Threading The Labyrinth by Kevin Doughty [Comp00]

IFDB page: Threading The Labyrinth
Final placement: 40th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’m a big fan of poetry, and I’m (obviously) a big fan of interactive fiction, but it seems to me that interactive poetry is a pretty challenging genre. Andrew Plotkin probably came as close as anybody ever has with his experimental work The Space Under The Window. That work threw most IF conventions out the window, asking the player instead to “type the names of objects (or attributes or aspects of objects) that you see in the narrative” at the prompt. Some words it wouldn’t respond to at all, some words might take you back to a previous node, and some words would reveal new information to you. Threading The Labyrinth takes a similar approach, with two changes: it offers some kind of response for every in-context word you type (in-context meaning words that the game has printed in bold text), but has very few words which open up the context further. For example, you might type the word “and” — the game will respond, “Both conditions expressed are simultaneously true,” but you’ll still be at the same game node, since no more bold text has printed. As a result, TTL ends up feeling like more of an interactive close reading. Like a close reading, it can yield interesting insight, though that insight is limited by the fact that it’s close reading its own text, and that it offers so little text to examine — just a few sentences and fragments, really.

For what we do get, I’d venture to say that the primary theme is an interrogation of interactivity. Both in its content and its form, TTL is interested in exploring how we interact with that which is outside of us, and what new dynamics and artifacts get created in the process. This is an intriguing theme in and of itself, and it lends itself readily to TTL‘s format. The game’s use of imagery from Greek myth isn’t entirely successful — its dominant image of the thread, for example, has an obvious connection to the idea of “UNDO” in modern IF, but the game doesn’t do anything with this connection. On the other hand, TTL does have some nice moments. I particularly liked its differentiation between mazes and labyrinths, and its revisitation of that image in the “They” section.

Too bad there just isn’t that much here. I finished the whole thing and (I think) read all the text available in about 10 minutes. What’s there is pretty cool, while it lasts. It doesn’t take long to play, so why not check it out? I get the impression that if you leave the game thinking about the nature of interaction, it will have achieved its goal.

Rating: 6.0

Unnkulia X by Valentine Kopteltsev [Comp00]

IFDB page: Unnkulia X
Final placement: 27th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

In the beginning, there was the 1995 IF competition. This competition had but One Rule: all entries must be winnable in two hours or less. The competition has gotten grander and more complex since then, but it has remained a competition for short games, not Curses-length epics. Somewhere along the way, though, the One Rule got mutated a little. I quote from this year’s rules: “Judges must base their judgement of each game on at most the first two hours of play… Authors may write a game of any length they desire, but should keep this rule in mind when determining the length of their entry.” This rule has been in this form, more or less, since 1998. Still, the competition has remained oriented towards short games.

There are some obvious reasons for this. For one thing, it takes less time to write a short game. The more objects, locations, NPCs, plot points, and such you cram into your game, the more work your game will be to produce, at least if you want to maintain a reasonable level of quality. I would argue, however, that there are other reasons to keep long games out of the competition. From a judging standpoint, I don’t feel comfortable evaluating a game unless I’m reasonably confident that I’ve seen most or all of it. If A Mind Forever Voyaging, for instance, were to be entered in an IF competition, I know for certain that I wouldn’t have an accurate picture of it after only 2 hours of play. I felt differently about Zork III before and after the Royal Puzzle. I could go on, but you get the idea. Consequently, the ratings given to a large game don’t really reflect the game as a whole, just its beginning sections. Also, it’s really comparing apples to oranges to put something like Worlds Apart up against something like, say, Winter Wonderland. Even if two games have a similar tone, or similar puzzles, or a whole raft of other similarities, length does matter. Ahem.

Nowadays though, the competition has become, to use a worn-out but apt phrase, a victim of its own success. Authors enter anything they write into the competition just because it’s so high-profile and receives so much ink (or electrons, or whatever.) They figure that even in the worst case, they’ll get a whole bunch of people playing and writing about their game, so why not enter it? I feel a rant coming on about this. The first part of my rant is directed at authors. Look, people, entering a game that is too long (or too buggy, or too poorly proofread, or otherwise inappropriate for the competition) is an abuse of the judges’ time. The feedback and recognition you get this way are ill-gotten.

Moreover, I would contend that especially in the case of overlong games, you’re not really benefiting that much, because whatever recognition and feedback you get are only based on the first two hours, not your game as a whole. You created an entire game, but if it’s just one of fifty entries, and it’s quickly apparent that two hours ain’t gonna cover it, not by a long stretch, how many of those players do you think will return to your game? How many people will see and give you feedback about the other three-fourths of the game that they didn’t get to during the comp? How much are you really benefiting from all that comp attention?

And while I’m on the topic, let’s move to the second part of my rant, which is directed to the community at large. Listen, I love the competition. It’s one of my favorite things about the IF community. But let’s face the problems that it has. The magnetism of the competition, the idea that it’s the best place for every game, is something we all need to work harder to address. Do your part. Release a long game (or a short one) outside of the competition. Write a review of a non-comp game for SPAG or XYZZYNews. Participate in things like the IF Review Conspiracy and the IF Book Club. Most importantly, post post POST about non-comp games. Make a commitment to post a reaction to any non-comp game you play. It doesn’t have to be a review. It doesn’t have to be thorough. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be smart. It just has to be done, because if it doesn’t get done, the authors who don’t abuse the competition will end up losing out, and that’s not right. So please — do it. Your efforts will benefit yourself and everybody else in the IF community.

Just to be democratic, the third part of my rant is addressed to myself, and people like me, people who write long, thorough reviews of every comp game. We are part of the problem. I recognize that consistency is important to us, and that’s why we devote more or less the same amount of space to each comp game. However, there can and should be limits. Don’t even play games that have catastrophic bugs, let alone review them. Any attention those games get contributes to the perception that it’s better to release a buggy game in the comp than a polished game in the Spring. We must work to prove that this perception is fallacious and untrue. As for overlong games, review them if you feel you must, but don’t feel obligated to spend much of the review talking about the game itself — spend it instead on some adjacent topic like the problem of inappropriate games in the competition.

I mean, for god’s sake, Unnkulia X is 865K! The thing is only 45K smaller than Once and Future! It’s freaking huge! Yes, it’s fairly well done, implemented with care and only a few lapses in English. (There’s a lot of unfamiliar diction, which I assume is attributable to the author’s first language being something other than English, but most of these alien word choices are rather refreshing instead of jarring.) Of course, I only got 60 points out of 300 after two hours, so these assessments are based on what I have to assume is the first fifth or so of the game. If it were the whole game, I’d probably give it about a 9. Considering it’s a fifth of the game, I think that works out to about a…

Rating: 1.8

Clock by Cleopatra Kozlowski [Comp00]

IFDB page: The Clock
Final placement: 38th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

There’s a long tradition in IF of Average-Joe protagonists who are thrown into a world where the normal rules no longer apply. Clock partakes of this tradition. Unfortunately, it also partakes of another, less pleasant IF tradition: the game where nothing really makes any sense. We start out with a fine, if somewhat fuzzy, premise: you’ve been asked by your friend Kitty to do some house-sitting and cat-sitting for her while she takes care of some urgent business. Being kind-hearted, you agree, but you soon find out that Kitty’s house is a strange clock-tower, and her cat is on the unusual side as well. Okay, great. To get much further, though, you’d better hope that your authorial telepathy is working really well.

For example (I am now going to spoil a puzzle that I can’t imagine anyone guessing for themselves): at one point, you find a “fairy coin”, which you’d think you might be able to use to buy something at the fairy shop you find later. Nope. The old woman who runs the shop says (without quotes, so it looks disconcertingly like a parser message) “This isn’t enough. I need proper paper money.” Alright, fair enough. Sadly, there’s no paper money to be found. So what do you do? Well, unexpectedly enough, you plant the coin in soft ground, water it, and a money tree grows! Now, it’d be one thing if there was some clear hint, like a reference to fairy money trees in one of the many reference books you find lying around, or if the old woman said “This is just seed money,” or something like that. The only hint we get is that on one of the TV stations (if you were diligent enough to watch every message from every station) an economic adviser says at one point, “Money doesn’t grow on trees!” Sorry, but that’s just not enough of a hint. The only reason I’d connect this comment with planting the coin is if I was thinking, “Now why would the game include that comment?” When I play IF, though, I’m not thinking like that. I’m trying to put myself in the mind of the character, not stepping outside and thinking about how the game is constructed. If I have to puzzle out apparent non sequiturs and try to parse them as hints, then the game has failed me, as far as I’m concerned.

So the first thing that Clock needs to be reasonably solvable is much clearer hints. The next thing it needs is a much richer implementation. As with Punk Points, many areas in Clock suffer from the weakness that the only things implemented are the solutions. Look, that’s just not enough. For instance, several puzzles in the game depend on the construction “ASK <animal> ABOUT <object>.” Now, without a doubt, these solutions suffer from the problem I describe in the first paragraph — with absolutely no clues about talking animals, why in the world would anyone think to ask an animal about anything? However, let’s set that aside for a moment and pretend that you’ve somehow taken it into your head to ask an animal about something. If you ask about anything but the topics necessary to solve the puzzle, you get a stock response like “The cat meows” or “The frog croaks.” When I get a response like this, I take it as a very clear signal from the game that the animal doesn’t talk, doesn’t understand me, and that trying to have a conversation with it is useless. When just the opposite is true, I can only conclude that the game has no idea how to communicate clearly.

There’s another issue at hand. At the very beginning of the game, you find a note from your friend instructing you very strongly not to touch anything. After reading the note, the game tells you “You decide to do pretty much as she says – but surely it couldn’t hurt to look around a bit, so long as nobody finds out!” So that’s what I tried to do — look around a bit, but do pretty much as she says and not touch anything. I sort of expected that something would happen where I’d be in danger, or the house would, or the cat, or something, and I’d have to break the rule and start rummaging through my friend’s belongings. Nothing happened. The clock stopped, but that’s about it. The dilemma I found myself in is whether I should behave like a standard text adventurer (search everything, take anything that isn’t nailed down, etc.) or like the character the game was shaping for me.

It soon became apparent, however, that the latter choice was pointless, because if I follow it, the game goes nowhere. Consequently, I had to start pillaging. I didn’t like it. What Clock didn’t seem to grok is that lots of players take their behavioral cues from the character the text suggests. If you have to deliberately break character in order to succeed in the game, then the game has basically shot itself in the foot. For this reason, and the others described above, I turned quickly to the walkthrough, finished the game, and didn’t have much fun. But none of those things were the worst part. The worst part is that there were two starvation puzzles (you have to feed yourself and something else) along with a pointless sleep timer. Authors, please. I beg you. I implore you. STOP IT with the starvation puzzles!! Stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it! Thank you.

Rating: 3.4

Rameses by Stephen Bond [Comp00]

IFDB page: Rameses
Final placement: 13th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

I was all set to slag off this game as another totally non-interactive self-pity festival with an insecure, pathetic PC, as kind of an Irish version of A Moment of Hope. But I finished it sort of quickly, so I decided to play it again, just to see if there were more choices than I found on my first time through. There aren’t, but in the process, something strange started happening to me. My first instinct about the game was being stretched, reshaped by things like the long, involved speech that one of the characters makes about free will.

I already knew that Rameses was well-written, so I had just assumed that its non-interactivity was an instance of an game that wanted too much control and wasn’t willing to create an experience where the player could take the lead. But if this was the case, what are the chances that it would make a point of having one of its characters pontificate on free will, a lecture whose irony is unmistakably manifest in this very constrained game? The more closely I looked, the more strongly I suspected that there is more to Rameses than meets the eye. As my second play-through went on, I again encountered the main character’s anguished words at the climax:

It’s just that… I can’t… do anything! I can’t do anything!” I scream at last. “It’s like I’m trapped inside and can’t get out and can’t be myself and… I’m stuck….

The first time I read these words, I just blew by them. I was too annoyed with the game’s steel restraints and its horribly wretched PC. The second time, though. The second time…

The second time I finally twigged to what the game is up to. Rameses uses non-interactivity for the purpose of deepening character rather than, as with most other non-interactive games, for the purpose of furthering the plot. Alex Moran, the PC, is an insecure, depressed college student who can’t ever seem to stand up to the bullies in his life, or to comfort their victims. Consequently, his only “friends” are smug, self-important blowhards who only want him along because they know that he’ll be a receptive (if resentful) audience for their grandiosities. He spends most of his time nostalgically dreaming about a childhood friend named Daniel, fantasizing about his reunion with that friend, despite the fact that he has totally cut Daniel out of his life due to his own inability to communicate.

Playing this character is an exercise in frustration. Every command you enter that might stand up to a bully, or leave a bad situation, or just let the PC take charge of his life in any way is wistfully brushed aside with a message like “Yeah, that’d be great, wouldn’t it? But I’ll never do it.” Annoying, yes, but it’s also the very soul of the character, and the very point of the game. In a sense, Rameses turns you into Alex’s real self, struggling to get out and be heard, struggling to make a difference, only to be smacked down by fear, insecurity, and sometimes outright paranoia. In his climactic speech, the PC voices the exact torment that the player feels at every prompt — it’s an agonizing experience, and that’s the point.

(I’m about to talk about the game’s ending — I don’t think I really spoil too much, but be advised that I’ll be analyzing how I think the last paragraph worked.) It’s pretty depressing stuff, and it’s made even more depressing by the fact that I don’t think the PC ever gets out of it. Rameses‘ ending left me a little uncertain, but the more I think about it, the more sure I am that the ending paragraph is a fantasy scenario. For one thing, it comes so abruptly after the PC has fled the scene of what might have been his redemption — without any transition, it feels more like a wistful reimagining than an actual event. Add to this the fact that the game begins with a fantasy scenario, one which ends with the very same words that end the closing paragraph. No, that final scene doesn’t happen — it’s just a way to open the next chapter of Alex’s life, another dream to focus on even as he lets it slip away. And as well-done as Rameses was, I hope that next chapter never becomes IF. Once around that track was more than enough for me.

Rating: 8.9

Punk Points by Jim Munroe [Comp00]

IFDB page: Punk Points
Final placement: 22nd place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Note: this review has a bit of profanity here and there.

Here’s a thesis: the method for making a great punk rock song is antithetical to the method for making a great IF game. See, when you’re making punk rock, the main thing is emotion. It doesn’t matter if you play the wrong chord, or sing the wrong note, or say the wrong words — those are details, and they aren’t important. The point is that you get the spirit across, that you communicate that great fucking barbaric yawp, as Walt Whitman might have said were he a punk rocker. But great IF doesn’t get made like this. The best IF authors are less like Sid Vicious or Jello Biafra and more like Todd Rundgren or (to take a really non-punk example) Mick Jones of Foreigner. That is to say, they are studio wizards who put endless attention into the details.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t communicate emotion, too, but it works differently, because we receive IF differently from the way we experience punk rock. Listening to punk rock is a passive experience, not because you don’t get involved emotionally — you certainly do, or at least I do — but because the band throws the song at you, and you have to catch it, and you’re not doing anything to influence them, at least not anything direct (and if you’re listening to a recording rather than a live performance, not anything at all.) Playing IF, on the other hand, is all about shaping the work. In addition, we receive IF one piece at a time, whereas music is more of a gestalt experience. Consequently, IF players spend a ton of time poking into the details, and they can be counted on to stray from the path of the plot. If some studio wizard hasn’t made sure that most of those odd steps are accounted for, and removed all the bugs that might trip an unwary player, the game is unlikely to get its yawp across.

By now you probably know where I’m going with this analogy. Punk Points is put together like a great punk rock song, which unfortunately makes it pretty much middling poor IF. The writing is spot-on, doing an excellent job of capturing a Catholic boys’ high school in 1985, crystallizing a portrait of the PC as 13-year-old malcontent rebelling against the school’s repressive system, and offering convincing characters with great dialogue. The coding, on the other hand, falls down rather badly, which takes pretty much all of the punch away from the writing.

See, in IF it’s not enough just to have a great song — you have to play all the notes right, sing on pitch, and remember all the words, too. Otherwise, you end up with players like me wandering around carrying an object that wasn’t supposed to be takeable, and banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what to do next, unable to do so because the answer involves a logical impossibility once I’m carrying the object. (Problems like this were intensified by the lack of hints, which the game asserts “are for fucking posers.”) The game has tons of errors like this — most not quite so game-killing, and some quite humorous (try putting your middle finger on something and walking away), but all of which take you right out of the immersive world that the writing has worked so hard to create. There are a ton of cool ideas in Punk Points, but after spending most of my time beating my brains out against its bugs and sparse implementation, I didn’t come out remembering any of the cool stuff — just the frustration.

The other big example of this problem is in the game’s characters. In the cut-scenes, these characters positively sparkle with reality. The dialogue in those scenes is crisp and believable, and their actions fit in well with their words. Once we get to the interactive scenes, however, it’s another story. These NPCs are just barely implemented. Nobody moves, nobody does too much except two or three random pieces of business, and worst of all, nobody has much of a response to anything, except the one crucial thing you’re supposed to ask them about. But see, when 9 out of 10 things get a default response, or no response at all, I’m not likely to get to that 10th question. I just figure that the NPC isn’t important, because obviously not much work was put into implementing it.

This reasonable but incorrect assumption tripped me up on a number of the game’s puzzles, especially those in the second act, several of which hinge on guessing the right noun in “ASK ABOUT”. When they don’t answer to pretty much anything else, why should I keep asking them about things? Stuff like that may be details, but lack of attention to the details just kills an IF game. Maybe that kind of meticulousness would make Punk Points less punk, but it sure as hell would make it a better game.

Rating: 5.8

Stupid Kittens by Marc Valhara as Pollyanna Huffington [Comp00]

IFDB page: Stupid Kittens
Final placement: 44rd place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Well. OK. Um. What can I say about Stupid Kittens? It lives up to its title, sort of. There’s only one kitten, so it doesn’t live up to the last “S” of its title. But it is pretty stupid. Either that or brilliant. It’s kind of hard to tell the difference with this game.

Here’s a definition of dada that I found on the Internet: “Nihilistic movement in the arts that flourished chiefly in France, Switzerland, and Germany from about 1916 to about 1920 [and later -ed.] and that was based on the principles of deliberate irrationality, anarchy, and cynicism and the rejection of laws of beauty and social organization.” I think Stupid Kittens might be dada. Or else stupid. It’s kind of hard to tell the difference with this game.

This game has God, and Krishna, and Einstein, and Buddha, and a crazy murderous little girl, and weird stuff, and lots of kitty litter, and the disintegration of reality, and Jennifer Love Hewitt encased in carbonite, and angels, and you can take your soul, and wash it, and dice, and more weird stuff, and a little electric chair, and a fish-head, and a crack pipe, and a vet, and a laptop, and Next Tuesday, and a grenade made of vinegar and baking soda, and then a bunch more weird stuff. It doesn’t have a plot. It doesn’t have puzzles. It doesn’t have stupid unintentional errors in spelling, grammar, or coding. Or else it does. It’s kind of hard to tell the difference with this game.

Rating: 3.8 (Also, I like cats, so I didn’t like this game.)

Enlisted by Greg Barry [Comp00]

IFDB page: Enlisted
Final placement: 23rd place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Enlisted, a military adventure with a Star Trek streak, imagines a Space Force that functions a bit like the French Foreign Legion reputedly did — as a last resort for people in desperate circumstances who need to escape their lives. The PC, fresh from an intertwined bankruptcy and divorce, certainly fits this category, and from the outset Enlisted gives its space Navy a distinctly authentic feel. There are still forms, though they’re now in electronic format. There are still humiliating medical exams, though now those exams are automated and high-tech. And there are still unpleasant surprises, like finding out that the length of your tour of duty is defined by how long it feels to you — the time you sleep away in cryogenic fugue doesn’t count. From the captain’s mission briefing speech to the endless, identical corridors of your ship, Enlisted creates a very convincing world.

Granted, there are a number of flaws that hinder the feeling of immersion — the writing often feels awkward, and is sometimes burdened with errors. In addition, there are still some bugs left in the game, as well as some basic errors like listing incorrect information about exits from a location; overall, Enlisted feels like it still needs one more attentive round of proofreading and debugging. Nonetheless, though I can’t claim a lot of personal authority on the subject, having never served in the military, the whole thing still just feels right. It captures the sense of being processed by a giant, bureaucratic system, as well as the excitement of setting out on a mission, encountering unexpected dangers and crises, and solving those problems. It’s not mimesis, exactly — a number of things are abstracted away in the name of high-tech — but the objects, settings, and situations felt genuine.

The problem is that genuineness isn’t always a virtue. Certainly, I was delighted when I encountered the other enlistees (“They look uncomfortable in their stiff and shiny uniforms and are mumbling amongst themselves.”) and the bevy of governmental-sounding acronyms at every possible location, but I was very disappointed by some of the things that the game chooses to display realistically. In particular, I’m thinking of a puzzle that requires you to travel outside the space station in an EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity — told you there were acronyms everywhere) suit. Using commands like “turnr” (turn right), “roll” (forward roll), and “lthrust” (low thrust), you must painstakingly maneuver the suit to a variety of locations based on x, y, and z coordinates.

I went through stages with this puzzle. At first, it baffled me completely — I ended up dozens of units away from anything, and totally unable to stop myself or correct my momentum. Then, after a restore, I started to get the hang of it, and thought it was amazingly cool. Once I had a mental picture of how the PC was traveling on x, y, and z axes, how turning and rolling could alter its orientation with regard to these axes, and how I could start and stop by turning and thrusting, it was fun and exciting to get myself maneuvered to the first place I needed to go. Then, when I realized that I’d need to go through this laborious process something like five more times, I started to get really annoyed. What started out as fun very rapidly devolved into tedium, and not only that, messing about with the EVA took the lion’s share of my 2-hour playing time, so much so that I didn’t even come close to finishing the game, despite typing straight from the walkthrough for the last half hour.

The more games I review, the more importance I place on one particular rule from Graham Nelson‘s legendary “Players’ Bill Of Rights”: “Not to have to do boring things for the sake of it.” The EVA suit stuff from Enlisted felt quite realistic — probably, traveling in a space suit via a backpack thruster and positioning system would be just as fiddly and drudging as the game makes it seem. However, reproducing this process does not make for enjoyable interactive fiction. As with regular fiction, we don’t expect to have to sit through the boring parts of an adventure, even though realistically there would probably be many of those. This puzzle would have been excellent if, for example, the player needed to use the manual turn/thrust method to reach the first target, and that target had contained an autopilot module which allowed the rest of the EVA stuff to be done automagically via a Starcross-ish command like “SET X TO 2. SET Y TO -2. SET Z TO 0. START AUTOPILOT” Instead, we have a few minutes of excitement and then long stretches of painful and tricky mucking about. If I wanted that, I’d have joined the real Army.

Rating: 6.7

Shade by Andrew Plotkin as Ampe R. Sand [Comp00]

IFDB page: Shade
Final placement: 10th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Way back in 1996, I entered my own comp game. In his review of it, Andrew Plotkin talked about the fact that my game didn’t give any warning when the PC’s perceptions suddenly shifted. He said, “Maybe the author intended that effect, the world changing without any sensation of change — it’s certainly a disorienting effect when it really happens to you.” This was a very charitable interpretation on Zarf’s part; of course, it wasn’t intentional, but rather one of the many novice mistakes I made in that game and corrected in the later version based on that kind of feedback. Shade, however, does use this effect in a way that I’m quite sure is intentional, and is in fact quite masterful. It’s also rather difficult to discuss without spoilers. Let’s just say that sometimes things change absolutely without warning in this game, in fact more and more often as the game goes on. When it happened to me the first time, I wasn’t sure what to make of it — I thought perhaps it was a bug, or some kind of misguided idea of providing variety. As the game went on, I realized that every detail of it is quite deliberate, and all of it calculated to deliver maximum effect. The effect it had on me was very powerful indeed. Quite simply, it blew me away. Not only that, it’s one of those games that I wanted to restart right after I’d finished, just to try different things. When I did this, even more details came together in my head. Even now, little pieces are snapping together in my mind, and I’m getting flashes of realization about the meanings behind the meanings of so many of the game’s elements. Few parts of the IF experience are as startling or as pleasurable.

Also a pleasure is the unwavering standard of excellence set by the game’s writing and coding, especially the coding. The one-room setting is implemented brilliantly, shaping its descriptions based around what the PC is most likely to perceive first. For example, if you’re standing in the living room, the computer desk and other items on the living room floor are described first, followed by mentions of the kitchen nook and bathroom nook. If, however, you’re standing in the kitchen nook, the game will first mention the stove, fridge, and cupboard, then go on to talk about the desk and such. The mimesis achieved by this effect is remarkable, which makes it even more stunning when that mimesis is carefully, strategically bent, then broken. Even better, this kind of care has gone into pretty much every item in the game. They reveal themselves to you in ways that are not only character-appropriate, but which change to accommodate the PC’s changing situation. Shade is the kind of game that puts a ton of care into its coding, most of which the player will never notice, because the very purpose of that care is to make the experience seamless for the player no matter what order she does things in. I noticed, because I think about those kind of things, and because I played it twice. If you liked Shade the first time, play it again — you may be surprised at how well it wraps itself around your commands.

If you haven’t played it once, then for goodness’ sake stop reading this review and play it now. It’s a short game — in fact, there really is no plot to speak of, nor any puzzles. Actually, now that I think about it, Shade almost fits better into the category of IF Art (as exemplified by the entries in Marnie Parker’s periodic IF Art comps) than the category of IF game. Still, like the best art, it creates an electrifying, unforgettable experience. I have to admit that it’s an experience that shook me a little — Shade has several surprises up its sleeve, not all of them pleasant. But don’t let that dissuade you. Try this piece. I think it’ll knock you out — I know it did me.

Rating: 9.8

Return To Zork: Another Story by Stefano Canelli [Comp00]

IFDB page: Return To Zork: Another Story
Final placement: 26th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

The IF competition sure puts me in some weird situations. I never thought I’d play through an actual game based on an Infocom sample transcript, but I did it in 1998, when I played David Ledgard’s Space Station. I never thought I’d read a mocked-up transcript of a fake game, then play a game actually implemented from that gag transcript, but J. Robinson Wheeler’s Four In One proved me wrong that same year. Now I’ve encountered what may be the weirdest situation yet: I just played a text remake of Return To Zork.

For those of you who didn’t play RTZ, it was Activision’s first graphical adventure to use the Zork license they had inherited from their purchase of Infocom. It was, in my opinion, pretty weak. It had a fairly cool interface, as graphic adventures go, and some nice features (like the various bits that took notes for you or recorded people’s speeches), but it was cursed with an incomprehensible plot, highly annoying puzzles, and absolutely execrable voice acting. Most of all, it just didn’t feel very Zorky, at least not to me. The cleverness was missing, and the splendor was, too.

For me, it’s completely baffling that somebody would want to actually remake this game. In fact, RTZAS isn’t just a remake — call it a “remake-plus”. It takes much of the original structure from RTZ, alters some things, and adds a bunch more. It’s kind of like if somebody was such a fan of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier that they wrote an entirely new novelization of it, changing a few bits around and adding whole new scenes and subplots. Well, of course the other difference is that RTZAS was produced with permission of the license holder, yet another example of Activision’s openness to the fan community. You can bet you wouldn’t see Paramount behaving so freely with the Star Trek license.

When I played RTZAS, I couldn’t help but be haunted by sounds and images from the original RTZ, bad voice-acting and all. This mental baggage already biased me against the game, sorry to say, and RTZAS‘s many, many problems did nothing to redeem it. First of all, as far as I could tell, the game makes no effort to clarify RTZ‘s tangled plot, and in fact snarls it further with the addition of new locations, characters, and subplots. Moreover, there are a number of bugs, though none very catastrophic.

The biggest problem of all, however, is the language. The English in this game is very deeply warped — almost every sentence features at least one bizarre error in spelling, grammar, or diction, sometimes so much so that it’s hard to tell what the hell the game is talking about. For example, here’s a sentence from the first room description: “The rocky underfoot descends ruggedly towards east in direction of a building that appears to be a lighthouse.” Sometimes RTZAS feels like the offspring of an unholy union between Return to Zork and For A Change, just because the game’s writing is so far from standard English. Much of it feels like it’s been run through a translator program like Babelfish, with typically hilarious results. For instance, at one point you find an old mill that the game refers to as “delicious.” Delicious? All I can guess is that some word like “adorable” was intended, but something got very, very lost in the translation.

Still, all that aside, I have to hand it to RTZAS: this game is obviously a labor of love. A great deal of care has been put into describing lots of objects, creating alternate solutions to puzzles, and lovingly recreating many of the scenes from RTZ. It also mercifully leaves out some of the very worst scenes from that game (“Want some rye? ‘Course you do!”), which I certainly appreciated. It seems like a very odd thing to want to bring into the world, but RTZAS could be a fairly worthwhile game after its writing has undergone a major overhaul and it’s been debugged more thoroughly. Nonetheless, even if it was at this point, it wouldn’t really be an appropriate competition game. This thing is huge! I played for 2 hours and didn’t even get halfway through, I don’t think. As it stands, it’s not only huge but very badly executed. And I just finished 2 hours with it. Maybe I will have that rye, after all.

Rating: 3.4

Kaged by Ian Finley [Comp00]

IFDB page: Kaged
Final placement: 1st place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Kaged is totalitarian IF. I mean that in two ways. First, the game’s setting is a paranoid, Kafkaesque dystopia, where a totalitarian government is clearly in control. The game tips us off quite early to the fact that it’s placing us in a very dark world indeed. The introductory text is full of capitalized phrases, phrases like High Inquisitor and Citadel of Justice. These give us a clue that the powers in charge surround themselves with an overwhelming air of authority, and the intro’s gory imagery makes it obvious that all is not well in this Stalinist wonderland.

When we reach the first room, a number of standard props are waiting for us: heavy, immovable desks symbolizing the drudgery of work; a seal and inkpad hinting at numbing bureaucracy; a solid iron typewriter, a technological relic to tell us that we’re in a place where innovation is squashed, where the status quo is upheld and even enforced for its own sake; and of course, a standard uniform, reminding us unsubtly that the PC is just one of a million pieces in the authoritarian machine. Then, finally, when we reach the first important scene of the game, we enter the chamber of the High Inquisitor himself. The Inquisitor’s job in this society is described thus: ” All decisions and power lay solely in the Inquisitor’s hands, the legal hocus-pocus of the past swept away. True Justice at last.” The irony is as thick as anything you’ll find in A Mind Forever Voyaging, and if you don’t get the point by now you never will. I found it all about as pleasant and effective as a hammer blow to the face. That is to say, Kaged is unremittingly, relentlessly dark in plot, setting, and characterization, and it certainly worked on me, spooking me into some of the sharpest paranoia I’ve ever experienced in IF.

Remember, though, I mentioned that there are two ways in which Kaged is totalitarian IF. Not only does it depict a totalitarian regime, it enacts one as well. With the exception of one branching point, both directions of which are functionally equivalent, and both of which put you at the same spot, your path through Kaged is very much predestined. Deviations from it are not tolerated. Commands that don’t advance the story tend to be met with terse dismissal: “That’s ridiculous.” Others are rejected with the rationale that the risk they involve is too dangerous, not that the game minds your taking the risks it intends. A few choices simply aren’t implemented at all.

A great deal of this is quite appropriate and logical, given the game’s setting. Surveillance cameras are everywhere, as are guards, and it’s a sensible design choice to disallow obviously suicidal commands with a “You don’t want to do that” type of message. In addition, this design dovetails neatly with the game’s plot. However, there are times when Kaged oversteps even these bounds, laying a controlling hand on the player to enforce the plot very rigidly indeed. For example, I figured out much of the foreshadowing in the game rather early on, and tried some rather reasonable actions to test my conclusions. Despite the fact that these actions would not have placed the PC in danger, certainly no more than most of the actions that the game requires to advance the plot, they were forbidden under the simple rubric of “You don’t want to do that.”

This bothered me — if I’ve figured something out, why can’t I act on that knowledge? Because it isn’t time yet, the game tells me, and besides it wouldn’t be in character. But when a game slips hints to you and then forbids you from acting on those hints, it has moved beyond simply shaping the character. In the case of Kaged, I felt very much that the game itself became an example of the kind of dictatorial control that it ostensibly was working to decry.

That being said, I’m in a dilemma about how to rate it. On the one hand, I have to admit that it does an outstanding job at achieving what appear to be its goals. By the end of the game I was twitchy, angry, and thoroughly awash in the reality-questioning quasi-madness brought on by works like Brazil and 1984. Like those works, Kaged is a kick in the head all the way through, and a very powerful kick at that. In a way, I love this — I find it a brilliant indictment of authority run rampant, and perhaps even a radical thesis on the problems of non-interactive IF. All that makes me want to rate Kaged quite highly indeed.

On the other hand, if I give it what it wants, doesn’t that make me complicit? If I truly believe in resisting totalitarianism (and I truly do), then shouldn’t I resist Kaged and its demands by giving it the lowest rating possible? Shouldn’t I raise my voice as strongly as possible to insist that IF like this is unacceptable? Maybe I should. But then again, what about that old rationale of irony? Sure, Kaged shows us totalitarianism, and controls us with an iron hand, but isn’t it just making a point by doing so? Sure. Of course it is. It’s all ironic, you see? That’s what it is. And it certainly would be overly paranoid of me to think of that as just a rationalization.

Rating: 9.6