomly drawn from a magnetic poetry set. In addition, the rushed testing job shows; CPT isn’t a relentless bugfest, but its code has some serious issues. However, like the readme, the project as a whole is well-intentioned, good-natured, and more fun than I expected it to be, given its acknowledged flaws.

I do want to talk a little more about the idea expressed above, that authors who don’t speak English natively are “innocent” when it comes to problems in their prose. Sorry, but no, they aren’t. I grant that English is a difficult language. I grant that the IF audience is tiny already, and that the majority of it communicates in English, making the choice of writing IF in one’s native language so audience-limiting as to feel like no choice at all. I grant that the majority of IF tools and parsers are in English. I grant that if I tried to write a game in Hungarian or Russian or Swedish or even Spanish, the language I studied in high school and college, the results would be far worse than even the worst translated game in this comp. I grant all these things.

But ultimately, the fact remains that whatever the circumstances, good games have good prose. When you write a story, you are responsible for every word in it. Who would try to write a novel in a language in which they weren’t fluent? What publisher would take it? Just because you’re writing an IF game doesn’t mean that you’re any less responsible for your words, no matter how strong the coding is, and no matter how tough you find English. In the end, I want to read good stories, not understandable excuses. Native speaker or not, if the prose in your game is littered with problems, your game will suck. Period. By the way, it did occur to me that the author may not have understood the connotation (or even denotation) of “innocent” when making the claim above. However, if that’s true, it only underscores my point, which seems well worth making in a competition where a full 15% of the games I’ve played thus far suffer from some amount of broken English.

So, that point made, how’s the rest of the game? Well, mixed. On the negative side, my game experience was diminished greatly by the presence of a bug so severe that it crashed the entire interpreter, which is an IF experience I haven’t had for a while. I checked it out, and the bug is reproducible — I think the game is trying to dynamically create objects that it hasn’t properly set up. There were some other bugs too, though none as bad as that one. In addition, I found the game too long for the competition; by the time my two hours had run out, I’d estimate I was about 75% done. Of course, having to keep restarting my interpreter didn’t help matters in that department.

In the positive column, CPT features some entertaining imagery, including a few parts that capture the Lovecraft feel quite well. Also, the game’s story is fun, kind of a jumped-up version of Uncle Zebulon’s Will. The hint system is very helpful, but most of the puzzles are crafted sensibly enough that I didn’t need it often, though I did turn to it as I was running out of time, or when I found the game’s prose just too impenetrable. Finally, what I appreciated the most about CPT is that its heart really seems to be in the right place. Despite its serious problems, it’s written out of a deep affection for both its medium and its themes, and while I can’t recommend the game, I applaud the effort, and I hope that the author improves it and continues to write more.

Rating: 4.4

Murder at the Aero Club by Penny Wyatt [Comp04]

IFDB page: Murder at the Aero Club
Final placement: 16th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

My first clue was a line in the banner: “(With apologies to all real-life characters and Government organisations upon which this is based!)” Do I detect a faint scent of “in-joke game”? Of course, the dead giveaway came when I encountered a character with the same name as the author. So assuming that “Penny Wyatt” isn’t a pseudonym, or that it’s the pseudonym of somebody who really does belong to an Australian aero club, I’m going to venture the hypothesis that this is one of those games where the author implements some familiar setting and characters, drapes a little concept around them, and then releases it to the world. It’s a close cousin of the “implement your house” and “implement your job” games: the “implement your hangout” game.

The vast majority of the time, games like this are vastly entertaining to the lucky few who are acquainted with the people and places represented, and irritatingly baffling to the rest of us. Murder At The Aero Club is no exception, though its competent prose and the presence of an actual story (albeit minimal) render it a cut above many. One of the problems with games like this is that they assume too much. Because the setting is so familiar to the author, a kind of unconscious shorthand sets in, a failure to fully describe the world. Perhaps it’s difficult to take an authorial approach to things that are right next to you, especially if you’re trying to fictionalize them just a little.

Certainly, unconscious assumptions would help clarify why so few first-level nouns are implemented. Take, for instance, the first room description:

Car park You are standing beside your car, parked in a small gravel parking area. Light streams onto the ground in patches, mottled by the shade of the gum trees high above. Surrounding you is an assortment of vehicles. A gravel path leads north to the front door of the clubhouse, while to the west stands a large maintenance workshop.

Here are the things I tried to examine: workshop, clubhouse, path, gravel, vehicles, trees, lot, and car. Here’s what was implemented: vehicles and car. The rest told me “You can’t see any such thing,” which seems awfully contradictory to what’s just been described to me. It’s very difficult to get a great mental picture of my surroundings when they seem so hastily sketched. Still, vehicles and car are at least something. Here’s what the game tells me about the vehicles:

The vehicles appear to belong to the various members of the flying club. Among the ones you can see from your position are a gleaming green Porsche, a dirty ute, a formidable-looking motorbike, and a dust-covered van. Many of the vehicles have “I Love Aircraft Noise” stickers attached to their windows. There’s also your little car, of course. It’s looking a little worse for wear after the gruelling eight-hour drive to get here.

You know what the game told me when I tried to examine the Porsche, the ute, the motorbike, and the van? Yeah, that’s right. I couldn’t see any such thing. The premise of the game is that you play a detective sent to investigate a murder at an amateur aviation club deep in the outback, but it’s hard to feel like a detective when you can’t even see huge objects all around you. Heck, I don’t even know what a “ute” is (aside from an Indian tribe and a joke from My Cousin Vinny), and I would have really appreciated a little description, but it wasn’t to be.

See, for this game’s real audience — the people it depicts and the people who know them — a description of those cars isn’t necessary, because those people already know what the cars look like. The PC is an outsider to the situation, and the game’s inattention to world-building certainly helped me identify with that excluded feeling, but I wasn’t even able to do the basic sorts of examinations a detective would do, which in the end wasn’t much fun, and didn’t really make much sense.

Plenty of things about the game don’t make a lot of sense, actually. The solution requires some pretty non-intuitive actions, though because the game is so sparsely implemented that I was still able to guess what it wanted me to do much of the time. It also introduces random, crazy crap from time to time, like the character who is seemingly able to drink jet fuel. When a game sticks with an otherwise realistic milieu and then throws in something like this, I just roll my eyes and disengage. If the game doesn’t care about its own world’s consistency, why should I?

However, there are things to like about MATAC. The detective PC carries a notebook to which the game automatically appends any relevant information that the PC encounters. This device is both useful and well-implemented. (Shades of Madame L’Estrange And The Troubled Spirit, another game set in Australia with an investigative PC who carries an automagically-growing notebook.) The prose is clean and clear, and the game is free of horrible bugs. Mind you, there are still plenty of run-of-the-mill bugs — discoveries that can be repeated ad infinitum, dialogue that repeats weirdly, and so forth. I’d guess that MATAC is untested or minimally tested. Still, if you’re a member of the club it parodies, you’ll probably have a great time with it. If you aren’t, I’m afraid I can’t recommend it.

Rating: 6.0

Blue Chairs by Chris Klimas [Comp04]

IFDB page: Blue Chairs
Final placement: 2nd place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Chris Klimas! Now there’s a name from out of the mists. Klimas released a game called Mercy in 1997 that garnered rave reviews for its writing and its pre-Photopia puzzleless design. (In fact, it was nominated for that year’s Xyzzy awards in both story and setting.) Then, he contributed a little fable called Once to the Textfire hoax, and disappeared shortly thereafter.

Now he’s returned, and what a welcome return it is — Blue Chairs is not only his best work, it’s the best game I’ve played so far in this comp. Klimas has a hold of something very powerful — interactive fiction steeped in surrealism and symbolism. This sort of thing has been tried before, but Blue Chairs is the best realization of it that I’ve seen. At the beginning of the game, the PC ingests a powerful hallucinogenic drug. True, you have the choice not to do so, but if you make that choice, the story winds up in a dead end, albeit an intriguing and well-executed dead end. This sort of thing always feels a bit like a sucker punch to me, especially when the only real choice is followed up with a “why in the world did you do that?” sort of message as it is here, but the game is so wonderfully crafted that I forgave it immediately.

The z-code “special effects” that Blue Chairs uses to represent the drug taking hold are very trippy and extremely effective, and from that point forward the game slides brilliantly between dream and reality. IF is an amazingly powerful vehicle for this kind of writing, because you’re not just reading about someone’s reality shifting around him — in a certain sense, those shifts are actually happening to you as you traverse the game’s world. Blue Chairs got so deeply into my head that when someone interrupted me while I was playing, I felt as if I was the one dreaming, as if the intrusion of reality into my game session was just as sharp and unexpected a lurch as the sudden hallucinations that happen to the PC. What makes these hallucinations so powerful, I think, is the fact that they’re full of compelling symbols and archetypes, mixed with totally ordinary objects. In this way, they really do feel like dreams. Blue Chairs‘ heady blend of symbol and story got its hooks deep into my psyche. It blew my mind. I love when that happens.

The psychedelic design was my favorite thing about the game, but a close second was the writing. Blue Chairs does an outstanding job of creating an utterly convincing PC, showing us the world as described by that character, then fracturing his world all to hell, capturing the interrelated parts of his personality like collecting hurricane-blown leaves. At the end, I felt like I really knew Dante. (Yeah, the PC’s name is Dante Hicks, and not only does he share a first and last name with the lead character in Kevin Smith’s Clerks, he also spends the entire game searching for a girl named Beatrice, a beautiful collision of high and low allusion.)

I don’t know that I had too much respect for Dante, but more on that a little later. There were so many sublime turns of phrase, so many funny moments, that my game transcript is littered with “ha”s and “whoa”s and “very nice”s. The game’s implementation was strong, too. Most actions were reasonably anticipated, often with hilarious or terrifying results. I only found one problem, but unfortunately it was quite a doozy. Late in the game, I was working on a puzzle and had come very close to the solution, but not quite hit it. A look at the in-game hints set me straight, and off I went to solve it. Except… the solution didn’t work. Near as I can tell, some kind of bug makes that puzzle unsolvable, which came as a crashing disappointment to me. In a game as strong as this one, a serious bug is all the more unexpected.

Luckily, Blue Chairs‘ design is open-ended enough that even an unsolvable puzzle didn’t prevent me from finishing, though the time limit nearly did. I just barely got done within the two hour window, and towards the end I was opening hints liberally, because I very much wanted to complete the game before rating it. There are multiple endings, too, though they’re nowhere near simple enough to be classified as “winning” or “losing.” (I’m about to discuss those endings in general terms — nothing too spoilery, but you might want to skip the rest of this review if you’re particularly spoiler-sensitive.)

By the time I saw the endings, I was feeling pretty ambivalent about the game’s main character. Right after Dante swallows the drug in the game’s first scene, here’s what it says:

It seems like now would be an excellent time to reflect why you, once a consistently above-average student full of ambition and love, just bought an unknown but almost certainly illegal substance from a stranger and drank it without a second thought.

A fine question indeed, and the game resists the idea of an answer, insisting that there’s nothing in Dante’s life to explain his rootlessness and ennui, that it “just happened, one second at a time.” That being the case, the sort of slacker malaise that Dante exudes is all the more unsympathetic — it’s tough to feel sorry for somebody who has led an incredibly privileged life, free of hardship, but still manages to be desperately unhappy just because he thought things would be so much more shiny, so much more interesting.

Blue Chairs calls itself “a chance to change,” but leaves it up to us to decide which ending really constitutes the change. I think it’s a pretty sure bet that it’s not the one where a soft-focus lens suddenly snaps onto Dante’s life, where the whole thing turns into a Thomas Kinkade painting. That one felt like the ending of Rameses to me, an insistently perfect fantasy that fulfills the PC’s wishes, wishes that have been unrealistic from the start. I’m not sure the other one is any better, though. There’s a kind of letting go to it, but I’m not sure that it’s letting go of the right thing.

Dante comes to a kind of peace with his inaction, but I’m not convinced he’s dropped the binary thinking, the idea that there’s something perfect just beyond his grasp, and that without it, everything is worthless. I think he still may be lost, because as long as he’s locked in that stark dualism, the next illegal substance from a stranger won’t be that far away. Like I said, I rushed through the end — maybe there are other paths I didn’t find. But from what I saw, Dante may not have a chance to change after all. Anyway, that’s just what I thought. You should really play Blue Chairs and think about it a while yourself.

Rating: 9.5

[Postscript from 2021: Blue Chairs was the last parser game Klimas wrote, but he wasn’t done with IF yet, not by a long shot. In 2009, he created Twine, a parser-less IF authoring tool that has arguably had the biggest impact on the IF Comp, and indeed the broader interactive fiction world, of anything since Inform. He’s created a number of other games too.]