Comp05, >INVENTORY

Waldo’s Pie by Michael Arnaud [Comp05]

IFDB page: Waldo’s Pie
Final placement: 18th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’ve played an awful lot of amateur IF, and that experience has changed me as a player. Where once I might have been easily swept up in a story, now I tend to be more robotic — methodically checking directions in case one wasn’t mentioned, examining every noun in every description, and often obdurately ignoring blatant story cues from the game, to make sure I don’t miss something crucial but under-clued. So it’s to the credit of Waldo’s Pie that I found myself emotionally involved very quickly, rushing along in character rather than acting like an automaton. The game casts the PC as a former clown, who is now just “concerned and loving parent, trying to fulfill a promise to your children.” That promise is to attend the circus, so when the circus suddenly shuts down, and the two boys disappear in an attempt to go to it anyway, well, I guess my own parental instincts kicked in, and I immediately dropped everything to set off after them.

I was pleased to find that the game handled this very smoothly, probably because that’s what it wanted me to do anyway. In those initial moves, Waldo’s Pie gave the impression of being able to handle whatever a frantic parent might do while searching for missing children. That is, up until I tried to ask an NPC about the boys, and got this:

I don’t know if you mean the boys, the any my two missing boys or the boys.

Whoa! There is so much wrong with this — apparently Alan surpassed the usual TADS disambiguation between identical items to throw in another grammatically mangled version of the topic, and on top of that randomly subtracted letters from the transcript it made of the response. (I added them back in for the quote above.) Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t actually refer to any of those things when rephrasing the question.

Well. Even setting aside bizarre responses that are probably caused by Alan rather than the author, the PC seems to have suffered some brain damage. He supposedly worked on a circus at the game’s main locale for many years, but has no memory of it. In fact, he encounters his own house, which he dimly remembers, but not so much that he doesn’t still have to solve puzzles to make anything work inside it. And once in the parlor, his perceptions get even stranger:

> S
In the Parlor
This is the parlor, a small and cozy room. There is a paisley easychair -- and someone sitting in it!

[…]

> X CHAIR
You focus your eyes on the person in the chair. There's something familiar about him... wait! You could never forget your best friend on Wheewhistle Island -- it's Boffo! And he is asleep in the chair, tossing and snoring rather fitfully.

What a strange way to perceive one’s experience, and as it turns out, there actually is a narrative reason for it. Finding that out bolstered my confidence in the game, but unfortunately it didn’t come to light until I’d run across several more problematic aspects. I ended up turning to the walkthrough about 45 minutes in, because I seemed to be out of options, only to discover that there was an object available whose description led me to believe it was attached to the landscape. Then I got a little further, and had to get myself unstuck again, this time based on a description that may have been culturally influenced — what the game calls a kitchen cabinet, I would have called something like a hutch, the difference being whether it’s freestanding or bolted to the wall.

Meanwhile, there are places where the game oddly short-circuits typical IF mechanics, likely out of a reluctance to implement them. This isn’t exactly a problem, per se, but it functioned as a barrier for me, given that it ran against the grain of my experience. Similarly, there’s quite a lot of realism in certain ways (for example, smooth management of a bulky inventory item) and absolutely none in other ways (you emerge from being covered head-to-toe in mud with no change in the PC’s description and no changes to carried items.) In addition, the game is kind of all over the place tonally — creepy moments of missing children superimposed on silly names like “Freeky Forest” or “Whoopdeville”.

When I finally got to the end, it all felt a little anticlimactic, especially since the rescue of the boys, which had motivated me so much at the beginning, ended up happening in the background, barely even mentioned in the ending text. As with the rest of Waldo’s Pie, it had definite strengths, and I wanted to like it a lot more than I did — both technical flaws and authorial choices got in the way.

Rating: 7.2

FutureGame ™ by Anonymous as The FutureGame Corporation [Comp05]

IFDB page: FutureGame
Final placement: 33rd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here we have a little joke. Not a game, not really. There’s a setup, and then there’s a punch line, or if we’re being generous, a selection of punch lines. But really they’re pretty much the same punch line, with maybe some micro-jokes embedded in their differences.

With a game, I try to avoid spoilers. With a joke, anything beyond the premise is a spoiler. So here’s the premise: there’s this business, and it has taken an absurdly business-y approach to crafting a successful IF game. Think you can guess the punch line? You are probably right!

Was it funny, though? Mildly. There’s some wit in the initial paragraphs, and I said “Heh” the first time I saw the punch line. I kind of saw this experience coming when I noticed that the entire game is 11 KB.

It’s a bit hard to rate this, as it’s really a completely different thing than almost all the other stuff I’m rating on the same scale. Super short. Kinda clever. Briefly funny. Not a game. So, maybe let’s call it a…

Rating: 3.1

Sabotage on the Century Cauldron by Thomas de Graaff [Comp05]

IFDB page: Sabotage on the Century Cauldron
Final placement: 23rd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

This game’s opening text suggests using the CREDITS command, and that command responds with a list that shouts out “My English teachers at VLEKHO”, which was apparently a Belgian university back in 2005. When somebody credits their English teachers, I start to worry that I’m going to be facing a game with broken English, but Sabotage is actually fine on this count. There are little typos and errors here and there, but I’ve seen plenty of games by native speakers whose English is much worse. There are some descriptions, turns of phrase, and explanations that struck me as a little odd, but those were at least mechanically correct, albeit baffling.

No, where this game really spins out is its tone. At the beginning, the PC wakes up in a spaceship sleeping cabin, naked and inexplicably “covered in dirty oil” (unless this is one of those turns of phrase, and the game just means to say something like “grimy” or “grungy”.) He’s yelled at by a comically inept character called “Captain Paddywhack”, who then immediately exits. There’s a bedside note that says “Note to self: sabotage the ship, return to earth, and get Spaika!!” Spaika is apparently the PC’s dog, and later on it turns out that the PC is some kind of mental patient, which I suppose would explain the otherwise bizarre behavior of writing an incriminating note to yourself and leaving it lying around.

The other document available at the game’s start says this:

‘You are one lucky shkhamooh! You have won a 98% FREE VIP evacuation flight to Huhubahubbalah! Since earth has become a truly miserable place, this is undoubtedly the happiest moment of your life.

…and so forth like that. Okay — “Paddywhack”, “skhamooh”, “Huhubahubbalah” — this game is going to be very silly. And it is, for quite a while, not to mention tiresomely juvenile. There are a LOT of bathrooms and toilets, including one wacky scenario where the PC actually becomes a toilet (in a dream). After you shower the dirty oil off yourself, there are no towels, but instead a button you press that makes big hands grab you and pull you into a compartment where you’re blow-dried, like some kind of nude Dr. Seuss or Jetsons scene.

But the aforementioned sabotage requires setting a bunch of bloodthirsty (and rather poorly described) monsters loose on the ship, and suddenly the game lurches into survival horror territory, with gory death scenes, bloody handprints, bodies scattered on the floor, and so forth. You have to fight for your life multiple times, decide whether to kill your closest ally in order to get back to Earth, and inject yourself with “disinfectant” to cure infection of your wounds. (I’m guessing this means antibiotics, since it was made before the days when our head of state thought maybe injecting bleach would be a good idea.)

These tones do not work well together, and neither one was done terribly effectively. Separately, they both feel like approaches that teenage boys might find fun, but I can’t believe even that audience would enjoy this weird melange. Of course, even if they did, they’d probably trip over the numerous implementation problems in this game. There’s a room with an exit to the west that’s described as an exit to the east. There’s an absolutely infuriating inventory limit, which at one point in the survival horror section made me choose between weapons, medicine, and light. There are lots of state-tracking failures, resulting in things like somebody who has gotten medicine continually asking for it, or a message after taking a dead guy’s walking stick that says, “He falls down.” (He was already lying on the floor.)

Then there’s the message that just made me stop playing. I was already at two hours, but I felt like I was pretty close to the ending, and by that point I was going straight from the walkthrough (which is more like suggestions for a walking tour), so I thought I’d power on to the end, until I found myself once again attacked by a monster, right next to the monster I’d already shot. The monster has a silly name, so I’m just going to substitute “[monster]” in the exchange that followed:

>shoot [monster] (with the ZXQ-239 laser gun) Which [monster] do you mean, the dead [monster], or the [monster]?

>[monster] Let's try it again: Which [monster] do you mean, the [monster], or the dead [monster]?

Oh, TADS. It’s been years, and I didn’t miss that behavior one bit. Because I know this to be a notorious TADS error, I’m not inclined to blame the author for it, but at the same time, in combination with everything that had come before, it was more than enough to make me quit the game for good.

Rating: 5.2

Psyche’s Lament by John Sichi and Lara Sichi [Comp05]

IFDB page: Psyche’s Lament
Final placement: 21st place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Psyche’s Lament bills itself as “An Interactive Geek Myth”, which in the world of comp entries could either be a very amusing typo or a clever turn of phrase. Having played through the game, I’m convinced it’s the latter, because language and concept are strong suits here. The premise is that you play Psyche, who famously marries Cupid but is never allowed to see him. When her curiosity overcomes her and she lights a lamp in their bedroom, he flees and she must fulfill a series of seemingly impossible tasks set by Cupid’s mother, Venus. (The game substitutes Aphrodite, but Psyche’s story comes from a Roman source, not a Greek one. Or a geek one.)

The way the game sets up this story shows more cleverness, as Aphrodite gives Psyche her first task, counting out every seed from a huge heap:

As you come back to your senses, you see your mother-in-law (Aphrodite herself!)towering over your prone figure, sneering and slashing open a huge sack with a flick of her perfect nails. Where are you? What is she saying? It seems you’ll never leave this place until you can carry out an easy task: tell her how many seeds she just sent flying. The words seep through your mind as she storms out, leaving you alone to repent at leisure.

The words “repent at leisure” are well-chosen here, as they call to mind the second half of a saying that begins, “Marry in haste…” I’m not sure how much haste was involved in Psyche’s marriage, but its conditions clearly weren’t sustainable.

All in all, it’s a promising beginning! Unfortunately, things start to fall apart once the “geek” side of the story begins to express itself. This game wants to substitute mechanical devices for the more classical solutions Psyche finds to her problems, and while this approach is seemingly very well-suited to IF, it falls prey to numerous implementation issues.

First, the mechanical objects are described just a little too vaguely, and responses to interacting with them don’t really get to the heart of the matter either. For instance, there’s an object that’s supposed to fit into a slot, but the game’s description of that object gives no indication of its size. The way it was described, I was envisioning something in the nature of a bathroom scale, and when I tried to connect parts of it to the small object with the slot, I kept getting messages along the lines of “It’s too hard to hold the [part] steady in its current position.”

In hindsight, this was clearly trying to get me to put tab A in slot B, but between the vagueness of the object description and the vagueness of the failure message, that didn’t even register with me as a possibility, so I kept trying to steady things on the ground, et cetera, before finally consulting the walkthrough and discovering that in fact what I thought was like a bathroom scale was more like a credit card.

Then, once I’d gotten past that hurdle, I did some fiddly circuit assembly and came up with a machine that could count the seeds. Which, when I pressed “go”, it did… printing out ten lines of output for every seed! This was insane, but bizarre in a different way was the fact that there were only like 5 dozen seeds. Psyche could have counted them by hand much, much more easily than all the rigmarole she went through, and she should not have been intimidated by such a small pile to begin with.

A similar mechanical puzzle is at work for the second trial, and this one went even more wrong for me. I wired up another circuit, set it going, and… put the game into an endless loop! It went through over 300 iterations before I decided that it was never going to stop. This was a surprising new way for a game to become unwinnable, and while it was funny, it did not win Psyche’s Lament any points from me.

The last puzzle is the most bewildering of all, but it didn’t matter, because by this point I had fully lost trust in the game and was going straight from the walkthrough. I still appreciated getting to uncover little sparkles in the text, but on the whole I found it a disappointing experience, and wished that the game had stuck with a little more Greek (or Roman, even), a little less geek.

Rating: 4.1

Mortality by David Whyld [Comp05]

IFDB page: Mortality
Final placement: 12th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

At its outset, Mortality makes a really big deal of how it isn’t for kids, indicating perhaps what its author expects the default IF game and audience to be, even in 2005. We are fairly warned that there won’t be “singing elves, saving the world and maybe a treasure hunt or two”. The help text describes it instead as “essentially an adult game”, and “more adult than not”. This feels like a strange bit of equivocation, as if it’s not confident in just outright labeling itself a game for adults, but as I played through, I found that the hedging was appropriate. While Mortality certainly has more than its share of (in the game’s words) “violence, bad language and scenes of a ‘questionable’ nature”, it’s not exactly aimed at adults either.

Rather, I’d associate it with the attitudes of a stereotypical teen boy, and kind of a gross one at that. There’s the protagonist who drives a Corvette, who “has slept with women of all colours, all nationalities, all races, from one side of the globe to the other”, who’s great with his fists and isn’t afraid to kill. There’s the love interest, who is always described as “ravishing”, or “the most stunning creature”, or “a truly radiant creature”, and so on. There’s rampant racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Every major character is thoroughly unlikeable, and the story itself is basically “noir with magic”, but minus any subtlety to the themes or development of the characters. There are numerous moments which adults (or at least this adult) would find eyerolling or outright offensive.

On top of this, the game is barely IF. There are bunches of cutscenes, or scenes where the interaction boils down to “press a key” or “do the only action we’ll let you do.” In the parts that are interactive, the implementation can be kind of screwy. For instance, you’re startled by a noise in the night, and jump up from bed to investigate. “X me” in this scene results in, “I am Steven Rogers, forty years of age. Ex-policeman, ex-SAS, ex-army. I am dressed in my usual clothes.” First, yeah, the PC inexplicably has the same name as Captain America, which I found pretty distracting. But also, he apparently sleeps in his “usual clothes”? There is a moment where the PC switches bodies with someone else, but “X me” spits back that same exact description. Come on.

My favorite wacky implementation moment was when the PC was hidden in a corner, waiting to ambush somebody. I took inventory and experienced this:

I am carrying a accident item and a blib.

X ACCIDENT ITEM I see nothing special about the accident item.

X BLIB I see nothing special about the blib.

An accident item (sorry, “A accident item”) and a blib? The scene is brief, those items never come into play (that I could tell), and they’re never mentioned again. Perhaps they were some kind of internal tracking mechanism that the game didn’t mean to reveal, but for some reason put into the PC’s inventory? My thought was, “This game has gone round the bend.”

My least favorite wacky implementation moment? The fact that the PC kept finding himself in chairs or beds, but Adrift cannot understand the command “get up”. I kept needing to stand, and the game and I kept doing this dance:

GET UP Take what?

Grrrrr.

Finally, there is the ending. My playthrough ended with me in a dark void, the game repeating over and over again, “All about me is the endless darkness of death. I have failed. I am undone.” Mind you, it still offers a prompt and pretends to be interactive at that point, but unless I was missing something clever, this was just “*** You have died ***”, but without the resolution. I hit this ending after a loooong non-interactive “dialogue” scene in which there kept being only one dialogue choice at each “branch”. How could I have avoided the “endless darkness” ending? I had no idea, so I turned to the walkthrough.

Except, the walkthrough is just a game transcript from a particular playthrough, not all that different from my own. (Really, the game is so minimally interactive that it couldn’t be all that different from my own.) What actions make the difference between one ending and another? It was a mystery. So I turned to the PDF which comes with the game. It suggests, “if you’re not adverse to some serious spoilers that might otherwise ruin the game for you, type the word cheat and see what happens.” I think you mean “averse”, not “adverse”, but okay!

CHEAT Try something else. That command is not one needed for this adventure.

Hey, thanks for that spoiler warning. It really preserved the surprise of that response. Later on, the PDF explains that Stephanie (the love interest NPC) is the key, and that there’s a hidden variable that tracks her state — keep that variable high enough for the better endings. Also, by default this variable is hidden, “but typing in the reveal command will display its current value.” Interesting!

So I typed “reveal”. I was not given the value of the variable! Instead, the game spit out the entire walkthrough, which, you’ll remember, is a full playthrough transcript. Or rather, it tried to do that, but seemingly ran out of gas about 90% of the way through. Until it did that, I thought I might mess around with different conversational choices and such to see what they did to the Stephanie state, but after that “hint” also failed, I decided I was done.

Mortality has some redeeming qualities. It’s an attempt at very story-heavy IF, and in some moments finds the balance between keeping the story on track and allowing the feeling of interactivity. The idea of choosing an ending based on how well you’ve kept a character happy is kind of cool (if a bit reminiscent of Galatea). The writing is, as the game might aver, “more error-free than not”, and does a good job of involving the senses, although a “smell” or “listen” command might not line up with what a description has said.

But overall, this is an unpleasant story populated with despicable characters, not really interactive enough to be interesting as a game, and burdened with an implementation that is not only shaky throughout, but doesn’t even fulfill the basic promises of its documentation. My experience with it went from annoying to puzzling to very annoying, and I’m glad to have it behind me.

Rating: 3.7

Hello Sword by Andrea Rezzonico [Comp05]

IFDB page: Hello Sword
Final placement: 30th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

There are two separate Hello Sword games in the Comp05 download: hs_ita and hs_eng, which apparently signify the Italian and English versions of the game. Yet, when I fired up hs_eng, the first full screen of text was a quote box, all in Italian. I thought maybe I’d accidentally clicked the wrong file, but then the quote got translated into English… sort of. Here’s the “translated” version:

And me, I’m who live at this point on my counted days,
who have dull dreams, who have fear, also I…
And me, I’m who go away just with these hands
to dyke the limits between the truth and the unreality…

To “dyke the limits”? Uh-oh. Then we get some introductory text that’s all, “You hasn’t the will-power”, and “today is one of the most hottest day of the month”, and “Altough that”, and “The guilty of all?”, and “read the note that Julius leaved.” Yeah, it’s immediately apparent that this review will be getting the “broken english” tag.

The English is so broken, in fact, that I quickly began thinking that maybe I could approach the game like For A Change — something whose language is so barely comprehensible that it melts your brain a little bit, but whose askew diction can be fun in itself. And there are moments where that is true! There’s a room description that includes the sentence, “A little square from that branch off four roads, which conduct to the four cardinal ways.” That feels a little bit like the “mobiles” of For A Change. Or how about this one?

Independence Street
In this street there are a lot of buildings, that – though impede the transit of the wind – almost guarantee a little shade. In this road, in addiction to the great number of houses, there are also a pub when you often spend your evenings and a stationer’s shop where you bought pens and pencils in times of low school.

“The transit of the wind” and “times of low school” are almost poetic in their brokenness. On the other hand, “in addiction to the great number” could work wonderfully if the substitution actually added anything, but alas, it remains only comical and sad. And that’s where my sympathetic strategy breaks down. See, Dan Schmidt knew exactly what he was doing when he broke the English of For A Change, and the linguistic changes worked towards the game’s overall artistic goals. Not so here. Instead, the author pleads innocence in the INFO text, similar to Chronicle Play Torn:

I’m absolutely acquainted with the great number of errors and incomprehensible expressions that crowded this adventure (by the way, I ask you to signal them to me), but I hope you at least appreciate the huge effort I made for you.

Sorry, but: NOPE! I sure don’t, because that effort did not result in anything good. As I said in the CPT review, I want to read good stories, not understandable excuses. And here’s the other problem: even setting aside the many, many, many language problems (the “signaling” of which would comprise hours and hours of work), this is not just a game in broken English. It’s a broken game in broken English.

There are guess-the-verb situations, pretty much impossible to pass without a walkthrough. (A better-written game might have laden the prose with clues that would trigger the correct verb, but this is not that game.) There are far-fetched solutions that the game itself keeps trying to discourage until they work. There’s the old Hitchhiker’s Guide trick of descriptions lying to you until you interrogate them repeatedly.

And finally — well, not finally, more like halfway through, but it works like a finale — the walkthrough itself fails. Even typing in commands literally from the walkthrough, even correcting those walkthrough commands that the game itself can’t parse (like “south-west”), I came upon a situation where the PC got thrown in jail and my game ended no matter what. And when that happened, dear reader, I was done.

Rating: 2.9

The Sword of Malice by Anthony Panuccio [Comp05]

IFDB page: The Sword of Malice
Final placement: 28th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

The Sword of Malice is not a good game, but it is instructive, in that it provides several excellent examples of potential pitfalls that designers can and should avoid. So in the spirit of making these reviews useful, I’m going to look closely at one of those pitfalls to explain what makes it problematic. This is also the moment where I’d encourage the author to try again, but it’s been 19 years at this point, and the IF ship has clearly sailed for Anthony Panuccio.

So let’s talk about randomness. Randomness is one of my favorite things, personally, and it can be put to excellent use in an IF game — random atmospheric messages or NPC behavior, all the way up to random events that can significantly affect the story. But randomness can also be a major source of frustration when it’s misused, and a classic type of that misuse occurs in examining a volume of similar things. This comes up a couple of times in Sword, first in the pages of a diary. Try to read that diary, and here’s what happens:

>read journal "Day 26 - ...the ritual was simplistic in nature. By simply touching the beast (the rest has been water smudged)..."

>g "Day 5 - ...I have been caught. On my return trip from the faraway lands, the Altari caught me. Let's hope they do nothing they will regret..."

>g "Day 26 - ...the ritual was simplistic in nature. By simply touching the beast (the rest has been water smudged)..."

>g "Day 57 - ...the Altari have gone mad! For some reason they have begun ruthlessly torturing me all day and all night. For being such a righteous race that they claim to be, they certainly don't show it. They would seem more at home with some of 'our' prison guards...."

This is not how reading works! Sure, you don’t want to write an entire journal inside your IF game — that makes sense. But in no universe would somebody open a journal, read a couple of sentences on page 26, then flip to page 5 and do the same, then read the same part of page 5 again, then the same part of page 26 (especially if it was water-smudged and unreadable in the first place!), then part of page 57, and so on, randomly bopping around the journal. (I’m simplifying here by pretending each day takes up a page.)

As a player, it quickly becomes apparent that the game isn’t willing to play straight with me, and wants to instead act as though my character doesn’t know how to read good. That could be a character trait, of course, but you have to establish it much more clearly than this. In addition, knowing that the game is picking random entries opens up the possibility that there is key information I need to extract from the journal, but I may not be able to reach it, depending on how the dice fall.

Part of this issue could be addressed by removing entries from the pool of random pages once they’ve been read. But I would argue that even then, this method of reading just makes no sense, especially reading something chronologically arranged like a journal. Randomness doesn’t belong in this part of an IF game. If something makes sense in a sequence, provide it in a sequence.

This issue crops up again later in the game, when the PC is rummaging for supplies before going on a quest. There’s a roomful of potions, and searching them looks like this:

>x potions Many potions fill one wall of the armoury. You scan the potions and find...

...a "Potion of Cursing". $#%!&$&(*$#*

>get potion You can't see any such thing.

>get potion of cursing You can't see any such thing.

>x potions Many potions fill one wall of the armoury. You scan the potions and find...

...a "Potion of Equilibrium". Your balance isn't that bad.

>g Many potions fill one wall of the armoury. You scan the potions and find...

...a "Potion of Indecisiveness". Hmmm...to take or not to take?

Oh, okay, so it’s just a bunch of jokes. Except, as I found out after concluding I can’t trust the game and therefore turning to the walkthrough, it isn’t! There is one potion in this random mishmash that is extremely helpful, but the rest aren’t even treated as valid objects. What’s more, though I don’t show it in this excerpt, they repeat just like the journal entries did.

In a way, this is even worse than the journal. It’s one thing to prevent me from methodically searching a book for information, but to prevent me from obtaining a useful item just because I don’t know how to search a pile of stuff and set the useless things aside? No. And the fact that the game doesn’t even treat the non-useful potions as implemented objects at all gives me the clear message that none of them will be useful, which turns out to be false. Designers, please don’t do this. Randomness isn’t completely out of place here, but a) treat objects as real, even if you’re not going to let me take them, and b) don’t repeat objects that the interaction has already established to be useless. Give me enough feedback to keep me searching.

There are many more object lessons (as it were) from The Sword of Malice, but treating them all at this level of depth would make this review much more of an effort than the game earns. (Arguably, it already is.) So I’ll just quickly list out a few more thoughts:

Move beyond Dungeons and Dragons. I love D&D — I’m a player and a big fan. But it is its own thing, an established set of mechanics, and your text adventure (short of going full Baldur’s Gate) will never be D&D. It’s not helped by lazy lifting like “wearing full plate armour and brandishing a large polearm” or “The skeleton has 9 hitpoints remaining.”
If you’re going to forbid something, give a good reason. Despite being an off-brand D&D simulator, this game will not allow you to pick up weapons, stating, “Swords, axes, polearms, and other various weapons are made available here for acquisition. For your quest, however, you do not need these weapons.” Same thing with armor. This despite the fact that later there is a full-on combat encounter with a skeleton, where I very much could have used those weapons and armor.
Have some moral awareness. From the game’s very first word (“War!”), it frames a moral universe in which horrible people are grasping for power, and the PC is one of those people, yet at no point does it seem to subvert that point of view at all, or show any awareness that this is a problematic way to proceed through the world. I read and listened to the history of the PC’s “race”, and said, “We sound like the bad guys.” I wish the game had known that too.

That’s enough. There’s value in playing and reviewing games like this, if only to clearly codify how to do better. But that doesn’t make them fun.

Rating: 5.2

Tough Beans by Sara Dee [Comp05]

IFDB page: Tough Beans
Final placement: 5th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Tough Beans has, hands down, the most powerful opening of any Comp05 game I’ve played yet. Here’s the first screen:

Lambkin. Babydoll. Princess.

In the large oval mirror above your dresser you watch a pale hand drag a bubblegum-pink brush downward through a section of fine blond hair. It is your hand. It is your hair.

You can’t feel anything.

WHOO! That alone knocked my socks off, and then it was followed by several more screens in the same tone, depicting a PC who has been “swaddled in epithets” (what a turn of phrase!) like the 3 words that start the game, but who is starting to emerge from her doll-like stupor. (And in that spirit, let’s note here that the PC does indeed have a name: Wendy.) In fact, as we discover gradually, pieces of her have been in rebellion for a long time, but today is the day it all breaks.

Man, did I love this premise, and for the most part, Tough Beans really delivers, with several cool techniques for enhancing its narrative power. There’s that stunning intro, with multiple screens of text, each one of which blanks out the last before finally giving way to the game proper. We’ve seen that before in IF, and it’s used very well here.

There are the introspective flashbacks tied to otherwise ordinary game actions, memories from childhood that deepen our understanding of Wendy and how she got into her current situation. Sometimes, those flashbacks show us those rebellious parts of her, parts which have been dutifully squelched in support of her conformist ambitions, but which roar up to support the destroyer that emerges. This, too, is not a new technique in IF, but Dee does a marvelous job with them, writing vignettes of memory that are not only compelling on their own, but which tie elegantly to both the specific action that prompted them and the overarching themes of the game.

Then there’s something I don’t remember ever seeing, but which made for a really potent effect when it worked. Upon Wendy entering a new location, Dee will often hijack the initial room description to instead provide a little cut-scene, before then allowing the room description to, well, describe the room. Here’s an example from early in the game:

Living Room There is so much sunlight streaming in from the window over the sofa that you have to blink your eyes a few times before they are fully focused. When your vision is restored, you notice a red rubber chew toy peeking out from behind a pillow on the couch. Barkley! As if on cue, you hear a loud snuffling sound behind you. You turn around just in time to see Derek's beloved bull mastiff settle himself down in front of the entrance to the hallway. He proceeds to gnaw on his toy with gusto, completely ignoring you as usual...

Followed by a few more paragraphs setting up a puzzle. Look again, and we get:

Living Room The living room, like the bedroom, is still a work in progress. All the necessaries are here, however: you've got a couch, a couple shelves to hold Derek's books, a TV, and plenty of sunlight. A colorful braided rug covers the floor.

This moment really worked for me. It acknowledged that I’d changed locations, but instead of being like another room in a colossal cave, the new location instead functioned like another beat in Wendy’s story. My focus was immediately drawn to figuring out what to do with Barkley (who is not only blocking Wendy’s way but also gnawing on her shoe… ick.) It was only after the first few obvious actions failed that I took stock of the room proper, a progression which felt strongly mimetic to how a person’s actual thought processes might work in such a scenario. There were other times when the technique didn’t flow so freely for me, and I found myself wishing I could see the room without having to LOOK a second time, but for the most part, I was happy to be swept through the story as I moved through the world.

The game isn’t pure narrative — there are definitely puzzles, one of which was enough of a doozy that it sent me to the walkthrough. But in employing a deft compositional hand between depicting Wendy’s interior and exterior worlds, Tough Beans got me strongly invested in navigating through her challenges.

I successfully managed to do so, at least after that little trip to the walkthrough, where I found out that my stuckness was due to neglecting the fact that the game frequently implements descriptions for second-level objects, and it turns out sometimes they’re important. However, I only finished the game with about half the points, and here’s where the final innovation lives. Tough Beans, we learn, awards points for solving puzzles, but just as often it does so for finding opportunities to fully realize the character. As the walkthrough puts it, points are awarded “in situations where Wendy shows some backbone, spunkiness, cleverness, etc.”

I would say it’s even a little more nuanced than that, as at least one point comes from behaving in an adult, responsible manner, though several others derive from being a hellion. In any case, the game was sized well enough that I’d found the non-optimal winning solution by about 80 minutes in, and could then spend my remaining 40 minutes finding opportunities to make Wendy an even stronger version of herself. It’s an ingenious idea to have the points, at least in part, function as a character-themed “Have You Tried…?” section.

This didn’t work perfectly. I think the point awarding could have been done a bit more consistently — 10 points is too few for all the potentially relevant opportunities in the game — and I wish the walkthrough had just come out and told me how to score the points rather than coyly hinting. Moreover, I really missed the inclusion of some features that do (I think) come natively with Inform, such as a Full Score breakdown and notifications when I scored a point.

Similarly, there are just a couple of little bugs and some places throughout where the prose stumbles, often by missing a word or a punctuation mark. Nonetheless, I spent the whole game rooting for Wendy and rooting for Tough Beans, and was happy to see them both succeed in the end, even if they weren’t flawless. In fact, as the game’s excellent characterization so effectively declares, flawlessness is most emphatically not the point.

Rating: 9.5

The Colour Pink by Robert Street [Comp05]

IFDB page: The Colour Pink
Final placement: 6th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

The Colour Pink is one of those games that starts out with one premise and then wildly shifts gears into something else entirely. There’s nothing wrong with games like that. Heck, I even wrote one. But putting your players through a major shift incurs a responsibility, and that responsibility is to make it clear what is happening. You don’t have to do that immediately — it’s perfectly fine to let a mystery simmer and then have the solution coalesce, either slowly or quickly, at the very end or before that. But if you never explain what happened, your players are left sputtering, “Wait, but how come… what was the… why was everything, and then… WHAT???”

That was me at the end of The Colour Pink, a game which starts out sci-fi, then turns into fairy-tale/fantasy, then skids back to sci-fi at the last move (or doesn’t, depending on which ending you choose), but at no point makes it clear just what you’ve experienced. It seems like maybe you eat a hallucinogen, but apparently its effects can last forever, if you so choose? Oh, and the thing you eat has one set of effects immediately (and even some effects before you eat it, along the lines of compelling you to eat it… in some unexplained way) and then a different set of effects later? Unless the second part (the shift to fantasy) wasn’t a result of eating the thing at all, but is some other weird thing happening on the planet?

Also, there are missing people, and we never find out what happened to them. Did they turn into the animals that we meet in the fantasy land? Are they normal but we’re just experiencing them as animals? What is the War that the fantasy animals keep referencing? I guess there’s a wizard who does a thing to a princess, but what is that even about? Or is the princess not a person at all, but rather a hallucinatory projection of a missing item? There’s some whole thing at the sci-fi level about trying to create a (sci-fi) love potion, and what happens with that? Is it what causes us to be compelled to eat the hallucinatory (or whatever) food? Is the whole fantasy landscape a dream or something? Or are we sharing a dream with the missing people, and the PC is the only one who gets out? (In endings that exit it?) Why is everybody an animal except us?

Questions, questions, questions, and there are no answers forthcoming. I kept waiting for them, and they never arrived. This is a… I want to say “betrayal”, and that’s a highly charged word, so maybe it’s a little too much. It is a shirking of authorial responsibility. Now, I will own the fact that I played this game in two installments with about a two-month gap between them. Maybe my failure to understand what was going on is on me. But even in my first few moments with the game, I immediately found myself scrambling for answers, trying to get my bearings in the description of events. Here’s that introduction:

You are on an abandoned planet again. Not content with almost killing you the last time, the Captain has delegated you again to investigate another out-of-contact colony. Apparently you impressed him with your survival instincts, by evading thousands of insect-like creatures before the ship finally sent down enough people to wipe them out. Maybe your job description should just be renamed as the Expendable Explorer. Unfortunately, you have no choice but to obey the Captain’s orders.

An hour ago you were sent down into a thick jungle. When you made contact with the ship you found out that they had missed the clearing where you were supposed to land. The intervening hour was spent cutting through the energetic plant-life until you finally reached your destination.

Immediately following that, I wrote: Already confused. “When you made contact with the ship”… Wasn’t I sent down from the ship? I “found out that they missed the clearing” where I was supposed to land? Wouldn’t I have known that from the fact that I didn’t land in the clearing? What is my destination? The out-of-contact colony? Was that where the ship was supposed to land?

I mean, once each milieu settles in, there’s a bunch of running around and solving puzzles in a very familiar IF way, and taken on their own, they’re reasonably satisfying, but they’re a bit like ornaments hanging on an invisible Christmas tree. Sure, they’re fine and pretty, but nothing seems to connect them in any way, which makes everything feel arbitrary and baffling. Consequently, while I had fun at moments in the game, it kept accumulating narrative debt that it never paid off, so even with multiple endings available (and even a whole potential violent path, a la Undertale, that I never bothered to explore), I still felt kinda cheated when it was done.

Rating: 7.0

Vespers by Jason Devlin [Comp05]

IFDB page: Vespers
Final placement: 1st place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

I came to this game knowing it had won the 2005 IF Competition. That couldn’t be helped. I was detaching from the IF community in that year, after my kid was born in June, but I was still dialed in enough to know the name of the winning game. It just took me almost twenty years to actually play the thing, that’s all. Because I just looked at its IFDB page, I also know that it won a bunch of XYZZY Awards, and that it has achieved lasting respect, still making it onto a list of Top 50 all-time IF games in 2023.

Starting with that knowledge gave me a rather unfair (albeit unavoidable) set of biases. Playing an acclaimed game, at least for me, comes with a higher initial bar of expectations, and maybe a little less tolerance for mistakes. Lucky for me, Vespers delivers on its promise, and earns its kudos. The religious subject matter is pretty alien to me, and religious games have been offputting to me in the past, so I appreciated the author’s note that Vespers “isn’t a religious game: at least not in the sense of trying to convert anyone”, and that he himself is “not Christian and wasn’t raised Christian”. Another unfair set of biases on my part, I suppose, but those upfront announcements helped me relax my guard and put my trust in the game.

Once I did that, I found it a rich and immersive experience, albeit in a disturbing way. I don’t think I’ve seen a better use of quotation boxes, with the possible exception of Trinity, which pioneered them after all. I hope it’s not too spoilery to say that Vespers uses quote boxes as a way to showcase the PC’s internal dialogue, an inner voice which becomes increasingly askew from its moorings, and which we learn later may have been leaking out for quite some time.

Yes, we have an unreliable narrator here, and maybe even an entire unreliable milieu, in a way that’s again hard to talk about without being too spoilery. And yeah, it’s a 20-year-old game (nearly), but I still strive to keep these comp reviews spoiler-free, as they’re about discovery after all. I’m making an exception, though. Fair warning: mild spoilers follow for both Vespers and Photopia, because I think there’s a fruitful comparison there.

There’s a moment in Photopia when what you’ve witnessed in the beginning comes back around, but this time with loads more meaning attached, and an oppressive sense of fait accompli. There’s nothing you can do to change what happens — after all, you already saw it happen — and indeed one of the knocks on Photopia was an alleged lack of interactivity, given the unchangeable nature of its central event. But I would argue that the very real interactivity of that game attaches the player to the event, and to the characters affected by it, with much greater ease than a similarly plotted short story could. You may not always be in the driver’s seat, but events witnessed from the passenger seat can still have a very powerful effect.

Vespers doesn’t hop perspectives the way Photopia does, but it does start with a decision already made by the PC, and everything else in the game flows from that decision. As the game goes on, the consequences of that decision become more and more clear, and it is the PC’s job to reckon with those consequences as best he can, within his declared moral framework.

And here’s where the Catholic setting becomes phenomenally useful to the game’s project, because it turns out we are dealing with an original sin. In Vespers, the sin was committed by the PC, but before he was being controlled by the player. We must inherit the consequences of that sin, and proceed as a flawed man moving through a flawed world. It’s as if the game begins with “*** You have lost ***”, and then asks, “Now what?” Nevertheless, and also true to its theme, Vespers does offer the possibility of redemption, at least on a personal level, even if a tsunami of suffering has overtaken the world. The path to get to that redemption is a very narrow one, but I think that also rings true in a Medieval setting.

I found this a brilliant use of interactive fiction, verging on profound. I have a fundamental quibble with the “good” path (albeit one that might be addressed if I understood Catholic theology better), and I did find a few places where the language or the coding fell down, but overall it’s clearly a well-tested and well-crafted game, which has absolutely earned its place among the all-time great works of interactive fiction.

Rating: 9.8