alan, >INVENTORY

WackyComp reviews [misc]

[I posted this in April of 1999, and it pretty much explains itself. I will note, though, that I was partly wrong in my conjecture of who wrote the games. Lelah Conrad was indeed one of the authors, submitting Knot To Be Undone as “Jess Kiddon”. The other author was Stephen Griffiths, who wrote Skipping Breakfast as “Dunnin Haste”.]

Last year, Lucian Smith had this idea. He thought it would be cool to have a “mini-comp”, where a bunch of people wrote games based on the same initial premise. There would be no prizes, but there would be voting, and rankings. So he announced his idea (actually, in the announcement, he attributes the idea to “someone on the ifMUD“, but in the absence of that anonymous genius, I’m giving Lucian the credit) on rec.arts.int-fiction, and generated quite a bit of enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, when he announced the premise and the rules around it, they were so amazingly specific, picky, and difficult to achieve, that he only ended up getting four entries, some of those after his deadline. If the voting or the rankings ever happened, I never saw it. He tried to scale back expectations by announcing a “micro-comp” (“Submit one or two scenes from a mini-comp entry!”), but by then it was too late: apparently the contingent of possible entrants wanted their mini-comps to really be mini. The main result of Lucian’s backpedaling was to produce a proliferation of goofy “meta-comp” ideas, each of which seemed to somehow incorporate all the others that preceded it.

Into this morass waded Adam Cadre, who had a simpler idea: write a short game that involves, in some way, a chicken crossing a road. It was dubbed the Chicken Comp, and it was a big success, garnering 19 entries, most of which were good, and many of which were wonderfully, hilariously funny. I still crack up anytime I recall Rob Noyes’ The Lesson of the Chicken, with its memorable piece of monologue, “Ah, Wang Chung. Everybody will have fun tonight.” The chicken-comp games were the highlight of the summer, and set the stage nicely for the established IF comp in the fall. There was still no official competition between the games except, as Cadre put it, the inevitable “discussion of which ones r001 and which suck.”

So along comes spring 99, and suddenly mini-comps are popping up like mushrooms. There was the Xcomp, for paranormal games, the I-Comp, for games without an inventory, and even the execrable Roadkill Comp, for games that involve dead animals. Most of the spring mini-comps garnered responses which made Lucian’s mini-comp look swamped in comparison, and David Glasser’s WackyComp was no exception. The WackyComp stipulated short games, each based on one of a list of quasi-aphorisms. The list’s contents don’t matter, because there were only two games submitted, both ALAN entries that based themselves on the first choice: “No knot unties itself.” I’ve tended mainly to review competition games, not spending much time on mini-comps, but the author of one of the WackyComp games asked me to take a look at the two entrants and provide a little feedback, so here it is:

The shorter of the two entries is by “Jess Kiddon” (another of the WackyComp’s conditions was that its authors don’t use their real names on their submissions), titled Knot to be Undone. The title is one of the game’s many puns on the word “knot.” This is not to suggest that the game is a huge mass of puns — it’s not a huge mass of anything. I’d be shocked if anyone spent more than 10 minutes solving this game. There is virtually nothing to do except for the actions to win the game.

You play Weava Knottersdaughter, professional knotter, though really what this means is that you’re a professional detangler — the “knot shop” where you work offers a knot-untying service. Anyway, in walks “the Body Adventura”, a stock adventurer type whose cryptic name, as far as I can determine, is a really strained pun on the name of Minnesota’s governor. He’s gotten himself stuck in a knot and your job is to untangle him, or better yet keep him entangled and somehow become the Body Adventura yourself. Luckily, this is no trouble, and then the game ends. That’s it. This is about as “mini” as a game can get, and still be considered interactive fiction. For what it is, it’s fine, but rather unsatisfying, kind of like eating just one potato chip.

A rather more substantial entry is Skipping Breakfast, by “Dunnin Haste.” In this game you’re a rabbit (though this is not immediately clear unless you examine yourself), who is tied to a tree and about to become a wolf’s breakfast. The wolf is off gathering more wood for the campfire over which he plans to cook you, so now’s the time to make your escape. Unfortunately, there’s the small matter of the knotted rope which binds you to the tree — you can’t untie it, and it won’t untie itself. Or will it?

This game’s puzzles are fun and rather clever, despite the fact that there’s a bit of “guess-the-noun”, and that the conversation syntax is sometimes too restrictive. The writing is charming, and the nature of the puzzles is quite well-integrated with the game’s fairy-tale atmosphere. Though it’s not quite as bare-bones as Knot, Breakfast is still a very brief game, with three points to be scored, relatively few objects, and only one location. That’s OK, though. It was fun while it lasted.

Both games are written and coded pretty well — I found neither bugs nor spelling/grammar errors in either one, though in both there was a real paucity of synonyms. Moreover, they both adhere faithfully to the concept behind the WackyComp, and work creatively within its confines. Neither succumbs to cliché, and both were fun. My main complaint is that each one (though Knot more than Breakfast) is over almost before it begins, but I suppose that’s the nature of mini-comps. Perhaps these tiny games could become preludes to fuller versions — I wouldn’t mind playing the sequel to either.

It’s also nice to see the ALAN language gaining some devotees, and perhaps one of these authors (whose identities are pretty clear from their choice of language and their postings before the WackyComp — nice job Mikko and Lelah) will be the one to write a major game which really shows off the language’s capabilities. It seems to be the pattern that IF languages only gain a significant following once a really well-done game has been completed in the language, like Inform‘s Curses or TADS‘ Unnkulia series. Now that’s a knot that won’t untie itself, but the nimble fingers of the WackyComp authors may be just the ones to unravel it.

Zero One by Edward Plant [Comp04]

IFDB page: Zero One
Final placement: 31st place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Because I am a whiny malcontent who is never satisfied, I’m beginning this review with another complaint about Alan‘s transcripting capability, or lack thereof. Last year, I moaned about the fact that Alan doesn’t offer a SCRIPT command, and therefore I was having to periodically copy and paste from the Glk scrollback window into a text editor in order to have a transcript for reference while I wrote my reviews. In response, a few friendly people informed me that if I start the Alan interpreter from the command line with a “-l” switch, it will indeed log a transcript.

This, though a little annoying, is happy news. I tested the method this year, and it works! Sort of. For no reason that I can ascertain, the transcripts are saved in an extremely goofy format, with one line per turn, a line that begins with output generated by the game, then lists the name of the current room, and ends with whatever I type at the prompt. Thus, the slightly more readable parts of the transcript look like this:

There is nothing special about the door.Cell> x walls
‘walls’? I don’t know that word.Cell> n
The door’s closed.Cell> open door
It’s locked.Cell> unlock door
You can’t unlock that!Cell> knock on door
You knock on the door.Cell> z

The less readable parts, which are predominant, occur when the game has anything substantial to say — they stretch off into the distance or wrap (depending on the text editor) to form a busy jumble of unformatted verbiage. Also, on a more minor point, I don’t get to choose the filename for the transcript, and Alan uses an inexplicably super-funky naming convention that gave my log files titles like “011100149966.log.” This transcripting capability is better than nothing, but the quality is still unacceptable. Come on, Alan. Transcripting is kind of a basic IF function, going way back to the 80s. Help a critic out.

Now with that screed out of the way, on to the game. I’m afraid that I don’t have many good things to say about it either. Zero One (or 01, as it likes to nickname itself) is an extremely silly game, cliche-hampered, lacking any sort of logical story, bug-ridden, and incomplete. If you were setting out to write a totally hackneyed IF game, what would be the starting location and situation of the PC? If you said “stricken with amnesia and locked in a cell,” you are today’s winner! That’s exactly the story with the PC of 01, but unlike, say, Square Circle, which builds an honest-to-gosh story around this situation, this game is totally uninterested in revealing the PC’s actual identity or the circumstances the led up to his incarceration.

Oh, it makes a couple of halfhearted gestures at explanation, but these are totally insufficient to actually build any real understanding, and besides, they’re totally overwhelmed by the weight of random events and situations. A good example is the kitchen drawer, in which you’ll find a dead fish along with the cutlery. Why? Aw, who cares? What bits of information do exist are burdened by a juvenile fascination with weapons and gore, like the pool of blood and splattered head that awaits the PC just outside his cell, or like this, after you find a handgun (complete with make and model info) and magazine of ammo:

> put magazine in beretta Lock and Load!

Bro-THER. Throw in a little queer-baiting, and you’ve got a game that just screams “12-year-old male.”

The game is good for a few unintentional laughs, though, due both to its harebrained shadow of a plot and to its buggy implementation. A great example is the doors to the prison, which are secured by a padlock that, to the game’s own surprise, can be unlocked with the first key you find (the bracketed comment is from me):

> unlock green door There is a padlock on the door and you don't have a key. [Actually, I do.]

> unlock green door with key The green door is now unlocked.

Sadly, this change just makes the game channel one of the maze rooms from Zork — going through the door will just loop you back into the current room. Oh, and I also managed to crash the interpreter entirely, though I’m not sure whether this was 01‘s fault or Alan’s. I write comments at the prompt as I go through the game, and after a particularly long line, the interpreter itself just up and shut down, much to my surprise. Luckily, I’d just saved my game, so I didn’t lose much.

Actually, I wouldn’t have lost much if I had just stopped right there and never opened the game again. The ending text insists that “ZERO ONE is not yet finished… Expect a return!”, but given the quality level of this game, that seems more like a threat than a promise.

Rating: 2.8

Sardoria by Anssi Raisanen [Comp03]

IFDB page: Sardoria
Final placement: 13th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

Okay, I know it’s bad form to start out a game review with a screed about the system it’s written in, but Alan is on my last nerve. First of all, I think I’ve mentioned before that I really dislike its lack of scripting capability. I keep having to remember to call up the scrollback and copy my latest moves into a text editor, and this is irritating in two big ways. First, having to constantly keep an eye on this really breaks immersion for me — I can’t get fully into the game when I’m having to manually monitor this administrative task. Second, if I do happen to become immersed, then I invariably end up forgetting to bring up the scrollback until too late, when the buffer only has half the moves I’ve made since my last copy-paste operation. Bad enough to have to copy from the buffer at all, but the fact that it only seems to hold a minimal amount of the scrollback makes the whole thing extremely aggravating.

The other problem that I just discovered with Alan is the apparent lack of portability in its save files. The way I play comp games often involves a lot of switching machines — laptop on the bus in the morning, work machine at lunch hour, home machine at night. Usually, this is no problem; I just drop my saved game onto a floppy and start up from it at the next machine. However, I discovered that whenever I try to restore a saved Alan game from another machine I get this infuriating message: “Sorry, the save file did not contain a save for this adventure.” It’s very, very annoying to restore “sardoria.sav” and be told that it’s not a save for Sardoria. I don’t know whether these flaws are in the language or the interpreter, but they just drove me crazy with this game, maybe because it’s a little larger or more ambitious than most other Alan games. (Certainly more so than The Adventures Of The President Of The United States, the other Alan game in Comp03.)

Whew, thanks for letting me get that off my chest. On to Sardoria. Well, I’m sorry to say that Sardoria also drove me crazy in its own ways, beginning with the very first room. It’s one of those games that starts with the PC imprisoned — thrown into a locked cellar, in this case — so the first puzzle is getting free. I must have spent 20 minutes trying out different commands in that room, none of which seemed to do anything for me. Finally, I turned to the hints and was told that I “need to find another object hidden in the cellar.” Well thanks, but that’s what I’ve been trying to do for the last 20 minutes, without success. Any more hints? Nope, “[t]here are no more hints for this location.”

Finally, I turned to the walkthrough, and found that the command the game was looking for was something that I would never have thought of doing, because it doesn’t really make much sense. The result is that as I’m doing the nonsensical action, I happen across the hidden item. “No fair!” I cry. It was especially galling because I had specifically checked the area where the item was hidden, and was told in clear terms that there wasn’t anything there. This sort of frustration happened to me over and over in the game; I tried on all of them, but I think I ended up looking at the walkthrough for every puzzle but one or two. Often I’d come close to the solution but failed to find the exact route desired by the game (shades of Gourmet), and sometimes the solutions just flat-out made no sense to me. There were also occasions when the actions required made a sort of sense, but were far too vague or arbitrary.

Many of these problems could have been overcome, or at least alleviated, if Sardoria had provided better feedback. More and more, I’m convinced that this is a crucial element of successful interactive fiction, at least IF with puzzles in it. When a player gets close to the solution, the game should indicate that rather than giving a flat “nothing happens” sort of response until it gets the exact right set of commands. Moreover, if players think of an alternative solution, the game should be able to either let them utilize that solution or provide a convincing reason why they can’t. How can an author provide this level of feedback? It’s all about the testing. Get at least three testers for your game, with a sufficient variety of approaches between them. Then, watch for the things they try. If they get close to the answer, your game should provide some appropriately encouraging feedback.

This is especially important in a game like Sardoria, where many of the puzzles are one kind of combination lock or another, most of whose combinations verge on the totally arbitrary. This is a subject that deserves a more detailed treatment, but I’m unable to do that in a spoiler-free review, so all I can say is that designers must anticipate the majority of player responses and handle them appropriately. It’s a lot of work, yeah, but it can be the difference between exciting and exasperating for puzzly IF.

Rating: 5.3

[Postscript from 2021: In a subsequent discussion on rec.games.int-fiction, someone pointed out that in fact, it is possible to create a game transcript in Alan if you start the interpreter with a “-L” switch at the command prompt. Fair enough, but I stand by my response from that discussion:

“You know, somebody probably told me that last year, too. Unfortunately, I immediately forgot because this is such an amazingly clunky and unintuitive way to provide a game transcript. I want to type SCRIPT and have the game start logging a transcript to a file. I do not want to have to open up a DOS window and start the game with a special switch from the command prompt, especially since I will almost inevitably have the interpreter and the gamefile in different directories (something the Arun interpreter barely knows how to handle as it is) and will thus be forced to type out an entire path for one or the other of them.

Anyway, I amend my complaint from ‘Alan provides no scripting capability’ to ‘Alan’s scripting capability is far too hidden and inconvenient.'”]

The Adventures of the President of the United States by Mikko Vuorinen [Comp03]

IFDB page: The Adventures of the President of the United States
Final placement: 21st place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

It’s been a long time since I’ve played a Mikko Vuorinen game. The last one was his 1999 comp entry King Arthur’s Night Out, which bizarrely recast King Arthur as a henpecked husband in a domestic farce. Some people, like Adam Cadre, apparently found this hilarious, but it mostly left me cold. Still, I was pleased to see Vuorinen’s name on a comp entry this year, and playing TAOTPOTUS felt like a reunion with a seldom-seen relative — even though its behavior was often exasperating, I couldn’t help feeling a certain fondness for it, both because of its reliably predictable traits and because of my sense of shared history with it.

Vuorinen hasn’t lost his affection for putting iconic figures into strange and comical circumstances, and indeed one of the most charming things about TAOTPOTUS is its gleeful disregard of realistic IF conventions. Consider, for example, this bit of game territory:

The United States of America. Good old USA, in your mind the greatest country in the world. Home of you and millions of other fellow Americans. The White House is a magnificent place, but once in a while it's good to see the real world. As you know, Canada is to the north and Mexico to the south.

> n O Canada. Their home and native land. Lots of trees and that's about it.

To the west is Alaska and to the south the rest of the United States.

Next to you is a particularly tall maple tree.

This isn’t any kind of carefully worked-out fantasy trope — it’s not as if the President is suddenly a literal giant, walking across the continents in state-spanning strides, though at times it’s hard to avoid that mental image. Instead, it has the childlike feel of marching an action figure around a big map of the world, having little adventures in different places without much regard for any sort of fictional coherence. I mean this in the best possible way. I loved feeling like I was part of an innocent “let’s pretend” session, miniature toys tromping across a world-themed game board.

From the game’s title, I was wondering if it would be a political satire, but as close as it comes is to suggest that perhaps our President really does see the world in terms as abstract and simplistic as these. Then again, maybe that’s plenty. There are some moments that suggest a gentle satirical agenda, such as when you try to go south from Russia and are told “You don’t want to go to the Middle East. Some people there might not like you.” There are also some moments that that made me laugh out loud, such as when I typed HELP and was told, “You do not need any help. You are the President of the United States of America.” I tried to STOP THE WAR, but sadly the game informed me that the word “war” is not recognized. If only that were true.

Unfortunately, fun with icons wasn’t the only Vuorinen trait that made it into this game — there are also a handful of good old guess-the-verb puzzles as well, along with the typical admonishment in the walkthrough that there are no guess-the-verb puzzles, and that the game should be simple enough for anyone to finish without clues. I got stuck on the very first puzzle, and discovered from the walkthrough that, just like in King Arthur’s Night Out, there’s an item that needs to be SEARCHed, even though examining it yields a dismissive response. Some of the puzzles made sense to me, but there were others that really felt like an exercise in reading the author’s mind.

The environment (what there was of it) was reasonably well-implemented, though there were several bits of dodgy English, and I struggled from time to time with the deficiencies of the Alan parser. I also need to take a moment here to grouse about the typically feeble Alan game engine, which fails to include such essential bits of functionality as UNDO, AGAIN, and especially SCRIPT. I really dislike having to periodically copy the scrollback buffer into a text editor in order to keep a record of my interaction with the game, especially since I only belatedly remembered that this buffer keeps a rather paltry amount, and consequently I lost the transcript from my first 15 minutes or so with the game. Okay, I feel better now that I’ve vented. Overall, TAOTPOTUS is brief and kinda fun, and if you’re a Vuorinen fan, you’ll probably like it a lot.

Rating: 7.5

Out of the Study by Anssi Raisanen [Comp02]

IFDB page: Out of the Study
Final placement: 24th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

A few years ago, I made up some vocabulary to describe a common aspect of IF. I’m not really sure if anybody else uses it, but I’ve found it immensely handy. The vocabulary is this: I call a noun that appears in a room description a “first-level noun.” These nouns either will or won’t have descriptions implemented, and the more of them that are described, the better, in my opinion. Nouns that appear in the descriptions of first-level nouns I call second-level nouns. Nouns from second-level descriptions are third-level, and so on. The deeper these levels go, the more complete and immersive the interactive environment, as we’ve seen in previous games like Hunter, In Darkness and Worlds Apart. Out Of The Study puts this technique to some of the best use I’ve ever seen, going very deep indeed with its levels of description:

> x family photo In the photo you see the professor together with his family.


> x family

The professor is standing in the photo with his wife and five

children.
> x children

The photo is really rather old as the children in it are still very

young. You know that none of them lives at home anymore. On the left

there are twin boys, looking to be of the age at which they have just

started going to school. In the middle, the youngest child, just a

baby, is sitting in her mother's lap. It seems to be hardly one year

old: you cannot tell if it's a boy or a girl, even from the clothes.

[...]
> x baby

The baby, whose sex you are not able to tell, is dressed in a pink

overall.

> x overall It is just an ordinary babies' outfit.

Given that OOTS is a one-room game, this depth of implementation goes a very long way towards making the environment feel real and interactive. Intriguingly, the point of this depth isn’t just to increase immersion; it’s actually an element of the game’s puzzles, and clues are often buried several levels deep. Enlightenment, from Comp98, explored this technique a little, but OOTS takes it much further.

This game’s puzzles are definitely its best feature. Like many one-room games, it has only a modicum of plot — you’re a thief who has been trapped inside the place you’re robbing, and you must investigate the environment to figure out how to escape. To do so, you have to figure out the mindset of the room’s occupant, and all the regular puzzles are subsections of that overriding goal. The design is generally sound, and I appreciated the fact that the environment was so richly implemented, but it would have been a lot more fun were it not so buggy. There’s a bit of an insect theme in this game, but actual game bugs are not welcome no matter how many metalevels of irony they provide.

Some of the problems may have been due to the ALAN parser; for instance, I found I couldn’t refer to objects by their adjectives, as in the following example where both a “torn photograph” and a “family photograph” are in scope:

> x photograph [It is not clear which photograph you mean.]

> x torn [You must supply a noun.]

Being able to refer to an object by any of its name words is a behavior I’ve come to love in IF, and I missed it a great deal during this game. Other things were clearly the game’s fault. For instance, “examine” and “read” were implemented as different verbs, but their implementation was not well-tested, resulting in exchanges like this:

> read books There is nothing written on the books.

Hope you didn’t pay too much for those books, professor — they aren’t worth the paper they aren’t written on.

Between the game’s bugs, its quirks, and its lack of a walkthrough, I came thisclose to just abandoning it altogether. Happily, some folks over at ifMUD helped me get unstuck so I could reach the ending. Unhappily, that ending is a bit of a disappointment. OOTS succumbs to the temptation to tack on a rather cutesy “twist” ending, but my reaction to it was neither “awwwww” nor “whoa!”, but rather “huh?”

In my view, all that ending does is to make hash of everything that came before, as well as to make the player’s labors seem rather fruitless. I don’t even think it can be justified as bringing some sort of justice to the thief, because it’s unclear how much reality has actually shifted, or how much we are to assume about the game as a whole. There are some good puzzles and a very well-crafted setting here, and with a round or two more of testing and a better ending, OOTS could be a pretty good piece of IF.

Rating: 7.0

The Isolato Incident by Anya Johanna DeNiro as Alan DeNiro [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Isolato Incident
Final placement: 22nd place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Okay, first: When I say “Alan” in this review, I’m referring to the programming language, not the author. Second: it’s always bugged me that Alan provides no scripting capability, but it’s never annoyed me more than it did for this game. That’s because this is the first Alan game I’ve encountered that’s been more about language than interactivity, and I desperately wanted to keep a copy of my interaction with the game so that I could refer back to its language when I wrote this review. I finally ended up hacking together a solution by periodically opening the scrollback buffer (thank you Joe Mason for porting Arun to Glk!) and copy-and-pasting the contents into a text file. Now that I’ve got that text file to peruse, I’m becoming even more aware of the strangenesses in the game’s use of words.

The main gimmick is obvious from the start: the entire game is written in the first person plural voice — as in, “Wait, we must stop.” Sometimes an approach just makes me sit back and say “wow, never seen that in IF before” and this was one of those times. The game is apparently from the point-of-view of a monarch, and therefore it’s fairly easy to assume that all this plurality is due to the use of that kingly favorite, the “royal we.” However, there are hints here and there that the “we” doesn’t just refer to the monarch and his subjects, but to some sort of actual multitude. For example, the narrator offhandedly mentions that “We like to coif our hair into shape, exactly like each other.” Each other? Granted, this could refer to the hairs themselves, but that’s not the only reference to multiplicity. For instance, in the first room description, we (that would be the “reviewer’s we”, dontcha know) see this:

Cozy Throne Room. This is where we rest, tarry, and make our fears vanish. There is enough room for all of us here.

Is this monarch of such tremendous girth that most rooms fail to hold him? Well, probably not, given the reference to “razorthin hips” in the response to “X US” (the game cleverly replies to “X ME” with “‘me’? We’re not aware of that word.”, thereby deftly employing a parser default response to further delineate the main character.)

All this would be quite enough to take in, but the game has other plans up its sleeve, too. To confusion of voice, The Isolato Incident adds a pile of words whose meaning has simply been displaced. Take this sentence: “We watch our bees, smear their history on our arms and legs.” That’s not some sort of metaphor about honey; instead, it’s a recontextualizing of the idea of bees and the idea of history into an entirely new grid. All this, and we haven’t even left the first location yet! After spending some time with the game, I started to figure out why my response felt familiar: it resembled my reaction to Dan Schmidt‘s 1999 entry For A Change. I’d look at a passage like this:

The Crux Of Our Landscape. Still, there is much to be admired here. The green slopes are flatter; thus, the cleft of the wind is much stronger. There are also choices etched in the road. South leads to the nearly endless royal road, and to the east of us is the bonegrass field and (further east) the treasury. We can also pitter-patter back to our hut to the north.

and run it through my hastily-constructed mental filter. “Okay, ‘cleft of the wind’ probably just means a breeze. ‘Choices etched in the road’ is probably indicating that this is a crossroads.” This filter felt more natural as the game progressed, but I never stopped feeling at a distance from the PC, and therefore unable to invest any particular emotional commitment into his struggles.

The game’s not-terribly-surprising twist ending might have removed this barrier, but as it happens, I still felt just as distanced from the game even after it revealed another layer of itself to me. I think this occurred because even after the twist, the game didn’t do much to connect with any particular reality to which I could relate. In the interest of not giving away the surprise, I’ll refrain from going into detail, except to say that the ending happened suddenly enough, left enough context unexplained, and raised enough further questions that it didn’t give me much of that feeling of satisfaction that we tend to expect from the ends of stories. For me, a narrative layer a little more grounded in reality would have done wonders for my emotional connection to the game. As it was, I could admire the prettiness of the words, but only from a remove.

Rating: 7.5

[Postscript from 2020: In the context of 2001, The Isolato Incident wasn’t submitted pseudonymously. However, as of 2020, the author has transitioned to using the name Anya Johanna DeNiro. I wrote Anya, asking whether I should credit her as Alan or Anya. At her request, I’m crediting the game to her as Anya, but noting that she wrote as Alan at the time.]

To Otherwhere And Back by Greg Ewing [Comp01]

IFDB page: To Otherwhere And Back
Final placement: 28th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

For the past several years, the IF community has created a variety of “mini-comps” in the Spring of each year, competitions where the games are instructed to stick to a particular concept. These concepts can range from a required image like “a chicken crossing a road”, to the inclusion of a particular element (romance, dinosaurs, the supernatural), to a stipulation about the game structure itself (include the verb “use”, disallow the player from having any inventory.) Furthermore, for as long as there have been Spring mini-comps, they have had an effect on the Fall “maxi-comp,” because inevitably some author has a great idea that fits with the mini-comp, but doesn’t manage to finish by the Spring deadline, so instead polishes the game further and enters it in the Fall comp.

This spillover effect has given us such past treats as Downtown Tokyo. Present Day., and Yes, Another Game With A Dragon!, and now To Otherwhere and Back, a game originally intended for Emily Short’s Walkthrough-comp. The concept behind this particular mini-comp was that entrants had to produce games (or transcripts) that conformed to a particular walkthrough; as a further twist, this walkthrough was in the form of an unpunctuated telegram, containing strings of commands like “TAKE NEXT TURN SMOOTH DUCK DOWN” and “LOOK UP DRESS BOOK SHIP PACKAGE PRESENT BOWL”, which could be broken up in any number of clever ways.

To Otherwhere and Back meets the challenge ably, and in doing so, emphasizes an underrated IF technique: cueing. What we learn from games like this is that IF can prompt even quite unusual input from the player, as long as the setup has been executed with skill and the cue delivered fairly clearly. For example, in order to get me to type the first command from the walkthrough, the game presented me with this situation:

The screen of the debugging terminal is covered with code and variable dumps. You stare at it with bleary eyes, trying to find the last, elusive bug that you've been chasing for the last 37 hours straight. You're so tired, you're having to make a conscious effort to think.

That first command was, of course, “THINK.” That’s not something I’d usually type in at an IF prompt, because most games just give a canned answer to it, if they give any answer at all. This piece of text, though, was enough to cue me that in this situation, that command might produce something useful, and indeed it does. It’s not that good cueing leads the player by the nose — in fact, the first thing I typed after reading the text above was “DEBUG”, which actually put me into the game’s debugging mode, hilariously enough. But after that didn’t work, I looked at the text again, and was able to discern the right move without looking at the walkthrough. This sort of dynamic is the essence of good cueing, and TOAB does it over and over again. Of course, what’s also true is that Alan‘s heavily restricted parser and the shallowly implemented game world had me looking to cues quite a lot, but in this game that paucity of options was quite appropriate.

What TOAB doesn’t quite manage, though, is to construct a coherent plot. Granted, hewing to a deliberately challenging premise while telling a story that makes sense is quite a tall order — most of the entrants into the walkthrough-comp either came up with some arbitrary reason why those words would be strung together (as in Adam Cadre‘s hilarious Jigsaw 2), or relied heavily on the dream/surrealism/hallucination device to justify the necessary contortions. TOAB pursues the latter option, and its story ends up feeling more than a little arbitrary as a result.

Still, the game applies itself to the walkthrough’s odder moments in some very clever ways, and provides some good laughs, such as the Polish phrasebook that “contains translations of many phrases useful to a traveller in Poland, such as ‘Please develop this film’, ‘How much is the sausage?’, and ‘Am I under arrest?'”. Overall, I enjoyed TOAB, and while the fiction element of it wasn’t so great, its interactivity techniques got me thinking. That’s not a bad track record for a comp game, no matter what comp it might belong to.

Rating: 7.1

Skyranch by Jack Driscoll [Comp99]

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

In my head, I’ve started this review a dozen different ways and discarded them all. The unused versions were rejected for being too caustic, too angry, or too harsh. During this current attempt, I will try to keep a leash on these energies, though they’re chomping at the bit (if I may mix my animal metaphors.) I want for these reviews to be helpful, not hurtful, and I want to keep my criticisms constructive. In that spirit, I offer a couple of changes that could (and should) be made to make Skyranch a playable game:

The game should be reprogrammed until it meets a minimum level of coding quality. I would put this minimum level right around the functionality provided by, for example, an Inform shell game (i.e. the bare-bones version of the library before the game author has added any real code.) To detail all, or even many, of the ways in which Skyranch fails to meet this standard would take more time than I want to devote to this game. One example: the game should recognize verbs like “ask” and “examine”. The game’s error messages should be helpful, rather than flippant parser responses like “What?” or “So… what are you saying?” Many authors meet this minimum standard by using a text adventure creation tool such as Inform, TADS, Hugo, ALAN, etc. to create their game. This isn’t strictly necessary, of course, but if a game is programmed from scratch, it had better be at least as good as one that was created with such a tool.

The prose should be rewritten until it consists of correct English sentences. The current writing in the game is pretty abysmal. Mistakes are so legion that the text is often confusing, sometimes completely incomprehensible. Until a text game is written in English, it won’t be any fun for me to play, because English is the only language I read fluently.

Until these two basic conditions are met, Skyranch won’t even be worth discussing, let alone playing.

Rating: 0.9

The HEBGB Horror! by Eric Mayer [Comp99]

IFDB page: The HeBGB Horror
Final placement: 16th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Patti Smith. The Talking Heads. Blondie. Television. The Ramones. While the Sex Pistols and the Clash were spitting in the face of the bloated English rock establishment, the artists named above were leading a concurrent American punk revolution in New York City. The nerve center of the movement was a club called CBGB (standing, ironically, for Country, Blue Grass, and Blues), where all of these artists got their start before being launched on the national stage. This is the scene to which Eric Mayer pays loving tribute in his competition entry, an ALAN game called The HeBGB Horror!. You play Phil Howard, a musician dreaming of hitting the big time in NYC. You’re down to your last few bucks, and ready to take the bus back home, when you spy a chance to see the reunion of legendary (fictional) punk band The Laughing Kats at their famous stomping grounds, HeBGB. It sounds great, so why can’t you shake this feeling of nameless dread? The game combines the trappings of the Seventies New York punk rock scene with the sort of Lovecraftian pastiche that seems to have become all the rage in IF since the success of Anchorhead.

I’m an avid rock music fan, so the former theme grabbed me immediately. The Lovecraft stuff, on the other hand, gets old pretty fast. Mayer obviously knows and loves the music, and the emphasis is on the New York punk scene — these themes could have sustained a game easily on their own. As I played through The HeBGB Horror!, I found myself really enjoying the punk parts, and wishing that the various “eldritch horrors” and such could have been edited out. I’m not sure how much the game wanted to parody CBGB, or how much of an homage it intended for the Lovecraft bits to be, but I think it may have achieved the opposite of its ambition, as the music parts felt mainly like homage, while the Lovecraftiana, with its various generic rats, tentacles, and gibbering masses, felt more like a parody.

But hey, as the game itself reminds us at several points, it’s only a “three-chord” effort. Indeed, one of the most endearing things about HeBGB is the way it evokes the D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) spirit of punk, making a joyous noise even though it’s no virtuoso. The author reinforces this viewpoint by cautioning us in the credits that HeBGB “does not represent the real capabilities of the Alan Language but does demonstrate Alan’s amazing ability to allow someone who has never done an iota of computer programming of any kind to produce SOMETHING within a few weeks!” This is a very nice thing to say about a programming language, and in fact HeBGB is quite playable despite a lack of programming polish.

However, there are a number of things missing from the game that the average game programmer shouldn’t have to worry about at all. For example, the game offers no “undo” function, nor an “oops” verb. Some simple things run contrary to convention, such as a “” prompt that accepts only the Enter key, rather than the space bar or any random keypress. Some fairly basic verbs are missing, such as “throw”. I attribute these flaws to deficiencies in the ALAN libraries (or perhaps, in some cases, the ARUN interpreter) rather than a failing on the author’s part. It’s unreasonable to expect every game author to program conveniences like “undo” on their own. That’s what libraries are for, and by being such a complete game in lots of other ways, HeBGB demonstrates the limitations of ALAN — not the language, but the default shell given to potential authors.

What the author can control he provides quite well. Despite a few spelling and formatting difficulties, the prose in HeBGB (especially when it’s not doing a Lovecraft parody) combines a snappy sense of humor with strong descriptions. The plot is clever, allowing a good deal of exploration while never opening so wide that the story feels aimless. There are a number of good things about the design, including the fact that the game is carefully structured in such a way as to allow players a second or third chance to obtain items that they may have failed to notice or pick up the first time around. These chances are always well-integrated within the game, and feel natural rather than gratuitous. This design choice allows HeBGB to close off early sections of the map once their purpose is served while avoiding the trap of making the game unsolvable once those sections are unavailable to the player.

The puzzles, for the most part, are quite good, maintaining a high level of originality and (with one exception) escaping “guess-the-verb” syndrome. The one qualm I did have about the puzzles is that at several points, you must return to apparently unfruitful locations to obtain an object that wasn’t there before. The reasons given for the appearances of the objects certainly make sense, but from a gameplay standpoint it’s not very logical for a player to assume that visiting and revisiting empty locations will be rewarded. Moreover, some of the actions required to make the object appear in the empty location don’t seem to have very much causal influence. In other words, the action which puts the object in the formerly empty spot gives players little reason to guess that visiting that spot again will be worthwhile. These quibbles aside, I enjoyed HeBGB quite a bit, and while I was wishing for the conveniences granted by more sophisticated libraries, the roughness of the game was in keeping with its topic, and that resonance lent it an unexpected charm.

Rating: 7.7

CASK by Harry M. Hardjono [Comp97]

IFDB page: CASK
Final placement: 31st place (of 34) in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition

Well, a game subtitled “my first stab at Interactive Fiction” doesn’t inspire much confidence. CASK is another one of those “I wrote this game to learn Inform” games that seem to be so popular this year. None of the other languages, even AGT, have inspired this particular genre of competition entry this year (with the possible exception of Mikko Vuorinen’s Leaves, written in ALAN), and I think it’s worth ruminating on the reasons for that. Inform is a sophisticated system, and there certainly have been no dearth of complaints on the IF newsgroups about how difficult it is to write programs with its C-like, object-oriented structures. Nonetheless, many people (including some of the people complaining on the newsgroups) have been able to use Inform well enough that they felt the results of even their first efforts were worthy for submission to the competition.

I think that part of the reason for this is that Inform’s libraries are comprehensive and detailed enough that even the barest shell .z5 game seems rich with possibility — dozens of verbs are implemented and ready to use, and creating simple rooms and objects is quite easy. The depth to which the Inform libraries are crafted allows even a designer’s first efforts to seem, at first blush, on a par with simpler Infocom adventures. Moreover, Inform enjoys a special place in the ftp.gmd.de hierarchy: besides being lumped in with all the good, bad, and indifferent systems in if-archive/programming, it also resides in if-archive/infocom/compilers. Consequently, anyone who came to IF by way of Infocom can stumble upon it in their first visit to the archive, simply through connecting to the most familiar word and then saying “Wow, the Infocom compiler is here?” I know that’s how it happened for me. Inform’s .z5 format is a nice piece of wish-fulfillment for all of us who wish that we could still get a job at Infocom. So just because Inform is granted this privileged association with Infocom, does that mean that a certain set of its users feel that their first efforts are on Infocom’s level, without a substantial amount of effort on the part of the author? Perhaps, but all these pieces combined don’t explain the trend I’ve seen this year. I’m not sure what the rest of the explanation is, but I do know this: I hope the trend won’t last. It doesn’t add a lot of quality interactive fiction to the archive, just a lot of shoddy Inform examples.

Which brings me up to CASK. The idea here is that you’re trapped in the basement of a winery, abducted for no apparent reason by your new employers. You must use your wits and the objects about you to make your escape. However, the real truth is that you’re trapped in a below-average interactive fiction game, which was entered in the contest for no apparent reason by its author. You must decipher vague prose, evade coding bugs, and defy logic to escape. Luckily, it doesn’t take too much time as long as you have help. Bring your walkthrough! CASK helped its author learn Inform. Let’s see that knowledge applied to the creation of a quality IF game.

Prose: There were a number of areas in which the vagueness of the prose contributed rather unfairly to the difficulty of the puzzles. [SPOILERS AHEAD] For example, at one point in the game you find a rusty saw, whose description reads “It is a rusty saw.” (Oooh! Now I understand! Glad I examined that!) When you try to cut something with the saw, the game tells you “You cut your fingers on the saw. Ouch!” Now, I’m no genius, but I do know which end of a saw to hold. It’s the handle, right? There’s nothing in the description suggesting that this saw doesn’t have a handle, so how would I cut my fingers? Is the handle sharp? Turns out you have to wrap a cloth around the saw then cut a hole with it. Though it seems to me a saw with a cloth wrapped around it isn’t going to have much cutting power. [SPOILERS END] Dealing with prose like this makes me feel like the character is supposed to be woozy and probably blind and pretty clueless as well. I hope the effect is unintentional.

Plot: Oh, I’m sorry. I gave away the plot earlier. You have to escape from a basement.

Puzzles: There are really only a few puzzles in this very short game, several of which involve having a switch in the right position (though figuring out which position is right is largely a matter of guesswork. Luckily the switch has only two positions, so even the brute-force solution doesn’t take long). There’s also a bit of outfox-the-parser, some find-the-bug, and a good deal of figure-out-what-the-hell-the-prose-means.

Technical (writing): The writing featured several entertaining errors. In one room (of the three total in the game) you can see that the room “has relatively few noteworthy” aside from “an old heavy machinery”.

Technical (coding): This game could definitely have used a great deal more testing. Object descriptions repeat when they shouldn’t, and some trapped responses behave in bizarre ways.

OVERALL: A 3.1