Comp99, >INVENTORY, Page 2

The HEBGB Horror! by Eric Mayer [Comp99]

IFDB page: The HeBGB Horror
Final placement: 16th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Patti Smith. The Talking Heads. Blondie. Television. The Ramones. While the Sex Pistols and the Clash were spitting in the face of the bloated English rock establishment, the artists named above were leading a concurrent American punk revolution in New York City. The nerve center of the movement was a club called CBGB (standing, ironically, for Country, Blue Grass, and Blues), where all of these artists got their start before being launched on the national stage. This is the scene to which Eric Mayer pays loving tribute in his competition entry, an ALAN game called The HeBGB Horror!. You play Phil Howard, a musician dreaming of hitting the big time in NYC. You’re down to your last few bucks, and ready to take the bus back home, when you spy a chance to see the reunion of legendary (fictional) punk band The Laughing Kats at their famous stomping grounds, HeBGB. It sounds great, so why can’t you shake this feeling of nameless dread? The game combines the trappings of the Seventies New York punk rock scene with the sort of Lovecraftian pastiche that seems to have become all the rage in IF since the success of Anchorhead.

I’m an avid rock music fan, so the former theme grabbed me immediately. The Lovecraft stuff, on the other hand, gets old pretty fast. Mayer obviously knows and loves the music, and the emphasis is on the New York punk scene — these themes could have sustained a game easily on their own. As I played through The HeBGB Horror!, I found myself really enjoying the punk parts, and wishing that the various “eldritch horrors” and such could have been edited out. I’m not sure how much the game wanted to parody CBGB, or how much of an homage it intended for the Lovecraft bits to be, but I think it may have achieved the opposite of its ambition, as the music parts felt mainly like homage, while the Lovecraftiana, with its various generic rats, tentacles, and gibbering masses, felt more like a parody.

But hey, as the game itself reminds us at several points, it’s only a “three-chord” effort. Indeed, one of the most endearing things about HeBGB is the way it evokes the D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) spirit of punk, making a joyous noise even though it’s no virtuoso. The author reinforces this viewpoint by cautioning us in the credits that HeBGB “does not represent the real capabilities of the Alan Language but does demonstrate Alan’s amazing ability to allow someone who has never done an iota of computer programming of any kind to produce SOMETHING within a few weeks!” This is a very nice thing to say about a programming language, and in fact HeBGB is quite playable despite a lack of programming polish.

However, there are a number of things missing from the game that the average game programmer shouldn’t have to worry about at all. For example, the game offers no “undo” function, nor an “oops” verb. Some simple things run contrary to convention, such as a “” prompt that accepts only the Enter key, rather than the space bar or any random keypress. Some fairly basic verbs are missing, such as “throw”. I attribute these flaws to deficiencies in the ALAN libraries (or perhaps, in some cases, the ARUN interpreter) rather than a failing on the author’s part. It’s unreasonable to expect every game author to program conveniences like “undo” on their own. That’s what libraries are for, and by being such a complete game in lots of other ways, HeBGB demonstrates the limitations of ALAN — not the language, but the default shell given to potential authors.

What the author can control he provides quite well. Despite a few spelling and formatting difficulties, the prose in HeBGB (especially when it’s not doing a Lovecraft parody) combines a snappy sense of humor with strong descriptions. The plot is clever, allowing a good deal of exploration while never opening so wide that the story feels aimless. There are a number of good things about the design, including the fact that the game is carefully structured in such a way as to allow players a second or third chance to obtain items that they may have failed to notice or pick up the first time around. These chances are always well-integrated within the game, and feel natural rather than gratuitous. This design choice allows HeBGB to close off early sections of the map once their purpose is served while avoiding the trap of making the game unsolvable once those sections are unavailable to the player.

The puzzles, for the most part, are quite good, maintaining a high level of originality and (with one exception) escaping “guess-the-verb” syndrome. The one qualm I did have about the puzzles is that at several points, you must return to apparently unfruitful locations to obtain an object that wasn’t there before. The reasons given for the appearances of the objects certainly make sense, but from a gameplay standpoint it’s not very logical for a player to assume that visiting and revisiting empty locations will be rewarded. Moreover, some of the actions required to make the object appear in the empty location don’t seem to have very much causal influence. In other words, the action which puts the object in the formerly empty spot gives players little reason to guess that visiting that spot again will be worthwhile. These quibbles aside, I enjoyed HeBGB quite a bit, and while I was wishing for the conveniences granted by more sophisticated libraries, the roughness of the game was in keeping with its topic, and that resonance lent it an unexpected charm.

Rating: 7.7

Jacks Or Better To Murder, Aces To Win by J.D. Berry [Comp99]

IFDB page: Jacks or Better to Murder, Aces to Win
Final placement: 10th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Jacks or Better to Murder, Aces to Win is a great title. Based on that title, I expected the game to be a dark detective story in the Raymond Chandler mode. I thought perhaps there’d be a gambler who owed money to the mob, or shady dealings at a poker game, or a crime ring run out of a casino, or something to do with playing cards. This, however, turned out not to be the case. Instead, the game centers on an arcane hierarchical religion, which is never named. The head of this religion is called The Power, and divine authority spreads downward from there, pyramid-fashion, following the letters of the alphabet. The highest lieutenants are called “A”s, the next step down “B”s, and so on all the way down to E. Apparently these church officials spend most of their time engaged in Machiavellian scheming of how to claw their way up the stack, and to prevent threats from those below them. The PC is an A, an old hand at all the tricks and conniving that are necessary to survive in this structure, and therefore almost preternaturally aware of life-threatening situations. As the game begins, the old A believes that an assassination plot is afoot — as the game puts it, “You have the feeling you are being set up and that your chair should have a bull’s-eye painted on it.” It’s not the game I expected, but it’s an interesting premise nonetheless.

The results are mixed. The prose can get rather florid — long, long sentences one after another — but is mostly pretty good, and it can in fact be argued that the prose style matches the baroque structure it describes. I have more conflicted feelings about the design. In an earlier review, one where I was complaining about scenes that only make one option available, I asked “Why even give me a prompt at all?” It appears that Jacks is the answer to my question. At a number of junctures in the game, it only takes a very minor action, such as moving in a particular direction, to impel the PC to perform a long sequence of actions, all of which are out of the player’s control. In a way, this is fine, since most of the actions performed would be very difficult to communicate to an IF parser, not to mention difficult to guess. However, this design choice once again tips the balance away from interactivity. Every time the PC makes a bunch of independent choices, I feel more and more like I’m not really involved in the story, like I’m just there to hold up the cue cards so that the plot can continue.

Still, of all the minimally interactive games I’ve played in this year’s competition thus far, Jacks is one of the most successful. It’s worth examining the game more closely to find out why. For one thing, the milieu is involving enough that just seeing the plot unfold is interesting. This gives Jacks a leg up on games that are set in a cardboard cutout genre world, or whose plots are a string of nonsensical non sequiturs — even though I didn’t have much influence on the plot, I was interested in it. Another factor which helps to counterbalance Jacks‘ lack of interactivity is the fact that it doesn’t make its puzzles too difficult, and it allows for multiple solutions at the most important juncture.

When there is only one way to advance through the game, the action (and the fun) grinds to a halt pretty quickly if that route is difficult to find. Jacks never falls into this trap, instead opening the next scene from fairly minor actions on the part of the player (usually involving examining everything or doing the obvious thing with the few items to hand.) Moreover, at the one juncture where the action might be difficult to guess, the author wisely provides for a number of actions that will resolve the situation, and gives each one its own lengthy text. In fact, I was interested enough in the situation at that after I finished the game I consulted the walkthrough and tried out the alternate solutions. For each action, I was rewarded with a different series of clever machinations on the part of the PC.

Oh! How could I forget? Jacks also features a really cool technical feat, which makes for some very funny moments in the beginning of the game. In the opening scene, an E is making a lengthy speech that uses lots of words, and says basically nothing. The game accomplishes this effect through the use of a random doubletalk generator. Each turn, the E comes out with randomly generated phrases, all of which perfectly mimic the kind of empty speech that often fills long orations. A sample: “One part of the whole must be that you should sing each song as if it will personally show others each other.” The mechanism for this doubletalk generator is complex and masterful — frankly, it’s worth the download time just to see this thing in action. And you’ll have no trouble lingering in the first section, since the author has provided a number of things which must be examined before the action can continue. Jacks is another fairly non-interactive entry into this year’s competition, but through technical innovation, fresh milieu, and shrewd design, it partly makes up for what it lacks in gameplay.

Rating: 7.3

Death To My Enemies by Jon Blask as Roody Yogurt [Comp99]

IFDB page: Death To My Enemies
Final placement: 29th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

I guess this is another ifMUD in-joke game. I make this guess partly based on my interpretation of the included readme file, which suggests that the majority of the author’s support came from MUD denizens, and partly on the fact that I recognize a very few references in the game, like “Eeagh!” and “Awwwk, want cork nut!”, as being from the MUD. I already talked about this kind of game in my review of Pass The Banana, so I won’t rehash all that here. I will say that the ifMUD in-joke game is rapidly climbing my list of least favorite competition entry genres. Right now it’s hovering just below the simulated-house and learning-Inform genres. I don’t know, I guess it’s funny if you’re in on the joke (though maybe not — not being in on the joke, I wouldn’t know one way or another), but to me it’s just really boring. There were some jokes that didn’t feel like they required outside knowledge, but I didn’t find them very funny. In addition, I can only believe that the solution to the game is another kind of in-joke, because I can’t see any logical way that players could come up with it on their own. This makes Death a slightly worse offender than Pass The Banana — at least the latter game was solvable for a MUD outsider. For outsiders to solve this one, they’d have to engage in quite a bit of random guessing, and spend a lot of time trying to do things with barely implemented red herrings. Being such an outsider, this is what I did for about 15 minutes before I gave up and looked at the walkthrough. I didn’t have fun.

Add to these flaws the fact that Death has quite a few spelling and grammar errors, and some really ugly formatting (the game seems to have an aversion to blank lines). Also factor in that the readme suggests that the game makes heavy use of “WHO IS ” and “WHAT IS “, but the game almost never seems to recognize such questions, responding instead with another irritating nonsensical reference. Did I mention that the solution doesn’t make sense either? Let’s not forget the fact that the game offers several objects to play with, but most of them don’t offer the slightest trace of interactivity. There’s a bottle that’s “not something you can open.” There’s an eggplant that’s “plainly inedible.” There’s a dustbuster that’s “not something you can switch.” The list goes on. Anyway, put all these things together and you’ve got one pretty tedious interactive experience on your hands.

The author announces that he plans to put out a “hopefully less buggy version of the game” after the competition is over. This is a good idea, of course, but I think that even after such a version emerges, it will only appeal to a limited audience. Basically, if you hang out on ifMUD a lot, you might enjoy it. If, on the other hand, you’re like me… you probably won’t.

Rating: 2.0

Hunter, In Darkness by Andrew Plotkin as Dave Ahl, Jr. [Comp99]

IFDB page: Hunter, in Darkness
Final placement: 8th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

[Several sections of this review could be considered plot spoilers when viewed from the proper angle. You have been warned.]

Actually, Wumpus and Wumpus II are in ‘More Basic Computer Games.’ Which
has 84 games, and is indeed by David H. Ahl. Wumpus rules. All IFers
should play it. Indeed, play it before the competition so that you have
a sense of our collective roots. Then marvel at where we’ve come.”
— Adam Thornton, 9/18/99

Hmmm. I didn’t follow this advice, but I remember Hunt the Wumpus. It’s a classic computer game, but pretty primitive. It involves locating a target within a grid of rooms, avoiding deathtraps and teleportation traps (the latter of which was adapted for a clever, though irritating, tribute in Zork I). It is almost nothing like Hunter, In Darkness. And yet… And yet one wonders why Adam was exhorting us so enthusiastically to play this game, preferably before the competition. I suppose we’ll find out our answer soon enough. In the meantime, let’s examine the game before us. It is a marvelous game, gritty and atmospheric with writing and coding savvy to spare. It is a true “cave crawl”, with much of the action involving literally crawling through sections of a remarkable cave, rife with tight passages, underground pools, and dangerous rock formations. And it is also an update of Hunt the Wumpus… sort of. As in the original game, you play a hunter, armed with a crossbow and five bolts. You can smell your prey from several rooms away, and must struggle with dangerous pits and threatening bats. But that is where the similarity ends. Where Wumpus was bare, even abstract in its depiction of the cave, Hunter is rich with description. In fact, the levels of description can run so deep that the detail of the game becomes almost dizzying, as in the following example:

>L Narrow Ledge This ledge is barely two feet wide at most. You try not to feel like it's angled slightly outward. The pit stretches above and below you; but you can see no way to climb from here, either way. A rope hangs across the pit, a gentle arc well above your head. >X PIT BELOW You can make out the pit floor. It's only two or three body-lengths down; but the stone formations directly below you look vicious. >X FORMATIONS Sharp spires rise directly below you -- some chance result of dripping minerals and flowing water. If you try to descend farther, you'll slip and probably fall into them.

I have a terminology I’ve made up to talk about this sort of thing. In this terminology, first-level nouns are those nouns that are mentioned in room descriptions. Second-level nouns are those nouns mentioned in the descriptions of the first-level nouns. Third-level nouns are in the second-level noun descriptions, and so on. The deeper these levels go, the more detailed and immersive the textual world. Most text adventures don’t even fully cover the first-level nouns, but Hunter does, and often many of the deeper levels as well. The result is a cave environment that feels hauntingly, sometimes terrifyingly, real. I have crawled through a few caves in my life, all of which were much safer (thankfully!) than the cave depicted in Hunter; the game matched my experience quite accurately, adroitly capturing the spelunker’s combination of awe and fear.

Along with being extremely well written, Hunter is also brilliantly designed and implemented. I went through the game several times and not only did I find no bugs whatsoever, I also discovered that the game very cleverly allows multiple routes to the same puzzles. There aren’t many puzzles in the game, but those that exist are very good indeed, and quite original. They belong to that rare breed of puzzle that is perfectly integrated with the story and the environment, and is a great pleasure to solve because it requires lateral thinking within a very logical framework. I didn’t find any multiple solutions to them, though seeing the care with which this game was designed, I wouldn’t be surprised if some existed. In addition, there is at least one point at which I think you can make the game unsolvable, but the situation only comes up because almost every logical action is implemented. I kept finding myself surprised at just how many actions were accounted for. Even those that were disallowed were often disallowed with a message that was specific to the particular circumstances of the PC, and that sometimes gave a clue as to how to proceed. As impressive as all this was, I was even more wowed by the way that the game subtly arranges itself so that it appears to allow a very wide scope of action, but in fact moves the PC through a specific plot. I can think of several junctures where multiple choices are possible, all of which lead, very logically, to the same point. This is a game that clearly took great care with its design, extending the illusion of freedom a long way while maintaining a fairly specific structure.

Also, several rooms have initial descriptions which describe the experience of arriving in the room, and the features that are most salient at first. Once this description has been displayed, further looks at the room will stabilize into a more settled description, one which takes details into account and bears reading multiple times. Attention to detail like this just permeates the game, and makes it one of the most engrossing competition entries I’ve ever had the good fortune to play. Its origins do sometimes undercut it a bit, such as when the fearsome beast is first revealed as a Wumpus — the comical tone of the name jars against the serious and deadly atmosphere of the rest of the game. However, the contrast between the original Hunt the Wumpus and this game is amazing. It’s like the difference between a limerick and a Stephen King novel. Follow Adam’s advice — play Hunt the Wumpus (there are several versions available on the web) and then try Hunter, In Darkness. You too will marvel at where we’ve come.

Rating: 9.8

[Postscript from 2020: In response to my epigraph at the top, Andrew Plotkin wrote: “If you *didn’t* see that post, by the way, it’s because Adam cancelled it almost immediately.

He was a beta-tester, but he posted that on his own, without consulting me
first. I more or less blew my top at him, and he apologized and killed the
post.

I spent the next weeks worried sick that it might have Ruined The Effect
for some hapless player. Fortunately, the whole mess turned out to be
trivial next to the lack-of-walkthrough problem. Heh.”]

Chaos by Shay Caron [Comp99]

IFDB page: Chaos
Final placement: 19th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Most interactive fiction games use the second person voice, and make it clear from the outset that this is their mode. Think of “You are standing in an open field west of a white house,” or “You are Primo Varicella.” Chaos appears to follow in this tradition, describing a character named Captain Chaos but using the second person form of address several times in asides like “You know what I mean” or “you guessed it.” Admittedly, the “I” in the first phrase throws a bit of a spanner into the works, and a player might well have cause to wonder who the “I” is that’s apparently speaking. The parser? The author? Some sort of in-game narrator? For me, though, it went by so fast that I allowed myself to suspend that question. From the introduction, I presumed I was Captain Chaos’ sidekick, there to help him with a sudden power failure on his jerry-built hovercraft. But then I typed in my first command, and this is how it went:

> I Chaos has a Evil Overlord list.

What? But what’s in my inventory? After a few commands, I slowly began to understand that the game was responding to my commands as if they were guiding Captain Chaos himself, then describing the results referring to the Captain in the third person — “Chaos walks south”, “He picks up the screwdriver,” etc. What’s more, from time to time the Captain Chaos character will offer some commentary on the command chosen, relating tangential or backstory facts about the parts of the environment he encounters while being guided by the player’s commands. The more of this that goes on, the more prominent one question becomes: Who is the PC of this game? Apparently the introduction was addressing me — me the player, not some avatar within the story with whom I am expected to identify. And who is Captain Chaos addressing with his asides? Again, it’s the player. In a real sense, the player is the PC in Chaos. You, the player, control Captain Chaos with your commands, but he is aware of your presence, at least enough to make the occasional remark to you. And if all that’s not complicated enough, wait until he finds (or you find, or something) the technology that allows him to control another entity remotely.

This is all rather haphazardly done in this particular game, as evidenced by my confusion at the first few prompts. I found myself bumping into unexpected forms of address, and having to puzzle out exactly what was supposed to be happening, or at least what it seemed like was supposed to be happening. Moreover, many of the questions raised by these narrative choices, such as those I mentioned about the use of “I” in the introduction, are just never answered. In fact, there is no announcement of any kind — subtle, blatant, or otherwise — that Chaos will overturn a fundamental IF convention, and the result is a rather jarring feeling of displacement. The creation of this feeling doesn’t really seem to serve the story, at least not in any specific way I could determine.

Nonetheless, I found it quite interesting. I was reminded of other competition games which have fiddled with the narrative voice, such as Christopher Huang’s Muse and Graham Nelson’s Tempest. Both of these games took a slightly different approach, having the parser itself take on a character, speaking to the player in the first person and executing the player’s commands as if they were that character’s own actions. Tempest even complicated matters further by explaining that its player’s role is as “the magical will” of Shakespeare’s Prospero, guiding Ariel (the parser’s character) through the various scenes of the play. These tactics have a bit of a distancing effect on the player, setting identification at one remove and shifting the action from the player character to the parser character. Chaos, though it explains nothing of its strategy, actually creates one further remove by allowing neither a player character nor a parser character but another character altogether to be the focus of the action. Yet when this third character (third person, you might even say) speaks outward in the second person voice, it addresses the player (in a “Dear reader” sort of way) and brings the game and player closer together than almost any other IF I’ve seen.

Orchestrated strategically and used creatively, these techniques could make for a masterful, groundbreaking work of IF. Chaos isn’t that work, but its experimentation does open up some very interesting, and mostly unexplored, territory. Beside this, the plot of the game seems quite inconsequential. There’s a ship to be repaired, and various puzzles to solve, some required and some optional. These puzzles are decent, and the writing is passable, and although there are a number of coding problems, the game is at least finishable. It’s a bit of a throwaway, though, a mediocre competition entry except for the unique approach it takes, almost offhandedly, to forms of address in IF. I enjoyed thinking about Chaos more than I enjoyed playing it, but if the author’s next game explores the techniques employed here in a consistent, systematic, and clear way, the result will be well worth a few false starts.

Rating: 6.6

Erehwon by Rick Litherland as Josiah Pinkfoot [Comp99]

IFDB page: Erehwon
Final placement: 11th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Erehwon reminded me of a Saturday Night Live skit I saw years ago. I don’t remember the details very well, and no doubt somebody will step in to correct me, but the basic premise was something along the lines of a group of people who wrote a numbered joke catalog, and when they’d get together for their annual convention, they’d just sit around and say things to each other like “Hey, number 534!” and then roar with laughter. Wandering through Erehwon, I felt like an outsider at that convention. There were plenty of inside jokes, some of which seemed to be oriented towards residents of the U.K., though of course, I couldn’t tell. Even the walkthrough would occasionally say things like “If this doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry about it.” OK, whatever. But it wasn’t even so much the inside jokes that made me feel like an alien visitor as much as it was the heavy emphasis on mathematics and geometry. For me, a game that says “the dual of a Platonic solid!” means about as much as a game that says “Hey, number 534!”

Erehwon seems to make a basic assumption that the player will find things like dodecahedrons and Hamiltonian circuits interesting, and that assumption led me to suspect strongly that I’m not part of the target audience for this game. Am I confessing to some sort of failure to reach the proper heights of geekdom here? (And I mean “geek” in the positive sense, let me hasten to add.) I know a lot of IF devotees approach it from the Computer Science side, and could sit endlessly enraptured in discussions of, say, non-Euclidean geometry. I’m not one of them. I come more from the Lit. side, and could sit endlessly enraptured in discussions of, say, feminist theory and postmodernism. There is an appearance by Stanley Fish, the namesake of a prominent literary critic and advocate of a theory of reading which fits in particularly well with IF, but the game never gave much indication that it recognized the allegiance. Or if it did, it sailed over my head along with many of the other references. For these reasons, Erehwon underwhelmed me, not primarily through any specific fault of its own, I think, but just because we’re not a particularly good match.

However, I do have some complaints that stem specifically from my viewpoint as an IF player. Heading the list of these is a huge maze. Again, I recognize that this is probably my own prejudice, but I just don’t like mazes. I don’t care how mathematically cool they are — I still don’t like them. Now, in fairness, I must point out that the game does provide for a couple of solutions which obviate the need to map the maze. However, as a player I had no way of knowing that without reference to the walkthrough, and therefore ended up spending much of my first hour of Erehwon gritting my teeth and trying to map this giant maze. You might contend that I should have understood that mazes without alternate solutions are simply unacceptable in modern IF and looked harder for the alternate solution, taking it on faith that one existed. Maybe so, but I find that I can take very little on faith in comp games — after all, I would think that proper spelling and grammar would be de rigeur as well, but plenty of games lack those basic ingredients (not that Erehwon was one of them.)

Besides, the path to those solutions is blocked by the other problem puzzle in the game, a puzzle which echoes one that appears in Trinity, but enlarges it for no clear reason. The main problem with this puzzle is that it violates one of the basic tenets outlined in Graham Nelson‘s classic Player’s Bill of Rights: not to have to do boring things for the sake of it. Indeed, a winning session will involve several trips through this puzzle, each of which entails ten moves at the very least, and it’s not at all clear that the size of the puzzle adds anything positive to the game. Aggravating the situation, the puzzle also has a rather arbitrary solution, at least so far as I could tell, and following any other track will get you hopelessly lost, making the whole thing into the basic equivalent of yet another maze.

It’s clear that there is a crystalline and beautiful mathematical philosophy behind each of these puzzles, but for me as a player, the translation of those philosophies into interactive fiction was awkward and unsuccessful, an ambitious washout. Much the same could be said for an alternate mode of navigation with which the game experiments. I tried it for a bit, and indeed was forced to use it at a couple of points in order to solve puzzles (puzzles that seemed arbitrarily constructed to require the alternate navigation method), but avoided it much of the rest of the time. I did appreciate the irony, though: in most games, the objection to the compass rose approach to navigation is that you don’t have a compass. In Erehwon you actually do have a compass, but are nonetheless forced to abandon compass-rose navigation at several points. I thought that was pretty funny. Indeed, there are lots of funny moments in Erehwon, one of its main strengths being its humor. Most of the inside jokes were past me, but there were quite a few funny moments that required no special knowledge to enjoy. For instance, this exchange with the parser:

>N North Boulevard On both sides of the so-called boulevard (more of a dirt track) is an impenetrable ferret. >X FERRET Did I say ferret? I meant forest. It's stoatally impenetrable.

As I laughed, I was reminded of some of the funnier moments in Hitchhiker’s Guide, where the parser momentarily rears up to take on a personality, using its trusted status as the reliable narrator to pull the rug out from under us and make us laugh at the same time. Those of you who’ve played Hitchhiker’s will know what I’m talking about. Those of you who haven’t: Hey, number 534!

Rating: 5.4

Stone Cell by Steve Kodat as Middle Edge [Comp99]

IFDB page: Stone Cell
Final placement: 14th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Joining Bliss in the rapidly burgeoning subgenre of jailbreak IF, Stone Cell doesn’t take too long to throw the PC into the eponymous prison. What happens just afterward is one of the most interesting parts of the game. When the PC is initially put in the cell, it is much as you’d expect: a simple room with a locked door to the north, and a mat and chamberpot within. However, after the PC sleeps on the mat and awakens in the cell, the mechanics of the game change radically. Suddenly, rather than just a one-location room with an exit to the north, the cell is now a 3 x 3 grid of locations, with door in one corner, the chamber pot in another, and so on. This can be a highly disorienting shift at first, but I thought it was a really cool technique, because it uses the mechanics of location in IF as a way of presenting the PC’s state of mind.

Every so often the argument crops up on raif that what IF ought to do is present location and navigation in terms tied to a specific simulated physics, so that you can specify exactly how far north you want to walk, how many degrees you’d like to turn and in what direction, etc. Predictably, these discussions bog down quickly in the face of how difficult it would be to implement and how incredibly tedious it would be for players to have to constantly type things like “WALK TWO METERS NORTH.” But even if it were possible to implement a smooth simulated physics in a text game, the question raised by Stone Cell‘s technique is whether that physics would even make a positive contribution to the interactive fictional project. The insight is this: IF with a characterized PC isn’t simply presenting a setting. It’s presenting a setting as perceived by a particular character. Consequently, a cell that seems small at first might grow in perceived granularity and detail the longer the PC is imprisoned within it.

Unfortunately, the excitement generated by Stone Cell‘s navigation-altering technique is quickly dampened by some of the game’s weaknesses. However, I think those weaknesses also have some excellent lessons to offer potential authors and anyone else interested in design and writing issues in IF, so I want to discuss them in some detail. In order to lend a little focus to the discussion, I’m going to concentrate on the portion of the game that takes place in the cell, despite the fact that there’s an entire section of the game that takes place outside the cell. I don’t think I’ll give away any spoilers, but if I do I’ll clearly mark them beforehand. Now then, having said all that, here’s the basic problem: having created a unique space for the PC’s expanded subjectivity in this prison cell via its use of navigation and location, the game fails to follow through with a similarly expanded parser and set of environmental descriptions.

For example, the cell initially has a description several sentences long, a description which engages several senses and mentions some of the PC’s emotional reactions to the cell. However, once the cell has metamorphosed into a grid, the descriptions of each grid location are extremely terse, sometimes not even full sentences. Some examples: “You slept in this corner.”; “The heart of the cell.”; “One side of the cell.” What an opportunity was missed here! Just as the PC’s perception of the cell’s size expands, so too should her awareness of the minute details of her surroundings. It seems to me that simulating the perception of being trapped in a tiny room ought to involve more description, not less. Perhaps there would be a danger of monotony, but this could be addressed through appealing to various senses and touching on emotions, even as the original description does. Instead, it’s as if she only gives the most cursory glance to her location, despite the fact that she is trapped inside and desperate for a way out.

Speaking of appealing to the senses, that brings up the other way that Stone Cell falls short of being truly involving: the parser is far too shallow. Think about the things you might do if you were trapped in a dungeon. Perhaps you’d listen at the door? Smell your straw mat? Feel along the walls, hoping to find a secret passage? If you did find a crack, might you try to pry it with something? I think so. Yet “listen”, “smell”, “feel”, and “pry” are all unimplemented, along with a host of other verbs that ought to be there. Authors, take note: if you plan to trap your players in an enclosed space, and make a puzzle out of how they are to get out, the puzzle won’t be much fun unless that space is very well implemented. The more often a player tries logical things that aren’t accounted for in the parser, the surer that player will feel that the solution is simply arbitrary.

That’s one of the worst consequences of breaking mimesis — reminding players over and over that they’re in a game, and not a very complex game at that, tends to derail any sense of emotional or intellectual involvement that those players have with the story the game is trying to tell. I was going to go on to make the same point about alternate solutions, but it strikes me that alternate solutions aren’t even necessary if enough verbs are implemented with sensible responses that nudge the player in the right direction. Unhappily, this sort of thing is exactly what Stone Cell lacks, and the lack degrades it from a great game to merely an interesting experiment in IF techniques. The experiment does teach us something, but the flaws that surround it teach us even more, and the learning process isn’t as much fun.

Rating: 5.5

Winter Wonderland by Laura A. Knauth [Comp99]

IFDB page: Winter Wonderland
Final placement: 1st place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Bless her, Laura A. Knauth just keeps getting better and better. Just about the time I was getting starved for a really good competition game, along comes Winter Wonderland, a charming and delightful piece of interactive fiction. By far the best thing about this game is its atmosphere. Winter Wonderland exudes a magical, storybook air that is enchanting without being saccharine. The heroine of the story is a young girl from a poor family who suddenly finds herself in a… well, you can probably guess what she finds herself in. A Winter Wonderland. The setting is just lovely, well-imagined and full of vivid, captivating images. A few of these images are present just for atmosphere’s sake, but the majority of them are puzzle components, and many of the puzzles are clever and fun. What Winter Wonderland does so well is to combine the nifty puzzles from Trapped In A One-Room Dilly with the sense of magical landscape from Travels In The Land of Erden, and adds to the combination a thematic specificity that is all its own and that works beautifully. The links between the puzzles feel very plausible because the entire setting is very consistent, and solving the puzzles rewards the player not only by allowing advancement through the plot, but often as well by presenting another appealing image to add to the already dense atmosphere. Romping around the snowy landscape encountering sprites, fairies and dryads was a great deal of fun for me, and the intricate and ingenious ways in which they presented interlocking puzzles was a real source of pleasure as well.

There are a couple of clunkers among the puzzles, unfortunately. The game has two sections that aren’t exactly mazes, but feel enough like mazes to provoke some annoyance. By the time you figure out how to solve them, you’ll have done a fair piece of mapping, and while there are no “trick exits” and everything connects to everything else in a fairly logical way, just the mapping alone is enough to make the whole area seem pretty tedious. In addition, there are a number of misspellings and a few parser problems which detract from the immersiveness of the game. I’ve emailed the author about these, and I’m optimistic they’ll be cleaned up in a future release. Even so, these flaws don’t ruin Winter Wonderland, simply because it has so many strong points alongside them. In addition, for each of the mazelike areas the puzzle isn’t the maze itself. In other words, the challenge of the area isn’t simply to map it and find the other end — each one contains its own puzzle, and both puzzles are intelligent and fairly well-clued. So for those of you who hate mazes, I recommend playing the game anyway. They aren’t all that onerous, and if you start to get frustrated, you can consult the excellent on-line hints.

The other area where the game really shines is in its technical prowess. While it isn’t a graphical game, Winter Wonderland does provide some ASCII art, much like last year’s Downtown Tokyo did. The art enhances the game’s atmosphere, but doesn’t conceal any crucial clues. Instead, it feels similar to the pictures shown at the beginning and end of On The Farm — images that enrich the text but are not necessary for enjoyment of the game. The author thoughtfully provides a “BARE” mode for those whose interpreters don’t handle such things well. In addition to its ASCII graphics, Winter Wonderland also uses the status line in innovative ways. It’s four lines high and includes score, location, and a compass rose indicating the available exits. We’ve seen the status line compass rose before, but I found myself using this on-screen mapping feature more than I ever have in any other game which provided it. The landscape is complicated enough that the compass rose feels like a real aid to gameplay rather than just a frivolous but useless feature. It actually reminded me quite a bit of the onscreen mapping in Beyond Zork, and felt about as useful to me. In addition, with an interpreter that handles color correctly the status line changes color subtly to enhance the atmosphere of the area the PC finds herself in. When she’s by a roaring fire, the status line is yellow and orange. When she’s in a moonlit snowscape, the letters are various shades of lighter and darker blues. What’s more, in some snowy scenes we actually see a few snowflakes show up in the status line, another attractive touch to embroider this already charming game. Winter Wonderland feels magical and joyous, and deserves to place highly in this year’s competition.

Rating: 8.7

Only After Dark by Gunther Schmidl as Anonymous [Comp99]

IFDB page: Only After Dark
Final placement: 17th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Seems like just a few reviews ago I was positing that the trend of the 1999 competition is non-interactive games, those games which give you only one choice of how to proceed, whether subtly or overtly. And now, as if only to vindicate my trendspotting ability, here comes Only After Dark. This game moves along like a teenager learning to drive a stick shift — lurching forward, then halting, then lurching forward again. The lurches are at points where the game shoves you into the plot without giving you much choice in the matter, and the halts are when it waits for you to find the one and only way out of the situation it just forced you into. Now, to be fair, I should say that the game is a little more interactive than, say, Life on Beal Street or A Moment of Hope. It does have a parser. There are no moments (at least, not as far as I could tell, anyway) when it just flat-out ignores what you type. However, there are several scenes where the game absolutely will not let you do anything but what the rigidly linear plot calls for.

Actually, this description fits almost every moment in the game — the advancement of the plot is enforced by meeting any deviation with either an abrupt ending to the game (usually via the death of the PC) or with some variant of “You can’t do that.” For example, there is one scene where the PC is in jail. The plot calls for him to go to sleep. Therefore, there is absolutely nothing you can do but go to sleep. Every other attempt at action is blocked, and the game gives intermittent hints along the lines of “There’s nothing else to do but go to sleep.” Mess around long enough, and the game puts the PC to sleep by force. Now, my question is this: if all I was going to be allowed to do is sleep, why even give me a prompt at all? Why not just say “You’re hustled into a jail cell, and although you attempt to escape, your attempts are thwarted. Deciding there’s nothing to do but sleep, you settle down into the uncomfortable bed, awakening the next day to a very strange scene…” Sometimes there’s a perfectly reasonable answer to this question, something along the lines of wanting the player to identify with the PC’s sense of imprisonment. But when every scene plays like this, and the game forces the player into really stupid decisions because it has made no provision for alternatives, the whole story starts to feel like a prison.

The other way in which the game enforces its plot is to present the player with situations in which there is one correct move, and any other action leads to death. Again, this sort of thing has its place as a technique, and can often be effective when used wisely. However, its vulnerability is that it tempts the designer toward guess-the-verb situations and save-and-restore puzzles — sometimes even both at once. Just as vexing is the fact that dying over and over again fails to be entertaining rather quickly. Only After Dark, sadly, neither resists the temptation nor finds a way around the boredom. Take the initial puzzle, for example. I won’t give away the situation or the solution, but the structure is this: the PC’s life is in danger. There’s only one thing he can do to save himself. If he doesn’t do that one thing he will die. You have one move to make the correct choice. The action is vaguely clued before the choice must be made, but I still ended up with a dozen death messages before I hit on the solution, simply because there is so little time to solve the puzzle. Reading the same death message ten times is pretty dull. Later on, there’s a puzzle in which a certain verb must be used, and the only way I could determine to figure out what that verb ought to be was to closely scrutinize the death message that comes from using the wrong verb. This is the worst of both worlds in IF puzzles.

All this bitching probably does very little to explain why I gave Only After Dark a higher rating than some of the other non-interactive entries in this year’s comp, so let me try to clear that up. First of all, the writing and coding were error-free, which I am really appreciating recently. Yes, the game may railroad you through the plot, but at least it does so correctly. Also, the subject of the game is lycanthropy, which is a fascination of mine. I really enjoyed the malleable aspect of the PC, and while this isn’t the ideal werewolf game, it’s a much better werewolf game than, say, Strangers In The Night was a vampire game. I thought the milieu was interesting, if a little confusing, and there were some nice little touches, like the game’s occasional use of color. Perhaps the only reason it was so linear was to fit the short format of the competition. If that’s so, I dearly hope that an expanded version is forthcoming. I would really like to play a game set in the Only After Dark universe, written and coded as well as the competition entry but offering the player an actual choice once in a while.

Rating: 6.3

Lurk. Unite. Die. Invent. Think. Expire. by Ryan Stevens as Rybread Celsius [Comp99]

IFDB page: Lurk. Unite. Die. Invent. Think. Expire.
Final placement: 35th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Nobody has entered the IF competition every year for all five years of its existence. Only one person has entered every year for the last four years. That’s right: Rybread Celsius. When he entered with two games in 1996, he was a mere 15 years old. Now, three years later, you’d expect his work to have grown along with him. In a way, it has. Last year’s Acid Whiplash was much more fun than anything he’d released before, though I suspected at the time that much of the difference was due to the presence of Cody Sandifer as co-author. L.U.D.I.T.E. confirms that suspicion. I don’t mean to suggest that there haven’t been some signs of improvement. This most recent game is free of misspelled words, which is quite a milestone. Actually, I should be more clear: it’s free of words that don’t exist. Rybread still has some trouble with homophones, as in the following sample phrase: “The room’s loan feature is a big door on the eastern wall…” I tried “BORROW DOOR”, but it didn’t work, so I can only assume that the door is really the room’s lone feature. Perhaps I should ascribe this problem to the “Ten Thousand Monkeys on Typewriters” to whom he credits the text, but after playing Pass The Banana I feel like giving the monkeys a rest.

So yeah, things are spelled right. And probably there will be some people who love this game. But me, I just don’t get it. None of it really makes much sense to me, and its hallucinatory qualities only hold my interest for a few minutes. I thought at first I was just stuck on the door puzzle, and I was going to present L.U.D.I.T.E. as Exhibit B for the argument in favor of including walkthroughs or hints with comp games. Then I noticed that Rybread had left the debug feature on, so I just looked at the game’s object tree to see if I was missing anything. Turns out I wasn’t. I tried jumping to a couple of other objects that looked like they might be rooms, but those objects lacked description properties. So what you see is, more or less, what you get. And what you get is not much, and what there is of it is really weird.

So hats off to Rybread for his persistence. I admire that. A game like this probably doesn’t take long to put together, but at least he’s still out there trying, and experience has shown that he does have a fan base. As usual, I’m not part of it. Oh well — there’s always next year.

Rating: 1.6