Escape to New York by Richard Otter [Comp05]

IFDB page: Escape to New York
Final placement: 11th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

I had to swim through some choppy technical waters to even get to this game. Apparently ADRIFT’s latest version isn’t backwards-compatible with games generated by previous versions, or at least it didn’t appear so — the interpreter squawked something about generator libraries at me, giving me an instruction it wasn’t capable of letting me carry out. (I’m guessing the instruction was for authors?) So back I went to a previous version, which required a full windows install and when run complained about how it didn’t have the right permissions to update the registry (surely something the installer could have taken care of?) Anyway, I fought through that — let’s chalk it up to me trying to play this game 16 years after it was released, and move on.

Escape to New York has an intriguing albeit somewhat odd premise. You play a thief who has boarded the Titanic. Now, the game is extremely coy about actually acknowledging the fact that you’re on the Titanic — the name isn’t mentioned anywhere in any of my game transcripts or the supporting materials. In the game, it’s just a big fancy ship that happens to leave Southampton for New York on April 10, 1912. Oh, and it also sinks. Hey, just like the Titanic! I’m not sure why the game is so reluctant about naming the ship — you can even find a pamphlet that tells you a million facts about it (perhaps somewhat anachronistically expressed in metres and metric tons?]… but not the ship’s name. A strange choice. Another strange choice: it names its protagonist “Jack Thompson”, which is really awfully close to Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Jack Dawson” from the massively popular 1997 film. Why?

In any case, placing the PC on the Titanic creates a weird sense of dramatic irony — we know the ship’s going to sink, but he doesn’t, and therefore it’s a little odd to be running around trying to liberate loot from the passengers on a ship you know is doomed. Apparently the game’s idea of a successful run is to steal as much as possible and make it to a lifeboat, but it’s not clear from the outset that this is your goal. I kept expecting a big twist to happen where suddenly you forget about being a thief and just try to make it out alive, but nope. The game’s insistence on petty goals when the player knows a life-or-death situation is coming made for an offputting dissonance.

The other offputting part is the underimplementation. Some aspects of the game are quite lovingly crafted — it provides lots of good descriptions and creates a fine sense of place, but just as often it frustrated me with its seemingly arbitrary requirements and boundaries. For example, the first section of the game requires you to wander around the ship’s corridors until you find the mailroom. Fair enough, but sometimes travel directions are closed off with the message, “Something tells you that wandering around the corridors of the ship is not the best use of your time.” Well, maybe not, but it certainly is what the game requires! You can’t succeed without doing that, so “something tells me” the PC’s intuition is a little off in that regard.

There are also several learn-by-dying or learn-by-undo puzzles scattered throughout the game. You might enter a room in which someone suddenly pounces on you based on something you’re wearing or carrying, with no warning whatsoever. In another section of the game, you require a disguise to get past a watchful policeman. The only ways to get through this are to either try it and fail with a game-ending message, or to finally acquire enough disguise-ish items that the game tells you, “That lot should make a good disguise.” Mind, it’s given messages before about individual items, saying that they’d make a good disguise on their own, only to snatch the rug out when you try to actually use them. It seems to me that if the PC is capable of assessing how complete a disguise needs to be, he should also be capable of assessing whether or not to assay an attempt at passing a policeman with an incomplete disguise, but the game provides no such internal monologue.

At some point I got annoyed enough with this bait-and-switch behavior that I switched over to using the walkthrough, and once I did I started having a reasonably good time. For one thing, it helped me understand what sort of playthrough the game had in mind — run around gleefully nicking stuff and stuffing it in a suitcase, so that you can escape to boat with your big prize (a stolen painting you connived to get into the mailroom) and a bunch of other loot as well. Strip away the historical scaffolding and it’s essentially a Zorky treasure hunt, albeit with far less clever puzzles — you mostly get stuff via LOOK ON [object] or LOOK UNDER [object].

I also found myself really appreciating ADRIFT’s autocomplete feature, which surprised me a bit. I’m sure it’s been at least 15 years since I played an ADRIFT game, and having recently reposted all my previous comp reviews, my memories of it are not kind. This time, though, I enjoyed the way that its autocomplete let me type just one or two letters of verbs and nouns, really smoothing the playing experience. It was also a useful (though not entirely reliable) way to see if the game had implemented something — it yielded some false negatives, but if you saw it autocomplete something, you knew it was in the game somewhere. It did have a downside, sometimes anticipating nonsensical input and leading me to accidentally enter commands like “put parcel in baggage slip” when I meant “put parcel in bag”, but overall it was a feature I found myself wishing were in other games.

Overall this was a pretty flawed game, with mild issues in premise, writing, and implementation, but once I allowed myself the walkthrough I found it fairly enjoyable, and I appreciated the chance to be in a story that takes such an unusual approach to the hoary set-piece of “You are on the Titanic.” Once I knew it was a treasure hunt, I could gleefully romp through the ship ripping off valuables, in hopes that me, my giant suitcase, and my stolen painting could end up safe on a lifeboat while the rest of my luckless fellow passengers scrambled for their mere lives.

Rating: 7.4

Interview from InsideADRIFT [Misc]

[I was interviewed by Ken Franklin for the May/June 2004 issue of InsideADRIFT, a fanzine for users of the ADRIFT IF development system. I’ve cleaned up the text and added links as appropriate.]

Interview: Paul O’Brian questioned by KF

This issue’s interviewee is the editor of that vital organ of the IF community, SPAG, a newsletter that packs in loads of news and game reviews. Having started on 15 May 1994, today represents the tenth anniversary of that first issue. That first issue was mostly packed with reviews of some of the games included in the Lost Treasures of Infocom package, with many of the reviews from Stephen Granade. Paul O’Brian has been editor since issue 18.

Paul, thank you very much for agreeing to answer a few questions for InsideADRIFT.

My pleasure — thanks for inviting me!

Q1. I always tend to start with this one. What brought you into the world of interactive fiction (and keeps you here)?

Probably the best and most complete answer to this question is the first editorial I wrote for SPAG, in issue #18. The short version is that after my dad introduced me to Zork in the early Eighties, Infocom became one of my teenage obsessions. Then, in the early Nineties, my interest in IF was reawakened by Activision’s release of the Lost Treasures of Infocom collections. I was discovering the Internet right about the same time, so one of the first searches I did was on “interactive fiction”; that led me to the newsgroups and to the discovery that IF is still alive and thriving, with a whole range of tools allowing people to write works just as good as or better than anything Infocom ever produced. Playing and writing new IF games was a dream come true for me.

As for what keeps me around, I think it’s a combination of things. Certainly, I’m still fascinated with the medium of IF, and I love seeing it continue to grow and evolve. In addition, editing SPAG and writing the Earth And Sky series have proved to be rather tangible commitments to participation in the IF community — even at times when I’ve felt like drifting away, I’ve found myself unwilling to leave SPAG rudderless and my game series incomplete. Finally, the IF community contains some of the most interesting people I’ve encountered in any social sphere. Being around such bright and creative people can feel a little intimidating at times, but it’s so rewarding.

Q2. The SPAG newsletter is a valuable resource for finding a wide range of reviews for the whole community. Does it currently meet the targets that you have for it and do you have more aims for the future?

Heh. “Targets.” I’ve never been inclined to set goals for SPAG, because it would drive me crazy to have specific aims for something that is largely out of my control. My only real goal is to hustle up enough reviews every three months to produce a viable issue of the zine.

Thanks to SPAG’s legions of volunteer contributors, I’ve always been able to reach that goal, though sometimes it’s meant stretching the definition of “viable” a little further than I’m comfortable with.

Remarkably, SPAG has survived for 10 years (as of May 15th, 2004), and that’s only because people continue to be interested enough in its project that they still want to submit and read IF reviews. I’m really not sure what the next ten years will hold for it. I’ll probably hand off the mantle of editorship at some point, though I’m not sure when that will be. In the meantime, I don’t plan any major changes to SPAG — I think it’s working pretty well in its current format, so aside from some possible improvements to the web site or any spiffy new features that occur to me, I’m planning to stay the course.

Q3. Editing a publication that survives on input from others can be stressful. Do you find that people are keen to write or do you have to twist arms regularly to get sufficient content?

You know, I think both are true. I believe that people are quite keen to write in theory. That is, the idea of writing a SPAG review appeals to a lot of people, and that’s why I receive work from such a variety of contributors. However, what’s also true is that people approach IF as a hobby, maybe one of many hobbies occupying their free time. So IF already exists as just a little slice of most people’s time, and when writing a review is a little slice of that IF time, it’s very easily delayed or abandoned. This is perfectly understandable, of course, but what it means is that most people need a little nudge to reignite their interest in writing a review for SPAG. I post these nudges a few weeks before each issue comes out, and I try to make them varied and somewhat entertaining, but ultimately, their purpose in life is just to serve as a little reminder and motivator for anybody with the intention of reviewing a game for SPAG. I think I’d get a lot fewer submissions without those little reminders, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t keen on the idea of writing reviews.

Q4. The interactive fiction community is an odd group, so often supportive yet also often aggressive in their arguments. Do you believe that this is all part of the healthy debate of a lively group or unnecessary conflict that detracts from its aim of producing games?

Neither. Both. I’m not sure I accept the premise of the question, actually. Certainly I’ve seen aggressive arguments on the newsgroups, but I’m not sure I’d call that a trait of the interactive fiction community per se. In part, I think it’s a trait of Internet conversations everywhere, though of course the degree of vitriol can and does vary depending on the forum and the topic. I’ve seen my share of people who I think of as IF community members aggressively pursuing a point — sometimes I don’t like it, and sometimes I take some pleasure in it, depending on how much I agree with the point and how much I think the target deserves the aggression. I’ve been guilty of it myself from time to time.

However, I wouldn’t say there’s some monolithic IF community that can be characterized as “aggressive” — what we call the “IF community” is really a very loose agglomeration of people collected around a bunch of different loci, containing personalities that range from enthusiastically friendly to dismissively sarcastic. There are also a couple of downright vicious people who haunt the newsgroups, but I don’t really think of them as members of our community so much as forces interested in wrecking whatever positive energy exists in it.

In any case, I tend to be annoyed or dismayed by most of the aggressive arguments that appear in IF fora, whether they be from established community members or from other people charging in and tossing around accusations of elitism, intellectual stagnation, provincialism, or what have you. However, my experience is that those little flamewars tend to be a rather small fraction of the mainstream of IF discussion, most of which is polite, friendly, and often thought-provoking.

Q5. The ADRIFT community can tend to feel that we are often on the margins, getting a few scraps from the wider group. I suspect this can partly be attributed to the fact that when working with the mainstream languages RAIF is the place you go for discussion, in contrast the ADRIFT forum provides us with a dedicated support group. Do you think this gives an appearance outside ADRIFT of us being different and standoffish?

Hmm. I’m not sure I have an answer for this. Just as I don’t believe there’s one dominant definition of the “IF community”, I’m not sure there’s a dominant perception of ADRIFT forum users. Even if there were, I don’t think that I’d know what it is. For my part, I think of the ADRIFT forum as one of the loci I mentioned above when I was calling the IF community a “loose agglomeration.” Others include raif, rgif, ifMUD, alt.games.xtrek, and the SPAG subscriber list.

Because I tend to follow the int-fiction newsgroups and (to a lesser extent) ifMUD, I’m not terribly aware of what goes on at the ADRIFT forum, but I’ve never thought of that as ADRIFT users’ fault — it’s just divergent interests. I suppose it would be nice if everybody had a common gathering place, but as long as there’s some cross-pollination, I’m not bothered, and certainly it’s never occurred to me to take offense at the ADRIFT forum’s existence separate from the int-fiction newsgroups. After all, what’s on the margins depends solely on what you define as the center.

Q6. I was just looking at the list of back issues, it is an impressive list and makes our 16 issues seem very small. Does it become easier the longer things go on for? (KF asked hopefully)

Easier. Well, the inescapable fact is that coming up with good original content takes work, both for you and for your contributors. That truth never really goes away. However, I do think that the more good issues you produce, the more you gain a reputation as something worth contributing to. So maybe it does get a little easier to elicit submissions as time goes on. I sure hope so, anyway.

Q7. As usual, I will end the interview by asking you what you are currently working on, and what you are looking for in the future for yourself and interactive fiction?

I’m working furiously on Earth And Sky 3 in hopes of having it ready by the fall. Speaking of which, it’s been a lot of fun to spout off and I appreciate the opportunity, but I think I’d better get back to coding now…

A Day in the Life of a Super Hero by David Whyld [Comp04]

IFDB page: A Day In The Life Of A Superhero
Final placement: 23rd place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

By now, my affection for superheroes is no secret. I love a good superhero game, and I love a good superhero parody. A Day In the Life Of A Super Hero is a good superhero parody, but unfortunately not a very good superhero game. Its greatest strength by far is its writing — there were many spots that made me laugh, and many more that made me smile. Super Hero‘s satire isn’t quite as finely honed as that found in Neil DeMause’s Frenetic Five games, but it’s lots of fun nevertheless.

Along with the typical comedy juice available from silly supervillain names like The Gardener and The Pizza Delivery Kid, Super Hero does a lovely job at conveying a boundless gee-whiz enthusiasm on the part of the PC. Near as I can tell, the titular hero actually has no discernible superpowers, and nor do any of the supervillains — they just adopt the exaggerated poses and outlandish names of the genre in the service of jazzing up their personalities. I also found it amusing that the game features no less than 28 ways for the hero to meet an unfortunate and ignominious defeat, and encourages you to collect ’em all, like bad-luck action figures. Moreover, Super Hero surprised me at times with its thorough coverage of unlikely verbs, and its witty responses thereto. For instance, when suspended above a crowd of people:

spit on crowd
That's the sort of thing super villains would do, not super heroes.

Of course, taking a scattershot approach with the jokes as it does, Super Hero misfires every so often as well. Sometimes it throws out a joke so old as to have lost all its appeal. Other times, it’s guilty of running a gag into the ground — one “bad odor” joke might be funny, but ten of them will not be. Still, judged on its writing alone, Super Hero is a rollicking good time.

Unhappily, the game’s interactivity does not support its prose, and much of that is the fault of Adrift. The unmodified Adrift parser is already quite weak, but somehow in this game it seemed even worse than usual. For starters, Adrift frequently falls victim to its asinine policy of ignoring input that surrounds a keyword, resulting in gems like parsing “look behind couch” as the same command as “look at couch.” But the problem seemed to come up way more than normal in this game. For instance, when the PC tries to address his animal sidekick, Smelly The Parrot:

ask smelly about soldier
A fusty smell pervades your apartment. It's probably a mixture of you never getting around to cleaning it and that time the Slug Monster was here to kill you.

The first time this happened, I went, “Huh?” After several tries, I finally figured out that the parser must be stupidly pulling “smell” out of that string and pretending that my command was “smell.” At least, that’s my theory for what it was doing, and repetition of the principle in other instances seems to bear that out. Conversely, the parser can be weirdly uptight about addressing items with their full name:

x rag
You see no such thing.

x city rag
The City Rag is the city's worst paper, one that specialises in writing slanderous and libellous stories...

[…]

x muggle
You see no such thing.

x mrs muggle
You've seen her sort before: old, grumpy, permanently displeased about something unspecified...

For a player like me, accustomed to other parsers’ much more sensible approach of treating all pieces of an object’s name the same, these responses are infuriating. Also infuriating is when the parser stubbornly and willfully misunderstands input:

ask erik about singer
"Sorry, can't talk," says the singer. "Genius at work. Ohhhohohohohoh!"

But most infuriating of all is when the parser out-and-out lies, and lies in such a way as to make winning the game extremely unlikely. For example, at one point, it told me it didn’t know the verb SHOW, when in fact that verb is crucial to solving one of the game’s puzzles. When there are a number of free IF tools that provide much, much better parsers, my patience for substandard parsing like this is limited indeed, and this game would have been so much stronger had it not been hampered by such silly flaws.

However, sad to say, not all of Super Hero‘s problems can be ascribed to Adrift. For one thing, there are all kinds of bizarre typos that I can only chalk up to carelessness:

“You mean as in give him a damn goof biffing till he clears off and leaves you be?” says Smelly.

A damn goof biffing? Secondly, like Whyld’s Comp03 entry, this game seems quite a bit too large to complete in 2 hours, which is something I really dislike in a comp game. Of course, perhaps much of my inability to complete Super Hero stems from its aggravating tendency toward read-the-author’s-mind puzzles. To blithely spoil one of these, the PC’s apartment has a half-dozen pieces of furniture, and moving one of them reveals a crucial item. Nothing in the room or object description suggests that moving it or moving anything else will be useful. And so on.

At bottom, Super Hero is entertaining writing trapped in excruciating code. I fervently hope that other talented IF writers can avoid this dastardly predicament.

Rating: 6.5

Sophie’s Adventure by David Whyld [Comp03]

IFDB page: Sophie’s Adventure
Final placement: 16th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here are some things about this game: It is cute. It is buggy. It is huge.

About “cute”: the whole thing is written from the perspective of 8-year-old Sophie, the daughter of a couple of retired magic-users, both of whom seem sunk well into strangeness now, but then again perhaps they’d look a little different through someone else’s eyes. There were many moments in the game that brought a smile or a chuckle, and much of the writing found a place between overly edgy and overly twee. Sophie has a rather hardheaded perspective, or so she seems to think anyway, and while she’s really rather spoiled, she does have some valid points about the foibles of those around her.

For instance, her mother has an inexplicable predilection for decorating in bright colors, and Sophie quite reasonably finds things like her painfully bright quilt rather difficult to stomach:

> x bed
It's hard to look at your bed with the colourful quilt lying across over it like that but you know there's nothing very interesting in it because you were lying there only a few minutes ago. You remember when you were a kid (well, a younger kid than you are now anyway) you used to worry that there was an evil gremlin that lived under the bed who would creep out after nightfall and eat you. But when you got a bit older you realised that no self-respecting gremlin would be seen anywhere near a bed with a quilt like that.

> look under bed
You look under the bed, searching for the gremlin you were convinced as
a child was under there.

Nope, no sign of him.

Writing like this lends a wonderfully strong personality to Sophie as a PC. The NPCs, too, are distinctive and interesting, and the menu-based dialogue can be a source of great amusement. On the basis of the writing (leaving out, for now, the issues of “buggy” and “huge”), I’m strongly inclined to recommend this game for kids, except for the fact that there are several parts that are outright gruesome. Sophie encounters gory battlefields, piles of corpses waiting to be burned, and dead bodies lying in pools of blood.

Now, I don’t have kids, and haven’t read children’s books for a while, so I don’t have a good sense of what are considered “appropriate” levels of gore and violence in those stories. I’m also a believer that what’s appropriate for kids isn’t so much determined by their ages as their personalities. Nevertheless, just because Sophie is 8 doesn’t mean the game would be great for any 8-year-old. Personally, I was able to ignore the gore, and so found it charming, though it would have been a lot more charming were it not so buggy and huge.

About “buggy”: Sophie’s Adventure breaks frequently, and often in the most unexpected ways. For instance, this exchange:

> n
You can't go in that direction, but you can move north, northwest,
west, southwest and down.

> north
You can't go in that direction, but you can move north, northwest,
west, southwest and down.

> go north
You move north.

I’ve had games forget to implement exits before, or forget to mention them in the exits list, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game that forgets in one place to make the directional abbreviations available. I’m surprised ADRIFT even makes this possible — I can’t think how it would happen in a more robust development system. Speaking of ADRIFT, all its parser deficiencies are still hanging around like unwelcome guests: the way it pretends to understand more than it does, the way it asks questions but doesn’t listen to the answers, and the way it totally ignores prepositions (LOOK UNDER = LOOK BEHIND = LOOK IN = EXAMINE, except when it doesn’t.)

Another bizarre way that Sophie’s Adventure frequently breaks is in its menu-based conversations; once out of every 20 or so times, the game just wouldn’t understand when I’d enter a number to choose a menu option. There wasn’t any pattern to this that I could discern — the broken choices might be first, middle, or last entries in the menu. It was always very aggravating when it would happen. The game is broken in larger ways, too, or at least it seemed so to me. Several times, I’d get information that suggested a roadblock puzzle — you know, the old “you can’t go this way until you perform this task for me” routine. However, if I simply walked in the forbidden direction: success! No puzzle-solving required. This is either a bug or head-scratchingly odd design. There are also tons of typos throughout the game, some quite hilarious (“It also looks remarkably similar to Golem in Lord of the Rings.”) All in all, the game is a couple of betatesting rounds away from being ready for release, and maybe more, given that it’s probably difficult to test because it’s so huge.

About “huge”: there’s no maximum score listed in Sophie’s Adventure, so I’m not sure how many points are possible, but after two hours with it, I’d scored two points. There’s also apparently a “niceness” score, which not only never changed, but never even seemed to offer any opportunity to change. Also, even after circumventing quite a few puzzles via the bugs mentioned above, I still think I’d only seen a fraction of the game’s locations. I already gave my spiel on too-big-for-the-comp games in my review of Risorgimento Represso, and most of those points apply here as well. However, where that game felt disappointing because I hated to rush through something created with such skill and care, Sophie’s Adventure evinces sort a flip side to that problem, which is that gigantic games are much harder to get right.

I boggle at the amount of work that must have gone into this game, and so I don’t mean to badmouth it, but at the same time, I can’t help but feel it would be a much better game if it were much smaller in scope. Fewer locations, fewer puzzles, fewer things to go horribly wrong. It goes without saying that this game is totally inappropriate for the comp because of its size, but I wonder if it’s simply the wrong size full stop. I say this because frequently, object and room descriptions seemed freighted with resentment for even having to be written:

As cracks go it's not a very interesting one and you kind of wonder
why you're even taking the time to examine it.

Somehow you doubt the fate of the world relies on you examining rat
droppings.

East Road
The land from here on eastwards is desolate to the point of having a
not-very-finished look to it. If anything, it looks like whoever was
given the job of designing this landscape got bored and decided to
just scribble in a few trees and bushes and leave it at that. [...]

There’s the straightforward problem with these that I don’t know whether something is interesting until I examine it, so would rather not be chastised for wasting my time, but there’s also this: when the descriptions themselves start complaining about being boring, there’s probably too much stuff in the game.

I think the best thing that could happen to Sophie’s Adventure would be if it were scaled back considerably (say to a size that is finishable in two hours), tested and proofread much more thoroughly, and entered in the comp in that tighter and stronger form. Too late for all of that now — I won’t be returning to this game after the way it aggravated me — but these lessons can be learned for future games, by this author and others.

Rating: 3.0

Unraveling God by Todd Watson [Comp02]

IFDB page: Unraveling God
Final placement: 12th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

And so the legacy of Photopia continues. Here we have a linear, puzzleless narrative, told in small portions out of chronological order, each of which is preceded by a blank screen with one word in the center. Sound familiar? Of course, there are differences: all segments are told from the same point of view, and rather than being a vision of tragedy, Unraveling God is more of a morality tale in the familiar Things Man Was Not Meant To Know tradition. I also don’t mean to suggest that UG is some sort of lame rip-off. It isn’t. I don’t think this game is trying to be Photopia, but is using many of the tools that Photopia used first in order to tell its story.

What we may in fact be seeing is the development of a new subgenre of IF; maybe fragmentation is such an effective way to tell a puzzleless IF story that it’s bound to become a time-honored technique in story-heavy games. The story and the writing are certainly the feature attraction in this game. You play Gabriel Markson, a scientist who has stumbled across a way to freeze organisms in suspended animation without the use of cryogenics. You are also, as a number of well-judged character details indicate, not a very nice guy. The game’s prose does a fine job of portraying the PC as a complex villain, someone who has elaborate mental structures dedicated to justifying his behavior, and this portrayal makes his opportunities for redemption meaningful. There are one or two logical gaps in the story, but for the most part events interlock nicely, which also lends power to the story’s climax.

The technical elements, unfortunately, weren’t as trouble-free. To begin with, UG started with the inherent disadvantages of the ADRIFT parser, and didn’t manage to overcome them with careful compensation like The PK Girl did. Because the game is more or less puzzleless, the parser’s deficiencies didn’t hurt it as much as they hurt this year’s other ADRIFT game, A Party To Murder, but they were still fairly irritating. In addition, this game had its own unique problem, which was that it was plagued by a mysterious lack of articles. For instance:

X FOLDER
A typed label on the manilla folder reads, "Time Magazine draft
article." Manilla folder is closed.

GET FOLDER
You take manilla folder from the desk.

OPEN IT
(manilla folder)
You open manilla folder.

This kind of thing happened throughout the game, and kept reminding me of that old Saturday Night Live skit from the 80s where Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein sing or read well-known works like “The Raven”: “Once upon… midnight dreary… While pondered… weak, weary…” The frequent injection of unintentional comedy doesn’t do much for a dramatic story. The grammar errors didn’t help either.

Still, I found some value in UG despite these flaws, and there’s one more thing I’d like to point out about it: this game is pretty clearly a work of Christian IF, and it is Christian IF done properly. I’m not a Christian, and I’ve been offended in the past by games like Jarod’s Journey whose overt mission is an evangelical one. This game chooses a richer path, which is to tell a story set in a world in which Christian myths turn out to be true, and exploring the consequences and subsequent choices for the characters once this revelation occurs. It’s not exactly great religious literature, but it does manage to portray a Christian world without condescension or arrogance. Because it allows a little complexity into its world, UG ends up a more thought-provoking and rewarding piece of work than the sort of Christian IF that just wants to shout scripture at the player.

Rating: 6.9

The PK Girl by Robert Goodwin [Comp02]

IFDB page: The PK Girl
Final placement: 6th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

I like comics, and I like animation, but I’ve never really read much manga or watched much anime. It’s not that I’ve been avoiding these forms, but rather that I haven’t happened to explore them yet. I’m a little bit familiar with the concept of hentai, because of the subculture of hentai IF that seems to be out there, which was brought to the attention of the newsgroups a few years ago, primarily by the efforts of a reviewer named Craxton.

Because of my unfamiliarity with Japanese comics and animation, I think I lack some context for evaluating The PK Girl, a text adventure with a deep manga influence. First and foremost, I’m not sure what to make of the game’s extreme, almost comical insistence on rigid and stereotyped gender roles. Whether this is a convention of manga, something particular to this game, or even just a quirk of the PC I don’t know, but while I found it at first just distracting and silly, it quickly graduated to annoying and even offensive. The game puts you in the role of a male PC, and quickly demonstrates that you have some pretty sweeping assumptions about femininity, and a fair amount of anxiety about maintaining the image of your own masculinity. The former becomes apparent in the description of the first female NPC you encounter:

The girl is clothed in a silky blue dress. Long vibrant hair cascades
over her shoulders and down her back. Her countenance seems to
reflect all feminine virtue, inclusive of kindness, submissiveness,
empathy, and consciousness of time and place.

So “submissiveness” is a feminine trait, in fact a feminine virtue? And kindness and empathy are outside the male domain? Certainly the female characters don’t have a lock on self-consciousness, as evidenced by the PC’s reaction to entering a women’s clothing store:

Why did you come in here? There is nothing terribly exciting here by
any male’s estimations. To a female, this could well be a lesser
incarnation of paradise. A wealth of clothing is available on
circular racks situated in aisles throughout the store, for trying on
and for purchase. The exit is west.

Yes, we know that all women love clothes-shopping. And men have no interest whatsoever in women’s fashion, which is why all fashion designers are women. Oh, wait. At its worst moments, the game spits out statements that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Victorian behavior manual:

GET PLATE
You don't need to take the plate; There are females here to clean up
after you.

Give me a break! If this is a manga thing, I don’t think I’ll be reading manga anytime soon.

On the technical (and more positive) side, The PK Girl is the long-awaited game that rises above ADRIFT‘s initial limitations to take a place among games created by the top-tier development systems. An unbelievable amount of care has gone into crafting this game. First of all, it addresses all the flaws in the ADRIFT parser that I’ve railed about in previous reviews. The game handles conversation very smoothly indeed, blending the ASK ABOUT approach with a menu-based approach in a somewhat similar fashion to my Earth And Sky games. On the rare occasions when the parser asks a question, it’s almost always prepared to handle the answer. SEARCH works, and in fact it works better than in most games, because the game explicitly assumes that it includes looking under and looking behind an object, and says so. Best of all, I never encountered the generic “Nothing special” message for an unrecognized noun, partly because the game changed the default message to be more Inform-like, but mostly because nouns are implemented in exquisite depth.

For that matter, not only are almost all nouns described, but a prodigious number are included in the first place. I didn’t come close to finishing this game in the two hours allotted, but I must confess that may be my own fault, because I frequently deserted the plot in order to wander around the game and marvel at the level of detail included. For this virtue alone, The PK Girl is one of the most immersive games in this year’s comp. In addition to its significant improvement on the standard ADRIFT parser, the game also includes professional-looking illustrations and an enjoyable MIDI soundtrack. This latter can get a little grating after a while, and I sometimes wished that a piece of music would play once and stop rather than continuously looping (or that I at least had the option of making the game behave that way), but it did enhance the scenes’ mood quite effectively.

As for the story itself, I found it pretty entertaining. After a fairly tranquil opening, the plot kicks into high gear with a dramatic incident, and events follow sensibly upon each other from there on. NPCs help propel the story forward by sometimes continuing about their business without waiting for the PC, thus forcing the player to keep up or lose the plot entirely. As I said, I didn’t get all the way through the story, but the portion I saw delivered excitement and fun, even if the writing sometimes had an oddly elevated tone which worked counter to the brisk pace. There were some problem spots in the writing, phrases that didn’t make much sense or that suggested with their awkwardness a few lapses in English skill. Still, for the most part they didn’t get in the way of the game’s ability to tell a good story.

Because its story is fun and quite chaste, The PK Girl might make a nice IF selection for kids, though perhaps it ought to be counterpointed by something rather less sexist. In fact, although I’m clueless about anime, the game reminded me distinctly of another branch of animation, the Disney feature film: technically impressive and proficient while remaining on the political level utterly, utterly reactionary.

Rating: 8.4

A Party To Murder by David Good [Comp02]

IFDB page: A Party To Murder
Final placement: 28th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

I will say this for it: A Party To Murder is the best ADRIFT game I’ve ever played. Unfortunately, that’s not saying much. Even if it were written in a first-tier IF language, APTM would have some problems to overcome, but as it is, it’s hopelessly lumbered by the terrible, terrible ADRIFT parser. We’re talking about a mystery game here, reminiscent of Suspect — you play a guest at a party where a murder is discovered, and you must extricate yourself from suspicion. A mystery game, okay? You might think that, in a mystery game, you’d be able to SEARCH things. Not this one — it doesn’t recognize SEARCH, LOOK IN, or LOOK THROUGH. Worse, with the latter two it parses them as LOOK rather than just admitting that it doesn’t recognize them. Same with LOOK UNDER and LOOK BEHIND. Hint: ignoring prepositions doesn’t make them go away, it just makes your response more likely to be wrong.

Perhaps, in a mystery game, you might want to SHOW things to NPCs. You can’t here. Even if you hold a completely damning piece of evidence and want to show it to the person whom it damns, all you get from the ADRIFT parser is “I don’t understand what you want me to do with the letter.” Maybe, in a mystery game, you might even want to TELL someone about something. In this game, you can’t. All these very basic verbs, absolutely standard with any first-tier system, are unavailable in ADRIFT, and their absence absolutely slaughters this game. In fact, from a very early stage, whenever I encountered one of the game’s many containers, I got in the habit of trying to GET ALL FROM it, because that was the only reliable way I could get the game to tell me whether there was anything inside. Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly feeling immersed in the story while doing so.

As I said above, even if all these problems were resolved, APTM still wouldn’t be a great game. Part of the reason for this is the fact that the game seems to operate on its own inscrutable logic rather than any sort of recognizable sense of cause-and-effect. For instance, there’s a portion of the game where access to a useful item is being controlled by one of the NPCs. The only way to persuade this NPC to let you have the object is to perform a long series of apparently arbitrary tasks, and the NPC doesn’t really indicate that it wants these tasks performed. The only way I found out was via the walkthrough, and I’d be surprised if anybody figured it out any other way.

Of course, by that time I was going straight from the walkthrough anyway, because in my initial playthrough of the game, I never found that NPC at all — it seems she only appears after a particular item has been discovered, even though that item is more or less unrelated to her absence. Oh, and that item is only accessible by using an object whose primary logical use is unimplemented in the game. For the sake of spoilers, I won’t name what that object is, but just for example, if you found a knife, and the game didn’t understand the word CUT, you might think that knife was a red herring (and that the game was lazily implemented). Wouldn’t you be surprised to find out from the walkthrough that even though CUT isn’t implemented, you still need the knife to, oh I don’t know, scrape the mud off a stone tablet or something? Something analogous occurs in this game.

See what I mean about inscrutable logic? In addition to logic problems, there are certain implementation errors as well. For example, most of the game consists of a flashback, but typing X ME while still in the frame story depicts the PC as if the flashback was already happening.

So after all this, what makes APTM the best ADRIFT game I’ve ever played? Well, for one thing, despite the occasional glitch, it does have a decent depth of implementation. Most first-level nouns are described, and the setting is rather richly detailed. I spent an inordinate number of hours with Suspect when I was younger, and at times this game brought back pleasant memories of that experience. The writing gets its job done with a minimum of errors, and the NPCs are coded to handle a reasonable number of inquiries. In fact, a couple of times during the game I asked an NPC about a somewhat extraneous topic, and was happily surprised to discover that the response had been implemented.

Another point in favor of the NPCs is that they will sometimes react sensibly to strange actions on the player’s part; for instance, walking into the teenage daughter’s bedroom while she’s making out with the neighbor elicits angry responses from both of them, escalating in intensity the longer the PC hangs around. Snooping around the objects in the house, though it’s necessary, also provokes suspicion from some of the NPCs. Then again, nobody gives you a second glance when you walk through the house carrying an 8-foot ladder, so this realistic implementation is really rather patchy. Overall, APTM would be a seaworthy craft, but between the logic holes in its hull and the tsunamis of ADRIFT inadequacy, it sinks dismally fast.

Rating: 4.6

Mystery Manor by Dana Crane as Mystery [Comp01]

IFDB page: Mystery Manor
Final placement: 43rd place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

I played this game on Halloween. I was alone in the house. The lights were off. There was a full moon outside. I was experiencing an eerie lull in the trick-or-treating. I could not have been more primed to be creeped out, frightened, and made into a paranoid wreck. Sadly, even when conditions are perfect, this game falls far short of effectiveness in the creep-out arena. The only thing that’s really scary about it is its writing. Observe, IF YOU DARE:

A swirl of icey air rushes past you, with bringing the sound of a womans screams. Just as you are about to make a run for it , the bloody decapitated body blocks your way. Holding her head in front of your face, so she may get a good look at you, the bloody head whimpers, “You are not the one” with that the ghost flees with a ear piercing scream.

Hmm, let’s see. “Icey” instead of “icy”. “With bringing the sound”? “Womans screams” instead of “woman’s screams”. Bizarre space before the comma (following “run for it”.) “The” bloody decapitated body? It was never mentioned before this. “Holding her head… the bloody head whimpers” — very funny misplaced modifier. “With that” should begin a new sentence, and there should be a period after “the one”. “A ear piercing scream” instead of “an ear-piercing scream”. And that’s just three sentences! It’s too bad this game didn’t give out points every time I spotted an error, because if it did, I think I’d have earned 524,000 points out of a possible 200, earning me the rank of Gibbering Grammarian.

Oh, or how about this: forget the writing errors — what if the game gave out points every time I spotted an implementation error! Man, I’d have scored big-time during scenes like this:

LOOK
You are in the dining room [...] The room is dark, lit only by
reflections from lightning outdoors.

X TABLE
This is a nostalgic oak dining table. The surface reflects the
overhead lighting. It has a beautiful oak finish.

So the table’s surface reflects the overhead lighting, even when there is no overhead lighting! Oooh, spooky! Elsewhere, a whiskey bottle contains more spirits than just the alcoholic kind:

OPEN BOOZE
You open the bottle of whiskey.

DRINK WHISKEY
I don't think you'll get anything out of the bottle if it isn't
opened. Your mouth is dry, palms moist.

OPEN BOOZE
The bottle of whiskey is already open!

DRINK WHISKEY
I don't think you'll get anything out of the bottle if it isn't
opened. Your mouth is dry, palms moist.

I keep opening it, but some invisible force stops me from drinking it! Don’t look now Scooby, but I think that whiskey bottle is… HAUNTED! Too bad, because I could really have used a belt at that point.

Then there were the numerous problems that were probably ADRIFT‘s fault rather than the game’s. There’s the famous “Nothing special” line whenever you EXAMINE <any word the parser doesn’t know>, including EXAMINE PARSER. Always a pleasure. There are the pop-up graphics that I think failed to pop up. (I’m guessing this based on the fact that I had files like “UfloorPL.bmp” in my directory, yet X UPPER FLOOR PLAN yielded no graphics.) There are the “cannot draw map — too complex” errors that the mapper gave me EVERY SINGLE FREAKING TURN after a while. There’s this sort of interaction:

X REFRIGERATOR
It is a large stainless steel refrigerator, with magnets strewed
about the surface. You don't notice any kind of fingerprints or
smudges on it. The refrigerator is closed.

OPEN REFRIGERATOR
You open the refrigerator.

LOOK IN REFRIGERATOR
It is a large stainless steel refrigerator, with magnets strewed
about the surface. You don't notice any kind of fingerprints or
smudges on it. The refrigerator is open.

Yes, I know it’s open, but what’s inside it? Apparently the ADRIFT parser searches on keywords and just ignores those other tiresome words that might happen to surround the keywords, thus neatly avoiding pretty much the entire concept of prepositions. My favorite extreme example of this tendency (from this game anyway):

[THIS SUPPOSEDLY SCARY STUFF STARTS TO GET REALLY BANAL AFTER A WHILE]
Take what?

“Hey man,” says the ADRIFT parser, “I don’t care what else you say — as long as you type “GET” anywhere in there, I’m going to ask, ‘Take what?’ Um… not that I’ll be able to handle it if you actually answer me.” Okay, one more example then I promise I’ll quit:

LIE IN BED
You can't lie in the bed.

LIE ON BED
You can't lie on the bed.

LIE DOWN
You lie down on the ground.

LIE DOWN ON BED
I don't understand what you want me to do with the bed.

GET UP
You stand up.

LIE DOWN ON BED
You stand on the bed.

Yay! Endless hours of fun. Not the sort of fun that the game seems to expect me to be having, but still. The endless well of humor from a terrible game was just the thing to lighten up a potentially scary Halloween night. Too bad that sort of thing doesn’t factor into the rating.

Rating: 2.3

The Cave Of Morpheus by Mark Silcox [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Cave Of Morpheus
Final placement: 32nd place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Ah, another IF competition begins. There’s nothing quite like unzipping that big pile o’ games, firing up the random list generator, and diving into the first offering. Of course, the thing about diving is that you may find the water a bit less pleasant than you had anticipated. There’s a misspelling on the first screen. The game engine doesn’t recognize the “script” command. [I figured out later that there’s a “start transcript” command from the menu, whose functionality is happily improved from last year. I’ll keep it in mind for the next ADRIFT game I play.] Oh yes, and then there’s the wonderfully opaque ADRIFT parser:

WEAR CLOTHES
Wear what?

CLOTHES
Wear what?

AAARGH! CLOTHES! C-L-O-T-H-E-S! IF YOU DON'T RECOGNIZE THE WORD,
JUST SAY SO!
Wear what?

It’s not that The Cave of Morpheus is untested. The author’s notes claim that the game “has been beta-tested fairly extensively”, and I can believe it. Sadly, though, the testing cycles didn’t quite catch all the problems, whether they be with voice (“I slap the palm of your hand”), room descriptions full of dialogue that repeats on every “LOOK” command, or glitchy parser trouble that leads to output like this:

GET ALL
I pick up the library book and

Okay, enough bitching about the bugs. TCOM is a college game, combined with that wonderfully flexible genre, the nightmare story. Because much of the game’s action takes place in dreamspace, you’re not to take it amiss that, for example, you’re naked and can’t find any clothes in your own dorm room. Of course, once you see the game comment on the PC’s penis, then dream or no dream, your reaction may be the same as mine: “Ew.” When that comment turns out to be an extended metaphor about drooping flags… well, double ew.

TMI aside, there are a few other strangenesses about the design, but the dreamlike setting makes it hard to know whether they’re intentional or not. For example, there appears to be some random combat, and it can indeed kill you. All that’s necessary to survive is to run away, but as a player, I was still left asking, “What was up with that?” I never really found out.

Inexplicably, the game is split into two files, and right about the start of the second one, I thought it was about to take off into something really cool. The PC plays Crowther and Woods’ Adventure on his laptop, commenting along the way like so:

X BIRD
{You scratch your head. This Crowther 550 thing is getting weirder
and weirder. What the hell would a bird be doing hanging out in a
Colossal underground cave? And if it did find itself there, what
reason would it have to be happy??...}

“Wow!” I thought. What a neat concept — a mini-implementation of Adventure, but seen through the eyes of a particular character, thus shedding light on both the game and the character. Sadly, it turns out that this cool idea wasn’t the idea the game had in mind. Rather than a mini-implementation, the Adventure section is a very long non-interactive passage, one of those dismal IF moments where it doesn’t matter at all what you type; the game keeps choosing your actions even if you just sit there hitting Enter, waiting for a chance to actually do something again. The interplay between character and game still happens, but it feels rather ironic to have interactivity completely removed just as the game is paying homage to a seminal example of interactive text.

There are some pleasures available in TCOM — the character of Alice is nicely delineated, and I found the PC’s relationship with her quite believable. The spiraling, repetitive structure of the game made for some effective scenes, and the notion of some idealized version of Willie Crowther as Virgil to the PC’s Dante is well worth exploring. Though these gems are embedded deep within a bland setting and an unfriendly implementation, their simple existence makes me look forward to the author’s next game.

Rating: 4.5

Wrecked by Campbell Wild [Comp00]

IFDB page: Wrecked
Final placement: 39th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

There are several points in Wrecked where the game collars you to proclaim just how awesome its development system is. For example, you meet someone who (surprise surprise!) just happens to be coding an ADRIFT game on a nearby computer. Ask her about it, and she’ll say to you, “I’m making an ADRIFT adventure. I’ve tried using Inform, TADS and Hugo, but I’d say ADRIFT is by far the best.” In another location, you can gain some points with the command “write graffiti,” something I would never have thought to do without the handy walkthrough to prod me. The graffiti the game chooses to write? “ADRIFT rocks!”

Apparently, Wrecked suspects that its own merits are not enough to convince you of ADRIFT’s supremacy, but that if it just shouts slogans at you once in a while, that might do the trick. For me, the former was true, but the latter, predictably, was not. I’ve already catalogued the shortcomings of ADRIFT in my review of Marooned, so I don’t see the need to rehash them here — the bottom line is that ADRIFT isn’t a bad system overall, and has some nifty features to recommend it, but its parser (which is MORE IMPORTANT THAN NIFTY FEATURES) is substandard, its model world needs work, and it’s still lacking in key functions like UNDO and SCRIPT. A random NPC might think it beats Inform, TADS, and Hugo, but a quick conversation with this NPC demonstrates that her powers of discernment are, after all, rather limited. The game’s self-hyping moments are offputting, as it would have been if Graham Nelson had chosen to have “Inform RUELZ!” scribbled on the side of the house in Curses, or if the spaceship in Deep Space Drifter had been named the USS TADS Is Supreme.

On the other hand, Wrecked is definitely a better showcase for ADRIFT than is Marooned. Those extraneous newlines that I blamed on the ADRIFT system in my review of Marooned turned out to be that game’s doing — they’re nowhere to be found in Wrecked. Many more first-level nouns are implemented, making the auto-complete option work much better, though it still doesn’t work flawlessly. Also, there’s no starvation puzzle in Wrecked, which sets to rest my fears that such a puzzle is standard issue in every ADRIFT game.

However, just being a better game than Marooned doesn’t make Wrecked a great game in itself. One part of the reason why I didn’t care for Wrecked is that it just feels very dated to me. It’s an old-school adventure, something that might have fit comfortably into the mainstream circa 1983 or so. You know the kind: you find a bowling ball with a button on the side, and when you push the button, the ball opens up to reveal a sapphire bracelet, which you then give to the sailor on the dock, who will reward you with a chicken pot pie that you can feed to the vicious warthog, allowing you to sneak into his lair and retrieve the bag of marbles, etc. etc. Everything is pretty much thrown together without any rhyme or reason, loosely grouped together under a threadbare rubric of plot and setting. Like I said, old-school. Unfortunately for Wrecked, the old school of IF lost its accreditation some time ago. To my mind, senseless grouping of stuff without any indication of internal consistency is something IF has outgrown, like mazes and starvation puzzles. Seeing it in a year 2000 competition entry isn’t going to score a lot of points from me.

However, even if I were willing to set aside the deep flaws in both the parser and the design of the game, there would still be the matter of the bugs. Most severe among these is the game-killing bug I encountered about an hour and 45 minutes into the game: despite all conditions being correct, I was unable to complete a critical puzzle, even though I knew from a previous play session that it was possible to complete this puzzle. Because ADRIFT makes a habit of overwriting old save files with the current save unless you explicitly tell it to do otherwise (by selecting “save as” from the menu bar — typing “save” will overwrite without prompting), I would have had to start from scratch and wind my way once more through all the nonsensical contortions required by the game’s plot, and there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t encounter the same bug again.

That bug ended my dealings with Wrecked, but there were other errors along the way. The voice was in first person, but would occasionally slip into second person. Sometimes the game failed to recognize rather important objects. In one supremely frustrating section, the game adamantly refused to recognize the word “keyhole,” despite a promiently featured keyhole in the location; it responded to all commands along the lines of “put key in keyhole” with “I can’t put anything inside the small key.” In short, between the bugs, the parser, the hype, and the lack of any kind of logic, Wrecked wasn’t a lot of fun, and it’s not likely to win many converts to ADRIFT. No matter how many times it insists that ADRIFT rocks.

Rating: 4.0