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

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

IFDB Page: Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis

File Under: Classic Knob

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

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

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

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

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

ERUDITION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW MISSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INNOVATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMPLEMENTATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spellbreaker [Infocom >RESTART]

IFDB page: Spellbreaker
[This review contains many major spoilers for Spellbreaker and some mild to moderate spoilers for Zork and Enchanter series games. Also, I wrote an introduction to these Infocom >RESTART reviews, for those who want some context.]

When I first started listening to the Beatles as a kid, I listened to the hits, and to me they were all just Beatles songs. Before too long, I could feel the differences between the early stuff (i.e. the red album) and the later stuff (the blue album.) From there I moved away from hits collections into regular releases, and my ears began to pick up the Paul songs, versus the John songs, versus the George songs, versus the Ringo songs. Sufficient listening, reading, and attention got me to the point of fine discernment, understanding the subtle but unmistakable differences between Rubber Soul Paul vs. Revolver Paul, or between Let It Be George and Abbey Road George.

Where am I going with this? The voices within Infocom, pretty clearly the Beatles of interactive fiction, reveal themselves similarly given sufficient attention. At first they all feel like just Infocom games, but we can start to pick out the styles after a while. There’s the brash, prolific, and eclectic Meretzky, the cerebral Blank, the ambitious and enthusiastic Moriarty, and so on. Spellbreaker belongs indelibly to the voice of Dave Lebling, possibly the finest writer of the lot, and a creator who lovingly balanced sober themes with dry humor, biting understatement with mathematical intricacy. Not only that, this is classic mid-period Lebling, a flowering of IF’s potential before the chillier days of commercial retrenchment set in.

>EXAMINE WRITING AND STRUCTURE

Spellbreaker was one of my favorite Infocom games when I was playing them in the ’80s, and I was particularly excited to share it with Dante. Looking at the game now, I think it holds up quite well, though I do have some critiques here and there. In particular, Lebling’s writing really shines. Just in the introduction alone, there are so many artful touches. For instance, when Sneffle of the Guild of Bakers complains about the gradual failing of magic:

>examine sneffle
Sneffle is a small doughy gentleman whose person is splotched here and there with flour.

“Doughy” is a rich word to describe a person, and using it for the baker, without piling on the puns, evokes a strong visual, especially combined with his comical flour-splotches. Then there’s the subtle evocation of Shakespeare when: “In the blink of an eye there stands at the podium, not the orator, but rather a large orange newt.” Eye of newt indeed, and something wicked this way comes.

This game also has some of Infocom’s most vivid imagery, and memories of playing it as a teen have stuck with me strongly through the years. In particular, the “beautiful blue carpet with a strange design of cubes” is something I’ve always wished would manifest in this world. I would buy it in a snap. (Though I’d probably want to haggle the price.) Etsy carpet-weavers, make me an offer. Here’s your product description:

>examine blue carpet
This is a carpet of unusual design. It is blue, beautifully woven and has a pattern that looks different each time you look at it. Sometimes, for example, it's an array of cubes pointing upward, and other times it's the same array pointing downward. There is a jaunty fringe around the outer edge.

In Spellbreaker, which by certain lights is Zork VI, Lebling finds himself in the position of finishing a second trilogy, and tonally he makes some similar choices to what Zork III did. Not that this game is anywhere near as bleak and radical as Zork III was, but it shares a similar feeling of somber grandeur. The ruins and the abandoned castle, in particular, give the same sense of desolation. The Ouroboros snake and the rat-idol, like the Royal Puzzle and the Technology Museum, are once-important landmarks left mouldering and forgotten.

Compared to the “fight the Big Bad” plots of the previous two Enchanter-series installments, this a darker and more adult finale, with richer textures and deeper pleasures than the other two. I’ll have more to say about the plot-level comparison with Zork III when I discuss the endgame, but for now I’ll leave it with the observation that the notion of magic slowly failing is a wonderful metaphor for coming of age, and this game moves IF from innocence to experience in a beautiful and gentle way, which encompasses the seriousness of Zork III but leaves much more room for playfulness than that finale did.

The cover of the Infocom grey box for Spellbreaker

Much of the fun in an Enchanter-ish game is the way that you can use your magic to make changes to yourself and the world around you, and Spellbreaker is no exception. Usually, when an IF game wants to surprise and delight, the author needs to anticipate actions that the player wouldn’t expect to see implemented, and give some fun response to those actions. However, Spellbreaker (and the Enchanter series broadly) gets mileage out of a different technique, which is to allow harmless alterations of the world that enrich the player’s experience without requiring any foresight on the part of the author.

One example of this is how you can frotz various things — the loaf of bread, the roc, et cetera — to make a lantern out of some unassuming object or imagine a puzzle component glowing uncharacteristically. This sort of pleasure was available in previous games, but Lebling adds another layer in Spellbreaker — the ability to label objects with arbitrary names, injecting your own sense of order or humor into the game’s world. Beyond Zork copied this quality but with less success, because (aside from the convenience factor of not having to type out “pterodactyl” all the time) its use was totally superfluous to the game.

Spellbreaker, by contrast, gives us a load of identical items — the cubes — which must be distinguished from each other in order to accomplish a successful playthrough. The ability to label these cubes in whatever way makes the most sense (or seems the most fun) to the player allows us to inject our own personalities into the game’s world. It’s such a pleasure that the Invisiclues even included a section titled “What did we name the cubes here at Infocom?”

Structurally, too, the game feels mature. Rather than a big, sprawling dungeon (like the Zork trilogy games) or a compact trunk full of puzzles (like Enchanter and, to a lesser extent, Sorcerer), Spellbreaker incorporates many dimensions and many sub-maps, which sometimes link into larger maps. Lebling themes these dimensions around fundamental elements, forces, and concepts, allowing players to feel that their travels are not only traversing a map but encompassing, via metaphor, the full universe of the game. Each new discovery not only expands the world but enriches it as well — rather like the mapping version of how the spell mechanic deepened the Zork game model. The ability to travel via cube gives us new angles on previously visited locations, as well as new locations, just as the ability to cast spells gave us new angles on puzzle-solving, along with all the old ones that were still available to us.

>COMPARE SPELLBREAKER TO D&D

One of those spells, “snavig”, proves particularly entertaining. This spell allows the PC to transform into any nearby creature, which not only underpins several puzzles but is also an imaginative delight. In particular, Spellbreaker breaks the trend of grue avoidance and lets us become a grue at last! This in turn enables one of the most fun Easter eggs in the game:

>snavig grue
You feel yourself changing in a very unpleasant way. Your claws feel odd, and you have an uncontrollable tendency to slaver. You gurgle vilely to yourself, worrying about the presence of light. Directly in front of you, a horrific creature recoils with a look of shocked surprise. It scuttles off, perplexed.

>slaver
You do that very well for such an inexperienced grue.

It’s fitting that Lebling, the inventor of the grue (for IF purposes), got to flesh them out with such panache here. Spellbreaker would be Lebling’s last grue-infested game.

“Snavig” feels indebted to the “polymorph” spell from Dungeons and Dragons, and it’s one of a few clear D&D tributes in this game. I’ve written before about IF’s connections to the classic tabletop RPG, and it’s worth mentioning again that Dave Lebling was a member of Will Crowther’s D&D group, which influenced Crowther’s genre-founding cave-exploration simulator. Besides polymorphing, the game strikes another D&D note when it lets you pry a gem out of the eye of a giant idol, a clear homage to the classic painting on the cover of the first edition Player’s Handbook.

The painting on the cover of the first edition AD&D Player's Handbook, by David Trampier. Two burglars are prying a gem from the eye of a huge demon statue, while various adventurers wait in the foreground by the body of a slain lizard-man.

The game’s biggest and best D&D tribute, though, is the magic zipper — a Bag of Holding in all but name. Just as frotz removed light source puzzles and rezrov removed locked door puzzles, so does the magic zipper remove inventory limit “puzzles” by allowing the player to carry a functionally infinite number of items. (How I wish it had been in Beyond Zork!) And just as these games found ways to create light and lock puzzles despite frotz and rezrov, this game finds a way to make the removal of inventory limits a detriment to the player, by including a puzzle that requires an inventory object to be sitting on the ground.

>ANALYZE PUZZLES

This puzzle — the gold box — has a great concept, but in practice it’s just underclued. In case it’s been a while: each cube has an exit that seems impassable, but it turns out that it really goes to wherever the gold box is if the gold box is keyed to that cube. However, because it’s counterintuitive adventurer behavior to not carry around everything you can, Dante and I never had occasion to find this out without turning to the hints, despite the fact that we knew the gold box was important and we understood it could be tuned to different cubes. The puzzle feels reminiscent of those puzzles in Zork II and Enchanter where you need to not have a light source.

However, those light source puzzles were hinted at — perhaps obliquely (especially in the case of Zork II), but hinted nonetheless. No such luck in Spellbreaker, and consequently it stumped us. Maybe if the opened “impassable” exit felt a little less rigid, even when you’re holding the box? Or if the phrasing when trying to put anything other than a cube in the box was a parallel to trying to go through the impassable exit? There needs to be something more to link the box to what it does — otherwise it’s hard to imagine many people actually figuring this out rather than stumbling upon it by flailing blindly. Perhaps I’m overstepping in that speculation, but it was certainly the case for us. Ironically, an inventory limit might have helped here, but what would have helped much more is better cueing.

The gold box puzzle is one of a few places where it felt like the game was trying to live up to its “Expert” difficulty rating. The last third (or so) of Spellbreaker has several puzzles which require quite a bit of patience — the octagonal rooms, the flat plain, and worst of all the cube piles. As you can probably tell from that summary, Dante and I found them a mixed bag. There was a certain elegance and satisfaction to the first two, but we face-planted completely on the last one. According to the Invisiclues, those cube piles are “a variation of a classic coin-weighing puzzle” — one coin may be heavier or lighter than 11 identical others, and you have to figure out which with only three weighings — but we never did solve it. We just got through it with dumb luck (and a lot of save and restore). None of these math/mapping/logic puzzles were as enjoyable for us to play through as the first two-thirds of the game, but that may be mainly a matter of taste. Except for the coin puzzle, at which I shake my fist one last time.

>WHAT IS MAGIC?

As I’ve mentioned, the cubes tie the game together and thematically traverse numerous fundamental concepts. As you progress through the game, you move from exploring the classical world of material elements — fire, earth, air, water — into an immaterial realm of concepts — connectivity, time, mind, life, death. Further, while the classical elements may make up our world, some of those more conceptual elements underpin the virtual world of the game. Connectivity suggests pointers in code, and the “No Place” of the mind cube is like a null pointer, or a null value. Connections between nodes run underneath the game at the code level, and within the game at the map level, not to mention that the title “String Room” is itself a string within the game’s code, along with every other snippet of language it contains. The binary oppositions (light/dark, life/death) evoke the ones and zeroes underneath it all.

Finally, there is magic, which is what happens when creatures like us from the material world use life and mind over time to interact with the virtual environment. Immersion is the closest we get to magic, and Spellbreaker is a masterfully immersive game — Dante and I made the fewest notes of any Infocom playthrough, because we found the experience so involving.

But startlingly, our final aim (it emerges) is to eliminate magic. There’s another interesting parallel with Zork III here. In that game, you become the owner of creation, by gathering the elements that distinguish its ownership. Here, you become responsible for creation by gathering the elements that define its existence, and what you must protect it from is yourself, or at least the worst version of you. Then, rather than safeguarding a dungeon of wonders, you must create a universe of mundanity.

The final screen from a winning playthrough of Spellbreaker.

The notion of a literal, magical shadow self echoes Zork III once again, wherein you must strike your shadow self down with a magical sword, then show compassion to it. Here, rather than a mystical test imposed by a godlike figure, your shadow is the result of magic itself, an “evil twin” that grows in power every time you cast a spell. Thus, if you eliminate the magic, you eliminate the evil.

It’s a nice thought, and Spellbreaker sells it skillfully, but it’s pretty problematic on inspection. The magical shadow only literalizes a truth — that the exercise of power is itself a creator of potential corruption. In 2022 it is painfully evident that even in a world without magic, we must regularly contend with humans controlled by their shadow sides in their desire to obtain and retain power. If only we could so simply remove the element of our existence that creates this quality, but we would have to remove ourselves. The problem isn’t magic — it’s humans.

There’s a less allegorical way to interpret this, though. In the end, what your shadow does is to create — implement — a universe. Your job is to remove the magic from the center of that universe. (We replaced it with a chunk of rye bread (providing light), a slyly still-a-little-bit-magical keystone.) The idea of turning a miraculous universe into an ordinary one (replacing mages with scientists) feels on one level like a counterintuitive, anti-creative notion. But it is an intriguing one for a magical world running on a scientific platform.

Also, there is this: perhaps solving puzzles unwinds the magic. Once you’ve played through Spellbreaker, it’s done. Sure, you can explore nooks and crannies here and there, but it has been dismantled for you. A solved puzzle is like a deconstructed hypercube — mysterious and compelling in its original form, but just a set of lines once it’s been taken apart. We can appreciate the elegance of what it was, but to solve it is to take the magic from the center of it. That is, until you allow sufficient time to pass, and revisit it with someone new along. Then it malyons back to life, ready to dance its enchanting little jig once more.

PAX East Part 1: The Suite Life of Zarf & Co. [Misc]

[I originally posted this on my other blog, >SUPERVERBOSE, way back when it was on livejournal. It’s the second in a series of posts about my visit to PAX East 2010, which was life-altering in a good way. I’ve cleaned up the text ever-so-slightly.]

*************************
There were further travel adventures after the plane arrived — I found my way to the subway without any trouble, and got off at the right stop, but it was dark and raining, and I was quite disoriented. Lucky for me, there appeared on the horizon a lovely Au Bon Pain with free wireless access. I ducked in and got my bearings over a delicious lemon danish & chocolate-dipped shortbread. Mmmmm… empty calories. Also, let’s hear it for the Internet — it was so great to 1) figure out the right path to my hotel via Google Maps, 2) write Laura to tell her I’d made the plane, and 3) look up sunrise tables to figure out when I’d have a little light on my side.

Armed with this information, I walked to my hotel as the sun rose, and asked them if there was any way I could pretty please get into a room early so I could grab a nap before proceeding with the rest of my day. Unfortunately, they’d been sold out the night before, so they didn’t have any rooms open that early. They took my phone number and suggested I grab a leisurely breakfast — they’d call me when something opened up. The rain had turned to snow at that point, so I opted to stay within the hotel. They had a cafe with a nice (albeit hotel-expensive) breakfast buffet, so I camped out up there for the next couple of hours until they finally called me with the good news.

Got a room, got into bed. Blessed sleep.

At 12:30 I arose, cleaned up, figured out my train path, and headed over to the IF hospitality suite. This was a room in the Hilton arranged by Andrew Plotkin (aka Zarf) on behalf of the People’s Republic Of Interactive Fiction (a Boston-based IF group) to be a welcoming space for PAXies interested in IF. They printed up friendly fliers and everything (click images for larger versions):

Photocopy - the front side of a flyer advertising "The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction" Hospitality Suite at PAX East 2010, listing various IF-related events at the con and in the room.

Photocopy - the back side of a flyer advertising the IF Hospitality Suite at PAX East 2010 - a faux IF transcript about finding the suite.

When I got there, I was pleased to find that it was pretty crowded! Not only that, it was full of people I’d known online for more than 15 years! Zarf was there, of course — we’d never met, although we’ve been in the same community since 1995. Also there was the estimable Stephen Granade, another guy I’ve known since the very beginning but never been face-to-face with. A few people I’d met at an IF gathering several years ago, so I wasn’t completely overwhelmed with face-to-name energy, but still, it was pretty amazing.

Top 5 awesome things about the IF suite

1) The swag! Robb Sherwin put together a great IF promotional CD (this, but updated with newer stuff) to give out to visitors. There was also a nifty postcard, with art on the front and a handy how-to on the back. Plus: badge ribbons, stickers, buttons, and nametags!

2) The food! Zarf & co. were kind enough to provide lots and lots of chips, M&Ms, and soda, and others brought delicious treats as well. Across the hall, Ben Collins-Sussman and Jack Welch even provided beer! Woo hoo!

3) The energy! At any given moment, there were usually two or three conversations going — newbies connecting with veterans, different subsections of the community interconnecting, people getting acquainted who had never really met before. People talked about IF, and also about their lives, what was happening at the conference, and what was for dinner that night.

4) The special guest stars! Don Woods, co-creator of the original Adventure, came to an IF panel and chatted with folks. I got to hang at the edge of a conversation between Emily Short and Steve Meretzky, so I got to thank the latter for his work, which has meant a lot to me over the years. Especially A Mind Forever Voyaging. Wow. Jason Scott hung out for a while doing his larger-than-life, bursting-with-anecdotes thing. It was a bit like a bunch of indie bands hanging out together, and then occasionally Paul McCartney or Robert Plant might drop by.

5) The people! I suppose this is a superset of the previous one, but holy cow, this room was PACKED the entire weekend! There was something really special about this locus of passion and force about IF. I loved talking to people who were new to the scene. I loved talking to people who had become community celebrities in the time I’ve been out of the loop. I loved talking to people I’ve known for years from the other side of a screen. I loved being in that room.

Dungeon by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2001.]

IFDB page: Zork

Archaeology

Zork I was the first text adventure game I ever played, and I played it a lot. That game occupied many, many hours of my time and, to this day, it remains one of only a few Infocom games I was ever able to solve without hints, due solely to my stubborn and relentless attention to it. Between those marathon childhood sessions and the occasions on which I’ve replayed it since, I have walked those underground caverns many times, and their geography is so fixed in my mind that I think if I should ever find myself transported there, I could navigate with ease. Or, at least, that’s how I used to feel, before I started playing Dungeon and got my internal map thoroughly whacked.

Dungeon is the predecessor to the Zork games; it was MIT’s answer to Crowther and Woods’ Adventure and, much like that game, it lived on a mainframe, since its prodigious size was too great for the personal computers of its day. When the authors decided to make a commercial go of the text adventure business, they chopped Dungeon into three sections, rearranging the geography and adding some new elements to each chapter, especially the second and third. I’ve played the Zork games many times, but I had always wanted to play the mainframe version in order to better understand just what was added and what subtracted. So when I opened the WinGlk version of Andrew Plotkin’s C translation of the game, I was prepared for some shifts in layout compared to my deeply-graven memories of Zork I.

What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the way in which Dungeon gleefully confounds any sense of actual geography in exchange for making the game map another obstacle to be overcome. In Dungeon, connections that line up properly (for example, leaving one room to the south and entering the adjoining room from the north) are the exception rather than the rule. Instead, you may go west and find that to get back to where you came from, you have to go west again. In a recent article about crafting a good setting for fantasy IF [1], Emily Short addressed this tendency:

[In] the ideal IF setting, the parts of the setting relate to each other in comprehensible ways. Things are located sensibly. I dislike mazes not only because you do have to map them but also because they interfere with and scramble up the intuitive sense of place that I otherwise build up as I play.

In this sense, almost the entirety of Dungeon functions as a maze, and any coherent sense of place that might emerge is bound to get smacked down as soon as the next exit is explored. I have a pretty good knack for mapping in my head, and thus don’t tend to make a map while playing IF but, with this game, there was no way I could pursue that strategy. Thus, grumbling, I hauled out my copy of GUEmap and tried diligently to record the tortured web of interconnections that make up the Dungeon landscape. When I finally finished, I uploaded the results to GMD so that other players like myself won’t have to struggle through the game’s mazes on their own.

And oh, the mazes — in addition to the general illogic of its structure, Dungeon also sports several mazes, all of which carry the “warped connections” tendency to its furthest extreme. Of course, when seen from the historical perspective, these mazes make sense: Adventure had mazes, and since mazes are one of the easiest kinds of puzzles to create, it follows that the game attempting to top Adventure would have mazes of its own. What Dungeon does, though, is to twist the knife: not only does it present the player with mazes, it confounds the typical “drop item and map” strategy by having an NPC come along and remove or rearrange those items, taunting the player with comments like “My, I wonder who left this fine hot pepper sandwich here?”

When viewed with a modern eye, obstacles like this make clear how different is the stance of modern IF from its ancestors. Dungeon set itself up unambiguously as the player’s antagonist, and it wasn’t particularly concerned with telling a story, nor even with describing a world. Plot is nonexistent, and fabulous treasures are described with perfunctory lines like “You see nothing special about the sapphire bracelet.” Instead, Dungeon puts its energies into confusing and confounding the player, and wacky map connections are but the tip of the iceberg. Along with the aforementioned mazes, there’s the light source, which always runs out at the worst possible times. There’s the Round Room, guaranteed to tangle any map. There are the “secret word” puzzles, some of which still perplex me to this day, even though I know how they operate. And of course, there’s the thief, whose annoyances are both numerous and legendary. Dungeon wants nothing more than to see you fail, and it’s not overly concerned with how much fun you might be having. As Robb Sherwin asserted on rec.games.int-fiction recently [2], “Zork hates its player.”

Today’s IF, by contrast, works a bit harder to collaborate with the player, with the aim of creating a shared experience, both in setting and plot. Even the Zork games moved in this direction, at least in comparison to Dungeon, mitigating some of the latter game’s greatest excesses by straightening out many map connections, allowing more flexibility with the permanent light source, and providing a bit more description from time to time. The ways in which Infocom itself engineered the shift from “text-based puzzle games” to actual interactive fiction is a subject for another article, but what’s become clear is that where the emphasis was once on opposition, it has shifted steadily to cooperation.

To my mind, this shift is both appropriate and necessary, and what playing Dungeon illuminated for me is that this movement towards collaborative IF is not the same thing as the concurrent movement towards “literary IF”, though they are often confused for one another. I can envision a game that, like Dungeon, has no particular literary pretensions, but unlike Dungeon, isn’t trying to undermine its player through the use of arbitrary techniques like twisty map connections and unreliable light sources. I would assert that collaborative IF doesn’t need to tell a story, and it certainly doesn’t need to aspire to literary greatness, but it does need to work with the player to create a rich, interactive world, and it does need to be concerned with giving the player a positive, fun experience. Of course collaborative IF can be puzzleless, but it needn’t be — puzzles can be part of the fun, as long as they aren’t geared towards forcing restarts after 800 moves, or making the player do tedious, menial work.

The move away from antagonistic IF is the reason why things like mazes, limited light sources, and starvation puzzles are met with a chorus of jeers these days, but the elimination of these elements doesn’t necessarily dictate anything in particular about how literary or puzzleless a game might be. Instead, the change makes the whole experience of IF more about fun than bloody-minded perseverance; playing Dungeon makes it clear how necessary this change was, and how far we’ve come since those mainframe days.

REFERENCES

[1] Short, Emily. “Developing A Setting For Fantastical Interactive Fiction”, 2001.

[2] Sherwin, Robb. “Re: nevermind”. rec.games.int-fiction, 2001/06/05

Landscape and Character in IF [Misc]

[The following article was my contribution to the 2011 IF Theory Reader]

If we reduce interactive fiction to its essence, we can view it as a triangular relationship between three basic elements: Landscape, Character, and Action. It’s possible to write IF without objects, plot, NPCs or myriad other ingredients, but as soon as that first room description appears, it introduces a landscape, just as the first prompt ushers in the concept of Action.1 I would further argue that the interaction between these two elements inevitably creates some concept of Character. The character that emerges is the being that would perform the actions selected when presented with the landscape (and situation) at hand. Even if that character is not human, not organic, or not even embodied (an omniscient narrator, for instance, though that voice is almost never used in IF because of the form’s powerful insistence on connecting Action with viewpoint), Action must have an agent, and that agent is what we call the Player Character.

In this formulation, the only one of the triumvirate completely under the game’s control is Landscape. Action is entirely in the hands of the player, and Character lies halfway between the two. That last statement may require a bit more unpacking. If Character is determined by Action, why isn’t it entirely in the hands of the player as well? The answer is that while Action does determine Character, it isn’t the sole determining factor. The game itself can shape character by statements as blatant as “You’re Tracy Valencia,” or by something as subtle as a particular word choice in a parser response. However, I would contend that while blatant character-shaping statements and even subtle nudges from default responses are far from inevitable in IF, some sense of landscape must be included in any IF game, and that both the design and the description of this landscape are extremely powerful factors in determining character. It is my aim in this essay to examine the ways in which Landscape influences and creates Character, and to raise what I hope will be some interesting questions about the nature of their interrelationship.

MAP DESIGN

[This section contains minor spoilers for Adventure, Planet Of The Infinite Minds, Strangers In The Night, and Suspect. It contains medium-level spoilers for Lost New York and Stone Cell, and major spoilers for Shade and 1981.]

Space is continuous. The landscape of interactive fiction, however, consists of discrete units, connected to each other in various ordinary and sometimes extraordinary ways.2 By convention we call these units “rooms”, but in fact they can be anything from a tiny subsection of a room to an entire town, country, planet, or universe. How does a game’s subdivision of continuous space affect our perception of the character in that game? Let’s look at some examples.

An illuminating comparison exists between two pieces of IF with urban settings: Neil DeMause’s Lost New York (1996) and Rich Pizor’s Strangers In The Night (1999). In the former, the character travels through Manhattan and other areas of New York City during various points in history. The game frequently compresses neighborhoods, boroughs, and other such swaths of territory into single rooms, albeit lovingly described ones:

Lower East Side
The scene around you is one unmatched in any other time and place in human history: Acres of identical four- and five-story tenements packed cheek-to-jowl with people, people who spill out onto the sidewalks and fire escapes in search of a little space, a little air. The el tracks continue down the street to the north and south; to the east, the tenements seem to stretch on forever, though you're pretty sure they eventually end at the East River shore.

Within each time period, these areas connect to each other directly, even though they may have been separated by miles in reality. Occasionally, a “traveling message” such as “You trudge north for close to a mile, finally arriving at…” will interpose itself between locations, but more often the traveling interval passes instantaneously and without comment.

Strangers In The Night, on the other hand, painstakingly sets out its generic city map as a street grid, and provides almost no description for the lion’s share of its locations:

Broadway and 11th
You are at the intersection of Broadway and 11th Avenue. To the southwest is the security door for your apartment building; the Broadway Sineplex (which a few downtown residents still consider an amusing name for a movie theatre) lies to the northeast.

>n
Broadway (10th & 11th)

>n
Broadway and 10th
One of the streetlights is dim here; the shadows that are cast against the sidewalk are oddly deformed, giving the corner an otherworldly feel.

>n
Broadway (9th & 10th)
Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm starts blaring it's [sic] Call of the Wild to the concrete jungle. This is followed a few moments later by the sound of figerglass [sic] crunching and safety windshields shattering until the alarm ceases.

>n
Broadway and 9th

>n
Broadway (8th & 9th)

>n
8th and Broadway
Carl Tuck's Coffehouse [sic] is to the southeast.

At first glance, it might appear that about half the locations contain room descriptions. In fact, however, only the first and the last do; the dim streetlight and the car alarm are random atmospheric messages that can pop up in any street location. In fact, the only time a non-random message, or a description of any kind, appears is when the location adjoins the entrance to a puzzle-solving area, or to the PC’s home. The game’s city grid is comprised of about 80 locations, all of which may well have been compressed into one room in Lost New York.

It’s a natural impulse to discuss these choices as they relate to game design, or to talk about their successes and failures in creating immersion or facilitating strategy. What may not be so natural is to think about how these choices influence the way we think about the player character; I would contend that consciously or not, we perceive these two characters differently based on the way the games construct their surroundings. What we know about the PC of Lost New York is that she3 knows New York City well enough to identify its various areas instantly, even as they appeared over a hundred years ago. In fact, the game’s easy recognition of areas such as “The Goats” and “Ladies Mile”, not to mention the copious historical detail infused into many room descriptions, creates a tension between the game’s identification of the PC as “a tourist” and what we know about her from her subsequent experiences.

Someone who could wander through New York’s past with so much information at hand must be intimately familiar with the city, either through experience or study. Her interest and perception is mostly broad strokes — she’s more interested in generalities of an area than in its specific details, and her sense of history is sweeping rather than finely grained — but her knowledge is quite comprehensive. Even if the game had insisted that this was the PC’s first trip to the city, we would have to conclude that she is someone who for whatever reason has immersed herself in New York City history; how else to explain such detailed knowledge in the midst of the extraordinary experience of time travel? If the game proved unable or unwilling to address and resolve this question, that lacuna could hardly be anything but a flaw in the work, just as it would be in a novel where the main character knows things she shouldn’t.

Unlike the PC of Lost New York, the character in Strangers has almost no interest in ordinary detail, let alone history. He never finds himself musing about ironies or architecture as he treads the streets, and in fact usually notices nothing but the bare identity of the location. Together with the game’s specification of the PC as a vampire, these facts can lead us to a few conclusions about this character. He sees the city not as human tapestry or even interesting backdrop, but rather as a sort of maze he must navigate in order to locate prey. The lack of room descriptions impels us to move quickly from one location to the next, replicating the urgency of the character’s thirst for blood. His disinterest in local color might even be seen as an undead disdain for the fleeting effluvia of mortal life. The game’s overall presentation isn’t quite strong enough to give this effect full potency, but all the same we know quite well that there is a significant difference between these two characters. The Lost New York PC, even if she were a vampire searching the streets for prey, couldn’t help but notice the landscape and be aware of its heritage, while the Strangers PC could be thrust into any time in the city’s history and would evince a similar disregard for anything but the most minimal details of place.

On the other end of the detail spectrum from Strangers is Andrew Plotkin’s Shade (2000), where the entirety of the action appears to be taking place in the player character’s studio apartment. In this one-room environment, however, movement is possible, and the game responds to this movement not by placing the character in a new room (as is the case with most IF), but rather by making a series of alterations to room description and scope for the current room. If the PC is in the center of the apartment, for example, the game first mentions objects close at hand, such as the computer desk and stereo, while reserving mention of the kitchen and bathroom areas for the later parts of the room description. When that character moves to the kitchen, however, text about the counter, the refrigerator, and such occupies the beginning of the room description. The desk and stereo are still visible from that location, and still mentioned, but are only visible, not accessible for touching or other manipulation until the character returns to the center of the apartment.

When Shade was released, this approach to map design was hailed as an innovative subversion of the conventional IF map, which it is. It is also a fitting choice for characterization purposes. The overlapping, connected nature of the apartment landscape makes clear to us that this is an environment with which the character is intimately familiar, and that even while he inhabits one area of it, his awareness of the other areas does not abate. The map design makes the apartment belong to the character in a way that it would not were it separated into discrete rooms. This sense of familiarity, of safety, and of enclosure makes the game’s later revelations all the more powerful, as the familiar dissolves into the strange, and safe enclosure into fatal exposure.

A similar effect, the subdivision of one room into many separate locations, appears in a variety of games, including Infocom’s Suspect (1984) and Steve Kodat’s Stone Cell (1999). In the former, it’s a grand ballroom that the game presents as nine separate locations, and the effect is to make the room feel enormous. The character in Suspect is a reporter at a party being given in a mansion, and the game’s map design underscores her sense of awe at the opulent surroundings — where the house’s owner’s perception of the ballroom might be closer to that of the character in Shade, the guest’s mind demands more concrete conceptual boundaries in order to take in the scope of the area.

Stone Cell achieves a different effect by performing the same gridlike subdivision on a much smaller room, the eponymous stone cell. Room descriptions and common sense tell us that this room is much smaller than the ballroom in Suspect, so the game’s partitioning of that space, rather than conveying immensity, instead reflects the PC’s awareness of the room’s tiniest details as a result of his imprisonment. What makes this design particularly effective is that the game initially presents the cell as one location, then expands it into a grid after the character sleeps, thus reflecting not only the character’s growing familiarity with his surroundings but also his growing desire to scrutinize each detail of the premises in hopes of escape.

The opposite effect is available, too, when games compress the extremely large, even the inconceivably large, into a single room description. One of the more extreme examples of this technique occurs in Alfredo Garcia’s Planet Of The Infinite Minds (2000), where the character might find himself here:

The Beginning of Space
All around you, distant suns flicker and twinkle. Painfully bright points of light seem to appear suddenly from out of the ether, as another retracts into obscurity. En masse, the effect renders a carnival of vibrant colours and astonishing beauty.

The simple fact of the character’s existence in this location tells us something about that character: that she has transcended humanity, attaining a sort of bodiless, godlike status. Since the game starts with the PC as a simple librarian, its transportation of her to such an abstract vista carries with it the implication of personal disembodiment and removal from reality as well. What’s more, her ability to know that the location is “The Beginning Of Space” rather than, say, a Christmas tree festival viewed through a hangover, suggests a metahuman omnipotence that we must assume has been granted to the character, at least temporarily.

The connection between map design and character stretches to the deepest roots of IF, for the majority of Adventure‘s (1976) map is named and divided in ways that would make sense to a spelunker. From the way that the game comfortably names areas of the cave as “rooms”, and indeed even the names of those rooms, which draw on caving vocabulary such as “Bedquilt” and “Y2”, we can clearly identify that the character in that game is an experienced cave explorer. Thus, even in the earliest days of IF, when games made virtually no overt effort to characterize the PC, character was already emerging as a function of landscape. The character in Adventure, while unraced, gender-neutral, ageless, nameless, and faceless, was nonetheless made distinct from the player herself by the way he perceived the landscape of the cave, seeing rooms and twisty little passages where a different character might have experienced the area quite differently.

In the hands of a skilled author, the effect of landscape on character can make for a portrayal that is very striking indeed. Take, for instance, Adam Cadre’s 1981 (2001)4. The first room description of the game is as follows:

New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven. The worst place on earth. The town is dirty and industrial, the students are sloppy, everything is horribly expensive. And you had to cash in $3600 of your stock to get here. But it was necessary. Four years at this place is enough to ravage anyone. You have to rescue her, your first true love.

Her dormitory lies to the north.

Already, we can see a dramatic narrowing of scope occurring. The character is so unconcerned with the details of his location that he compresses an entire town into one unit, dismissing all of it as “the worst place on earth.” Then the broad outlines of location gain sudden, sharp focus: “Her dormitory lies to the north.” The contrast between the vague, reviled whole of New Haven and the focus on the dormitory, set apart in its own line, suggests to us that the character’s concentration on his goal is unhealthy, perhaps even obsessive, and moving north confirms this suspicion:

New Haven, in her dormitory
You're standing in front of her door. It's closed. It's always closed. You've shoved approximately one hundred poems and letters under that door. You figure she's probably read about half of them.

Scope narrows even further here, from one building to the tiny area in front of one of that building’s doors. The room descriptions certainly confirm our impression of the main character’s unbalanced and obsessive nature, but even without them, the basic funneling performed by the map design would get the point across admirably. When we discover that the PC is John Hinckley, Jr., and that the door in question is to Jodie Foster’s dorm room at Yale, the revelation is terrifically powerful, because via its map design, the game has already taken us directly into the viewpoint of its would-be assassin.

ROOM DESCRIPTIONS

[This section contains minor spoilers for A Change In The Weather, Heroes, Varicella, and Zork I. It contains medium-level spoilers for Once And Future and Wearing The Claw, and major spoilers for Nothing More Nothing Less.]

Of course, in 1981 it’s more than just map design that clues us into the character — the room descriptions themselves make it clear that we are seeing the game’s landscape as filtered through one individual’s highly idiosyncratic viewpoint. Short, choppy sentences give the text a jittery feel, contributing to the general tone of uneasiness. We know the character has some access to wealth because of the “$3600 of your stock” line. We also know the character is either a heterosexual male or a homosexual female from the reference to the true love as “her.”5 And we certainly know how he feels about New Haven.

Cadre is particularly skilled at bringing character across through room description, as in this example, the first room in Varicella (1999):

Salon
You've funneled the lion's share of the palace improvements budget -- and most likely the tiger's share as well -- into renovating the salon... not that the Philistines you live among are equipped to appreciate it. From the plush Quattordici chairs to the handsome volumes in the library to the imported Ming tea service to the steward you hired to attend to your grooming needs, this is an oasis of taste and comfort in what is otherwise a fairly uncomfortable and tasteless building. Ah, well. When you become Regent you'll have greater latitude to redecorate. The arched windows overlook the western gardens, while the exit leads east.

This description follows several paragraphs of introduction, which announce the player character as one Primo Varicella, Palace Minister to a recently deceased king, and Machiavellian schemer for the throne. Even without that introduction, though, this room description would frame the character aptly. From the “lion’s share” clause we know that the character is in charge of improvements to a palace, and from the room name we know that he is in the Salon mentioned in the first sentence; therefore we can conclude that he is employed by the palace in which the game begins — a succinct way to bring across Varicella’s position and occupation. Moreover, the phrase “live among” tells us that he resides at the palace as well. The “tiger’s share” clause gives us an example of his sardonic humor, and the “Philistines” reference an example of his snobbery. His identification of the chairs and tea service, and the contrast to the “uncomfortable and tasteless” remainder of the building, communicate clearly that this is a man of very strong preferences, a persnickety aristocrat whose refined tastes run to the extremely expensive. Finally, the character’s ambitions, and the drive behind them, are summarized neatly: “When you become Regent you’ll have greater latitude to redecorate.” Just by seeing one room through this character’s eyes, we learn all the essential facts about him that will carry throughout the game.

If there’s a continuum that measures the degree to which a game’s room descriptions blatantly shape character, it’s fair to say that Varicella is probably on the extreme end of it. Does that mean that the room descriptions of games on the other end don’t shape character at all? Predictably, my answer is no — the effect is just a bit more subtle. To illustrate, let’s compare descriptions from two different games, neither of which has character as its focus. First, from Andrew Plotkin’s A Change In The Weather (1996):

Rocky Outlook
A wide angular tongue juts out from the hillside. The park stretches off to the north and west, a vast expanse of luminous meadowland, patched with the dark emerald of forest. The streams are already shadowed in their beds. In the distance, a lake reflects red fire, beneath the greater fire that leaps silently on the horizon.

A trail leads southwest down the hill, towards the bridge. From where you stand, it turns southeast and continues upward, deeply cut into the hillside. A narrower trail leads more steeply up to the east.

Zork I (1981) by Infocom offers a location that is very nearly analogous:

Rocky Ledge
You are on a ledge about halfway up the wall of the river canyon. You can see from here that the main flow from Aragain Falls twists along a passage which it is impossible for you to enter. Below you is the canyon bottom. Above you is more cliff, which appears climbable.

Though their locations may be similar, these two characters are very different indeed. Weather‘s wanderer takes the entire first paragraph to describe the area with intense, poetic language. The words don’t directly narrate the emotions felt by the character, nor impute opinions like the descriptions in Varicella, but they deploy vivid adjectives like “luminous” and “dark emerald”, and powerful metaphors — the tongue of rock, the red fire of sunset reflected in a lake, the setting sun as a “greater fire that leaps silently on the horizon.” This is a character whose soul is moved by the grandeur of a natural landscape. Only after this reverent depiction does the character notice practical details: the trails and where they lead.

Zork‘s PC, on the other hand, goes directly for the practical. She mentions the river’s passage only in terms of whether she can enter it. What she notices about the cliff is that it is climbable. Though the natural scene — a canyon, a river, a waterfall — is probably quite impressive, the description is almost entirely mechanical. There are no rapturous sentences about the stark rock of the cliff or the sparkling river. Adjectives are almost entirely absent, and where they do exist their purpose is highly prosaic: “river” further identifies “canyon”, as “Aragain” does “Falls” and “canyon” does “bottom.” Other descriptors exist solely to describe travel options: “impossible” and “climbable”. Indeed, she sees every element of the scene only in terms of how it can be manipulated or traversed, and this viewpoint is consistent throughout the game, just as the intense description of natural phenomena is a constant in Weather. Both games’ main focus is puzzle-solving, but when we compare how their characters each view a similar scene, it becomes clear how different the characters are from each other.

Comparing the PCs of two different games illuminates important differences between the characters, and the effect is even more potent when several points of view are available within the same game — instead of seeing how two different characters view analogous locations, we get to see how they view the exact same location. Several recent games have made use of this technique: J. Robinson Wheeler’s Being Andrew Plotkin (2000), Stephen Granade’s Common Ground (2000) and my own LASH (2000) among them. The current apex of POV-diversity, though, probably belongs to Heroes (2001) by Sean Barrett. This game offers a minimal landscape of something like a dozen locations, but gives five different viewpoint options through which to view it. For instance, the opening location of the game as viewed by a Zork-like adventurer:

Temple Way
The grimy, ramshackle buildings of Oldtown dutifully try to reform themselves as you progress east down Temple Way, but nothing besides the temple itself makes any real pretense of belonging anywhere other than Oldtown. Or rather, nothing besides the temple and Baron Sedmon's nearby mansion.

a King:

Avenue
This broad avenue leads right into Temple Square, the heart of fabulous New Oldtown. Towering over the square to the east you do perceive your stark white Temple of Justice, beautiful and well-appointed, offering a statement to the neighborhood: this, this is what progress is about. Sadly, the buildings around you are scarcely up to this new standard; Baron Ventillado's house north of the square is much more satisfactory. How you hate having to come here. This would all be so much simpler if Blackhelm were found dead one morning, but it's never happened yet, despite your best efforts.

a thief:

Shadowy Road
Sturdy, functional buildings lie in and out of shadow on the road to the temple square. Simple architecture, devoid of handholds; closely spaced buildings, devoid of alleyways; uncut walls, devoid of windows: the builders in this area knew how to encourage amateurs to go elsewhere.

a mage:

East-West Road
Randomly arranged paving stones form this street, proceeding east towards a more attractive arrangement. The darkened buildings lean sloppily over the edge of the street, reducing the energetic potential of the strict east-west layout. West the road leads back into the seething mess that is Oldtown.

and finally, a dragon:

Open Tunnel
We were surrounded by the man-things' structures, structures of dead trees and rock and distortions of iron. Beneath us we felt the arrangements of stone into a path for man-things' mobile receptacles. We could smell hints of the Crystal along the path to the east.

Where the adventurer just sees a temple, the King sees the temple as his own possession, a symbol of his attempts to renovate and improve the city. Where the mage sees leaning buildings distorting the street’s pristine geometry, the thief sees those same leaning buildings as a source of precious shadow. Through the use of a past-tense, second-person plural voice, Heroes renders the dragon’s viewpoint quite alien, and emphasizes that dissonance by showing us how the dragon sees the street: an “open tunnel”, contrasted with the more irregular shapes of nature and constructed by contemptible “man-things.” Heroes takes excellent advantage of Landscape’s ability to reveal Character, and through its use of multiple viewpoints, it leverages the power of the Landscape-Character axis to accomplish something more: the revelation of Landscape via accumulated details from a variety of characters. The descriptions coalesce in the player’s mind to create a picture of the location that is much more complete than any one viewpoint could provide, while at the same time establishing distinct portraits of each viewpoint character.

Other games have made use of changing room descriptions in order to demonstrate change or progression in a single PC, or to give us that character’s revised perspective as a situation changes. Nothing More, Nothing Less (2001) by Gilles Duchesne is a case in point. The first puzzle of this slice-of-life game takes place in a bathroom, initially described like so:

Bathroom
I’ve seen bigger bathrooms, but must admit this smaller one suits our needs well. There’s a small sink with a cabinet under it, a mirror, a bathtub (equiped [sic] with a shower head and curtain) and a toilet.

However, after the character urinates6, the toilet clogs and begins to overflow. Unprompted, the game reprints the room description, which now reads as follows:

Bathroom
I’ve seen bigger bathrooms, but must admit this smaller one suits our needs well. There’s a small sink with a cabinet under it, a mirror, a bathtub (equiped [sic] with a shower head and curtain) and a toilet.
Right now, my attention is also grabbed by: the toilet tank. Water keeps flowing from the tank, nearing the bowl’s edge.

The room description stays the same, but the game adds a sentence to demonstrate that the character’s attention has become focused on one particular aspect of the room: the toilet tank. This sentence serves gameplay purposes, indicating that the toilet tank is in fact implemented and thereby hinting toward the solution of the “overflowing toilet” puzzle. In addition to this, the attention sentence demonstrates a shift in the character, showing us his revised perspective as well as the fact that he’s quick-witted enough to think immediately of the toilet tank in this crisis. The other sentence is typical of IF room descriptions, indicating an action currently taking place in the room and lending urgency to the character’s desire to solve the puzzle. After the character opens the tank, lifts the toilet float, and fixes the stuck valve to stop the toilet running (alas, too late to prevent water flowing onto the floor), the game once again reprints the room description, this time altered considerably:

Bathroom
I’m now standing barefoot in some icy water. I’ve seen bigger bathrooms, but must admit this smaller one suits our needs well. In fact, at this very moment I’m terribly glad the floor isn’t bigger, as it would only mean more water to remove. There’s a small sink with a cabinet under it, a mirror, a bathtub (equiped [sic] with a shower head and curtain) and a toilet.
Right now, my attention is also grabbed by: my towel.

There are several changes, doing several different sorts of work within the description. The first, the “icy water” sentence, indicates a change in the room itself, one that is reflective of situation rather than character, though of course the way the character chooses to relate this situation — emphasizing discomfort by noting his bare feet and describing the water as “icy”, conveying a mood of urgency without panic — does accomplish some characterization. A later sentence takes a fact of the bathroom addressed by earlier descriptions (its small size) and relates it to the new situation, revealing a practical and rather optimistic side to the viewpoint character. This sentence also demonstrates that the character’s perspective, while pragmatic, is not particularly scientific, since a larger floor wouldn’t actually mean more water to remove, only a greater surface area from which to remove it. Later, we get a new “attention” sentence; the toilet tank is no longer in focus, and instead the character is thinking of his towel. Note that this towel was not mentioned in any of the previous room descriptions, because the character had no particular need of it. Nothing More, Nothing Less makes extensive use of this technique, heightening realism by filtering not only the general experience of landscape through the PC, but also specific points of focus as well. Finally, once the toilet is plunged and the water toweled and mopped, the PC has showered, and his feline nemesis has entered the room, the bathroom’s description changes to this:

Bathroom
This a bathroom, of which I’ve seen more than enough in the last minutes. Come to think of it, I’ve seen enough of it for the whole day. And the presence of that hairy pest doesn’t improve my morale. Azrael licks one of his paws, while keeping an eye on me.

The character’s perspective on the bathroom has changed once more, marking the end of his progression from bland interest, through urgent focus, and resting finally at mild exasperation. The emotional registers aren’t extreme, but the room descriptions convey very clearly the changes taking place within the character as a response to the changes that occur around him. In games like this, Landscape does even more shaping of Character than usual by virtue of its changing prose.

A final aspect of how Landscape reveals Character lies in the concept of elision: what rooms does the game avoid describing, and how do those gaps influence our understanding of the character? Many games take the character, via non-interactive cut-scenes, or even simple transitions, through landscape that we never get to see from the PC’s perspective. My experiences as an author have taught me about this phenomenon; in my first game, Wearing The Claw (1996), I elided an entire sea voyage. In practical terms, I made this choice because I didn’t have the time, energy, or skill to implement the journey as an interactive experience, but its absence from the game couldn’t help but affect the PC’s characterization. His reluctance to relate the details had to be explained somehow, so I made him someone who is deeply intimidated by the ocean, someone who would want to block out the experience of being at sea as much as possible:

Soon you find yourself at sea for the first time in your life, and you learn that the rocking and swaying of a small boat on a choppy sea does little to relax you. Nausea swells and recedes like the the [sic] waves beneath you, and though the journey to the isle of the Goergs takes little more than an hour, it ends none too soon for you.

I’m not willing to make the claim that elision always contributes to characterization — sometimes cuts are in place just to serve a story’s structure, leaving things unimplemented even though the character certainly would notice them. However, there are times that what isn’t described is just as important as what is. These sorts of gaps are particularly noticeable when they contrast with the player’s expectations, as happens from time to time in Kevin Wilson’s Once And Future (1998). One particularly memorable absence in that game is the matter of the cat: late in the game, Frank Leandro (the PC) is required to obtain a bit of cat hair for a magical recipe, and conveniently enough happens across a stray cat who sheds a bit into his hand and rides his shoulder for a while. A while later, that cat jumps into the chimney of a boarded-up house (chasing a bird) and disappears. Frank has a sword that cuts through anything, but the game forbids him from cutting through the boards to find the cat, saying “You could, but there’s not much point to it.” So however much the player may want to make sure that the kitty is okay, she is constrained by Frank’s disinterest; the inside of the house isn’t part of the map, because Frank doesn’t see the point of exploring it.

A PC-CENTRIC VIEW OF INTERACTIVE FICTION

[This section contains minor spoilers for The Beetmonger’s Journal, medium-level spoilers for Hamlet (the Shakespeare play), and major spoilers for Photopia.]

It’s possible that objections may arise to some of the points I make above, on the grounds that what I ascribe to character could just as easily be seen as a particular author’s writing style, a game’s depth of implementation, or even the formal constraints of IF itself. It’s quite true that I’m taking a PC-centric view — this is how I experience interactive fiction, and it’s easy to feel that it’s simply how the form works, but I certainly acknowledge that there are other, equally valid approaches. It’s also true that the PC is not the only possible point of view within a work of Interactive Fiction. In The Beetmonger’s Journal (2001) by Scott Starkey, for instance, some very nifty POV-jumping occurs in sections where the PC is the hero of some stories being read by the frame characters — from time to time those characters are interrupted in their reading, and we get a small cut-scene from their point of view.

However, what I would argue for is the extreme difficulty of disconnecting the point-of-view from the Player Character at the point of action. The IF prompt implies a certain kind of remote control: the player is to type in an action which will then be executed within the game. Invariably, this action is performed by the PC. Indeed, this is the very definition of Player Character. Similarly, landscape descriptions, especially when that landscape is available for traversal and manipulation from the game prompt, almost cannot help but be filtered through the PC, because all the knowledge conveyed in them is available for use at the point of action. If room description were to convey something that the PC couldn’t possibly know, such as the color of an object when the character is blind, the result would be severe cognitive dissonance for the player. If we type “OPEN BLUE DOOR” and the blind PC is able to do so, we must conclude that the PC is not blind after all — that’s how powerful the connection is between Character and Action. Because Landscape, Character, and Action are so intimately connected, it’s quite difficult to avoid making Landscape a function of Character, especially as the two get nearer and nearer to Action.

Given this PC-centric take on IF, it’s worth asking what possibilities reveal themselves as open or closed in its light. We’ve already seen some of what’s opened, from Heroes‘ cumulative place-building to Shade‘s resonant evocation of the familiar, and no doubt future games will continue to explore the power of the Landscape-Character axis. Conversely, one element that seems rather alarmingly curtailed is the possibility of dramatic irony. For instance, imagine Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an IF game, in which the player controls Hamlet, but is allowed (as a reader) to see Polonius stepping behind the arras in the queen’s bedroom. In order to retain the dramatic irony of the scene, Hamlet must stab the arras and inadvertently kill Polonius, but why would the player order him to do so, knowing what Hamlet doesn’t? In other words, how can the player be allowed to know things that the character doesn’t if that knowledge is expected to facilitate dramatic irony? The only answer I can think of is to force the PC’s actions, to make Hamlet stab Polonius no matter what the player orders, but as soon as that happens, the interactivity drops out of the IF game, and thus Action is removed from the equation. I’m not prepared to contend that this sort of dramatic irony is impossible, but the game that solves this problem will be a major breakthrough.

The work that’s probably come the closest to this grail is Adam Cadre’s justly revered Photopia (1998). Thanks to its fragmentation of the narrative line and its array of POV characters, when the climactic scene arrives, we know all the awful freight of what’s about to happen. We also can’t stop it — in order to achieve its dramatic irony, Photopia must remove our power to act. There’s an argument to be made that this sort of moment becomes even more powerful in interactive fiction, the useless prompt underscoring the inevitability of the character’s tragic fate. That’s as may be, but it doesn’t change the fact that PC and Action are still inextricably connected, and the only way the PC can be made to do something inevitable is to remove control from the player. Photopia cleverly makes the inevitable moment a car accident, thus giving the PC only a split-second to react (and thus providing a plausible context for lack of choice) and making his default desires identical to the player’s desires (STOP THE CAR!), but in the final analysis, the moment is still achieved by removing control from the player, and indeed the great majority of the criticism directed towards Photopia has been of its non-interactivity.

If Action is to retain its place in the IF triangle, Landscape and Character must remain inextricably connected. Their powerful bond to each other creates many exciting possibilities for the development of both, possibilities that have begun to be exploited in the last several years, and which no doubt will continue to yield opportunities for development. What’s also true is that noticing this connection and its potential still only scratches the surface of character development and landscape exposition in IF. Character can be revealed not just through landscape, but through objects, plot, direct narrative, and many other devices. In turn, while character is the primary lens for landscape, that landscape can alter greatly from the passage of time, from plot events, from NPC actions, or hundreds of other vectors, and each change to character and landscape deepens both. We’ve only just started finding the techniques, and it’s a heady feeling. We’re at the beginning of an art form — there’s much more undiscovered territory to explore.

Endnotes

1 A note about terms here: First, I should note that by “interactive fiction”, I refer to text IF. Some of the points here are certainly applicable to graphical or mixed-media IF as well, but some may not be. Secondly, the general concepts of Landscape, Character, and Action aren’t meant to be taken too literally. IF could be (and in many cases has been) created with a map of entirely abstract locations, or one location, or location descriptions that consist entirely of describing what’s absent. Similarly, actions might involve no actual action (WAIT, for example, or THINK), and a character can be anything from an intrepid adventurer to an ear of corn. However, I would contend that these elements are present in some form in all IF — indeed, the absence of these elements (such as the absence of landscape in Eliza) removes the work from what might reasonably be called interactive fiction.
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2 This trait isn’t entirely restricted to text games, but while no text game offers continuous space, some graphical games, such as Half-Life and Zork: Grand Inquisitor, do in fact offer a continuous, unbroken environment through which the PC travels. In that case, map design becomes a much less powerful factor in fixing Character, and in fact it might be argued that in those cases, the term “map design” has more or less lost its meaning, and might be better called “level design” or something similar.
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3 The subject of how description influences our perception of PC gender could occupy another entire essay, and is out of scope for this one. Consequently, in the case of games that don’t explicitly specify the gender of the PC, I’ll rather arbitrarily select one, trying to hit a more or less even ratio between the two.
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4 1981 is credited to the pseudonymous A.D. Mcmlxxxi, and Cadre has never claimed credit for it. In private correspondence, he explained that this is because the game was a bit of a rush job, not polished enough for something he would put his own name on. He agreed to be credited for the game in this essay on the condition that I put in a note explaining that he “wasn’t actually trying or anything with that one.” That 1981 is the game Cadre produces when he isn’t even breaking a sweat is a testament to his skill as an author.
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5 Or a bisexual of either sex, it probably should be said.
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6 This is one of the very few times that excretion has appeared in an IF game without being a function of rather dodgy toilet humor. Instead, the game plays it completely straight — just another element in its realistic scenario.
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Beyond Zork [Infocom >RESTART]

IFDB page: Beyond Zork
[This review contains many spoilers for Beyond Zork. I’ve written an introduction to these Infocom >RESTART reviews, for those who want some context.]

To play the next game with the Zork brand, Dante and I jumped forward five years, from 1982 to 1987. By this time, Infocom was well-established and successful, but it also found itself reckoning with trends in the computer game industry that threatened interactive fiction, and prominent among those was the CRPG, the Computer Role-Playing Game.

>CONNECT IF TO RPG

As I said in the Zork I review, Zork was created in the shadow of Adventure, which itself was in the shadow of Dungeons and Dragons. Adventure co-creator Will Crowther was partly inspired by his experiences in a D&D group — one which apparently included Zork co-author Dave Lebling! — to combine his caving experiences with his gaming experiences. Zork, in turn, included randomized combat with the troll and thief, though it turns quickly away from the D&D model into something more static and puzzly.

In the meantime, game developers continued to make inroads on replicating the D&D experience via a computer. The Ultima and Wizardry series got their starts shortly after Zork I was released, mapping the initial territory of the CRPG. These games were much lighter on description and puzzles than Infocom’s work, but they offered the joys of hacking and slashing your way through hordes of monsters, and gradually increasing in power as you do so. It took quite a while for a game to surface with the actual D&D license, but the way having been paved by the CRPGs of the early and mid-Eighties, it was only a matter of time before two of the big geek trends of the era combined.

That first D&D game was called Pool of Radiance, which brings us in a rather roundabout way to Beyond Zork. This game is Infocom’s attempt to bridge the gap between IF and CRPG, and in fact it includes an actual pool of radiance. The connection seems far too on-the-nose to be coincidental, but it’s true that the D&D game didn’t come out until 1988, whereas Beyond Zork was released in 1987. Perhaps Brian Moriarty, the author of Beyond Zork, knew the D&D game’s title in advance and decided to write an anticipatory homage? In any case, while Beyond Zork tries to bridge a chasm betwen two genres, it also itself features a chasm whose bridge cannot be crossed. Moriarty’s subconscious may have been telling him something, because the connection between IF and CRPG is a pretty uncomfortable one, at least in Beyond Zork.

Like most RPGs, this game starts out by asking you to build a character, and Dante and I obligingly did so. We named him Azenev. (If you know Dante well, you might guess that this is an N.K. Jemisin reference, and you’d be right. It’s a backwards spelling of a character name from Jemisin’s The City We Became.) We built Azenev from six attributes: endurance, strength, dexterity, intelligence, compassion, and luck — a pretty close mapping to D&D‘s strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma. Here’s where Problem Number One surfaced: we had no idea which attributes would be important. We tried to make him pretty balanced, though Dante felt like luck could make a big difference in everything, so we poured some extra points into that.

Well, it turns out that luck doesn’t seem to make a substantial difference in very much of anything, so Azenev version 1 met his demise almost immediately. One would hope that with a balanced character you’d be able to survive and thrive in an RPG, but not in this one. Apparently endurance is the key stat, given that attacks reduce it and you die when it runs out. So we rebuilt Azenev with more endurance and less luck, but still didn’t fare much better, because of Problem Number Two: monster mismatches.

In a typical RPG, be it computer or tabletop, your character starts out weak — level one. With a character like this, you can’t go out and fight dragons or ogres, so a well-designed game throws you some monsters you can handle — maybe big spiders, or little goblins, or medium-sized rats. When you conquer those, eventually you level up, and can face the next tier of danger, continuing through that cycle until you finally can smite mighty dragons.

Image from the Beyond Zork feelies, describing the cruel puppet and the dust bunnies.

Beyond Zork allows players no such accommodation! You start at level 0 (even weaker than level 1!), but you can encounter powerful adversaries at any time, with no real way to tell how powerful they are, except how fast they kill you. One of the first monsters we ran into is called a “cruel puppet”. It’s an entertaining enough creation — a marionette-looking thing that drains your endurance with vicious insults. But it is in no way appropriate for a zero-level character to face. Dante and I died over and over and OVER to the cruel puppet. We died after using a healing potion. We died after figuring out how to wield our weapon. We died after leveling up our character. We died after upgrading our weapon. We died after retreating to heal and then coming back. We just. Kept. Dying.

This is not fun, but I think I understand why Moriarty designed the game this way. He was wrestling with the tension between Infocom’s bias towards large-world exploration and the RPG’s tendency to tailor the story and encounters towards the character’s level. In addition, he was trying to reconcile IF’s narrative qualities against “crunchy” RPG mechanics that show you things like the level, attack power, defense strength, and health of everybody in the fictional world. Getting to explore the whole world right off the bat meant that we could easily and quickly wander way out of our depth, and leaning towards IF narrative meant that we had none of that crunchiness available to tell us that we’d need to be much more powerful before venturing in.

Defining the problems suggests the solutions. Maybe the game could have scaled encounters to character level, so that any monster you meet is just powerful enough to present a reasonable challenge. Maybe it could have shown more stats on monsters — as it is, the only way to tell a monster’s health is by examining it, and not only does that cost you a turn where the monster can attack you, it also gives vague descriptions like “gravely wounded” and “seriously wounded” — which is worse? Or maybe it could cordon off areas of the game until you’re powerful enough to face them. The trouble is, Infocom likes to cordon off game sections with puzzles, and your ability to solve a puzzle has little bearing on the power of your character.

There is an area where Moriarty blends all these things quite successfully: the cellar of the Rusty Lantern inn. You enter this cellar in search of a particular bottle of wine, and the cook slams and locks the door behind you. In the course of exploring the cellar, you’ll encounter low-level monsters that can be defeated by a weak character, treasures that can be sold to buy better gear, magic items that also upgrade you, and a means of improving one of your character’s stats, in this case dexterity. Staying alive in the cellar and getting out of it require puzzle-solving, and when you emerge you’ll likely have leveled up, improved your stats, and acquired some good loot. It’s very satisfying!

I’m inclined to think that maybe Beyond Zork should have forced that sequence first, or at least steered us toward it much more emphatically, rather than letting us traipse around a bunch of set pieces that were much too hazardous for us. In fact, if the entire game had been structured as a series of these compact mini-games, with interconnections between them and a common landing place to buy gear, that would have gone a long way toward settling the conflict between the IF and RPG conventions.

However, that on its own wouldn’t have been enough to deal with Problem Number Three: challenges that depend on stats. In trying to meld RPG mechanics with traditional IF, Moriarty runs into serious friction between the two, created by basing story barriers around the character’s attribute scores. In a tabletop RPG, each character has strengths and limitations, but multiple characters bind themselves together into a party who balance each other out. In IF, the character is solo, but typically not bound to attribute scores, so they are a purer proxy for the player’s puzzle-solving. So in a solo RPG, the PC’s limitations remain unchecked, which risks making certain barriers difficult or impossible to pass. Solo CRPGs typically manage this by adding numerous NPCs to the player’s party. Solo tabletop RPGs are certainly possible, but they require a DM or an adventure that is flexible enough to shape the story around that one player’s character. Beyond Zork does neither of these things, and therefore the elements never quite jell.

For example, if your intelligence score is too low in Beyond Zork, you’ll be unable to read the magic scrolls that are critical to solving certain puzzles. There’s no brainy wizard in your party to help out, so a low score in that stat means you’re just out of luck. (Your luck stat does not help.) Now, there are ways to possibly make up these deficits, and in the case of intelligence, one gets provided for free, though Dante and I still lost access to it, for reasons I’ll explain later. For other attributes and weaknesses, though, the improvements tend to cost money, and the game’s major source of money is locked behind its worst puzzle. More about that later, too. Other times, the improvements are locked behind layers of puzzles, none of which are terrible but due to the interwoven nature of everything, it’s very difficult to get past those puzzles until you’ve defeated the enemies that you needed the improvement for in the first place. The strength-enhancing morgia root is a perfect example of this — only available after large portions of the game have already been conquered, by which point it makes little difference.

Cover of Beyond Zork

There’s a Problem Number Four, or perhaps Problem Number Zero, because it’s fundamental to the others: hidden mechanics. If you’re playing a tabletop RPG, the rules are available. Sure, the DM may have some nasty surprises in store for you, but everybody is playing from the same set of books. Now, there’s a discussion about metagaming to be had here. Metagaming, for those who don’t know, is the term for when a player makes decisions based on information that would be unavailable to that player’s character, such as, “I’ve read the Monster Manual, and I know that the cruel puppet has 200 hit points, so my character runs away.” This sort of thing is emphatically frowned upon in RPG circles. So it’s fair enough to say that the game master (or game designer as the case may be) must keep some things hidden in order to keep the narrative’s boundaries logical. However, at least for Dante and I, understanding the mechanics behind this game’s pronouncements would have saved us a lot of frustration.

For instance, there’s a scrystone (read: crystal ball), about which we’re told: “Visions of things yet to be lie within its depths, for those with enough wit to see them.” When we look into it, we just see an “unintelligible swirl.” Well that sure sounds like we need to boost our intelligence stat, and hooray, we know just what to do — let’s buy that Potion of Enlightenment and drink it. So we do that, it boosts our intelligence stat, we look in the scrystone again, and… our boosted intelligence makes zero difference. Now, behind the scenes, it turns out that the scrystone requires an extremely high intelligence, and there is only one item in the game that provides that kind of massive boost. Without understanding that requirement, though, we were left to feel that the game simply misled us, and that improved intelligence is not the way to solve the puzzle.

>KILL INVENTORY LIMIT

For our entire playthrough, we found ourselves frequently guessing blindly at how our stats were affecting gameplay. For example, would this game’s extremely annoying inventory limits have been relieved had we had more strength or dexterity? Because if so, boy oh boy would I have maxed those stats. I ran into more infuriating inventory limit nonsense in this game than in any other Infocom game before or since in this >RESTART series. Here’s a prime example — we’re wandering through the market when somebody drops a “fish cake”. We’ve read in the feelies that eating fish increases intelligence, so we want that thing. But…

>n
"Oof!"
The street hawker you just bumped into glowers. "Watch where I'm goin', will ya!" You clumsily help to pick up her spilled wares; she stomps away without a word of thanks.
As you dust yourself off, you notice something lying in the dust.

>get fish cake
Your hands are full.

>put all in pack
The scroll of Fireworks: Done.
The potion of Forgetfulness: Done.
The rabbit's foot: Done.
The staff of Eversion: Done.
The scroll of Mischief: Done.
The bit of salt: Done.
An alley cat races between your legs, snatches the fish cake and disappears into the crowd.

ARGH! Tightly timed object availability plus clunky inventory mechanics equals super frustrated IF player. (Also, I wonder how it is that I help her to pick up her spilled wares if my hands are so full?) By this time in our play session, Dante and I had made a fair bit of progress but hadn’t saved recently; we just didn’t have the appetite for replaying through all of it just to make sure we bumped into a totally sudden and arbitrary encounter with our hands free. We decided to just forego the intelligence boost, since we were at least able to read. That did make for a moment, though, after the potion of Enlightenment failed to help us read the scrystone, where I wondered through my curses if we had been blocked from winning the entire game due to a frickin’ inventory limit early on.

You may note that the game provides a pack. This is very helpful! However, Infocom never quite got to the point that Graham Nelson reached in the Inform libraries, where not only does the player carry a sack object, but the game automatically handles all the tedium of putting something old into the sack when the PC picks up something new. Consequently, we’re unable to grab that fish cake even though we know exactly how to do it.

We ran into this very same issue when trying to accept the goblet from the Implementors. A group of gods tries to hand us a holy object, and Beyond Zork is hitting us with, “Your load is too heavy.” By this point, we were carrying enough around that even the pack didn’t help. (That’s right, it too has a limit.) The Implementors get more and more annoyed at our “contrariness” in not picking up the goblet, and they eventually force it into our hands, only for it to immediately clatter to the ground again. The hilarious part is that if anybody should understand why we can’t pick it up, it should be the Implementors! God how I would have loved it if one of them had said, “Oh hey, looks like his load is too heavy. Let me just do away with that problem forever so he can take this nice goblet.”

Instead, the pack helped just enough with the problem of carrying things that we weren’t using our previous Zorky method of leaving a bunch of stuff at one location, but it didn’t help so much that we didn’t still find ourselves unable to pick up things in timed situations. In fact, about three-quarters of the way through the game, we did resort to our old Zorky ways, leaving a pile of objects at the Hilltop starting location.

Part of what made our inventory so dang full was the profusion of items in this game. Magic items abound — scrolls, potions, and all manner of point-and-enchant doohickeys. There’s a cane, a wand, a rod, a stick, and both a staff and a stave. The identity of these items changes from one playthrough to the next — you might find a stave of Sayonara in one game, but if you restart you could end up with a stave of Dispel. That’s one of several ways that Moriarty brings in the RPG trope of randomness.

The "Southland of Quendor" map from the Beyond Zork feelies

Of course there’s the randomized combat — get lucky enough with your hidden dice rolls and maybe you can overcome that strong monster in your way. (Not the cruel puppet, though. Never the cruel puppet.) But even beyond that, items are randomized, and the very landscape is randomized. Though the general layout of regions in Beyond Zork is a constant, the internal geography of those regions varies by playthrough. The geographical randomization works pretty well, thanks in part to the handy onscreen map provided. For each region (forest, swamp, jungle, etc.) Moriarty provides a grab-bag of locations with evocative names and descriptions, and then the game decides randomly (within set parameters) how they’re laid out in relation to each other in that region. Then within those locations, items and monsters are also placed randomly. This can sometimes affect difficulty, such as when two key areas that interact in a puzzle get randomly placed far apart, but for the most part it just adds flavor.

Randomization of items can be a little more frustrating, as it can determine whether a certain item is just lying on the ground, or whether it costs money in a shop. In the latter case, you have to defeat some monsters and gain some treasures in order to purchase said item. As I’ve mentioned, that’s not always so straightforward a task with an under-leveled character.

>CRY ABOUT TEAR

Now that we’re back to the topic of purchasing, let’s dig into the puzzle that nearly ruins this game: the Crocodile’s Tear. In my first encounter with Beyond Zork, as a teenager in the 1980s, this puzzle really did ruin the game for me — I abandoned the whole thing after a long struggle. Abandoning a game was quite a last resort in those days, as it had cost a lot of money to acquire, and I had pretty much unlimited time to spend on it. But after a year (not exaggerating) of on-and-off struggling against this puzzle, I simply could not find a way through it, and there was no Internet full of answers to consult. By that point, I was too disgusted to consider buying Invisiclues. I felt like somehow the game wasn’t playing fair with me, and I turned out to be correct.

When Dante and I encountered the puzzle, there was no question that we’d get through it, just a question of whether we’d need to consult hints — easy enough to do in the 21st century but still a sign of failure on someone’s part, either the game’s or ours. But like my teenaged self, Dante could not solve the puzzle on his own, and I must have repressed the solution, because I needed a hint too.

I’ll break this puzzle down, but first a little digression to give some background. Recall that one of the PC’s attributes is a compassion score. This seems like a bit of an odd stat for an RPG — it’s certainly not any good in a fight, and it doesn’t seem to help with using magic or solving puzzles. (Turns out it matters in the endgame, but there’s obviously no way of knowing that until you reach it.) You can boost your compassion score, though, by doing compassionate things, like rescuing a unicorn locked in a stable, or saving a minx (cute cat-like creature) from a hunter. These scenes are written and constructed beautifully, particularly the minx. Rescuing these poor creatures and raising our compassion is far more heartstring-tugging than anything in the original trilogy. (It helps that we have a very fluffy cat at home, who does not say “minx” but might as well.)

Keep all that in mind as we talk about the Crocodile’s Tear. The Tear is a legendary sapphire, found in Beyond Zork‘s jungle section. It’s worth much more money than all the other treasures in the game put together. You find it attached to a huge stone crocodile idol, at the back of the idol’s gaping maw. Trouble is, when you climb the lower jaw to get to the jewel, the jaw tilts like a seesaw, making it so that you can’t quite reach the treasure, and when you lean too hard, the jaw tilts backward and drops you into the idol’s interior.

So far, so fair. Maybe we need a stick to reach to the gem, or a projectile to knock it loose, or a counterweight to allow us to keep climbing the jaw after we pass its fulcrum. We tried all these things, in many permutations. We were especially hopeful when we acquired a sea chest, which is definitely both heavy and bulky — I’ve got the painful inventory management transcripts to prove it. We set that sea chest on the maw — which the parser allows without complaint — but it did absolutely nothing to counterbalance us. Sigh. Finally, after lots of failed attempts at getting this jewel, we turned to the hints, and were shocked at the intended solution.

Pages from the Beyond Zork feelies describing the hungus and spenseweed.

See, nearby the idol (well, nearby or a ways away, depending on how the jungle region was randomly laid out) is a heart-rending scene. A mother hungus (part hippo, part sheep) is with her baby. The baby is trapped in a pool of quicksand. The mother gazes anxiously at the baby. She bellows impotently, and the baby responds. If you should walk away, the baby hungus bellows mournfully. Well, the answer to this one is obvious. We’ve got a stick of Levitation, so we point that at the baby hungus, and this happens:

The baby hungus bellows with surprise as he rises out of the quicksand! Sweat breaks out on your forehead as you guide the heavy burden over the mud and safely down to the ground.
The ungainly creature nuzzles you with his muddy snout, and bats his eyelashes with joy and gratitude. Then he ambles away into the jungle to find his mother, pausing for a final bellow of farewell.
[Your compassion just went up.]

Fantastic! We’ve raised our compassion again. What does this have to do with the Crocodile’s Tear, you may be asking? Well, it turns out that the solution to that puzzle is to attack the baby hungus while it’s stuck in the quicksand. (Strangely, attacking the baby hungus does not make your compassion score go down, though it surely should.) That gets the mother mad enough that she’ll chase after us, and if we climb onto the stone maw, she’ll stand on the other end, counterbalancing it so we can get the jewel.

We found this outrageous. The notion of attacking a baby animal in peril is so completely against the grain of everything else Beyond Zork asks us to do, and so generally repellent, that it absolutely should not be the solution to anything. Not only that, doing the compassionate thing actually makes the game unwinnable! Let me say that again: saving a baby animal from dying (or at least, doing so before attacking it first) ensures that you cannot win the game, because the hunguses disappear from the game after you rescue the baby. This might be the worst puzzle in the entire Infocom canon. It’s all the more surprising coming from Moriarty, who had already done such brilliant work in Trinity exploring player complicity and moral culpability with an animal-killing puzzle. Here, instead of a metaphorically freighted moment of tragedy, the animal cruelty is treated as a mere mechanical device — it’s both disappointing and baffling.

If you’ve read other entries in this series, you might recall that every Zork game so far has forced Dante and I to restart, for one reason or another. Well, this puzzle forced us to restart Beyond Zork, because of course it did. Who attacks a baby animal before saving it? Actually, this was the second time we’d had to restart. The first was caused by a different sort of inventory limit — magic items that only had a limited number of uses. Certain areas of the game are unreachable except via these items, and if you run out of “charges” for them before you’ve solved everything in the area, it’s off to restart-land you must travel.

>ENJOY GAME

So, that was a lot of ranting. I’m out of breath. Let me wind this up by talking about some of the things we really enjoyed in Beyond Zork, of which there were really quite a few, despite all my complaints above. I haven’t spoken at all about the game’s primary technical innovation, a multi-windowed display which always shows a boxes-and-lines map and relevant information such as inventory contents, room description or character stats alongside the game’s main text. That’s how, in the text above, we knew to say “get fish cake” even though the transcript only said “you notice something lying in the dust” — the room description window identified the fish cake. This display was very slick for an Infocom game at the time, and still works pretty well. I think my favorite thing, though, is the way you can use the number pad to navigate — for instance, pressing 8 on the number pad automatically enters “NORTH” and a carriage return into the parser. Combined with the map, this was an awesomely fast and easy way to get around. I wish more IF games did it now.

A screenshot from Beyond Zork, showing the onscreen map, the description window, and the parser interaction below both.

Another highlight of the game is its humor. Moriarty knows his way around a joke, such as this bit from a gondola conductor, which continued to amuse us throughout the game, despite how many times we saw it:

“Thirsty?” asks the conductor. “Stop by the Skyway Adventure Emporium for a tall, frosty Granola Float.” He smacks his lips dispiritedly. “Mmm, so good.”

Moriarty also does a lovely job of tapping into the general joy of Infocom’s tone and culture. By 1987, a whole lot of love had gone into the Zork universe — although this was the first game to carry the “Zork” name since Zork III, there were several intervening games set in the milieu that filled the gap, namely the Enchanter series and Moriarty’s own Wishbringer. With all this history established, Moriarty can draw on quite a few sources for references, jokes, and general explanations of what’s going on.

Now, we hadn’t played all those other games at the time we ran through Beyond Zork, so many of the references were lost on Dante, and sometimes only dimly recalled by me. But writing this review now that we’ve played them all, I can appreciate the game’s easy command of Enchanter-ese, such as “yonked a girgol just in time.” There’s another mailbox, with another leaflet, this one yielding a burin, which is a co-star of Spellbreaker, the game at the other end of the Zork spectrum. The unicorns all wear gold keys around their necks, a la Zork II. The boot crushed by the farmhouse is quite reminiscent of the Boot Patrol in Wishbringer, and the platypus recalls that game’s feelies, not to mention being emblematic of Moriarty’s sense of humor. All these allusions gave us (especially me) that warm insider feeling of, “Hey, I understood that reference.” Similarly, the scenes of recent or future Infocom games visible in the scrystone (Hitchhiker’s Guide, Zork Zero, Shogun) are a delight.

There are plenty of good puzzles in the game, too — it isn’t all attacking babies. This was our first game with copy protection via feelies, and it was a lot of fun leaning on The Lore and Legends of Quendor to help solve puzzles. The dust bunnies and dornbeast were particularly successful examples of this. The gray fields area is another pretty successful puzzle box. We appreciated the way it unfolds in layers — first entry, then understanding the scarecrows, then figuring out the use of the sense organ, and finally the Wizard of Oz sequence, relying on what you’d learned in the other parts. The subtle changes with the corbies and the corn are the kind of thing that work gangbusters in text but would be very hard to pull off with the same nuance in graphics.

Overall, we had a lot of fun with Beyond Zork despite its flaws, and I looked forward to replaying the next Infocom Zork game — the most technically sophisticated of them all, and certainly the biggest. Ahead of us was final Zork game from Infocom as an actual artistic ensemble rather than just a brand name, though in another way, it was the first: Zork Zero.

Zork I [Infocom >RESTART]

IFDB page: Zork I
[This review contains lots of spoilers for Zork I. I also wrote an introduction to these Infocom >RESTART reviews, for those who want a little context.]

Legends grow in the telling, and so it was with Zork in Dante’s mind. He had seen so many references to it, so much appreciation for it, that he had begun to think of it as some kind of platonic ideal for IF. Within minutes of playing, that expectation crashed against the reality of a vintage text game.

Instead of typing “X”, you have to type the full word “EXAMINE”. (Well, technically only “EXAMIN”, or even just “LOOK”, but nevermind — this was about 1980 IF breaking modern expectations.) Locations are almost immediately mazy, with pieces of the forest connecting in unexplained nonsensical ways to each other. The status line sports no handy exits listing, and when travel in a direction is blocked, it’s often blocked with no explanation. For every “Storm-tossed trees block your way”, there are dozens of “You can’t go that way”s.

In what became a running joke for our playthrough, many incredible things have the description, “There’s nothing special about the [incredible thing].” A non-exhaustive list of things about which Zork I claims there is nothing special: an elvish sword of great antiquity, a pile of mangled bodies, a painting of unparalleled beauty, Neptune’s crystal trident, a sceptre (possibly that of ancient Egypt itself), a beautiful jeweled scarab, a golden clockwork canary, and a solid rainbow complete with stairs and bannister. I had to explain to him that Zork was operating under a draconian space limitation — they simply didn’t have room to include descriptions for anything that didn’t directly contribute to a puzzle. For him, this limitation was almost unthinkable. I mean, it’s just text! How could they not have room for it?

Space limitations also show up in a lack of scenery objects, a problem that can manifest in a fairly benign form or a fairly malign one. For instance, in the Shaft Room, one sentence of the room description reads, “Constructed over the top of the shaft is a metal framework to which a heavy iron chain is attached.” Try EXAMINE FRAMEWORK and you’ll get the response, “I don’t know the word ‘framework’.” Fair enough, the framework apparently wasn’t implemented as an object. On the other hand, try EXAMINE METAL and you’ll get the much more problematic response, “You can’t see any metal here.”

This happens because elsewhere in the game, there are objects that legitimately can be referred to as “metal” — the metal ramp in the Cellar and the metal bolt in the Dam, for example. The framework isn’t implemented, though, so while it’s described as “metal” in the room description, there’s no game object in that room for the word “metal” to reference. This has the story-breaking result that you’re told there’s a metal framework in front of you, but also that there is no metal in the room. Our favorite manifestation of this:

Land of the Dead
You have entered the Land of the Living Dead. Thousands of lost souls can be heard weeping and moaning. In the corner are stacked the remains of dozens of previous adventurers less fortunate than yourself. A passage exits to the north.


>EXAMINE DEAD
You can't see any dead here!

Another modern feature that we missed awfully: UNDO. For instance, when you type OPEN EGG WITH WRENCH, and get a response which begins:

The egg is now open, but the clumsiness of your attempt has seriously compromised its esthetic appeal. There is a golden clockwork canary nestled in the egg. It seems to have recently had a bad experience…

…the natural response is to type UNDO. Oh how painful to receive the reply, “I don’t know the word ‘undo’.” Again, the microcomputers of 1980 couldn’t really have supported such a state-management function, at least not without sacrificing too much text and parsing capability. Instead, games of that era tried to make a virtue out of compulsive SAVEing, and called their game-closing responses part of the challenge. Seen from today’s perspective, they simply invoke the tedium of forcing a RESTORE, or worse yet a RESTART. Replaying up to the game-closing point isn’t challenging, just time-consuming.

Zork I logo, with the caption "Your greatest challenge lies ahead -- and downwards."

In what became a running theme of our Infocom replays, we had to restart Zork I. In fact, we had to restart it twice — the first time because our light source ran out and we hadn’t yet found a permanent one, and the second time, very far into the game, because we realized that we’d killed the thief early on through a “lucky” fluke, but we still needed him to open the jewel-encrusted egg. I ran both of these replays on my own — Dante had no patience for retreading miles of known ground just to get to something new.

All of these pain points served to illustrate clearly the distance that text adventures have come since 1980. I sometimes hear it argued that IF isn’t really all that different now from how it was in the Infocom days, but Dante’s experience with playing modern IF and then going back to Infocom puts the lie to that claim. I mean, yes, it’s still essentially getting a parser of limited vocabulary to cooperate with your traversal of a fictional world. Some of the parsing innovations we might have imagined arriving in 40 years have not come to pass — there’s no intelligent computer DM to respond reasonably to anything you type as it takes you through the dungeon. But as far as the moment-to-moment experience of playing a text game, the state of the art has improved a great deal.

The same is true of the puzzles, at least when it comes to the damned mazes. This was another area that I ran on my own — Dante was interested in the first few rooms of maze-mapping, where we’d drop an object, go a direction, and see whether we’d found a new room. But it just. Kept. Going. Hundreds of moves’ worth of this, painstakingly updating our Trizbort map as we went. This is a test of bloody-mindedness, not complex thought. Luckily, the thief didn’t confound us, due to his aforementioned dumb luck defeat. Still, the Zork maze was another perfect example of something that may have passed as fun in 1980, but could make no such claim today. Actually, make that the Zork mazes, as there’s another one in the Coal Mine, albeit not nearly so tortuous.

On the other hand, many of the puzzles have lost no sheen whatsoever. Flood Control Dam #3, for instance, is just as marvelous as always. There’s an aspect to it that is simply mechanical — figure out how to unlock it for changes, and then figure out what tool is needed to make those changes happen. But then once you make those changes, they imply new relationships and new attributes to various parts of the landscape. I was impressed to see that Dante intuitively grasped these implications, moving quickly not only to the emptied reservoir, but also to the quieted Loud Room, for instance.

In general, I was fascinated to see how he reacted to puzzles I remembered. He immediately grasped puzzles I remember struggling with, like the Loud Room, the Cyclops Room, and the deranged bat. On the other hand, we were quite a ways into our playthrough before he figured out to tie the rope to the railing, which I remember doing pretty immediately.

Dante’s intuition and experience led him more astray on the combat-style puzzles. He’d already embraced a different branch of retro gaming, having logged dozens of hours on Angband, but while Zork is no Angband, the inclusion of D&D-style combat very near the beginning of the game makes it seem as though there’s going to be quite a bit of overlap. Consequently, Dante snapped into the mode of looking for weapons and armor, evaluating the axe vs. the sword vs. the knife, etc., when that’s not really what Zork is designed for. This becomes especially apparent when you find what seems like a magic trident, except it can’t even be used as a weapon at all.

It makes historical sense to me why this randomized combat is in here — IF at the time was still in the shadow of Adventure, which in turn sat in the shadow of D&D. But the combat sits uneasily against the rest of the game, and Zork I‘s commitment to it is pretty half-hearted. The only fightable “monsters” in the game are the troll and the thief. Moreover, the fights with these monsters don’t expose any of the typical RPG mechanics — you can’t see numerical representations of attack, damage, or defense, and consequently you may not know that randomization is happening behind the scenes. The first time we fought the troll, we knocked him out immediately, which seemed like just what the game had “intended” — imagine Dante’s shock when next time around, the troll killed us! Unlike the elegance of most Zork puzzles, the randomized combat can contribute both to sudden losses out of the player’s control and to “lucky” wins that cut off victory. Both happened to us.

The opening screen of Zork I

Then there were those puzzles that we both had trouble with. I have a strong memory of playing Zork I as a kid and flailing around at the Entrance to Hades. I rang the bell, mostly out of sheer desperation, but could make no sense of the response. I was talking through the problem with my Dad when he asked me, “Hey, do you happen to have a book and a candle as well?” Well yes, but how on earth did you even come up with that question to ask? He explained to me then the cultural reference of “Bell, Book, and Candle”, which was entirely lost on me as a kid. Now I can report that the passing of a generation has made that reference no clearer, and Dante’s dad had to explain it to him.

Of all the Zork I puzzles, the gold coffin gained the most in my estimation from this revisit. The puzzle, for those who may not remember, is this: you’ve descended from a rope into a temple chamber. You cannot ascend back up the rope, as you drop from it into the temple and it ends several feet above your reach. The only exit from the temple is through a small hole in the floor, next to an altar. Within the chamber you find (among other things), a gold coffin. You can get through the hole with the other treasures you find, but if you try to take the coffin, Zork says, “You haven’t a prayer of getting the coffin down there.”

What to do? The failure message, along with the religious trappings of the room, hint towards the solution: PRAY. When you do that, this happens:

>PRAY
Forest
This is a forest, with trees in all directions. To the east, there appears to be sunlight.

The command instantly teleports you out of the underground altogether, along with all your possessions — including the coffin. Besides the puzzle being well-cued, it also has a quality of awe, possibly deriving from the suddenness with which everything changes from dark to light. There is no sweeping transition text, which almost any author (including me) would be tempted to put in today — just an instant shift with no explanation. That shift prompts a more mysterious feeling of religious wonder, at least in me — it’s immediately apparent that there are greater powers at work in this world than simply an adventurer manipulating mechanisms, and those powers do not care to explain or announce themselves.

That’s one of the magic moments of Zork I, and there are many. Another, for us, came at the Mirror Room, where we had visited many times and looked at our bedraggled image. That night, there was a thunderstorm outside while we played, and as we reached out to TOUCH MIRROR for the first time, two things happened simultaneously: Zork I said, “There is a rumble from deep within the earth and the room shakes” while outside there was a loud CRACK of thunder. I felt aligned with the universe at that moment.

In replaying this game and its successors, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two fundamental things that make Zork special, and that are reliable sources of delight in subsequent Infocom games: moments of humor and moments of magic. Sometimes they are one and the same, or at least right alongside each other.

Consider, for example, inflating the boat. There’s a moment of satisfaction when you realize that the hand-held air pump connects to the valve on the pile of plastic, like finding two jigsaw puzzle pieces that connect to each other. That satisfaction turns to magic with the appearance of the boat, which suddenly recontextualizes parts of the landscape you’ve already seen. Rivers, streams, and lakes that once seemed like scenery have become pathways to traverse in this new vehicle, opening up new vistas of the map for exploration.

A partial map of the Zork I landscape, including the Frigid River

This is one of the best tricks that IF can pull — revealing a new dimension within a familiar situation, one which expands the possibility space of the entire game world. Previously ordinary aspects of the scenario jump to life with vibrant new potential, and the player sees everything fresh. In the case of the Zork boat, this exciting development comes with a laugh, as the boat contains a label reading:

!!!! FROBOZZ MAGIC BOAT COMPANY !!!!

Hello, Sailor!

[…and then some instructions for how to use the boat.]

Aside from the comical quality of the exclamation points and the capital letters, this label squeezes in two different running gags that thread through most of the series — “Frobozz Magic” products and the phrase “Hello Sailor”, introduced by the prayer book on the altar.

This the other source of pleasure in Zork and its progeny: unexpected unity. Both drama and comedy use the basic structure of a setup leading to a payoff, and that structure finds its place in text adventures as well. The very first underground location in Zork I, the Cellar, contains the bottom of a metal chute, too slippery to climb: setup. Many hundreds of moves later, we find a Slide Room — part of a coal mine containing “a steep metal slide twisting downward.” Of course, enter the slide and you find yourself back in the Cellar: payoff. In that moment, the game unifies two pieces of itself, yielding the satisfaction of a question answered.

In the case of Frobozz Magic products, the structure is more like a single setup leading to a series of payoffs, each building on the last through the long series of games. Each new appearance of these products, especially as they grow in ridiculous specialization, is a comedy callback that enriches the joke. Sometimes, as in the case of HELLO SAILOR itself, the payoff occurs several games away from the setup, and contains both drama and comedy. But more about that in a later post.

The ultimate (meaning both final and best) example of such unity comes when all the treasures are collected, and a voice whispers that there is one final secret. The map we find brings us back to the very first location of the game, encircling the experience in a great dramatic unity. I found the appearance of the secret path to the stone barrow unexpectedly moving, probably because it was a thrilling moment that I was getting to re-experience alongside Dante, while he saw it for the first time. As Zork I both wrapped itself up and invited us to further adventure, I couldn’t wait to continue delving further with him.

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

Masquerade by Kathleen Fischer [Comp00]

IFDB page: Masquerade
Final placement: 8th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Romance has always been a rather underrepresented genre in IF. Lots of people praise Plundered Hearts, but few authors have stepped forward to create more IF romances. One of those few, though, is Kathleen Fischer, whose IF Art piece The Cove was ostensibly just an interactive landscape, but whose viewpoint character was straight out of a historical romance novel. Now that character returns in a work that further embraces (pardon the pun) the conventions of melodramatic genre romance — the woman in distress who passionately fights against the men who oppress her, the moustache-twirling villain who threatens to destroy the woman’s livelihood unless she marries him, and the mysterious stranger who takes an unforeseen interest in the situation.

If setting is the star of science fiction, and plot is the star of mysteries, then surely character is the feature attraction in a romance. Character, however, is not the strongest point of IF, and the game makes a number of clever choices that help smooth what could be a very difficult blending. For one thing, the conversation system is neither ask/tell nor menu based; if you want the PC to talk, just type “talk” (or “talk to ” if there is more than one in the room) — the game will fill in your words for you. In this way, Masquerade can construct the heated dialogues necessary to demonstrate its characters’ interactions without having to cobble together meaningful exchanges from conversation commands that are necessarily quite simplistic. Another smart choice is to reduce the number of takeable objects, which takes the focus off of trying to figure out what MacGyverish feat to perform on inanimate obstacles and places it on trying to figure out how best to deal with the other characters. Finally, like The Cove, this game implements nouns to an impressive degree of depth, creating the illusion of a fully fleshed-out world in which the characters move. Not only that, the descriptions of various characters (and yourself) change as their relationships to one another shift, a technique which breathes a great deal of life into them.

These choices, especially the first two, step away from the conventions pioneered by games like Zork and Adventure, and the gains that they provide in character and plot are taken out of interaction. In some cases, the tradeoff is handled with so much skill that I didn’t even realize how little interaction was really available until my second play-through. In others, the seams showed rather more.

The game provides the player with a number of yes/no decision points, but few of them seem to make much difference. In addition, there appear to be some places in which the right thing to do is far from obvious — I was never able to get to one of the game’s successful endings because my ability to interact with the characters was so limited, and manipulation of the environment so curtailed, that I was unable to guess the proper action, and therefore never found happiness for the PC. It didn’t help that the game’s meager hint system almost always came up with the response “You ponder your situation, but nothing comes to mind.”. This is one case in which a bundled walkthrough would have helped me a lot — it may have just demonstrated that I wasn’t reading the author’s mind properly, but on the other hand it may have demonstrated that I was being incredibly dense and overlooking an obvious clue.

Instead, I was exhorted to email the author for help. I did so, and eight hours later I haven’t heard back, so I’m going ahead with this review. Authors, allow me to suggest that not providing hints or a walkthrough with a comp entry is detrimental to your chances of doing well in that competition. I’ve only got a few days left, and several more games to get through — I don’t have time to wait around for a reply, and I think many judges are in the same boat. In a non-comp game, omitting the walkthrough can prompt players to post hint requests, or to email you, and this is a good thing. In a competition game, though, when the players are under time pressure and are committed to playing as many of the games as possible anyway, this strategy only ensures that they will be delayed and annoyed if they get stuck. Not the recipe for a high rating.

Even if I had been able to win the game, I still would have had to contend with the numerous bugs that appear in it. At various points, the game referred to an object that wasn’t there, or allowed me to take objects that should have been unavailable, or absconded with one of my possessions after I dropped it, or permitted travel in a direction that should have been forbidden (putting me in a room with the description “.”) Each one of these instances threw me out of the immersive world that the other aspects of the game work so hard to sustain. According to the credits, the game has been tested, but I was left wondering if that testing process was perhaps more rushed than it should have been due to the competition deadline.

Between the bugs and my inability to get anywhere with the puzzles (or even find them), I didn’t enjoy Masquerade nearly as much as I wanted to. If you haven’t played it yet, wait for the next release — the author has always shown a strong commitment to fixing problems, so I’ve no doubt there will be one. Once the bugs have been fixed and better hints are available, Masquerade will have a great deal to offer fans of genre romance. In this incarnation, though, I’m afraid it was a bit of a disappointment.

Rating: 7.3

VOID: CORPORATION by Jonathan Lim [Comp00]

IFDB page: Void: Corporation
Final placement: 41st place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

I like cyberpunk, though I prefer it in small doses. I’d never go on a cyberpunk reading jag, but I thoroughly enjoy the occasional William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, or Pat Cadigan novel. I also think that IF in the cyberpunk vein could be really cool — after all, if cyberpunk has one defining characteristic, it’s a certain atmosphere, and atmosphere is something that IF does very well. There is a danger, however: with IF conventions having been shaped out of a stock fantasy/D&D tradition in games like Adventure and Zork, the temptation might exist to just slap a cyberpunk sheen on standard fantasy tropes and call it good, when good is something it very probably wouldn’t be.

It’s exactly this trap into which VOID: CORPORATION falls. Instead of a shiny silver key to open a locked door, we find a “silver slab” imprinted with microcircuitry. A pistol instead of a sword, a cube with liquid metal software instead of a spell scroll, et cetera. And instead of wandering kobolds and bugbears and such, we get wandering FMI (Federal Military Intelligence) agents and “cyberpunks.” (It works much better as a label for a genre rather than for a group of people, by the way.)

Let’s talk a little bit more about those wandering monsters. Ask any Quake or Half-Life player this question: “How would it be if every time you fragged something, you dropped your weapon, and had to explicitly pick it up again before you could frag something else?” I think we both know that their answer would certainly be some variation on “It would SUCK! A lot!” Yet this is exactly how things work in V:C. At the beginning of the game, we are told this about the PC: “more people have died at his hands than braincells at a ‘Silver’ party.” Unfortunately, the guy seems to be more butterfingers than trigger-finger. Even worse, the game doesn’t even tell you that you’ve dropped your weapon — it was quite a surprise the first time I tried to shoot somebody and was told, “You don’t see any gun here.” Strange enough that the game seems to want to emulate the random-stream-of-bad-guys dynamic of action games, despite the fact that typing “kill cyberpunk” carries absolutely none of the visceral thrill of an FPS frag. But for god’s sake, why why why would this trained professional killer drop his weapon after every single kill? (Nevermind the fact that these kills happen on crowded streets and shops where nobody seems to bat an eye at gunplay.)

Adding to the irritation is the fact that certain monsters can only be killed by certain specific weapons, even though both weapons are basically guns. For example, if you try to kill a “mean-looking cyberpunk” with your shotgun, you are told “You strike at the cyberpunk with the shotgun, but your weapon bounces off it harmlessly”, almost as if you tried to clobber the guy with the stock rather than the far-less-strenuous effort of pulling the trigger. Yet a pistol takes him out without fuss? What could the difference possibly be? This bizarre behavior, coupled with the fact that every dead bad guy disappears in “a cloud of red smoke” made me feel sure that at some point the game would have the PC “discover” that he’s in a VR scenario. But no, that never happened, and the only explanation I’m left with is that some serious slippage into fantasy has occurred in these portions of the game.

Some of this behavior may be due to the fact that the game is written in AGT. I haven’t played many AGT games, since most of them seem to have came out between the fall of Infocom and the release of Lost Treasures, which is a period during which I had given IF up for dead. However, I have vague recollections of people asserting that the wandering monster stuff is default behavior in AGT, and that it has to be explicitly removed for a game not to have it. Or maybe I’m thinking of GAGS or something — they all sort of blend together for me.

In any case, there are problems in this game that definitely cannot be blamed on AGT. For example, one of the critical puzzles in the game depends on the PC going in a direction that is not indicated as available in the room description. This, mind you, when every single possible exit is listed in every other room description. Hasn’t the UN passed a resolution or something against games behaving like this? In fairness to the game, it’s true that a hint toward this action is given at one point, but in fairness to me, the descriptions do little to indicate in what location the hint is applicable, and in any case that’s still no excuse for leaving an exit unlisted when all others are. This is definitely the worst offender among the puzzles, but every aspect of Void, from the design to the writing to the plot to the coding, is tarnished with flaws. Some of these aspects have a genuine spark of excitement, or at least the possibility of such, but in the end, VOID: CORPORATION is a game that promises far more than it delivers.

Rating: 4.4