>INVENTORY, Page 2

Eurydice by Anonymous [XYZZY]

[I originally reviewed this game for the XYZZY Awards, as part of a project to review all the 2012 nominees for Best Writing.]

IFDB page: Eurydice

I identify very strongly with the Orpheus myth. There have been various times in my life — and right now is one of them — when I find myself questing about desperately to find the magic that will retrieve a loved one from the underworld into which they have descended. And even when it seems like I’ve succeeded, it is very difficult to maintain a belief in that success. So given this game’s concept, it was pretty much automatic that it was going to speak to me on an emotional level, and it did. Sometimes that happened directly because of the writing. Sometimes it happened despite the writing.

Before I dive in, though, I want to acknowledge a couple of things. Anonymous obliquely suggests that elements of this game may be autobiographical, and the choice to remain anonymous strengthens this impression. The details of the story are very painful, and must have been difficult to write — even if it’s not autobiographical at all, it’s clearly a cri de coeur, and an effective one. I recognize that sometimes strong emotion can get in the way of high gloss, so it always feels awkward to start making persnickety comments about a work that’s so personal. Nevertheless, my charge here is to review the writing of these four games, so that’s what I’ll do. Happily, the author seems both self-aware and open to criticism, at least based on the comments that appear in the game’s menu system.

On to the analysis. The game feels to me like the work of a talented writer who has not yet found his voice. (I say “his” — I don’t know whether the author is male or female, but I’ll stick with male since the PC seems to be male, though I’m not even certain about that.) The tone shifts from one response to the next, sometimes rather dramatically:

>X ME You've been better.

>LISTEN There is nothing to hear except, if there is such a thing, the sound of absence.

>X CARPET The carpet is the colour of sand, as though the room has become a tide line, washed clean of its cockleshell memories and mermaid-hair dreams.

I have a preference here. The first response is excellent — punchy but understated, getting across the character’s grief well enough (given the context) but with a wry grit, and not a trace of self-indulgence. The second one reaches a little farther, and works a little less. Saying “if there is such a thing” undermines what impact the “sound of absence” metaphor might have had. The third response, however, goes the other way — instead of hedging or pulling back, it doubles down on melodrama, which if anything is even worse. If the sentence had ended after “tide line”, I’d have liked it well enough, though I might have balked a bit at even that level of intensity being injected into — let’s face it — beige carpeting. However, when I was presented with “cockleshell memories and mermaid-hair dreams”… whew. In those moments, I recoiled from the narrative voice, because it was hitting me with the emotional equivalent of a sudden earsplitting sound.

These tonal shifts are jarring, but I was a bit grateful for them, because I knew that even if I was wincing at an error or an ill-chosen word, something powerful and true was probably around the corner. My transcript is peppered with comments like “that hits home”, “quite good”, “this is getting to me”, and so forth. Anonymous displays a keen observational eye about the emotional resonances of objects and places, like the boxed-up books that are “like meeting old friends you forgot you cared for” when you reopen them.

There is some deeply affecting writing in this game, and some problematic writing too, sometimes even in the same description:

>X MASK From last Christmas, you seem to remember, another lifetime. Like all Celine's gifts, it came exquisitely wrapped -- black and gold, perhaps, to match the mask itself. You wonder if Celine's box of wrapping paper, ribbons and decorations is still beneath the eaves, or if her parents took that too. "Why go to all that trouble for something that's just going to be ripped off?" you'd ask. But Celine loved the ephemeral. And, so, apparently did you.

“Another lifetime” is a bit cliched but still speaks to a potent truth — from within grief, remembering something like a joyful Christmas gift exchange, it feels almost ridiculous, like an implausible story about another person. The observation about the wrapping is superb, building a lovable and somewhat quirky character trait into Celine while enhancing the radiance of the memory. Then we swing back down rapidly into bereavement, which again is quite realistic — the mind keeps returning to the sources of its pain.

Best of all is the topper — saying Celine was not only just as beautiful as the wrapping, but just as temporary too… what a gut punch. That “apparently” does a great job of conveying the PC’s bitter surprise, or rather it would do, if not for the fact that the line is badly punctuated, which drains it of much of the impact it might have had. Think about an actor reading that sentence aloud, using the commas as guides for where to pause. If you’re anything like me, you’re hearing one bizarre line reading, because for some reason the commas emphasize the word “so”, which is “so” clearly not the key word in that sentence. I regret coming over all dogmatic about this, but to my mind there is only one correct way to punctuate that sentence: “And so, apparently, did you.” That would have had a brutal impact, rather than the muffled (albeit still painful) landing of the sentence as written.

Something I particularly enjoyed about Eurydice‘s writing was its use of multiple responses for the same action:

>X JOHN You remember the first time you invited John and Celine to come to dinner. You can see them now on the doorstep, John slightly behind, handsome and distinguished in a military-style coat with gold buttons and braiding, Celine, in black just like always, holding out to you a hand-tied bouquet of flowers the colour of her lipstick, and smiling.

>AGAIN Like everyone else in the room, he looks washed out and tired, a lesser version of himself.

This sort of thing happens many places in the game, and it conveys a wonderful effect of progressing thoughts. It’s not just with object descriptions, either — a variety of actions in the game garner different responses when they are repeated. This sounds like it should be frustrating, and in some games it is. (I’m looking in your direction, Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.) Here, though, it ends up feeling quite natural, like pushing past an emotional barrier to get something done. It’s admirable, too — I find it challenging enough to write engaging responses for all major objects and actions in an IF game, but to write more than one of each is impressive indeed, especially when they work this well.

Finally, I suppose this is more about the design than the writing, but I want to take a moment to appreciate the way the lyre is handled. I was surprised to find when I reached an ending that the lyre was a Wishbringer object — a magic shortcut through puzzles that is convenient but not necessary. However, where Wishbringer‘s magic was included to make the game more child-friendly with adjustable difficulty, the lyre here is doing more interesting work. Essentially, Eurydice is a magical realist story that allows you to adjust the ratio of magic to realism. My knowledge of modern IF is nowhere near as current or comprehensive as it once was, so perhaps this has been done before, but I’ve never seen it. I’m intrigued by the possibilities it offers, because it leverages a strength unique to interactive storytelling. I hope the game inspires other authors (or this same author — how would I know?) to continue exploring this promising vein.

Dinner Bell by Jenni Polodna [XYZZY]

[I originally reviewed this game for the XYZZY Awards, as part of a project to review all the 2012 nominees for Best Writing.]

IFDB page: Dinner Bell

Well, I can see why this one was nominated. It’s hilarious! Now, there’s always a danger to analyzing humor, as frog-lover E.B. White once remarked. But presumably everybody reading this has already gotten to enjoy the game’s jokes, so let the batrachian carnage begin!

One technique that Dinner Bell uses to great effect is piling on the wacky, with jokes, funny concepts, and surprises sometimes stacked up several layers deep in a given turn. For instance, along with the player’s score increasing, the game goes out of its way to congratulate the player every time a food gets bagged. That’s kinda funny. The congratulation repeats exactly each time. That wouldn’t necessarily be funny, unless the method of congratulation is something ridiculous, that would seem increasingly ridiculous the more it was repeated. And, in fact, the method of congratulation is a pat on the head, which fits the bill perfectly. The pat is delivered by a head-patting robot. That’s really funny. The head-patting robot is named Pat. That’s not only funny, it actually sets the player up to type something funny, which of course gets a funny response:

>PAT PAT You pat the head-patting robot on his little robot head. He seems confused by this bizarre shift in circumstances.

A closely related move is to make a joke, feint away from it, and then return to it with a slightly different riff, like so:

>X BEER This beer is big, and brown, and furry, with claws on the ends of its powerful arms and legs. Wait, I'm thinking of a bear. This beer is a bit on the hoppy side, with woodsy undertones. Like a bunny.

It’s funny enough for the narrator to start describing a bear rather than a bear, then to catch itself, especially since “big” and “brown” could reasonably describe a beer, but “furry” throws us right off the map. Lots of writers would stop after “Wait, I’m thinking of a bear,” or would perhaps give a perfunctory description afterwards, which would amount to more or less “You see nothing special about the beer.” Polodna makes us think she’s doing that, though with a funnier version that slightly skewers beer connoisseurs. Then, the knockout punch: “Like a bunny” not only returns us to the kooky hilarity of mistaking beer for a woodland animal, but it recontextualizes “hoppy” (hoppy! how perfect is that?) and “woodsy” from the straight-seeming description that precedes it. That panache makes a good joke into a great joke.

However, amidst the jokes, there’s a thin layer of creepy, which puts the horror in “Horror/Comedy.” The game is still about 95% comedy and 5% horror, but that’s enough to keep us off balance. The eerie bits provide a background for the jokes, so that the sheen of desperation adds to their humor, and their humor illuminates the desperate moments, allowing them to take us by surprise:

>X BELL When the bell goes ding, it is time to eat. It is time to eat when the bell goes ding. You cannot eat until the bell goes ding. Bell : ding :: time : eat. You understand this with every fibre of your being. Sometimes (actually, most of the time) it's all you understand anymore.

The repetition is funny, as is the inappropriate use of analogy notation. However, “it’s all you understand anymore” is an unexpected shot of pathos, playing the PC’s dilemma straight. The picture of a prisoner, starved and experimented upon, gives an uncomfortable edge to our laughter at the jokes preceding and following it.

So Dinner Bell often serves us multiple layers at once, a few of which may be a little unsettling. However, the layering also happens across the playthrough, getting good mileage out of the comedy callback. For instance, when we first examine the oven:

>X OVEN This oven's designer got tired of trying to remember if they'd left the oven on, so they invented an oven you can't turn off. Its internal temperature is a constant 400 degrees Fahrenheit. You know this because you are omniscient all of a sudden, but only as regards this oven and the names of everyone in New Jersey.

The oven is closed. This fact is clearly visible to everyone, but you used your omniscience to discern it anyway, because why not.

The oven you can’t turn off gets a rueful grin from IF designers who know how nice it is to be able to take shortcuts around the fiddlier parts of world modeling, but it’s “you are omniscient all of a sudden” that gets the biggest laugh. We’ve all seen descriptions that introduce or draw upon knowledge that the PC couldn’t reasonably have, and lampshading it here is a great gag. As is typical for this game, that gag is topped by a couple more, building on the omniscience concept first by applying it to an unexpected context, and then by incongruously using a superpower to do something very ordinary.

That’s all terrific, but it gets even better late in the game:

>X CAKEBOT Cakebot is the most sophisticated AI in, not just the building, but the tri-state area containing the building, and all people ever do is put cakes on his head. You know this because he complains to the oven sometimes, so it falls within the limits of your omniscience.

(You also know that the oven feels no sympathy whatsoever. The oven wishes people would put cakes on its head. The oven would consider that a lovely break from the daily indignities it suffers.)

This callback to the omniscience joke does the work that a callback should, playing on our familiarity with the concept to give us the feeling that the game is making a private joke with us, leveraging the relationship it’s built to intensify the comedy. On top of that, it re-lampshades the omniscience concept, and suddenly imparts comically doleful personalities to the both the Cakebot and the oven, a la Marvin the Paranoid Android. So of course, the whole thing gets paid off here:

>PUT CAKE ON OVEN You put the cake on the oven, and the oven sighs contentedly. This is the happiest day of its life.

That’s a beautifully constructed joke, and it’s not the only one. I particularly enjoyed the gag can of snakes that turned out to have peanut brittle inside. That’s a very clever reversal. (Not to mention that it prompted me to revisit Paul F. Tompkins’ Peanut Brittle bit, the definitive comedy statement on gag peanut brittle cans.)

One more favorite: the Shiptogar easter egg. So the Shiptogar itself is awesomely absurd, and its presence reaffirms that this game is about the jokes, not the puzzles. It’s perfectly fun turning the ship in a bottle into a bottle of vinegar. However, the Shiptogar really comes into its own elsewhere:

>X SINK Closer examination reveals this to be merely a child's drawing of a sink. The drain has been hastily rendered in blue crayon, and near it a posse of scrubbing bubbles is fighting a dinosaur.

>X BUBBLES You're not sure who you'd put money on in this battle. The dinosaur can breathe fire, but the scrubbing bubbles have the power of friendship.

>SPRAY SINK You spray the sink liberally with Shiptogar, and get the weird sense that something almost imperceptible and incredibly unimportant has changed.

>X BUBBLES You're not sure who you'd put money on in this battle. The dinosaur can breathe fire, but the scrubbing bubbles have the power of friendvinegar. Wait, friendvinegar? Never mind, you're putting fifty bucks on that dinosaur, then.

Like every bit of prose in Dinner Bell, these responses are funny and silly, but the situation itself is 100% prime IF humor, similar to the linguistic deformations of Nord And Bert, Ad Verbum, and the Leather Goddesses Of Phobos T-Remover. It’s the kind of joke that plays to IF’s strengths pulling off deftly what would be impossible in film and rather more tedious in straight prose.

Dinner Bell‘s help text says, “most of this game’s entertainment dollar value lies in examining things and reading the dumb jokes.” That sells it a bit short — there’s lots of humor to be found beyond object descriptions, and the jokes are pretty smart. What’s true, though, is that this game is not about plot, setting, character, or puzzles. It’s about the jokes, and lucky for us, they’re excellent. This riotous game deserves every writing accolade it gets.

Bee by Emily Short [XYZZY]

[I originally reviewed this game for the XYZZY Awards, as part of a project to review all the 2012 nominees for Best Writing.]

IFDB page: Bee

Because it uses the Varytale format rather than the more traditional parser-based approach, Bee has the opportunity to inject writing into the choice mechanism itself, and Emily Short uses this opportunity to the fullest. The choices in Bee tell us something about its PC in a way that the “>” prompt cannot. More than that, they give us clues about how we are shaping the PC. Take, for instance, the choices that appear after the PC’s father complains about having to drink chocolate milk in public school, even when he was forbidden chocolate for Lent:

The world isn’t always on our side.
Bet the other kids made fun of Father.
Having to drink chocolate milk is a pretty whiny thing to complain about.

The first option steers toward a PC who is earnestly trying to absorb her parents’ lessons and reflect them back, both to show them that she has done so and because she honestly believes it. It also reinforces the barricaded quality her family has adopted, with the good and true people on one side of the wall, and “the world” on the other. The second option reveals a PC whose immediate response is compassion. However, it also highlights her liminal place as an adolescent. (L I M I N A L, an intermediate state, phase, or condition.) She’s advanced to the age where her parents have become fallible, and she can impose upon herself uncomfortable thoughts of them as children, subject to childhood torments and humiliation.

The third option, on the other hand, takes her adolescent quality in a different direction, finding the ridiculousness in her father’s complaint. In this direction, we see her separating from her parents by opposing them rather than awkwardly pitying them. And her (very funny) response of “I hear that Roman Christians were also forced to drink chocolate milk in the arena” gets a predictably chilly reception.

Other choices are noteworthy for they way they seem to be having a conversation with each other — “Possibly Lettice is not the sharpest. / Then again, she’s your only natural ally.” Some passages where there is only one choice available (at least, based on the particular attributes of my playthrough) still used that choice to provide a moment of reflection and pacing for the prose. (e.g “Ah, rhetorical terms. Now you’re on familiar ground.” in the “Are you a feminist?” scene.) Finally, I was struck by the presence of certain choices greyed-out, with reasons attached. We see this during the spelling bees — the better a speller the PC is, the more options are greyed-out — but also in more character-building ways:

While you work you make up stories in your head.
About how even Cinderella got away.
About how you were switched at birth. A bit hard on your parents, perhaps.
About becoming a designer and making more stylish clothes.
About becoming so wealthy that you could have servants.

With action-based choices, this is more or less the equivalent of the “You don’t want to do that” type of parser message from a traditional IF game. Here, however, it conveyed a slightly different message: “You don’t want to THINK that.” Thus, even as the available choices let us know how we’re shaping the PC, the game also shows us how we cannot shape her, but might be able to in a different narrative context, say if annoyance with her parents has pushed her limits.

Of course, to an extent it’s true that the choices in any style of IF game shape the character, but what’s different about Bee is that the voice of that shaping is the same as the voice of its response. It’s similar to the trade-off that happens between menu-based conversations and ASK/TELL style: the former restricts player choice, but gives greater characterization in exchange. Sometimes this trade-off is well worth it, especially in games where the prose is its own reward.

That’s certainly the case with Bee. Most every passage of the game is a pleasure to read, and a few are nothing short of sublime and beautiful. As usual for Short, she accomplishes a great deal with subtlety, understatement, and concision. Her trademark sentence fragments are sparser here than in her parser-based games (probably due to the lack of room descriptions), but used to good effect where they appear. Where she outdoes herself is in characterization. The prose feels deeply inhabited by the main character’s point of view, in a way that is clear-eyed enough to let us understand some of the things she does not, but also authentic enough that it generates sympathy not only for her situation but for those around her who create that situation. In an admirable effect, characters who start out as caricatures reveal more depth and complexity as the PC gets to know them better, just like in real life.

I could go on and on about how much I loved the writing in this game, and how I found it not just remarkably accomplished but sometimes quite moving. Instead, I’ll just nominate three more favorites, to stand for entire categories:

1) Bits of poetic diction: “You imagine what it would be like to stand in the middle of a haboob, your skin scoured by grains of sand, eyes stinging, barely able to breathe; and then, if you lived through it, dust in every crevice. If you were not killed, you would be completely sanded down, polished, perfected.”

2) Well-chosen details: Describing the documentary about North Korea to Jerome, we get a clear echo of the PC’s own dilemma: “But it wasn’t girly at all. It was like everyone being in an army. All the time.”

3) Satisfying emotional development: I followed many branches of the story, and greatly enjoyed the range of possibilities it allowed, providing a greater holistic view of “the truth” in that particular fictional world. However, I still think my favorite moment is when the PC runs away from home to find Sara. She’s confronted with things that are beyond her ken (but not ours), and must face the reality of her situation, but is comforted in a poignant, crystalline moment:

“So what am I supposed to do now?” you ask.

“Get ready,” she says. “The way I used to think of it was, I was in a chrysalis. I read things and I watched movies and looked things up on the internet, and I learned things that made me ready to break out as soon as I had wings.”

“Caterpillars are almost completely dissolved in the chrysalis,” you say. “The liquids break down their bodies into a nutritional soup. The butterfly is pretty much a different animal.”

“Yeah,” she says. “That sounds right.”

Understated, heartfelt, brilliant, and utterly beautiful, not to mention a wonderful culmination of a very long buildup. Yeah, that sounds right.

A New Life by Alexandre Owen Muñiz [Comp05]

IFDB page: A New Life
Final placement: Tied for 2nd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

It’s clear that a lot of thought has gone into the world of A New Life. In the standard manner of high fantasy, the text is littered with names of lands, kingdoms, rulers, saints, legendary figures, and so forth, none of which seem to have any reference outside the fictional milieu. Examining a coin can give you a paragraph-long infodump about how the local economy has been affected by the waxing and waning power of a particular merchant league over the last three hundred years.

Not only that, it becomes obvious early on that the people of this world can change genders, or rather biological sex — not quite at will, but gradually over time in ways that exist on a spectrum of voluntary to involuntary. We see the implications of this trait appear everywhere from the children’s stories we encounter to the answer to “X ME”:

In your month of travel you have allowed yourself to slip into the neutral gender as a practical matter; as a result of the changes in the shape of your body, your clothes fit you poorly.

For the most part, I found this fictional realm pretty impressive — I particularly enjoyed the user’s manual for a Bag of Holding, which explains how important it is to tend to the item’s emotions. And yeah, there’s a Bag of Holding (though not exactly with that name). There are goblins. There’s a dragon. There’s a magic staff, and a charm that senses danger, and a fancy sword, and in general a whole adventurer’s-packful of Dungeons and Dragons tropes, albeit frequently with some changes rung on them, like the bag’s sensitive ego, or the goblins who turn out to be adorable and wise rather than disposable low-level mooks.

Still, for as thorough as the worldbuilding generally is, those D&D-isms sometimes get in the way of logical sense. For instance, we learn that the PC is a refugee, on the run from battles and press-gangs, about which you can learn plenty by use of the REMEMBER verb. Yet, when this refugee comes across an “Adventurers Wanted” sign, the game’s story demands that we show interest. As I was playing the character, they were not an adventurer, and getting involved in some dangerous lark is the last thing they’d want to do. The goal was just to get to a new city and establish, as the game’s title suggests, a new life.

Yet when I tried to do so, here’s the message I got: “Soon, you will follow the road and go on to start a new life in Isult. But your curiosity is not yet satisfied.” Really… curiosity? I’m on the run from a war, having tragically lost my brother (whose decision not to change genders may have led to his death), bartering my possessions along the way in a long and difficult journey, but I’m not allowed to continue that journey until I satisfy my curiosity about the mysterious and vaguely hostile peddler-woman I met along the way?

Yep. That’s the story, and it’s an example of how very convincing worldbuilding can actually work against quest-plot design. With a less defined character, I’d feel far less resistance to just getting on with exploring the spooky caves. Once I started to explore those caves, that’s when the next design flaw kicked in.

I found myself drawn into a beguiling story, with excellent NPCs, an intriguing background, and a clear goal. The problem was, as I realized about 80 minutes into the game, I was in a dead branch. I’d gotten to where I was by going through a dark place with a guide. I needed to get back through that dark place, but my guide was gone, and no light was available. Even more frustrating, although there were plenty of plausible ways I could have acquired such a light, the game hadn’t implemented any of them, and the main information-giving NPC had nothing to say about it. The hints were no help, the walkthrough was no help, and so I was forced to restart, but with considerably less engagement than I’d had the first time.

So I finished the story, but with far less emotional impact than I think was intended, due both to its insistent disconnection from the PC’s own characterization and the way the game had locked me out of a valid narrative the first time. Even at the end, when I seemed to have checked all the boxes, the game didn’t seem to respond. I ended up checking the walkthrough, only to find out that all I needed to do was travel in the direction that my “curiosity” had cut off the last time. Without a cue that I was ready to go, I had no reason to believe that command would work again. But work it did, and the game ended with an epilogue that didn’t land for me, because as detailed as the world and the story were, the game’s style of interactivity had let them down.

Rating: 8.0

Distress by Mike Snyder [Comp05]

IFDB page: Distress
Final placement: 4th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Say you’ve got an idea for a story. It’ll be thrilling, fast-paced, and ingenious. Say, just for illustrative purposes, it’s a story about the survivor of a crashed spaceship, who has to help injured crew members, signal for a rescue, and figure out why the ship crashed in the first place, all while being hunted by a hostile creature on the unexplored planet. You know what all the beats are, and how your protagonist gets from beginning to end by making clever use of nearby resources and surviving tightly timed encounters like chases and medical emergencies. You know there’s going to be a twist at the end, how you’ll foreshadow it, and how it will finally manifest.

Now, you could just go write that story! Who knows if it’d get published anywhere — it’s pretty cliché-heavy — but if you wrote it you’d be able to shape it exactly to how you imagined it. But what if you wanted to make that story into a game? It would seem to fit an IF milieu pretty well, with the protagonist being alone in an unfamiliar landscape, and having to piece together information and objects to get to the best ending. How do you take your story, which is specific and clear in your head, and turn it into an interactive experience that is — and this part is important — fun and enjoyable for players?

Well, this is where things get dangerous. When you make a story interactive, you are now obligated to create sufficient margin around the ideal plotline that players can experience the game’s world and its events without feeling like they’re inside some kind of narrative lab experiment where electric shocks are applied anytime they step off the prescribed path. At one extreme of this continuum, any command that doesn’t adhere to the ideal walkthrough results in a losing ending. At the other end, the player could depart from the story entirely and still be supported by the game to eventually reach a satisfying conclusion.

Guess which end of this continuum is easier to code? Lots of authors fall into the trap of forcing their players to adhere too closely to a specific string of commands, either by failing to implement anything outside of it or by lowering the boom immediately on any deviations. Very few authors create a world so rich that new and different stories can emerge from it autonomously, because doing so is unbelievably difficult. Finding a satisfying middle ground between these extremes is the essence of the IF designer’s craft. That’s why it’s often said that the best IF doesn’t offer unlimited interactivity but rather a very convincing illusion of unlimited interactivity.

So back to our crash survivor story, which, yeah, is the plot of Distress. You might implement this by creating lots of ways for the protagonist to survive, and in some ways, Distress attempts this. However, its flexibility tends to be around more trivial tasks such as what verbs can be used for one step of a first aid process. It has zero flexibility on more important things, like how many turns you have to complete that first aid process, and heads up — if you don’t complete it correctly, you are locked out of a winning ending without knowing it.

Some games might handle a situation like this by providing a generous time limit, and ending the game upon failure to complete the task, which would cue players that this is a puzzle whose outcome is crucial to success. Other games might give you clearer and clearer nudges towards the right solution, and then end the game on a failure, or even outright force a success. Distress, on the other hand, makes it seem like the failure is a valid outcome, and maybe even inevitable, only to silently prevent success even after many more steps are completed.

The author makes a telling comment in the text file accompanying the game: “To some degree, I think we as IF players have grown soft.” This comment suggests a view of interactive fiction in which the players battle the authors for dominance over the experience, and longs for the good old days in which authors would sharpen their knives and players would hope not to bleed too much. That’s one view of this medium. It’s not mine. I play IF because I want to experience a world and a story, and while I enjoy a challenge, I do not enjoy repeated electric shocks.

So it was with Distress, whose name seemed more and more apt the longer I played it. The writing is good, the coding is strong, and the premise is solid, and I found it fun and compelling at first, but it quickly became apparent that there was many an electric shock to be had. I lost over and over and over again. Finally I turned to the hints, and despite following their cues, even the one that “solved the puzzle”, I still lost. Then I turned to the walkthrough, and lost. Then I started over, adhered closely to the walkthrough, and finally got past the point that had been battering me. Was I having fun? Reader, I was not.

Distress set out to punish me for my deviations from its ideal route, and it certainly succeeded, but repeated punishment is not my idea of a good time. Even valid ideas for how to solve a puzzle, even ideas that actually are the solution to that puzzle, aren’t allowed unless you carefully shepherd the PC’s mindset through them. So, for example, there might be a battery to be found right next to you, but you’re not allowed to find it until you demonstrate to the PC that a battery is needed. To make matters worse, the many tightly timed sequences pretty much guarantee you’ll be replaying parts of the game many times, so while you learned about the battery problem 10 playthroughs ago, you still have to pretend it’s your first time.

Distress may well appeal to a certain kind of player, one who agrees that we’ve all gotten too soft. It wasn’t for me.

Rating: 6.8

PTBAD6andoneeighth by Jonathan Berman as Slan Xorax [Comp05]

IFDB page: PTBAD6.5: The URL That Didn’t Work or Have You Seen the Muffin Man? He Is Quite Large
Final placement: 35th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

So, I guess this game technically has a much longer and different title than appeared in comp05.z5, but honestly PTBAD6andoneeighth is bad enough. Remember when I was cataloging the different kinds of bad comp games and I mentioned “the obnoxious bad ‘joke’ game where the joke is on you for playing”? This is one of those.

The winning move is mildly amusing — it’s actually one of the first things I typed in, and in response the game gave me a winning message, then implored me to play more. “Of course, you COULD restart and poke around a bit,” it said. “I mean, how could it hurt? Its just a few more minutes of your time.”

So I spent a few more minutes of my time. It did hurt. Then I stopped, and was glad.

Rating: 2.1

Son Of A… by C.S. Woodrow [Comp05]

IFDB page: Son of a…
Final placement: 15th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

If you’ve read many of my comp game reviews, than you probably know that while I certainly notice and dislike all kinds of mechanical prose errors, there is one error that consistently tops my enemies list: the NASTY FOUL ITS/IT’S ERROR. There’s a moment in this game where you can be stung by thousands of wasps until you eventually have an allergic reaction and die. Well, my its/it’s allergy had pretty much that experience while playing Son Of A…. A NFIE in the introduction was rapidly followed by two NFIEs in the first room description. Yet another one starting the very first object description I looked at (the wallet) had me commenting “ahhhhhhhhh IT IS killing me with the many errors BELONGING TO IT”.

It just kept going, and for a while there, I began to theorize that the author just always uses “it’s” no matter the occasion, which made me feel… a little better? But then, nope, there are correct uses of “its” sprinkled throughout the text, sometimes right alongside incorrect uses of “it’s”, as in this description of a ladder: “It’s thick structure has turned a silver-grey from sitting in the weather. Despite its age, it appears to have held up well.” There are also occasional correct usages of “it’s”. Sigh.

Aside from this swarming pestilence, and a few other mechanical bugs, the game’s writing is actually pretty strong. Son of a… does a nice job of setting an effective scene and layering the PC’s point of view with humor. In addition, the game implements nouns at a satisfying level of depth — players are often rewarded for inspecting every detail of a scene.

Other implementation details are a bit more peculiar. For instance, the game clearly states in its help text:

1. Entering important places or taking important things will increase your score.
2. Completing puzzles will not increase your score.

But… why? I’m guessing perhaps this is the foible of a first-time author who found it too difficult to make Inform recognize when a puzzle was solved, and just gave up on the whole idea. This approach does lead to an odd gameplay experience, though, in which you can be wandering around with full points but several more puzzles to solve before completing the story.

As for the puzzles themselves, they’re a pretty pleasant diversion. Just as the writing does a good job of setting the scene, the structure of the scenario is intriguing and offers lots of opportunities for logical barriers solved by logical means. There is a pretty gaping plot hole — wouldn’t a long-abandoned motel have had its power cut off? For the most part, though, I enjoyed finding ways to resolve the PC’s predicament, and even had a few satisfying “aha” moments when I hit upon clear solutions that had initially eluded me.

What a pity, then, that a fundamentally enjoyable game is badly flawed with simple, fixable mechanical errors that simply were not fixed. Here’s an oldie but a goodie: Bob’s Guide to Its and It’s, You Idiots. Print it out, hang it up, and avoid those mandatory deductions.

Rating: 5.0

Cheiron by Sarah Clelland and Elisabeth Polli [Comp05]

IFDB page: Cheiron
Final placement: 26th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Okay, first I want to tell a little story about me that I promise will be at least marginally relevant to my experience of this game. I’m in the fifth grade, and we’re taking a class field trip to some hospital, I guess so we can learn about how hospitals work. We go to a few different places, and then are shepherded to the lab. There, a medical researcher shows us a centrifuge, and explains how they use it with blood to separate out the red blood cells, platelets, and plasma. He holds up a test tube of blood (not a sight I wanted to see), swirls it, and… next thing I know I’m looking up at a bunch of concerned faces. (And some amused ones.)

I had passed out, directly in reaction to seeing that blood swirl. Lucky me, I got to do the rest of the tour in a wheelchair, with my classmates competing for who would get to push me. That’s about how I do with medical stuff. (Ironic, given that my mom had a 43-year career as a nurse.) In fact, years later — after 9/11 — I tried to give blood, and had such an extreme reaction to the process that I was asked not to come back. So it’s fair to say I am not in the audience for a game that tries its hardest — including usage of images and sounds — to simulate the experience of being a medical student. I felt woozy and icky for much of the time I made my way through Cheiron.

That said, the fundamental premise of Cheiron is quite cool! If pilots can hone their skills through flight simulator software, maybe medicos could have training simulations too. If nothing else, this game taught me some of the initial steps in a medical consultation — greeting, wash hands, ask for consent. Or at least, those are apparently to be the steps in the UK, where this game seems to have been produced.

Unfortunately, nifty though the concept may be, the implementation is problematic, though not due to lack of effort on the part of the authors. This exchange encapsulates the experience of the game pretty well:

>take pulse Which do you mean, the jugular venous pressure, the left dorsalis pedis pulse, the right dorsalis pedis pulse, the left posterior tibial pulse, the right posterior tibial pulse, the left popliteal pulse, the right popliteal pulse, the left femoral pulse, the right femoral pulse, the left carotid pulse, the right carotid pulse, the left brachial pulse, the right brachial pulse, the left radial pulse or the right radial pulse?

Aaah! There is a lot going on here, most of it not so good. First of all, for a lay player like myself, this disambiguation question is laughable, as it reads mostly as gibberish to me. How am I supposed to make a choice between 15 different options, none of which I know what they mean? Second, does it really make sense to offer the player 15 different options at this point? Is there any world in which it would make sense to reach around the patient’s left knee rather than using, like, the wrist? This feels like an instance where the game should have just done the obvious and not made a big deal of it, unless somehow the obvious course is not available, in which case the game could either make a challenge of figuring out how to take the pulse despite an obstacle, or defaulted to the next most obvious thing.

And yet, the inclusion of all 15 of those options is a perfect emblem of how earnestly the authors approached this game. Clearly, an enormous effort was made to provide an incredible number of options for the player, which makes a lot of sense for conversations and examinations that are meant to focus in on a diagnosis. The hints for inquiring about the patient’s history list no less than 79 topics you can query, ranging from mood to pets to vomiting to rheumatic fever. It’s incredible!

Because I’m not a medical student, I ended up using Dr. Google to try to put together diagnoses based on the information the game gave me. This actually worked pretty well! I don’t really understand much about acromegaly, but given a set of lab results and a physical exam, I can put together enough clues to come up with it on a web search. Frustratingly, though, there’s no way to validate a diagnosis in this game except to look at the answers, which lists all 4 patients’ diagnoses at once. I think it would have been fine to implement fewer conversation topics in order to make room for this kind of mechanic.

All in all, this felt like a fundamentally flawed attempt at what could be a pretty interesting educational piece, though the dizzying breadth of it (at the expense of consistency and depth) demonstrated just how difficult a task the authors had set themselves. I love them for trying, though — Cheiron is a fascinating failure that feels more worthwhile than many of the weak-tea fantasies and argumentative rants I’ve played in my Comp05 list thus far.

Rating: 6.5

Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis by Adam Thornton [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2012. Mark is the source for editor’s notes in the text.]

IFDB Page: Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis

File Under: Classic Knob

Note: Due to the nature of the game being reviewed, this review contains what the MPAA would probably call “pervasive language and strong sexual content.” Also, mild spoilers, both for this game and for Nabokov’s Lolita.

From the “sentences I never thought I’d write” department: I don’t think I’m well-educated enough to fully appreciate this Stiffy Makane game. With Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis (MMA), Adam Thornton brings us what might be one of the most erudite and wide-ranging IF games ever, and what is certainly the most erudite and wide-ranging IF porn parody ever. Thornton has been talking about Mentula Macanus for quite a long time now — since 2001 at least, when he released his previous foray into Stiffiana, Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country (SM:TUC). Hell, maybe longer, given that Google’s Usenet archive search leaves much to be desired. It always sounded to me like a gag — I mean really, a Stiffy Makane game all in Latin? Not even the guy who created an elaborate and technically accomplished science fiction Stiffy parody, complete with graphics and sound, would undertake such a thing, right?

Right. He didn’t. Instead, he spent a decade crafting an enormous, sprawling classical epic, with an expanded mission. Where SM:TUC was a gleeful takedown of so-called “Adult” IF, MMA sets its sights on a bigger target: IF itself. With tremendous innovation, technical polish, and abundant humor, Thornton upends the medium with a work that’s simultaneously traditionalist and transgressive, a layered and richly allusive delivery system for some highly demented and depraved content. It’s a hugely impressive achievement, and I can’t imagine anyone else pulling it off. I can’t imagine anyone else even trying.

But before I dive deeper, let me offer a little background, for those who need it and haven’t quit reading already. Way back in 1997, those innocent days when AGT didn’t yet signify “America’s Got Talent”, a guy named Mark Ryan unleashed upon the world a game called The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane, which he apparently wrote in BASIC in the eighth grade, then inexplicably ported to AGT and uploaded to the IF Archive. Adam Thornton played it, and wrote a funny review, in which he called it “easily the most amusingly horrible work of IF I’ve ever seen.” (By the way, anybody who wants to witness how delightful the IF newsgroups were back in the days before their troll-induced decline could do worse than to read the ensuing thread. The Graham Nelson comment in particular made me laugh out loud.) This review pointed out the terrible writing, the repellent ending, the freaky non-sequiturs, the risible implementation (including, famously, the ability to DROP PENIS), and so forth. It helped propel the game to “legendarily bad” status, but even so, Stiffy would likely have been soon forgotten if not for what happened next.

Exactly one year and one day after the review, a pseudonym-cloaked Thornton and a still-anonymous co-author released a MST-ing of the game (remember Mystery Science Theater 3000?). A few years later, Adam entered the 2001 IF Comp with Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country, a game which, as I said in my review at the time, “[makes] its PC the object as well as the subject of penetration (and penetration by a moose, no less.)” At this point, Stiffy and his stiffy had entered into the community lexicon as a shared in-joke, with Adam always in the vanguard. In fact, at this point, I’d say that Adam Thornton has made a career out of Stiffy Makane, which sounds much less promising than it’s actually turned out to be. Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis is the zenith of that career.

ERUDITION

From the beginning, the game lets us know the territory it intends to cover. A rotating dedication name-checks people from the world of literature, like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, as well as people from the IF world like Robb Sherwin and Graham Nelson. Then follows a bit of untranslated Italian — Thornton quoting Eliot quoting Pound quoting Dante. After that, the game throws you into a scenario in which you battle “the Gostak chief”, which will certainly remind some of us of Carl Muckenhoupt’s game The Gostak, which itself grew from a seed planted by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, in their book The Meaning Of Meaning. Confused yet? MMA has a helpful bibliographic referencing system to help you along:

>X CHIEF The Gostak chief [reference 2] [reference 3] is a giant of a man, with lank, thinning blond hair [reference 4]. He carries an enormous mace, which he wields as if it weighed nothing at all.

The Gostak chief aims a vicious blow at your head. You twist away desperately, skidding on the wet flagstones. The mace smashes into the stone, throwing a shower of sparks.

>REF 2 [Reference 2]: Ogden, C.K. and Ian Richards. The Meaning of Meaning, (citation unknown).

>REF 3 [Reference 3]: Muckenhaupt, Carl. The Gostak, passim.

>REF 4 [Reference 4]: Wolfe, Gene. The Sword of the Lictor, Chapter XXXVII, Terminus Est.

As if that weren’t enough, the game provides a parallel system of footnotes to complement its references, like so:

Curia Interior The Curia is still under reconstruction; renovations won't be completed for quite some time [footnote 1]. For the time being, the Senate still meets over at Pompey's porch. Frankly, this place is basically just a construction site. Steps to the Forum lead down to the south.

An olive-colored velvet bag rests empty on the ground here.

[To look up a footnote, use FOOTNOTE number-of-footnote]

>NOTE 1 [To disable poncy footnotes, you can type PONCY OFF]

[Footnote 1]: The Curia Hostilia burned in 52 BC; Julius Caesar started its renovation, but the Curia Julia (named in his honor) was not completed until 29 BC during the reign of Augustus. I hope you now feel better-educated.

Keep in mind: this is a porn parody IF based on a character created by a horny 14-year-old [ed. note: That phrase seems redundant somehow.]. It keeps a sense of humor about itself, but at the same time, there’s a clear delight in classical history and the ancient world. Observe:

Cocceio's Cave Cocceio's Cave runs arrow-straight from the town of Cumae, to the west, to the shore of Lake Avernus, to the east. It is a kilometer long and wide enough for two wagons to pass one another. It has recently been excavated on Caesar's orders [footnote 9], but it also makes for a very convenient road for petitioners seeking the Sybil. Regularly spaced torches light your way.

>NOTE 9 [Footnote 9]: Lake Avernus is a volcanic crater filled with water, which makes it an ideal protected harbor. Julius Caesar began construction of the port here, connecting Avernus to Lake Lucrino with a canal and thence to the sea. Cocceio's Cave was excavated to allow easy access by chariot to the war fleet housed in Avernus. The port (Portus Julius) became fully operational in Octavian's reign. Thus, it is probably slightly ahistorical to have Cocceio's Cave in this story, as it is likely an Augustan, not a Julian work; nevertheless, it's not badly out of place, and it's a really nifty Roman military construction, so in it stays.

The game’s erudition extends beyond Roman history and modernist poets. For instance, at one point there’s a hotel register you can examine, which yields entries like “Johnny Randall, Ramble” and “Harry Bumper, Sheridan.” Those entries don’t have a footnote or reference citation, but by that point I knew that there were very few arbitrary choices in the game, so I googled them. Turns out they’re from Nabokov’s Lolita — Humbert Humbert uses various false names in hotel registries as he searches for Lolita in the latter part of the book. Over and over, MMA rewards research and demonstrates an impressive range of literary reference. In fact, I’d say this game sent me to Google more than any other IF game I’ve ever played. Sometimes even that was fruitless, as in the time when Stiffy (under my control) attempted to venture into avian bestiality, making amorous advances toward a duck named Anas:

>FUCK DUCK (Anas) You, sir, are no Henry Miller [footnote 24].

>NOTE 24 [Footnote 24]: Hey, you know, it's kind of odd that "Anas" is so close to "Anaïs", isn't it? D'ya think?....nah, couldn't be.

Did Miller have some kind of sexual inclination toward waterfowl? Even Google couldn’t tell me, unless perhaps my Google-fu wasn’t up to par, which is always a possibility. I know that Miller had a passionate sexual relationship with Anaïs Nin, but whether the game’s Miller reference extended beyond the superficial similarity of names, I couldn’t tell. Again, that nagging feeling: I may have a Master’s degree in English Literature, but I don’t think I’m well-read enough for this Stiffy Makane game.

MMA‘s breadth of IF reference is equally impressive. Besides the fact that it expends herculean effort to expand the mythos of an otherwise extremely minor IF character, and the aforementioned Gostak shout-out, MMA touches on everything from Adventure to Scott Adams to Infocom to Losing Your Grip to Kallisti. In fact, at one point it even scores a two-for-one by including Madame Sosostris, who figures prominently in both Eliot’s The Waste Land and Graham Nelson’s Curses. Nelson, another IF author with an Eliot fixation, comes up again in a late-game scene, one that I thought really encapsulated MMA‘s humor:

Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter noon [reference 30]. A graveyard, of sorts, is to the south. A rather fetching garden lies to the west. A low, blocky palace, built of obsidian, looms to the east. A plaza stretches to the north under the towering bulk of an obelisk.

Identical men in dark suits and bowler hats scurry to and fro.

>REF 30 [Reference 30]: Eliot, T.S.. The Waste Land, III.208.

>X MEN Each identical man (for they are all men) wears an identical dark suit and an identical bowler hat, carries an identical black umbrella [reference 31], and, incongruously, sports an identical nametag proclaiming, in bright red letters, "HELLO MY NAME IS GRAHAM." I had not thought death had undone so many [reference 32].

>REF 31 [Reference 31]: Rowson, Martin. The Waste Land, I.31.

>REF 32 [Reference 32]: Eliot, T.S.. The Waste Land, I.63.

>FUCK MEN You see no Nelson's Column here.

A barrelful of Eliot references, several of which (the Unreal City, the bowler-hatted army) overlap again with Curses, collides with a British geographical/historical reference which also serves as a hilarious anatomical double-entendre about a founding father of modern IF. Deep respect jumps into bed with profound irreverence, and the result is quite satisfying. That’s Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis.

NEW MISSION

Thornton’s 2001 Stiffy game (SM:TUC) was deeply, rightly scornful of its main character. As in the game that spawned him, Stiffy was an projection of a boneheaded eighth-grade boy’s sexual mentality, albeit this time seen from a more adult perspective: unsatisfying as a lover, profoundly clueless, misogynist, and homophobic. His ideal sexual encounter is with a Holodeck robot — “jump through some hoops, get to fuck the girl. If only real life were so easy!” — and even she is less than enthusiastic about the experience. SM:TUC demolishes the ludicrous tropes of terrible “adult” IF in part by demonstrating that mechanical sex is the opposite of eroticism.

MMA is a different story. The Stiffy of MMA doesn’t have a trace of homophobia, and is enthusiastically omnisexual (within limits, and even those are played for laughs.) He’s still an eager lover, but this time he’s a good one, as we can tell by the reaction of his partners. His encounters often have a joke at their center (as when Stiffy fucks some version of Archimedes, who teaches him the true meaning of “Archimedes’ Screw” and who exclaims, “My lever’s big enough. Just give me a place to stand and I’ll rock your world!”), but the joke isn’t at Stiffy’s expense. The descriptions embrace sensuality, in direct contrast to SM:TUC‘s anti-erotic prose.

What changed? The mission changed, that’s what. AIF was always an easy target, albeit a fun one, and between his review of the original Ryan game, his MSTing of same, and SM:TUC, Thornton seems to have said his piece about it. Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis moves on to satirizing IF in general, especially the classic Infocom style. The game’s writing and design echoes this style — for all its transgressiveness, MMA‘s puzzles and prose are often quite traditionalist. Descriptions are generally concise, even terse, and there’s no attempt whatsoever to sidestep the artificiality of IF puzzles awkwardly grafted to a big long quest plot. There are no mazes, dragons, hunger puzzles, or other such tired figures, but there are heaping helpings of item-fetching, locked-door NPCs, and actual locked doors. The game is unapologetically an epic, old-fashioned puzzlefest, albeit one with a few differences.

Just the carnality itself is a major difference, really. Infocom was writing for a mass market which included children, so their games were necessarily quite chaste, even when they were trying to be otherwise. Credit to them for attempting something a little racy with Leather Goddesses of Phobos, but compared to MMA, even the “lewd” mode in Leather Goddesses of Phobos is ridiculously tame. Thornton’s game is IF sex comedy with the restraints taken off, and it works. It’s genuinely funny and sometimes even genuinely sexy.

It also uses its taboo subject matter to hilarious effect, blending perversity into IF as skillfully as I’ve ever seen. Take the puzzles, for instance. In 2002, I released a game called Another Earth, Another Sky, in which you play a super-strong PC and the solution to many puzzles is some variation of SMASH [object]. I thought of that game a lot when playing MMA, in which you play a super-virile PC, and the solution to many puzzles is some variation of FUCK [NPC]. The number of times that Stiffy’s stiffy is in some way the solution to a puzzle is both a great running gag and a great subversion of standard-issue IF object and NPC interactions. (MMA‘s version of the common light-source puzzle is particularly memorable.)

Sometimes, instead, the penis is the puzzle rather than the answer, as in the episode when Stiffy gets the clap and has to seek out a cure. The solution involves a regular IF activity — a mini-quest to seek out a medicinal herb and bring it back to the local doctor — but the context is something you don’t see in many other games. Not only that, the actual resolution of the quest turns IF convention its ear too, as we discover that the herb isn’t the cure at all, but simply serves to distract while the doctor administers a much more violent and unpleasant remedy.

Sex and gross-outs aside, MMA also provides a few great anti-puzzles, in which the obvious action is the correct one, but the game manages to make you think otherwise with persuasive writing. Take, for example, this bridge across a chasm:

A rickety footbridge — really, little more than flimsy-looking boards laid across twisted vines — spans the canyon to the west, swaying sickeningly in the breeze.

Makes you want to look for another way across the chasm, doesn’t it? I certainly did, based on my memories of a thousand other rickety IF bridges. They always collapse — that’s why they’re described as rickety. Plus, I’d already died many a death in MMA getting to this point. So I found a place to jump across the chasm, and failed. I failed tantalizingly, and thought I might succeed with a different approach. Nope. After a few more attempts, I returned to the bridge and decided to cross it, hoping I might get a clue from the inevitable death message. Instead, Stiffy crossed it. The end. The anticlimax was hilarious, and I loved the way the game played a joke on me by exploiting my IF experience. I realized later that I was also holding a set of instructions which explicitly told me to cross the bridge, but it had been so long since I’d looked at those, I forgot all about them. D’oh!

Alongside these are more typical IF puzzles, ranging from the simple (follow a recipe and get the desired result) to the rather clever (dress up as a prophet to fool a god into taking you into a new location.) MMA skewers IF, to be sure, but it isn’t just taking the piss — it’s a genuinely fun IF game on its own merits.

INNOVATION

Along with its transgressions and subversions, MMA brings a number of excellent IF innovations to the table. One of my favorites is how it handles repeated questions to an NPC. One of the weaknesses of the ASK/TELL conversation system (which MMA uses) can be a tendency toward repetition. The first time you ASK MIKE ABOUT FISH, Mike should tell you about the fish. But what happens if you repeat the command? Lots of games just would repeat Mike’s dialogue, which makes the NPC obviously robotic. However, that robotic behavior serves a gameplay purpose — if the player forgets some crucial nugget of information, the ability to retrieve that information shouldn’t be sacrificed in the name of character realism, or else you’re just trading one annoyance for another. In addition, topics sometimes have aliases, so the player may not even realizing that from the game’s point of view, she’s asking the same question twice. MMA comes up with a solution to this conundrum which I thought was rather ingenious:

>ASK SYBIL ABOUT FUTURE "To seize the Golden Banana is a mighty deed, but the Son of Aeneas must look to the Son of Abraham to release it from its sheath."

>ASK SYBIL ABOUT BANANA The Cumaean Sybil has already told you that you will need the help of a Jew to unsheath [sic] the Golden Banana.

By having the parser intervene when a question is repeated, the player gets the needed information without the NPC having to behave like a tape recorder.

MMA also innovates at the design level, with an intricate story structure surrounded by a clever series of framing layers. It’s not uncommon for an IF game (or a traditional story) to start in the middle of some action, advance to a point where it looks pretty bad for the hero, and then flash back to tell the story leading up to that point. It’s quite a bit more unusual for the hero’s death to actually occur. Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis solves this dilemma brilliantly, with a perfect marriage of its classicism and its game-nerd geekery. Not to mention that the response to “X ME” in this section is one of the funniest parodies I’ve seen of a standard Inform library message.

On top of this, there’s still another layer of narrative complexity, as seen in a section where the available range of action has drastically narrowed to only two possible commands, and very boring ones at that. Just when I was thinking “man, fast forward,” this happened:

[Here the original text is badly damaged and illegible for many pages. What we can piece together from the extant fragments of this section and the remainder of the work, however, is that Stiffy somehow becomes accepted as one of the Vikings. He wins his toga and the Banana back, acquires the honorific "Sven Stiffy" for his deeds, and meets up with a Druid leading a Pictish revolt. A brief and curious fragment from this last section survives.]

Thus the action shifts out of the previous trap, and MMA piles on yet another inventive application of scholarly mechanics to gameplay mechanics, letting us know that not only does the game have narrative layers in itself, there’s also a metanarrative outside of the story, in which the whole of MMA is in fact some kind of ancient text in translation, which has not survived in its entirety. Employing this device not only allows Thornton to skip past some of the boring or illogical sections (always with a comic purpose) and also reinforces the erudite side of MMA‘s ongoing juxtaposition.

These layers are great for comedy, but I think my favorite comedic innovation in MMA is its running gag of warned deaths. Insta-death is all over the place in IF, especially old-school IF, but MMA takes an approach which allows the whole thing to be a lot funnier: every time the player enters a command which will lead to instant death, the game issues a warning first. Then, if the action is repeated, the game delivers the insta-death:

>PUT PENIS IN OPENING It is pitch black in there. Your cock is likely to be eaten by a grue [reference 6].

>PUT PENIS IN OPENING Chomp! A grue bites your dick completely off, as was foretold.

*** You have been emasculated by a grue ***

There are dozens of these scattered throughout the game, leading to all manner of horrendous demises. Instant IF death is annoying (though UNDO mitigates it a lot), but I thought this was wonderful. Every time I saw one of these warnings, I gave a little tiny cheer inside, because I knew that the next thing I would get to do is steer Stiffy into another hilarious Wile E. Coyote calamity. The more of these there were, the funnier it got, as is the nature of the running gag. (The other great running gag: the game’s responses to failed attempts to fuck people. Or things.)

Also funny and clever was the CAST command, which lets us know the models for various characters in the game. These models spring from reality (Ron Jeremy as Stiffy), literature (Baldanders from Gene Wolfe as the Gostak chieftain), TV (Dr. Nick Riviera from The Simpsons as the aforementioned clap-curer), and Dungeons & Dragons (Froghemoth makes an appearance.) I particularly enjoyed seeing Thornton’s dogs expressing their separate personalities as the heads of Cerberus.

Finally, I have to mention the ending. I won’t give too much away, except to say that it’s one of the more entertaining ways I’ve ever had the plot shouted at me while tied to a chair. A fitting topper to this epic and bizarre game, it partakes of the epic and the bizarre on a grand scale, justifying the game’s subtitle and winding up with an excellent closing joke.

IMPLEMENTATION

Of course, smart references and clever ideas only get you so far — it’s in the execution that an IF game is made or broken. It should probably come as no surprise at this point in the review that I found Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis to be outstanding in this department as well. The game isn’t completely bug-free — it would be very surprising indeed to find a game of this size that had no bugs or errors whatsoever — but it credits multiple rounds of testers, and their efforts shine through. The writing is similarly error-free. It rarely aspires to poetry, but it excels at finding that perfect word to make a graphic detail really vivid, whether you’re being splattered with filth in the sewers of Ostia or inhaling the mephitic vapors of a pit that leads to Hades.

Many many actions are accounted for with proper verbs and witty responses. Most first-level objects are described, albeit sometimes rather curtly. There are many fun surprises embedded for the curious to find, including one of the better XYZZY easter eggs I’ve seen in a while. (Actually, come to think of it, that only seemed like an Easter egg — it’s actually necessary to solve a puzzle.) There’s even the occasional spate of runic and/or Greek writing mixed in with the prose, thanks to Inform libraries written by Thornton himself.

MMA also pays good attention to detail and logic within the confines of its model world. For instance, Stiffy is often obliged to disrobe, whether for the purpose of solving a puzzle or just for a pleasant diversion to pass the time. Either way, it’s easy to forget to put his toga back on him, but invariably the other characters in the game notice when Stiffy is parading around naked, and usually have some witty remark to make about it.

Finally, in case I haven’t made this clear, Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis is quite the extensive game. Every time I thought it was ending, it would instead open up a new vista of plot and setting, with more surprises and more hilarity. In addition to being long, it’s quite deep as well. I noticed this particularly in the Great Library of Alexandria, in which you can learn not just the key fact that helps the plot along, but all about much of the game world and even the greater historical context of its setting.

Glancing at the source code (which Thornton includes in the game package), I can see that there are many more responses I never even uncovered. The expansiveness of the game gives it great access to callbacks, both comedy kind and the IF kind (returning to a location or situation after time has passed and things have changed.) MMA wears its influences on its long, long sleeves, and by the end, it can count itself as an influence. It’s a bit like the question Stephen Colbert asked when he interviewed the band Rush: “You’re known for some long songs. Have you ever written a song so epic, that you were being influenced by your own song, because it happened so much earlier in your career?” This is a game that took a decade to produce, and it’s clear the time wasn’t wasted.

Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis was the perfect finish to my mini-journey of reviewing all the 2011 XYZZY Best Game nominees. I rolled the dice and reviewed those games in random order, but the sequence turned out just right. Zombie Exodus was an oddball nominee, unfinished and not my cup of tea, while Six was an utterly charming comp entry. Cryptozookeeper beat them both with music, graphics, spectacular writing, and an epic scope. It took home the XYZZY award, and it deserves all the recognition it’s gotten, but for my money Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis has the edge over even Cryptozookeeper. Its careful coding, clever design, thematic boldness and overflowing intelligence have made it my favorite game of the bunch. I look forward eagerly to whatever Adam Thornton has cooking for 2021.

Cryptozookeeper by Robb Sherwin [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2012.]

IFDB Page: Cryptozookeeper

We Eat The Night, We Drink The Time

It took me some time to appreciate Robb Sherwin’s work. I found his first comp game, Chicks Dig Jerks, a really unpleasant experience, due to its misogyny and its bugginess. His second comp entry, A Crimson Spring, fared better with me, partly because it concerned superheroes, one of my favorite genres. But that game too was quite bloodthirsty in its content, and quite buggy in its execution, so it wasn’t really to my taste. Even then, though, the change had begun. Sherwin’s writing, which won praise in some quarters from the very beginning, was sharpening, and his coding discipline was increasing, albeit slowly. Subsequent games like No Time To Squeal and The Recruit gave Sherwin’s writing a chance to shine while somebody else took care of the fussy coding details, and outside the comp he bucked the general trend towards short games by releasing sprawling long-form works like Fallacy Of Dawn and Necrotic Drift. Not to mention, I met the guy on several occasions, given that we’re both IF people who live in Colorado, and it turns out that he’s one of the nicest people in the community. Belying the outrageousness of his writing, the man himself is a gentle, witty, soft-spoken presence, a real mensch who’s done me many a good turn over the years.

Which brings us to today, and Cryptozookeeper. It’s the most Sherwin-esque Sherwin game I’ve yet seen. It’s gonzo, it’s funny, it’s extreme, and it’s shambolic, and it’s all these things to the most highly refined degree I’ve ever seen Robb accomplish, which means it’s all these things to the most highly refined degree I’ve ever seen anyone accomplish. And is it still buggy? Oh sure, of course it is. There are bugs in this game that had me pounding highly creative curses into my keyboard, just so I could log them in my notes and remember how aggravated I was.

But then some well-crafted joke or unexpected linguistic fireworks would burst forth from the screen, and suddenly I was having a great time again. I don’t know whether this means that I’ve finally acquired the proper tastes, or whether Robb has finally pushed his work over my personal tipping point where good writing outweighs bad coding, but in any case, I found myself enthusiastically quoting the game to others, and recommending it to at least some of my friends — those with strong stomachs who could handle the gore and grotesquerie. Cryptozookeeper is by turns enthralling and infuriating, fascinating and repellent. Its reach ultimately exceeds its grasp, but oh, what a mighty reach it is.

Like many of Sherwin’s other games, Cryptozookeeper is a multimedia work, taking advantage of Hugo‘s ability to present images and sound integrated into the text game. I found the pictures a mixed bag. Many of the character photos, especially those of the PC, were both funny and informative, providing visual information that nicely rounded out the characterization provided by the text. The location shots, on the other hand, were sometimes useful but more often just a bit baffling. They were almost always washed with some weird filter that oversaturated colors and downplayed contrast, making the images so information-light that I soon mostly ignored them, a habit which ended up biting me later when a puzzle depended on me watching for subtle differences in the location photo.

The music, on the other hand, was a roaring success. Cryptozookeeper is equipped with an excellent soundtrack of ominous electronica, which almost always enhances the game’s mood with creepy synthetic overtones. I enjoyed the music so often that I found myself using the “NP” command (which displays the title and artist of the song currently playing) every few minutes, and periodically made notes to myself to seek out the tunes for my iPod. Another gimmick which worked well was the dynamic credits and help screen — in order to avoid spoilers, the game’s documentation keeps a few of its cards hidden early on, only displaying instructions for new commands and new actor appearances after they’ve been revealed in the story.

As with any Sherwin game, though, the star of the show is the writing, and Cryptozookeeper does not disappoint. The room descriptions in particular dazzled me over and over. Standard issue in the Robb toolkit is the extended aside that starts out original, then piles on harder and harder just to make sure that it’s absolutely matchless. To pick a sample room description more or less at random:

Building Corner The corner of this building has a window at ground level. There aren't any security signs upon it, or systems that seem to be in place, other than "windows make a lot of sound when shattered," which is a feature you get for free with windows, even the ones in this town sold door to door. You were under the impression that the place was recently constructed, but judging by the deep scratches along the exterior, the place has apparently been under siege by either a pack of ravenous, wild, roving bobcats or sentient handclaws.

Calling “windows make a lot of sound when shattered” a building’s only security system is original, and funny. Mentioning that this is “a feature you get for free with windows” not only adds to the funny by belaboring the obvious but also, by its use of the word “feature”, echoes the sort of advertising claim that comes along with the operating system that happens to be called Windows. But it’s still not done! We learn that Christmas City, New Mexico (the game’s locale) apparently suffers from door-to-door window salesmen, whose products may be shoddy but not so shoddy that they aren’t still noisy when broken. And that’s not even mentioning the roving bobcats and the sentient handclaws. The vast majority of room descriptions contain this sort of wit overload, and they make the game a joy to read.

Not only that, there are a variety of miniquests built into the game’s design, and Sherwin frequently employs them as excursions into unusual writing styles, like the Rybread-level psychedelia of the section whose rooms have titles like “Were you ever content or did you assign it in retrospect?”, “Esophagus”, and “Despair and mouth.” Not all these experiments work perfectly, but each is executed with such bravura gusto that I was more than happy to be carried along. There are also a ton of inside references for Infocom and IF nerds, which I found quite enjoyable given that I am one such nerd. Every time the game threw out a phrase like “oddly angled” or “it all comes down to this”, I grinned wide. There’s plenty of food as well for other kinds of computer geeks, sports geeks, and aficionados of the weird and twisted. I can’t say I enjoyed every bit of it — this game prompted me to look up a few things I wish I’d never learned about — but I sure enjoyed a lot of it.

Sherwin is also well known for his dialogue, and there’s plenty of it here. It’s embedded, sometimes awkwardly, in a conversational system that provides a list of topics and makes TALK the central command. Though NPCs are nearby the vast majority of the time, most commonly there are no conversation topics available. However, when the plot is ready to move forward, Cryptozookeeper cues the player that a topic is available by highlighting the word in another character’s dialogue. Sometimes you even get your choice of two. Having three or more topics available at once is pretty uncommon, though.

This system eliminates the need to code lots and lots of responses into an NPC, and considering what excessive care Robb puts into his dialogue, it makes perfect sense to have such a labor-saver on hand, but as a player I found it clumsy more often than I wanted to. There were situations where an NPC would ask a direct question of the PC, but the topic of the question would never be made available in the topics list, which forced me into the situation of not being able to pick up a rock-solid conversational cue, and not being able to even acknowledge to the other character the reason for my silence. Other times, there were some things going on that seemed to beg for discussion, but the system didn’t allow for it.

However, when dialogue is available, life is pretty good. All Robb’s characters are more or less the same character: intelligent, self-hating, morally bankrupt, directionless individuals whose primary skill is hyper-referential and hilarious snarky commentary, and who are nursing some secret or semi-secret pain, often connected with a failed relationship. This results in a fairly low level of emotional engagement with their stories (at least for me), but an extremely high level of entertainment in their banter. Again, picking a sample more or less at random, how about a section where the cute goth host of a local access TV show is speaking to the PC:

“…It’s all right down here, but I’m originally from Colorado and I think I am moving back. Shortly. I just signed a contract to do this show on a station that way. Not that I’d tell any of the turnips around here. Do you have satellite TV?”

“I – ah, I’m between televisions right now. Trying to see what format emerges dominant. The color versus black and white thing really screwed with my ability to trust technology. That and the wireless revolution: I developed a fixation and craving for power cords.” The truth is that you could not afford programming for your TV once Elephant Memory fired you, so you just sold the television itself. (The part about power cords is also true.)

“Well, download my show off Usenet,” she says. You brighten, pretending you know what Usenet means. “It’ll be a lot of the same show, but with a slightly bigger budget. It’s really going to fly!”

Almost every sentence contains some offbeat note — “the turnips around here”, “a fixation and craving for power cords”, “pretending you know what Usenet means.” And that’s when the characters are flirting with each other. When they start sniping at each other, clever digs abound. That’s also when a lot of their backstories come out. As I mentioned, I don’t relate to these characters much on an emotional level, and that goes for their histories too, which in my mind generally tend towards the category of “sob stories from asshole guys.” For the most part, these people tend to behave in despicable ways and then suffer the inevitable consequences of doing so, which doesn’t make them very sympathetic. Even they have their moments, though. There’s something a little touching about the way these misfits find and sometimes help each other. The ending, in particular, I found satisfying and even moving as a character moment.

What really ties the whole game together and makes it work is the comedy. Sherwin has become a master of the well-turned IF joke, and Cryptozookeeper has many many many funny funny funny bits. Just to pick a few of my favorites:

Deanna looks at Lebbeus with irritability and exhaustion, as if he were lobotomized, an oft-misbehaving ferret, or had just left a comment on Youtube.

“Hey, ANY OTHER HORRIBLE CLONES THAT MAY BE IN EARSHOT – WE’RE COMING OUT! Everyone BE COOL or I will BEAT YOU with my INVENTORY.”

Everyone stops their animal fighting, boozing, whoring, sports book calling, plotting, thieving and usage of emulators in conjunction with ROMs they don’t own to stare – mouths agape – at your faux pas.

“Hey, jerkoff,” says a non-descript guy in the back trying to attach a stiletto to the wing of a baby bald eagle, “What’s the goddamn matter with you? What an asshole!”

There are hundreds and hundreds of examples of such wit in this game. Cryptozookeeper is epic in many senses, but most of all it’s a boundless source of laughs. Even if it were an utter failure on all other levels (which it isn’t), this game would totally be worth playing for the jokes.

These jewels are strung together in a structure that doesn’t put much emphasis on puzzle-solving, branching, or interactivity. Quite frequently, the dialogue trees and even the compass directions equate to more or less a “turn the page” command. That’s not to say that Cryptozookeeper is some kind of foulmouthed, pseudoscientific Moment Of Hope. There are some puzzles, and certain aspects of the game in fact offer a vast variety of choices (thanks to the magic of combinatorics). There’s also a branching narrative in certain places — more about that in a bit. What’s true, though, is that this is a pretty conceptual game. It is far less focused on presenting the player with a landscape and objects than it is on presenting a definite plot (admittedly one studded with a lot of optional goals), a variety of set-pieces, and of course lots and lots of dialogue, jokes, and joke-laden dialogue. Consequently, quite often a directional command isn’t so much a method for getting through a physical landscape as a way of getting to the next piece of the story.

I mentioned miniquests earlier, which is where the opportunities for branching and optional goals come in. The PC is hunting for DNA samples from a wide variety of animals — nevermind why. A few such samples are required to finish the game, but for the most part, gathering a whole lot of them is entirely voluntary. I strongly recommend pursuing all available paths, though — the optional quests are quite often the occasion for crackerjack showcases of prose style experimentation and, of course, more jokes. Not only that, the DNA samples that are invariably the prizes of these quests open up greater and greater richness that can be brought to bear on the game’s midsection.

On the other hand, it’s in the miniquests where I encountered the game’s worst bugs, which were generally of the “unstable inventory” variety. Items, as well as people, disappear and (occasionally) reappear throughout the game without explanation. Or sometimes the explanation is so lame and the player so powerless that fury results. In particular, there was one occasion when an NPC purloined a number of my hard-won DNA samples, which never returned, and I never even got the opportunity to engage him in conversation about it or otherwise try to retrieve my stuff. This almost ruined the game for me, and I spent dozens of turns cursing at the screen about it. Few occurrences in IF provoke more ire from me than when inventory that took a great deal of work to obtain suddenly disappears, irretrievably, for no good reason. In fairness, at one point the game declared that it would eliminate an important item of mine, only to have the item reappear later on, seemingly none the worse for wear. So sometimes the instabilities worked in my favor, but they were still bewildering.

I should say here, by the way, that I hardly want to be the guy ragging on what was obviously an enormous labor of love. Like Peter Nepstad before him, Robb Sherwin obviously put a colossal amount of energy and dedication into this game, so much so that it in fact sent him to the hospital at one point. Plus, as I said, he’s a hell of a guy in person. However, a review that avoids mentioning any of a game’s flaws does a disservice both to the author and the audience, in my opinion. Thus, we say what must be said, albeit sometimes a bit sheepishly.

So while I’m complaining, let’s spend a little more time on the game’s defects. The biggest problem was the bugs, as is par for a Sherwin game, but it wasn’t the only problem. In some ways, the entire premise of the game is flawed, in that it seems to purport that the main character has some sort of special power to bring cryptids into the world, but the reason, such as it is, for the character’s power is very flimsy. The creation process is extremely simple, and completely facilitated by technology. Literally anyone could do it, but everyone in the game acts as if the PC is the only one capable of this rudimentary button-mashing.

The only thing I could piece together from the background given in the game is that his ability springs from his utter scientific ignorance and incompetence. In other words, anybody could do these simple things but only the most ignorant person would, because someone with even a shred of scientific understanding or basic sense would dismiss the entire thing as preposterous. So I guess this is a little subversive, having a PC whose abilities spring from stupidity, and it might work well for a one-time puzzle, but Cryptozookeeper forces the PC to engage in this process over and over. It seems to me that once everyone witnesses the process succeeding, the ignorance premise becomes invalid.

Speaking of repetition, let’s talk about the combat. Have I mentioned the combat? Loooong stretches of the game’s midsection are taken up with RPG-ish combat scenes. The game will allow an unlimited number of these, and a fairly hefty minimum is required in order to proceed to the endgame. Crucially, it’s unclear how much leveling up and how many combatants will be necessary in order to succeed in that endgame, so I decided to have ten combatants, and grind away until I’d leveled one combatant up to the highest possible level (which is level 5). This took a whole lot of grinding. I’ve got literally thousands of lines of transcript devoted to this fighting.

The fights are not without their charm. When the battle begins, a window displays the crucial stats for each fighter along with a little tagline, just for fun. As with everything else in the game, the nature of the creatures themselves as well as their taglines were often a source of laughs. For instance, the wolverine’s tagline is, “I’m the best at what I do.” Not quite a direct X-Men quote, but close enough to make me laugh. Also, each attack made by either enemy is described with some colorful little sentence, along the lines of “The sloth could have avoided that last blow, but craves oblivion, taking 3 points of damage.” There are maybe 20 of these sentences, and they’re fun and fine and everything, but like I said, the combat goes on for thousands of lines. Even this level of variety gets numbingly repetitive pretty quickly.

I wonder — for a game structure like this one, could the damage descriptions be crowdsourced? Say Robb got on ifMUD, or Jolt Country, or intfiction.org, (or maybe all of these and more) and asked 20 or 30 co-conspirators to come up with 5 or 10 damage descriptions each? Suddenly the algorithm’s options increase by an order of magnitude, and even thousands of lines of combat might still yield the occasional surprise. For all I know, this has been tried in the past — I haven’t bothered to check it out. All I can say is that a handful of even the cleverest lines wear thin through constant repetition, and I wonder if it would have worked better if there had been a barrelful. Thankfully, there is quite a bit of variety in the randomly selected enemies, and there’s a great deal of richness to be found when creating the combatants — more than I even wanted to take the time to find, really. Not that I wasn’t pissed when losing the opportunity.

Despite the repetition, or perhaps because of it, I found myself attaching distinct personalities to each of the fighters in my little ragtag army. I knew which ones were the badasses, which ones were the chokers. Some weren’t as good as their stats might imply, while some seemed to pull out an unexpected victory surprisingly often. The PC is portrayed as having paternal feelings towards the fighters, and damned if I didn’t find myself echoing that very dynamic. It was a peculiar phenomenon — code constructs that had almost no description, couldn’t be interacted with, and had virtually no personality at all aside from a photo and a tagline, suddenly became characters that I cared about, and whose foibles I knew, just because I watched them each go through randomized combat dozens of times. I don’t know if everyone would have the patience to do this (really, I doubt it), but I found it bizarrely and surprisingly rewarding, especially when the fighters came into play in the endgame.

On the other hand, given that there was so much repetition, I wish the game had done a better job of smoothing the path. Each time I wanted to set up a fight, I would go north, push a keypad, select a fighter, and go south. I did this over and over and over again, like a few hundred times. I dearly wish the process would have been condensed into one command, or even less than one command. Perhaps every time a fight ends, the game could ask me if I wanted to trigger another, and if I said yes, allow me to pick a fighter, then start the next fight straight away. That would have been so much less annoying than running through a litany of steps over and over.

There are a few interface stumbles like this. Several times, some kind of action scene involving the PC would begin, but action-y verbs like “KICK [object]” would still result in comically inappropriate standard library messages like “Venting your frustrations on [the object] wouldn’t accomplish much.” Or perhaps someone is coming at the PC with an axe, but “GET AXE” yields “You haven’t seen anything like that.” Oh, well, what a relief then — guess I can stop worrying about being chopped to bits by it! Finally, I found the conversation system syntax awkwardly staggered. The game enforces this formulation, with the “T” command for talk:

>T DEANNA Please enter a topic >> GUNS

Over and over again, I’d forget about this enforced second step and type something like “T DEANNA GUNS“, only to be told “[That is not understood by the game.]” I really wish it had been.

Okay, enough of that. I want to praise one more thing before I close: the cueing. This is the art of very subtly guiding the player into typing an unexpected or non-standard command at the prompt, and Cryptozookeeper does it masterfully. I won’t cite any examples, because that would obviously take the fun out of them for potential players. Instead, I’ll just say that several times I was rather flabbergasted at what the game got me to type, without being at all overt or on-the-nose about hinting at that response. Every time that happens, the player gets to feel like a genius. It’s one of the best tricks IF can pull, and Cryptozookeeper does it beautifully.

This game is definitely not for everybody. If you find gore and repulsive behavior too upsetting, avoid it. Similarly, if repetitive RPG combat makes you want to shoot yourself, stay healthy by not playing this game. For me, though, IF that makes me laugh over and over again, and occasionally astounds me with something sublime or defiantly ridiculous, can be forgiven of almost any sin. Cryptozookeeper is that kind of IF. It’s Robb Sherwin at the top of his very strange game, and I’m glad I finally figured out how to enjoy that.