Tag: anssi raisanen

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.'”]

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 Chasing by Anssi Räisänen [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Chasing
Final placement: 14th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

When I finished The Chasing, I knew that it was a competently produced text adventure, and that there wasn’t much with which I could find fault in it. Yet, for all this, when I thought about a rating, I ended up feeling like it should rate somewhere in the high 7s. This isn’t terrible, but neither is it stellar, and yet the feeling persisted. Why? The writing, after all, was nothing exceptional, but it was at least error-free. After playing so many games in this comp that seem unable to employ basic English, having a game in which I could only find one error (and that a misspelling of a rather uncommon word) is nothing to take for granted.

There were even some nice details thrown in, such as the fact that the various estates throughout the game often have charming names such as “Bluebells” or “Valleyside” rather than just being called “Large House” or “<npc>’s House”. The nice thing about this choice is that it works subtly toward enhancing the character of the PC, a wealthy landowner whose relationships with his equally privileged neighbors are friendly and congenial. The idea that the PC knew immediately the affectionate designations that the neighbors had for their houses granted authenticity to his friendships with them, and made the landscape feel more inhabited as well. Still, for each detail like this, there were plenty of descriptions that remained mired in the pedestrian, like so:

Road.
The road goes on to the northwest and to the south. Gualtier's house
is to the east.

Descriptions like this are obvious placeholders, just marking distance between the areas in which the game is really interested, and even in those latter areas, description often feels perfunctory rather than immersive. There’s nothing in particular wrong with such writing, but it doesn’t do much to spark enthusiasm either.

The same might be said for the plot. The Chasing‘s premise is that your seven prize horses have escaped to various corners of the valley in which you live, and you must spend the day rounding them up. The PC takes this rather shocking lack of basic stable management in stride, emitting “a short amused laugh” and thinking, “Looks like it is going to be a chasing-day today…” In fact, the latter comment seems to imply that this is not the first time such an escape has happened, which in real life would be even more likely to irk the horses’ owner. However, instead of immediately firing the stable staff, the PC instead casually makes a walking-tour of the valley, chatting with neighbors and solving various problems for the valley’s denizens.

Of course, this being a text adventure, those problems take the form of puzzles, and after every puzzle, one more horse is found. Only one of the puzzles actually involves looking for a horse; the others are totally unrelated, but end in a sentence reading “Now that you have solved Bob’s problem, you happen to notice your horse grazing happily just north of here,” or something to that effect. This, obviously, feels rather contrived, and is made more so by the fact that the horses all have names like Patience, Serenity, Unhesitancy (unhesitancy?) and such, and the solution to each puzzle gets reflected in the name of the horse that is the reward for that puzzle. In other words, you find Patience (the horse) after solving a puzzle by being patient, etc. It’s a cute conceit, and that’s all. After puzzles (none of which are brain-breakers) are solved, the game ends, without ever having given much offense nor granted much excitement.

The game’s implementation follows this theme. On the one hand, it’s quite thorough in most places. Most first-level nouns are described, or at least implemented with a “that’s just scenery” message, and a number of second-level nouns are treated as well, especially in the “thicket” puzzle, probably the best puzzle in the game. NPCs, on the other hand, are numerous but very shallow. Basically, they exist only to give tasks to the player, and refuse to answer most queries, no matter how basic. In fact, the npc implementation is so shallow that even the one topic that most will react to (“horses”) lacks a singular synonym (that is, NPCs will tell you about “horses”, but not about “horse”.) In addition, there are a few objects in the game which simply provoke nothing whatever in the way of description, like so:

> x house

>

See what I mean? Every aspect of The Chasing has its good points, and all of it is competent, if undistinguished. You aren’t likely to remember it long after you’ve finished, but it does make for an agreeable afternoon’s diversion.

Rating: 7.7