>INVENTORY, Page 29

Dinner With Andre by Liza Daly [Comp00]

IFDB page: Dinner With Andre
Final placement: 18th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

When I first opened Dinner With Andre, I was enchanted. The game is real-world IF of a genre I’ve never quite seen before — “date IF”, I suppose. You play a woman who’s offered to buy dinner for a co-worker, hoping to get to know him. The opening scene is of a swank restaurant, where you’re just coming to the end of a wonderful dinner with your date and wondering what the rest of the evening has in store. He excuses himself for a moment, and when you reach for the check, you get a very unpleasant surprise: dinner was much, much more expensive than you thought, and your credit card isn’t going to cover it. Unfortunately, it’s the only form of payment you’ve got with you. I thought this was a terrific premise, and just a few minutes into the game I was grinning with excitement at the prospect of seeing how the rest of the plot played out.

A half-hour later, I was ready to shove my head through my monitor. I tried everything I could think of to solve that first puzzle, and was rebuffed by the game at every turn. Several of the things I tried (like “call mom on cell phone”) were actually implemented, which was a pleasant surprise, but most of my ideas weren’t implemented, which was no surprise at all considering how desperate some of them were (like “write IOU”). I’m always reluctant to turn to the hints in a game that’s clearly well-written and bug-free, and DWA definitely fits that description. However, I really can’t afford to buy a new monitor, so I swallowed my pride and checked the hints. It’s rather difficult to discuss without revealing spoilers, but my feeling when I read the solution was, “but I tried that and was told it doesn’t work!” Turns out I had already had the right idea, but hadn’t expressed it in quite the way the game wanted.

This experience of being alternately thrilled and frustrated was emblematic of my entire encounter with the game. DWA has lots of wonderful moments, and several of its responses made me laugh out loud, but I found myself thoroughly stymied in most of my attempts to get through the plot. By the end, I was relying solely on the hints to wade through the game. I don’t think the problems are terribly deep-rooted, mainly a lack of gentle nudges in the text and a need for alternate phrasings in several parts. Unfortunately, due to the extreme difficulty I had with the first puzzle, I was much more ready to reach for the hints at each successive stuck point.

Once I lost my inhibitions about using the hints, I found I enjoyed the game quite a bit more. Disaster after disaster happens to the PC, and her reactions force her into several very funny situations, situations which require further wacky contortions to escape. In fact, I’m realizing as I write this that the genre of DWA isn’t “date IF” — it’s “situation comedy IF”. Now, I mean that in the kindest sense (that is, the Seinfeld sense rather than the Major Dad sense), but I think that this insight gets to the heart of why I had trouble with the game. Solving the game’s puzzles requires coming up with the funny response that the game had in mind, and using a less funny but still sensible response, or even a different funny response that the game hadn’t envisioned, puts the player at a rather unhelpful dead end.

Thus, in the first puzzle I had figured out what I wanted to do, but hadn’t come up with the particular funny way of doing this thing that the game was looking for, and therefore I found myself going in ever more frustrating circles. Therefore, if you’re anything like me, you probably shouldn’t be afraid to turn to the hints in DWA, but once you do, you’ll have a pretty good time. If only we could say that about all our disastrous dates.

Rating: 7.6

Transfer by Tod Levi [Comp00]

IFDB page: Transfer
Final placement: 5th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

What is it about isolated research complexes? Is it that their combination of solitude and high-tech niftiness is particularly well-suited to IF? Do their deeply buried labs and living quarters provide plenty of fodder for interesting room descriptions while furnishing a very logical justification for a paucity of objects? Does something about all that Big Science that inevitably goes catastrophically awry appeal to writers in a computer game genre that is generally thought to be long since technically outmoded? Whatever the reason behind their mystique, isolated research complexes have appeared in every IF competition since C.E. Forman blazed the trail with his 1996 comp game Delusions, a game so good that perhaps it can take credit on its own for inspiring the trend. From Babel to Unholy Grail to Four Seconds, it’s just not an IF competition without a game about an isolated research complex where Dangerous Experiments go Horribly Wrong. Despite its rather pedestrian title, Transfer is a captivating thriller in exactly this mode.

The game’s central conceit is a machine that allows “Entity Transfer” — an exchange of minds between animals and humans. Naturally, the genius Professor who built this machine has been mysteriously put out of commission, and you as the PC can’t be sure who to trust among the various colleagues and security agents who roam the complex in the wake of this disaster. The game never makes your quest explicit, but it’s clear enough that you are charged with clearing up the mystery and flushing out the culprit behind this obvious Foul Play. The transfer machine allows the author to once again exercise the skills that he demonstrated in last year’s cat-perspective game A Day For Soft Food, this time thrusting the PC into a whole menagerie of animal points-of-view — this device is not only lots of fun, it serves as a vehicle for some very clever and original (if at times somewhat implausible) puzzles. These puzzles are also quite well integrated into the game’s plot, a plot which I found quite gripping.

In fact, the strength of the story serves ironically to highlight the game’s major flaw, which is the unrealistic behavior of its NPCs. These NPCs are well-characterized, but implemented much too shallowly. I know this because I was so into the story that I found it extremely frustrating when I wasn’t able to progress in the plot even after telling an NPC about some stunningly important clue, or showing them some highly significant objects I’d acquired. In fact, there are times in Transfer when something obviously alarming is going on, but the NPCs ignore it completely, going robotically about their daily rounds despite my best efforts to draw their attention. Because the rest of the work was so involving, the characters’ unresponsiveness became a real point of frustration for me. Other than this weakness, the game appears to be quite well-tested — I found only a couple of small, isolated bugs and spelling errors, and on the flip side noticed several spots where the game’s code revealed outstanding craftsmanship in its handling of subtle details. I wasn’t able to finish the game in the two hours allotted judging time, but assuming I survive the process of grading another 50 games, I eagerly anticipate returning to reach the ending of Transfer — if the rest of the game is any indication, the payoff should be worthwhile indeed.

Rating: 8.8

Guess The Verb! by Leonard Richardson [Comp00]

IFDB page: Guess The Verb!
Final placement: 11th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: Guess the Verb is fun. In fact, I’ll go even better than that: Guess the Verb is great! I was quite worried when I saw the game’s title, fearing that I faced another Annoyotron, or at best a riff on the Textfire game Verb!. What I got instead was a highly enjoyable comp game that I’m eagerly looking forward to revisiting after the judging period is over. What a bargain! For one thing, the game is just screamingly funny. In fact, even the meta-game materials are hilarious. Not two minutes after loading up GTV I was giggling like a loon. My wife walked past and asked, “Good game?” “I haven’t even started the game yet!” I replied. “I’m just reading the instructions!” Those instructions are not to be missed, and they set the tone wonderfully for the rest of the game, a riotous spoof on IF that skewers everything from pretentious authors and critics (like myself) to overly literal parsers to shopworn genre conventions.

Here’s what’s even better: even though GTV is a spoof, it is simultaneously a really fun game. The first puzzle, for example, makes terrific mockery of IF parsers, but it is also at the same time a clever, original, and completely fair puzzle, one which gave me that invaluable “Aha!” feeling once I had figured it out. Examples of this kind of dual excellence abound throughout the game, and there are so many examples I loved that it’s hard to pick one, so I’ll just select this room description from early on in the game:

The Midway The lights and noise of the midway seem hollow and dull compared to the aura of excitement you felt at the verb guessing booth. You survey the sights around you as though through different eyes: the merry-go-round, the concession stand--they seem so pedestrian now. You feel a strange attraction pulling you back towards the southwest, as though a ham-handed author were trying to place hints into the room description that the game would progress a lot faster if you went back to the verb guessing booth already.

This is a lovely parody on the tendency of IF authors to give rather clumsy hints in the midst of otherwise banal descriptions of objects and rooms, in hopes of giving the player a friendly shove in the right direction. But even as GTV lampoons the silliness of that technique, at the same time it enacts that very technique and achieves the hoped-for effect. Stuff like that makes me smile very, very widely.

Another great feature of this game is its impressive replayability. The plot branches randomly into five small scenarios, and I don’t think that all five scenarios are reachable in a single play session, at least not without very copious amounts of UNDOing, and perhaps not even then. Each scenario is well worth visiting, even the briefer ones, so there’s a reason for replay right there. Not only that, the game is just stuffed full of Easter eggs. I played for two hours, got to the end, and was rewarded with a long list of amusing things to do, things that I’m just itching to go back and try, especially knowing how many of the game’s jokes truly were amusing. In fact, even when some of the scenarios get cut off, GTV sometimes compensates you with additional items that can be used in a bunch of entertaining ways.

This game wasn’t perfect — mercifully, I found no coding errors, but there were there were a few typos here and there, and the very beginning of the game is lumbered with a misfeature that forces you to enter some very specific information before you can get to a standard prompt that allows you to restore, script, restart, etc. Those quibbles aside, however, I can say without reservation that this is by far the best game of Guess the Verb I have ever played or could ever hope to play.

Rating: 9.7

Aftermath by Graham Somerville [Comp00]

IFDB page: Aftermath
Final placement: 37th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Sometimes a comp game can be summed up in one word. Of course, that never stops me from going ahead and writing three paragraphs about it anyway, explaining why that word fits, but for those with a distaste for verbosity, that one word can be a handy precis. Aftermath is such a game, and the word, I’m sorry to say, is “dismal.” The game’s topic is war, and not the glory of triumph in battle or the allure of military machinery, but the dismal, dismal existence of lone soldiers on frost-covered battlefields, struggling out from under heaps of bodies and fighting off the human vultures who scavenge through the corpses’ belongings.

This topic, by itself, is quite a downer, but still could be the basis of an excellent game. Unfortunately, Aftermath‘s dismal characteristics don’t stop there. The writing is dismal, the grammar is dismal, the spelling is dismal, the coding is dismal, and the puzzles are beyond dismal. Run-on sentences and other grammar bungles are everywhere, programming errors are legion, and there are as many spelling mistakes as dead bodies. (And with this game, that’s really saying something.) In fact, after I finished the game (with an inexplicable 120 out of 100 points) and received the ending message, I found myself still at the prompt. When I typed “L”, the game said “It looks like an ordinary to me.” I still had all my possessions (including “a apple”), but was trapped in a bizarre post-game limbo. It was almost as hard to figure out as some of the game’s puzzles.

Oy, those puzzles! From the very beginning of the game, I quickly determined that guessing the verb, as well as the noun, was going to be necessary in numerous cases. On top of that, several times very particular objects (or sub-objects) must be examined before the game will reveal things that, by all rights, should be dead obvious (pardon the pun) to the PC. Sadly, that’s not even the worst of it. There’s one puzzle in particular that made me say to my monitor, “How in the hell was I supposed to know to do that?” My monitor never answers me when I ask it that kind of stuff — probably for the best, since it’s not the kind of question that really has a good answer. I’d be quite surprised to learn of anyone who solved all the puzzles in Aftermath without the walkthrough, because not only do they require reading the author’s mind, but they occasionally fly in the face of all logic and sense as well.

The real shame is that an IF game in the war genre could be so good, and Aftermath falls so short of its potential. Heaven knows there’s a ton of inherent drama in war, drama that works from Henry V to Platoon have mined to spectacular effect. What’s more, it’s the kind of genre we don’t see very often in IF, which tends to be more or less dominated by science fictional and fantastic themes (a trend to which I’ve made my share of contributions.) Once and Future starts out in a war, but quickly shifts into Arthurian Fantasy mode. Remembrance delves into WWI, but in a way that could hardly be called interactive. In fact, the only memorable IF game in the war genre I’ve played is Persistence of Memory, which leaves great swaths of territory still untouched.

Aftermath, unhappily, can only manage to come up with gratuitous gore and relentless dreariness, sprinkled throughout with wince-worthy histrionics and unintentionally funny English and TADS errors. It’s all the more disappointing, because the game could have been so moving. Aftermath has a very solid theme, and its basic plot engine, the idea of a character who is the sole survivor of a battle and is obsessed with building a monument to the dead, could have made for a dynamite story. Aftermath isn’t that story, though. Instead its only success, as well as its disappointing failure, lies in the fact that it is just so dismal.

Rating: 3.1

Being Andrew Plotkin by J. Robinson Wheeler as Celie Paradis [Comp00]

IFDB page: Being Andrew Plotkin
Final placement: 3rd place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

I was the perfect audience for this game, or near-perfect anyway. I’ve seen and enjoyed Being John Malkovich, the film by Spike Jonze. I’ve hung around the IF scene for a long time. I’ve played every Plotkin game, even Inhumane. I’ve also played every Infocom game, which turns out to be helpful as well. Even with all that, I’m not sure I caught every reference (especially given the prodigious list of such references provided by the author in the endnotes), but I think I caught a lot of them. Consequently, I’m not sure how somebody who doesn’t fulfill some or all of the above criteria would react to BAP, but I can tell you this: I thought it was a delight.

In fact, even as I was reflecting on what a rockin’ great start to the competition this game gave me, I was also regretting how small its target audience surely must be. No doubt somebody familiar just with the IF newsgroups, or just with Zarf (that’s Andrew Plotkin’s nickname, for those of you not in the know), or just with Jonze’s movie would find some entertainment value here, but how much more they would derive if they were, well, me. And believe me, there is a lot here to be appreciated. The game is gleefully deft at playing with the identity themes so memorably plumbed in the movie, and it does so in ways that are wonderfully appropriate to the medium of IF and to the specific project of exploring Zarf’s head. On top of that, it throws in lots of nifty IF references and generally has a hell of a time exploring some dark and unmapped corners of the form. In short, it works as a riff on the movie, as a riff on Zarf, and as a riff on IF itself.

The writing is, at times, a bit wobbly. I admit to being a little worried when I saw the first sentence of the game: “At last, your troubled fortunes seemed to come to an end.” The use of the past tense rather than the more traditional IF present tense, as well as the awkward phrase “troubled fortunes”, confused me. It felt like there was an initial paragraph missing, or perhaps that the PC had just died (which is how most people’s fortunes, troubled or not, tend to come to an end.) I think if the game had started out with “At long last, your troubles seem to have come to an end,” I could have swung with it, but as it was, it took me about a hundred moves to turn off the little editor in my head (apparently we all have a cast of characters capering around inside our skulls) and go with the flow. Once the game got rolling, though, there were some fantastic bits of writing. Particularly evocative and exciting were the effects generated by the various shifts in perspective that the game executes.

Those perspective shifts are some of the most intriguing things that happen in this game, or in any comp game I’ve ever seen, for that matter. I don’t want to give away spoilers here, so I’ll just say that the game explores some more or less uncharted IF territory by doing quite a bit of “head-hopping”, in both the literal and figurative senses. And of course, the fact that it is both literal and figurative is just one of the many fun things about this game. I love it when I’m still thinking about a game long after I’ve played it, still having little “aha!” moments making connections and grokking references. Yes, it’s true that the text probably could have used another round or two of revision. It’s also true that there are a few bugs remaining here and there, though there were other moments when I was pleasantly startled by the depth of implementation in some areas. The author confesses at the end of the game that “He began coding it on 2 September 2000 at 7:04am, and raced like the wind to finish it in time,” and in places, the rush shows. On the whole, however, the game is a whole lot of fun, and very thought-provoking, too. Being Andrew Plotkin is an experience not to be missed.

Rating: 9.0

About my 2000 IF Competition Reviews

By 2000, the Comp had become the center of the IF community, for good and for ill. The good: artistic achievement continued to explode outward in every dimension. Comp00 delivered a bumper crop of stunners. I rated 7 (of 51) games a 9.0 or above, more 9.x scores than I’ve given any set of comp entries before or since. Those games came up with delightful variations on the Infocom themes, haunting new versions of old cliches like the one-room game, and writing that was simply fantastic. October of 2000 was an awesome time to be an interactive fiction fan, as your hard drive could suddenly fill up with one incredible experience after another.

Even the games that weren’t roaring successes were often bold experiments. This was the year of the breathtaking attempt, like Ad Verbum‘s astonishing linguistic gymnastics, Being Andrew Plotkin‘s POV shenanigans, or, gods help us, a full text adventure recreation of, and expansion on, Return To Zork. There was comedy (very hard to do well in IF), there was dada, there was brilliant subversion. There was even a game that tried to reverse the roles of the player and the writer! This year also saw the first comp entries by future winners (and all-around rock stars) Emily Short and Jon Ingold.

Basically, because the IF Comp had acquired a reputation for producing excellent games, it garnered a lot of attention, and because it garnered a lot of attention, people kept funneling their best work toward it. This attention economy had a dark side, though, which is that people also began to exploit the focus and feedback that the Comp generated. We’d seen some of this before, but the trend really accelerated in 2000, as people threw in “games” that were really more like pamphlets, or protests, or proselytization.

Combine with this the fact that there were no less than fifty-three games entered, to be judged over a six-week period. I reviewed 51 of those games, skipping over Happy Ever After and Infil-Traitor, which had known bugs required recompilation before the games were viable.

Consequently, my patience strained and then snapped when I was presented with games that weren’t really games at all, but rather (as I viewed them) abuses of my time, purchased with the general good will of the IF Competition’s overall reputation. In addition, I had (and have) zero time for obnoxious snipes at development systems or community members, disguised as comedy. Homebrewed games continued to bedevil me, and there was a new development system on the scene (ADRIFT) whose UI was cool, but whose parser was not up to snuff. And oy, do I ever want people to learn the difference between its and it’s.

Deadline misery was entirely self-created, though. Looking back, I’m rather astonished that I played 51 games and wrote 51 reviews in the course of six weeks. It’s easy to see why I stopped doing that once I became a parent. It’s harder to see how I ever did it at all.

I originally posted my reviews for the 2000 IF Competition games on November 16, 2000.

Lunatix: The Insanity Circle by Mike Snyder [Comp99]

IFDB page: Lunatix – The Insanity Circle
Final placement: 12th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Early on in Lunatix, I typed “X TUKE.” The game responded, “It looks just like you might have expected.” Of course, there’s no “tuke” in the game — I meant to type “tile” but my right hand had strayed a bit from its accustomed spot on the keyboard. I’m glad it happened, though, because the incident taught me something important about Lunatix: its parser pretends to understand more than it does. In my book, this is a big no-no. In fact, if I ever write a Parser Manifesto, my first principle will be, “Parsers must not pretend to understand more than they do.” Even a fairly innocuous violation of this rule, Inform’s famous “You can’t see any such thing,” has caused no end of debate on raif. When a game pretends to understand more than it does, you can never really be sure when you’re encountering a bug, because bugginess has been built directly into the interface.

What’s more, it’s a cop-out. Instead of doing the often tedious work of creating descriptions for the available objects, the game elides the absence of these descriptions by acting like it recognizes them when it doesn’t. As a player, I find this pallid deception infuriating. Unfortunately, Lunatix‘s parser does something even more infuriating, which has led to the formation of the second principle in my hypothetical Parser Manifesto: “Parsers must not give smarmy, unhelpful error messages.” My encounter with Lunatix was filled with exchanges like this (the words after the ellipses are my input):

...FILL WATER GUN Your logic, although interesting, is flawed. ...TURN ON FAUCET That's a pretty crazy idea, but it didn't work.

These kinds of responses make me want to scream obscenities at the game, and sometimes I did, along with feeble protests like “No it isn’t! Wanting to fill a water gun with water is not flawed logic! Turning on a faucet isn’t a crazy idea!” Then I remembered that talking to yourself is a sign of impending mental collapse, so I stopped. But my blood pressure stayed high.

The problem with this kind of message is that the game is willfully occluding its own shortcomings at the player’s expense. Error messages that insult the player, when in fact it is the parser that has failed, piss me off. I’d so much rather see the game say “I don’t know that verb” or “You can’t fill that” — that way I know exactly what hasn’t been implemented, and that knowledge will be useful to me throughout the game. Instead, Lunatix sneers at me and acts like its flaws are my fault.

Which brings me to the third principle of my Parser Manifesto: “Parsers must not ask questions without being prepared to receive an answer.” I had lots of exchanges with the game that went like this:

...POUR CPU What are you trying to pour out? ...CUP In a perfect world, that might have worked. ...POUR CUP You empty the cup's contents onto the floor.

OK, so I made a typo in my first command, and the game asked me a disambiguating question. Fair enough. But wait! Further evidence reveals that the question only appeared to be for disambiguation. Actually, the parser wasn’t asking me a question at all, but giving me a message along the lines of “I only understood you as far as wanting to pour.” By phrasing that message as a question, Lunatix tricks me into thinking it is following the standard set by every other major parser: ask the player a question and process the answer. Instead, it’s only prepared to follow through with the first half of that standard, and gives me a snippy error message in the bargain. Grrr.

These kinds of problems have been more or less eliminated in the default library parsers used by most major IF tools, but Lunatix doesn’t use one of those parsers. Instead, it is a “homebrewed” creation written in (from what I can glean from the readme) QBasic, and presenting a radically different interface than most IF games do. The game splits the screen into four windows: the top half of the screen is split vertically between a square graphics window (displaying a picture of the current room) and a square text window, which always displays the textual description of the current room. Taking up most of the bottom half of the screen is a rectangular text window, which displays the game’s responses to the player’s input. Below that, a frame around a one line text field, is a window for the player’s input. It’s a bit reminiscent of the Legend interface, except instead of a compass rose and clickable command menus, there’s just a room description next to the graphic.

The graphics themselves are grainy and pixellated (or at least, they were on the two monitors I used to play the game), but still manage to be appropriately atmospheric at times, and even rather attractive once in a while. More importantly, they add significant content to the game — there are some objects that would be difficult to envision when described in text, but the presence of the graphic clarifies the setting a great deal. The window with the textual room description was nice, too, as it allowed systematic examination of the first-level nouns without having to periodically “LOOK” to remember what those nouns are. Of course, the game doesn’t actually implement most of these nouns, but that’s not the window’s fault.

The only difficulty I had with this window is that it didn’t always automatically update when something drastic had changed about the room, unless I explicitly typed “L” again. Thus, after solving a puzzle I might see a picture of a normal hallway, while the description alongside it raved about the giant squid blocking my path. In addition, lots of keen features were implemented in the interface, like command recall with the up-arrow, splash screens at the beginning and end of the game, a weirdly pulsating cursor, and nifty sound effects. So I can say with certainty that Lunatix is the most technically competent homebrewed game in the competition, perhaps even the most technically competent homebrewed game in the history of the competition. Unfortunately, all the snazzy windowing and gee-whiz effects in the world don’t really make up for its substandard parser.

The other part of the game’s core, its story, is OK. It’s one of those IF scenarios whose premise rationalizes why it is full of patently ridiculous things. In this case, you’re the unscrupulous director of an insane asylum and you’ve been given a drug which replicates insanity. This is a cozy explanation for why nothing you see really makes any sense, and seems to be just a setup for lots of different code and one-use-object puzzles. These puzzles are mostly OK, too. They’re more or less logical (within the confines of the completely nonsensical story) and, with one or two exceptions, pitched at the right level of difficulty. There is one real howler towards the end which makes almost no sense but will be deeply appreciated by fans of The Penguin on the old Adam West Batman show.

So in other words, the story and puzzles aren’t great, but they aren’t terrible either. Unfortunately, the combination of fair-to-middling plot with really-irritating parser makes the game less fun to play than it should be. See, (he said, mounting his soapbox) an IF game is a fusion of parser and story. The beauty of the modern IF languages is that they have freed designers from most of the hassle of worrying about the parser, allowing them to focus the bulk of their creative energy on the story. When a game eschews these time-tested solutions, it doesn’t just double its work, but increases it exponentially. Lunatix, strong as it is, isn’t quite up to the task.

Rating: 7.1

Exhibition by Ian Finley as Anatoly Domokov [Comp99]

IFDB page: Exhibition
Final placement: 5th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Exhibition is a game of absences. It has no plot. It also has no puzzles, at least not in the way we’re used to thinking about puzzles. There are no takeable objects whatsoever in the game, and most of the action consists of standing around examining things. What it does not lack, however, is quality. It’s a masterwork of storytelling, creating a spellbinding narrative from spaces inbetween. I loved it. The story takes place at an art exhibition, the final show of a painter named Anatoly Domokov, who committed suicide shortly before the show opened. The only thing to do is stand around and look at the show’s twelve paintings, but devoid though it is of traditional action, the exhibition has psychological action galore. The player may view the paintings from one of four viewpoints: the wife of the dead artist, a critic, a twenty-year-old man, or a student. Although we can see (via HTML TADS image embedding) a drawing of each character, we do not see the paintings. Instead, each character describes each painting in magnificently written paragraphs, and in doing so tells as a little about the painting, and quite a bit more about themselves, usually unintentionally. The absence of the paintings is just another example of the way Exhibition tells us its most revealing secrets by what it chooses not to include.

Like last year’s winner Photopia, Exhibition is all about someone whom the player never controls. Unlike Photopia, this game goes one step further: we never even see Anatoly at any point in the game. Instead, what we get are descriptions of his works, sometimes mixed in with anecdotes about him when the work is being viewed by someone who knew or met him. With each description from each viewpoint, we get another piece of the puzzle. All the pieces fit together like a jigsaw, but they do not form a clear portrait of the artist. Instead, like a frame around his outline, they define his shape, each moving from a different direction to collide with one of his boundaries, and sometimes with each other too. At the end of the game, we know Anatoly’s form, but only obliquely, filtered through the very individual perceptions of each viewer.

In the bargain, we are granted insight into his art, his loved ones, his disposition, and his culture, but all these insights are lines around a central emptiness, an absence reflected in the artist’s final painting, “Iscariot.” The painting, in the words of the critic, is “a simple desert landscape with a frayed noose hanging empty on a gnarled tree and a scrawny goat searching in its shadow.” Anatoly hanged himself, and was found next to this completed painting. Each character offers an interpretation of the empty noose (as well as its grisly companion), and each interpretation gives us a piece of the truth. The author notes that, in part, Exhibition aspires to be “an experiment in how tales are told and the inevitable gap between the teller and the audience.” It is by shining its light through these gaps that the game so sublimely illuminates and limns its subject.

Unexpectedly enough, this collection of descriptions is a puzzle, though certainly not in the tradition of most IF puzzles. It is up to the player to create that outline, to put the pieces together so that one viewer’s comments clarify those of another viewer, and both together sharpen the focus on Anatoly’s silhouette. Even the shape of the gallery itself, walls around a space, contributes to the developing portrait. Exhibition makes the process of deduction easier with its stellar production values. In the reams of text presented by the game, I found not one grammar or spelling error. I didn’t find a single bug either, though the game’s design is admittedly simple as far as programming is concerned. These virtues by themselves give me great pleasure, but what made the game a true joy to play was its wonderful writing. As an exercise in character and viewpoint, Exhibition is an impressive performance. As storytelling, it is mesmerizing. Exhibition may be a game of absences with death at its core, but like the stories it tells, it wields a power far greater than the sum of its parts.

Rating: 9.9

Beat The Devil by Robert M. Camisa [Comp99]

IFDB page: Beat The Devil
Final placement: 9th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

If you grew up in suburban America in the 1980s or 90s, what would be your vision of Hell? Where would you least like to spend eternity? Where does it already feel like an eternity when you’re there? That’s right: a shopping mall! In Robert Camisa’s Beat The Devil, Lucifer is building an addition to Hell, and you’re his betatester. He overheard you mumbling about how you’d sell your soul for a chance with the object of your affections, and, being surfeited with souls already (“Washington and Hollywood provide me with all the souls I’ll ever need to buy.”), makes you this alternate offer: wander through this Stygian mall and defeat the incarnations of the seven deadly sins, and that date is yours.

It’s a fun concept, and Beat The Devil gives it an energetic, cartoonish implementation. There are a number of funny spots, though the humor tends to lean a little too far in the direction of over-the-top junior high style exaggeration. For example, to make fun of stores whose decor is all white, there’s a store in the Hell-mall whose shelves are so white that they’re blinding. There are a number of choices like that, which puts the humor at the lowest common denominator. Still, on the whole the game remains pretty funny, just because by being such a detailed working-out of its concepts, it manages to satirize both malls and typical depictions of Hell.

The game is clearly the product of a novice IF author, and while the writing and coding are both fairly good, each has a number of errors easily identifiable as beginner’s mistakes. On the writing side, there are a number of punctuation problems: sentences missing periods, contractions missing apostrophes, quotes missing quotation marks and the like. The grammar and spelling are better, though an occasional glitch will slip through on those as well from time to time.

On the coding side, there are a few little oversights such as some objects missing short_names, disambiguation problems caused by objects whose names are too short, and a number of unimplemented first-level nouns. More interesting is another slip-up. Searching the shelves in one store yields this:

Yada yada..blow dust..yada yada..small white packet.. yada yada... again with the no gold or jewels. Sigh.

The description didn’t make much sense to me until I reached another store, searched its shelves, and found this description:

You blow dust off the shelf, almost choking yourself from the resultant cloud, but you uncover a pair of pliers, which you pocket. Personally, I'dve preferred gold or jewels, but beggars can't be choosers.

Clearly, the game assumed I would search the shelves in the opposite order that I did. This is an easy mistake to make, especially if you’re concentrating on making sure your game is winnable by focusing on a particular walkthrough path. Vexingly, it’s also the sort of thing that your betatesters won’t always find — if they go through the game in the same order that you envisioned, no problems will be apparent. Writing text that is dependent on some other text already having been displayed is very tempting in IF, but you have to be careful that you take account of what happens if that text hasn’t yet been seen.

These are minor mistakes, and can be cleaned up easily in a subsequent release of the game. They don’t much interfere with enjoyment. The same could be said of the puzzles. While there are a couple of sticky spots, most of the puzzles are either pretty obvious or rather clever. The “obvious” part of that evaluation may sound like an insult, but I don’t intend it as one. I’m a fan of obvious puzzles — they’re a lot better than “guess-what-the-author-is-thinking” puzzles, and in an author’s first game you’re more likely to find the latter than the former. The clever ones include a nifty device reminiscent of the “T” remover in Leather Goddesses.

The one real clunker is flawed in a way that, again, marks it as a beginner’s error. There’s an object in the game that will destroy anything put into it. When you try to put anything into it, you’ll see a funny default message about how destroying something you may need later is a dumb thing to do, and the game won’t let you do it. However, there is one object you must destroy in such a way in order to win the game. Based on the default message, there’s no way of knowing that the destroyer will react differently to one particular thing. This isn’t a problem with the puzzle so much as the way it is implemented — it’s like a hungry troll saying “I don’t want to eat!” when offered the wrong kind of food, rather than saying “I don’t want to eat that!” If the default message were worded slightly differently, the player could twig to the fact that although the attempted action is wrong, a similar one might be right. This is the sort of thing you learn with experience, either of writing a lot of IF or playing a lot of it, or both. Beat The Devil is an auspicious start, and I look forward to the author’s next game.

Rating: 7.5

King Arthur’s Night Out by Mikko Vuorinen [Comp99]

IFDB page: King Arthur’s Night Out
Final placement: 22nd place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

This game depicts King Arthur in a way I’ve never seen him before. Instead of tragic hero, noble warrior, or eager wizard’s apprentice, it’s King Arthur as… henpecked husband? Yes, you as King Arthur just want to head to the pub for a pint or two with “Lance” and the boys, but your wife, the uncharacteristically shrewish Guinevere, wants you to stay home while she sits on the bed, knitting. The puzzle, then, is how to get out without her knowing. It seems to me that this plot could have easily taken place in a suburban house rather than Camelot. Yes, Excalibur makes an appearance, but even with that addition the game is still a rather pedestrian affair with a superficial sheen of Arthurian trappings laid on. I’m not convinced that this sheen improves the game. There’s an element of the unexpected, I suppose, in seeing Arthur cast in such a strange way, but the surprise does little to illuminate either the Arthurian mythos or the game itself. In addition, the henpecked husband stereotype has never been one that I’ve found all that compelling, so mixing it in with the legend of King Arthur shatters the power of the legend while doing little to enliven the stereotype.

King Arthur’s Night Out suffers in several places from “guess-the-verb” weaknesses. There is an item that, when SEARCHed, will yield an important discovery. However, if you look in, shake, push, open, or examine it, you won’t find a thing. In another spot, you must retrieve an item from underneath something else. However, you can’t crawl under this thing, nor lift it, nor just get the item from underneath it. The puzzle has a logical solution, but because such a specific wording was required, I didn’t find that solution until I checked the walkthrough. I felt annoyed when I discovered the answer, because it was no more complicated that the things I had been trying, things which got no response. How was I supposed to know that this particular method had been implemented, I wondered, when 5 others weren’t? I think my experience contains a lesson for me as an author — puzzles shouldn’t consist of hunting around for the one method which the author anticipated. The author should anticipate three or four methods of solving a puzzle, and implement them all, either as alternate solutions or as dead ends which will help point the player toward the correct method.

Having griped about that, I will say that the game was coded quite well overall. Many actions were accounted for, especially in areas which weren’t puzzles. I found no bugs in playing the game, and only a very few errors in the prose mechanics. I still didn’t have a particularly great time playing the game, but a large portion of that reaction is due to the fact that I didn’t find the premise very interesting. Perhaps people who enjoy broad domestic farce would like it more. In addition, if a second edition of the game emerges that implements the puzzles a little more robustly, King Arthur’s Night Out will be a solidly coded, if a little bit odd, piece of interactive fiction.

Rating: 7.2