arrival, >INVENTORY

SmoochieComp reviews [misc]

[Also in 2001, I was asked to judge a minicomp organized by Emily Short. It was a SmoochieComp, themed around love and romance. Like PrologueComp, I’ve added names where authors submitted pseudonymously. Unlike PrologueComp, the entrants were proper games, albeit small ones.]

These SmoochieComp reviews are written in a similar style to my reviews of games from the Fall Competition, but their ratings are structured a little differently. Since the SmoochieComp doesn’t ask participants to rate the games on a scale of 1 to 10, I decided instead on a scale of one to five smooches, similar to the star scale used by many movie reviewers. Turns out most games huddled around the middle of that spectrum — the lowest rating I gave was two smooches, and the highest rating was four smooches. Still, the quality index was satisfyingly high, especially for a mini-comp, since these often tend to generate games that are playable in ten minutes and feel like they were written in thirty.

As I did for the Comp00 games I played, I’ve held onto the transcripts from my interaction with all SmoochieComp games (except Bantam, whose environment didn’t allow scripting.) I’ll happily send the appropriate transcripts to any author who emails me a request. I’ll probably delete all of these around March 15, so don’t delay.

Finally, these reviews are presented in the order in which I played the games. I ran a little randomizer to determine what this order would be, and strangely, what it came up with differed very little from alphabetical order, Oh well, that’s randomness for you.

And now, on with the reviews…

1981 by Adam Cadre as A.D. McMlxxxi

Urgh. This game puts me in a tough spot. It’s a small piece, with an important twist, and it’s very difficult to talk about without spoilers. In fact, most of the things I can think of to say about it necessarily involve spoiling the surprise. However, I am committed to writing this entire review without giving away the secret — we’ll see how it goes. 1981 puts you in the shoes of an apparently lovelorn young man who has cashed in some stock money to travel to the college town where the girl of his dreams resides. At the outset of the game, you stand outside her dormitory, decked out in new jacket and new boots, clutching a sheaf of poems you’ve written for her and trying to get up the nerve to walk up to her door. At this point, the game teeters on a fine line, and the player can’t be sure whether it’s going to tip towards a cute story of shy college sweethearts or towards a Moment-of-Hope-like tale of unrequited affection.

As soon as you go to the door or read the poems, 1981 careens over the precipice into a tale that not only deals with unrequited affection, but the darker themes of obsession and even insanity. The game gets these themes across in lots of different ways, from the subtle to the blatant. For the latter, we have the poems, which teem with disturbing images and buckets of adolescent angst. Lines like “Regardless of the laughter of children/ I cannot continue to pretend/ I cannot continue to live” sound like a teenager trying to imitate The Cure, but other poems mention psychiatric visits and murder, clueing us in that something that something more serious than pimply puppy love is at stake here. On the more subtle side, there’s the first room description:

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.

The game’s encapsulation of all New Haven into a few desultory, derogatory sentences demonstrates the PC’s creepily jealous disdain for the world surrounding his would-be lover, and his contrasting focus on her dorm building reveals his single-minded obsession.

From this point forward, 1981 straitjackets the player into its plot, offering no choices at any point, or at least not any which allow any alteration of the storyline. This lack of interactivity gets particularly chafing when the PC is such a disturbed and disturbing individual, but the PC’s nature also offers a rational justification for such linearity. If Alex in Rameses suffered from Social Anxiety Disorder, the PC in 1981 is in the grips of full-blown psychosis. The writing and pacing of the game, as well as the elements it includes, deftly outline the boundaries of this illness, and the effect is chilling. By putting the player into such a twisted mind, 1981 sheds valuable light on its subject; standing beneath that light is a deeply uncomfortable experience — even more uncomfortable than trying to write an entire review of the game without giving away its secret.

Rating: Four smooches

August by Matt Fendalheen

In the “about” text for August, the author claims that he learned Inform and coded the game in the space of seven days. Usually this is the sort of thing I dread hearing at the outset of a game, since it almost always signals that the experience I’m about to have is will be an unpleasant one. Indeed, the game’s own notes profess it to be “a horrid, malformed, wretched, crud-eating wreck of a failure.” With this kind of pep talk, it was hard to keep my hopes high, but when I started playing, I was pleasantly surprised. The game is written in a florid High Fantasy tone, but the writing worked for me, and I found it rich and involving rather than overblown and annoying. In addition, I came across no outright bugs in the coding, which was a relief. Finally, the character interaction… well, I’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s just say that if the author learned Inform and wrote this game in seven days, it must have been one hell of a week. Then again, perhaps those claims were just meant to keep my expectations low so that I would find the game’s achievements all the more impressive. If so, it worked. Hooray for the Low Expectation Theory.

The game’s story is of a warrior lord, Hakuin Ikthanadar, returned home from a great victory in which he killed the most dangerous enemy of the realm. He is attending the annual Feast of August in order to fulfill a promise he made to his beloved Rosalyn, and as the game begins we find him searching the revel for signs of her. As time progresses, August deftly unfolds more information about the victory, the enemy, the feast, and Rosalyn herself, mixing flashback, dialogue, and description to weave its story. I was pretty impressed with the way this was done, and the most impressive part was the centerpiece of the game, an extended conversation with a key figure in the plot.

The game uses the standard ASK/TELL conversation model, and the instructions warn that subjects should be limited to one word — “ASK CATHBAD ABOUT UNDERWEAR will get you somewhere… while ASK CATHBAD ABOUT HIS UNDERWEAR will not.” I was ready for this to feel pretty restrictive, especially when the questions I had were very difficult to encapsulate in just one word. However, I frequently had the uncanny sensation that even though my language was amputated, the game was able to figure out exactly what I meant. For example, I wanted to ask the person why she had come to the feast, but all I could type was ASK HER ABOUT WHY. Imagine my pleasure when the game displayed this text:

You extend your arm, keeping her distant in the motion of the dance.
“Why did you come here?” you ask. “I doubt you were invited.” Or welcome.
“I go where I will.” she states, lifting her chin defiantly. “If these perfumed cattle object to my presence, they can leave.” She swings about, pulls herself close to you again.

Even better, when she returned the question, I was able to TELL HER ABOUT ROSALYN, and the game understood exactly what I meant. I’m not sure whether the game’s ability to predict what I was thinking came from its precise coding or its precise writing, but every time it happened, I was made very happy.

Sadly, for every time something like that made me happy, there were two times that the game disappointed me. None of them were crashing disappointments, but each one made it a little easier to believe that the game really was done in a week. Something is described as happening to the east when I know it’s actually to the west. Something is mentioned about the PC’s right hand that is really about his left hand. Its/it’s errors. Sometimes August can’t even seem to make up its mind about how the names of its own characters and places are supposed to be spelled. Basically, the game just needs a good round or two of proofreading and betatesting, because even though it’s solid at its core, its surface is badly lacking in polish. In the author’s lengthy introduction, he implies that he’s ready to write this game off as a failure and move on to his next piece of work. I hope he reconsiders, at least enough to clean up the basic errors in August, because once it’s been refined a little, this will be an enjoyable work of IF with some extremely satisfying moments.

Rating: three and a half smooches

Even Bantams Get The Blues by Eric Mayer

If there was some kind of meta-competition for writing games that fit into as many parameters as possible from past mini-comps and themed releases, Even Bantams Get The Blues would make a perfect entrant. This is a Frogger-style game about a lovesick chicken (with no inventory) who must cross a road to find emotional release. See what I mean? It’s got the chicken from the ChickenComp, the Frogger theme from the IF Arcade, and of course a bit of romantic backstory so that it actually fits into the SmoochieComp. I’m not sure if the lack of inventory was an intentional reference to that mini-comp, but the chicken certainly isn’t carrying anything (well, not really, anyway). All it needs is a toaster, a dinosaur, a dragon, and some aliens to complete the picture. Ironically, the romantic element feels pretty tacked-on, so the game’s least significant element is the one that pertains to the comp in which it was actually entered, but hey, I’m not complaining.

Unlike the other two SmoochieComp games I’ve played so far (1981 and August), this one is pretty lightweight (or should I say bantamweight?) There is very little freedom available, even less than in the original Frogger, really — this chicken can’t even change direction. The game only allows travel to the north, so cars and trucks can’t be dodged by backpedaling or sidestepping. Then again, the Frogger element is completely deterministic, so winning is still pretty easy once you’ve recognized the pattern.

However, there are some pleasures to be found beyond the simple task of conquering the road-crossing ordeal. For one thing, Bantam offers a LITERARY mode alongside its default ARCADE mode. This mode offers plenty of fun little Easter eggs; for example, if you type “X ROAD” in ARCADE mode, you get an extremely terse key to the game’s ASCII graphics:

A road ... trucks == cars +.

However, in LITERARY mode, “X ROAD” yields this:

The four lane highway. before you is a breathtaking sight, a vast smooth expanse of night-black asphalt, flecked in spots with some trace of mineral that sparkles with a star-like effulgence in the brilliant sunlight blasting down from the cloudless blue dome of the overarching heavens.

And it goes on like that for an extremely long paragraph. Actually, I should say that there are Easter eggs to be found in both modes, and part of the fun is seeing the differences between them — the sensation reminded me a bit of the differences between the two modes of alien speech in Stephen Granade’s Arrival. The game also suggests that there are several ways to win besides crossing the road, though I didn’t find any of them. (I did find some amusing ways to lose, though.) Bantam probably won’t occupy your attention for too long, but it’s good fun while it lasts, and if you’ve enjoyed a mini-comp in the past few years, it’s probably got something to appeal to you.

Rating: three smooches

Pytho’s Mask by Emily Short

Believe it or not, here’s another large, impressive Inform game that the author claims was written in a week. Like August, the other game in this category, Pytho’s Mask takes place in a fictional kingdom, at a large gathering whose purpose is to celebrate a cyclical occurrence. The party in Pytho’s Mask is called The Celebration of the Night of the Comet, and the astral event it marks occurs only once every hundred years. When it does, the forces of stability in the kingdom are at their weakest. This concept is of a piece with the astronomical imagery used throughout the game: the king represents the Sun, and he is served by a Moon Minister and an Earth Minister. What’s more, he is currently being eclipsed by a mysterious illness that could allow insurgent forces to exploit his Comet-induced vulnerability. The PC is charged with investigating the illness and protecting the king.

The setup worked wonderfully for me, and the writing was, predictably, a pleasure to read, infused as it was with Short’s gift for evoking dazzling scenes through terse, elliptical language. The use of such fundamental symbols as the Earth and the Moon felt a bit reminiscent of books like Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, and as in that book, the imagery helped give the setting a magical feel without explicitly invoking any particular supernatural occurrences.

The other important thing about Pytho’s Mask is its experimental conversation system. The game eschews the ASK/TELL interface that Short employed so effectively in Galatea, opting instead to offer a menu-based system… with a twist or two. The first innovation is that all of the menu options reside in the status line, and all players need do at the prompt is to type the letter (A, B, C, D, etc.) corresponding to their selected menu item. This removal of menus from the main window makes the transcript read a bit more like a dialog, though it does divorce the entries at the prompt from all context. The other unique aspect of the conversation system is that if none of the menu options offered seem right, the topic can be changed. As the game explains it:

So for instance if your options listed at the moment are all vapid remarks about fashion and you would rather say, “Pass the Stilton, please,” you might try >TOPIC CHEESE. >TOPIC does not cost a turn to use, so you can explore a number of topics if you’re looking for something specific to say.

The great strength of this system is that it combines the freedom and openness of the ASK/TELL system with the more realistic dialogues permitted by menu-based systems. This combination makes it powerful, but as Spider-Man says, with great power comes great responsibility, and this game doesn’t always live up to its responsibilities. Several times, I found myself presented with options that seemed inappropriate, if not downright nonsensical, and from time to time the replies fit this description as well. Moreover, there were instances when the conversational menus didn’t seem to keep up with the plot; when I encountered the masked man after he had already confessed his identity to me, one of my options was “Are you going to tell me who you really are?” “Not yet,” he said. Indecisive fellow.

A number of little warts like this tarnish what would otherwise be an outstanding game. Some, such as those described above, were continuity problems, while others came down to a lack of robustness in the interface. The worst of these was an unfortunate guess-the-syntax problem at a critical moment, which rather wrecked my immersion in the game’s climax. Finally, Pytho’s Mask occasionally shares a problem which plagued Short’s acclaimed comp game, Metamorphoses: there are a couple of moments where the game executes a series of unprompted “hit any key” pauses, and since I’m usually already typing the next action, I would end up startled to discover that reams of text were flowing by me unexpectedly.

Still, these blemishes are probably attributable to the fact that the game was done in a week, and even with them, Pytho’s Mask is immersive and highly entertaining. There are a couple of wonderful swashbuckling moments, and the PC’s propensity for sneaking around, bribing servants, pumping NPCs for information, and getting into romantic entanglements made for an immensely enjoyable playing experience overall. If you’re the impatient type, it won’t be a big problem for you to dive into Pytho’s Mask as it stands. However, if you’re a fan of Emily Short, or if you want the best playing experience possible, I’d advise you to wait. Short has an excellent reputation for fixing bugs and adding improvements to her games, and once this one has received that treatment, it will be a terrific slice of romantic adventure.

Rating: four smooches

Sparrow’s Song by J.D. Berry

What becomes apparent is that J.D. Berry has a talent for creating fictional universes. Sparrow’s Song is the third game he’s entered in a competition, and it’s the third time he’s given us a fresh, interesting setting, replete with its own culture, people, and idiosyncrasies. His Comp99 entry, Jacks Or Better To Murder, Aces To Win, revolved around a rigidly hierarchical religion of Berry’s devising, one in which Machiavellian scheming was the norm and the highly-ranked PC was always on guard against assassination attempts. The Djinni Chronicles, from Comp00, contained an intricate magic system to explain the motivations and capabilities of magical spirits summoned from bottles, lamps, and suchlike.

Now we get Sparrow’s Song, with another new set of characters and situations. Some of the stuff is fairly standard-issue fantasy: the PC is Baron of a sorta-medieval keep, and in his travels may encounter nymphs, rocs, or the occasional pegasus. However, the predictable elements are spiced with some intriguing personal relationships and a refreshing lack of ethereal elevation in the dialogue. Take, for example, your servant’s response when asked about a treaty:

“Where’s you head today, Kellen? The Ronqons? You know, the giants that live in those mountains over there? The giants who have strangled overland trade for the past, oh, 500 years? Yeah, those. If you agreed to their terms of peace, you were supposed to have that treaty to them today. I guess it’s water under the bridge now, Baron von Pocket Veto.”

The game is entirely unafraid of such anachronisms, and as a result much of the dialogue (typos aside) escapes the stale feeling of some fantasy games. On a similar note, did I mention that this game can be really funny? This game can be really funny.

In case you’re worried that there isn’t some funky new system to experiment with, never fear. It’s just that this time the system isn’t part of the setting, it’s part of the interface. That’s right, it’s yet another new approach to conversation. Similar to Pytho’s Mask, this game’s system allows the player to choose the topic of conversation, in this case by typing the topic followed by a question mark, such as “love?” However, Sparrow’s Song streamlines the idea somewhat, eliminating the element of multiple-choice lists, and instead simply taking the topic and running with it. Topics aren’t addressed to any particular person; rather, conversation is directed at whoever happens to share a location with you. Handily, the game makes sure that you’re never with more than one conversation-worthy entity at a time. There are also plenty of times when the game will simply reject a suggested subject, saying something like “You’re not so dense as to bring up THAT topic.”

Finally, the verb “TOPICS” is provided, which will always bring up one to three possible topics, and also functions as a kind of just- barely-a-hint-system. Sometimes this scheme worked perfectly, especially when an NPC mentioned a topic I’d never heard of (like “Ronqons”) and I was able to say “Ronqons?” at the prompt. That interaction felt much more natural than most NPC conversation in IF, mainly because I was able to type exactly what I would have said if I were really in the situation. The rest of the time, it alternated between feeling like an abbreviated ask/tell system (where I’m able to just type “TREATY?” instead of “ASK ARCTOS ABOUT TREATY”) and feeling like a more focused version of the Lomalow “ask me something twelve times to hear all I have to say about it” system. The pleasant writing relieved the tedium of these latter moments somewhat, but only somewhat. On the whole, the conversation system felt like a noble experiment that garnered mixed results.

The same can be said of the story in general. The initial hook is great: you awake to find a sparrow sitting at your windowsill. After regarding you for a few moments, the sparrow begins to sing, and in that magical song it communicates to you that there is someone who loves you, and that she sent this sparrow to reveal her feelings. The song touches something pure and deep inside you, and you find yourself instantly in love with the person who sent the sparrow, pledged to finding her and beginning a life together. From this promising beginning, the game fans out to encompass several different NPCs, each of whom can help you in varying ways, many of which overlap or constitute decision points. One thing that’s clear is that there are multiple paths through the game, and perhaps multiple endings as well.

I was only able to complete one path, since the other two I found both led to a puzzle I was unable to vanquish, so I only found one ending. That one felt rather abrupt and unsatisfying to me — it failed to tie up several loose ends from the plot, and it also seemed to leave the protagonists in a rather precarious situation, with not much hint of how they would move beyond it into some kind of peaceful denouement. I wonder if Berry simply ran out of time to implement the more gradual buildup he might have been planning, and was forced instead to tack on a quick-and-dirty closure. Whatever the reason, my relationship with Sparrow’s Song felt, in the end, like a love affair that began tenderly and showed great potential, but finished bittersweet.

Rating: three and a half smooches

Dead of Winter by Gunther Schmidl as Christina Pagniacci

Dead of Winter is a tiny game, an interactive vignette, really. The basic plot is that a mysterious being known as The Ice Queen has kidnapped your boyfriend Saul, and you want to get him back from her. She sends you on a quest that encompasses maybe half a dozen locations, and when you return, you find out whether or not your efforts were successful. There are a few decision points along the way, but it wasn’t particularly clear to me how the decisions related to which ending I got. Some paths where I made what would seem to me to be some wrong choices ended up with what appeared to be a winning ending, while the path that seemed most right led straight to an ending that felt quite suboptimal. Then again, even the “winning” ending had a sneaky little twist at the end, so it’s hard to say which ending is really the better one. The twist had some punch to it, but felt a little overly familiar at this point, similar devices having been used in other recent games. Also, it was a little confusing that the twist was only used in one of the endings, since it tries to impose a retroactive perspective shift on the entire game.

There were a number of pleasant things about Dead of Winter. It was entirely free of bugs, as near as I could tell, which is always a big plus. In addition, the writing was grammatically correct, something that makes a game feel more immersive to me. Finally, the game employs some special effects with timed display and colors in its title sequence. These effects definitely help to set the mood — I first started playing in WinFrotz, but quickly switched to DOS Frotz and was happy I did, since the black and grey color scheme selected by the game deepened the general atmosphere of chill and desperation.

Dead of Winter is over almost as soon as it begins, so perhaps it’s understandable that I didn’t feel particularly grabbed by it. It’s a sketch rather than a full painting — sparse descriptions, short plot, few objects and unresponsive NPCs. On the whole, it felt like a first attempt at writing IF, and assuming that the author’s name isn’t a pseudonym, a first game is probably what it is. As such, it’s not an unsuccessful effort. When I reached the end, I didn’t want my ten minutes back. In fact, I was looking forward to the author’s next effort, with hopes that it has a little more meat on its bones.

Rating: three smooches

Second Honeymoon by Roger Ostrander

Here is a SmoochieComp game that doesn’t implement the verb “kiss.” That about sums up Second Honeymoon, a well-intentioned effort that fails due to sparseness of implementation, dull design, and multiple errors. For a sample, consider this excerpt from the game’s opening text:

You’re a successful computer programmer, enjoying his fifteenth year of marriage to a wonderful woman. […] You announced your plans to your surprised wife two days ago: a secluded lakeshore cabin, away from the hectic rural life you usually lead.

Unless the PC is a programmer for a big farming outfit, or is telecommuting somehow, I’m thinkin’ that last sentence wants to be about his hectic urban life. Stuff like this is scattered throughout the game. There’s a room description that mentions an exit to the north, but attempts to go that way meet with no success. Conversely, there’s a room whose description never mentions the important fact that there’s an exit to the east. I only found it due to my obsessive-compulsive playing style, which entails trying every single direction in every single room (a style, I might add, that evolved as a response to games such as this one.)

It’s not that this is a terrible game. It’s sweet, and has its heart in the right place. But after playing all the other games in the SmoochieComp, I’ve come to expect a little higher standard of writing and coding, and I’m looking for a plot a little more interesting than the one this game gave me. Basically, the idea in Second Honeymoon is that you’re getting ready for a vacation with your wife, and you need to go around the house and get some various items to take with you, like your camera, your swimsuit, etc. Visiting some places, or performing some actions, will remind you of other items you need. When you’re finished packing, you win. Probably the neatest part of the game is that it maintains a dynamic packing list that keeps track of items added and items fetched. It’s similar to the list carried by the PC in the first part of Firebird, though a bit less slickly implemented.

If you’re beginning to think that Second Honeymoon is one of those games that asks you to wander around a suburban house (the layout of which is very probably modeled on the author’s own home) and do fairly quotidian things, give yourself a gold star. There’s really only one puzzle to solve, and that one so trivial that it shouldn’t slow down anybody who’s ever actually lived in a suburban house. Really, pretty much all of the items you’re looking for will be just laying around on the floor waiting for you when you enter the right room. Then all you do is scoop them up and give them to your wife, who serves as this game’s equivalent of the Zork trophy case. That’s about all she does, too — asking her questions or trying to be affectionate with her will get you nowhere. If what I’ve described sounds like your cup of tea, give Second Honeymoon a shot. If not, why not put some effort into your real-life relationships?

Rating: two smooches

Journey From An Islet by Mario Bencroft [Comp01]

IFDB page: Journey From An Islet
Final placement: 12th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

First of all, how big a coincidence is it that I’m playing two games in a row penned by New Zealanders? Are we seeing the harbingers of a Kiwi revolution in IF? Well, maybe not. Journey From An Islet isn’t a bad game, but it doesn’t give much context for either the PC or the story, and the result feels a bit like walking around in a painting. The beginning of the game deposits you on a mountaintop, with only these words by way of introduction:

You have seen many strange and wonderful places in your travels, but the world where you have fallen remains quite dark and enigmatic. What will time bring; how will you continue your journey...?

Fair questions, but I was hoping I could get some others answered, like: “Who is the PC?”; “Why is he/she traveling?”; “How did he/she get to this islet in the first place without a boat or something?” These questions never got answered — not even close, really — and consequently I felt pretty disconnected from the gameworld even as I explored it. Granted, even some of the most revered IF offers empty PCs and no explanations, but those games (like the Zork series) tend to offer an absorbing setting and tons of clever puzzles, which help shift the emphasis away from questions about the story. Journey is pretty sparse in every department, and I found it pretty hard to engage with.

Actually, I should amend my earlier statement. The game isn’t sparse in every department — one thing it provides is a fairly thorough implementation of first-level nouns. Of course, given that most of the game concerns itself with describing a pretty landscape, most of those nouns have to do with the landscape, too. Usually, I find exploration satisfying, and feel pleasantly immersed by deeply-implemented description, but for some reason, this game’s text just left me cold. I think perhaps that vivid, forceful landscape description is a lot harder than it looks. Take, for example, the game’s description of a mountain path overlooking a forest:

Southwestern mountainside A narrow path twists dangerously around cliffs and chasms as it passes down the mountainside. Protruding crags cast weird shadows against the snow. A dark green carpet of dense treetops rolls across the west, smothering the ground, not penetrated by sunlight.

Compare this with a similar passage from Andrew Plotkin‘s A Change In The Weather:

Rocky Outlook A wide angular tongue juts out from the hillside. The park stretches off to the north and west, a vast expanse of bright meadowland, patched with dark woods and stitched with streams that glitter in the sunlight. In the distance, a lake reflects white fire from the setting sun.

In the first passage, the room name is as one might identify the spot on a map, while in the second, the name reflects the direct experience of the PC. In the latter passage, we get striking, original images — a “tongue” of rock, a lake of white fire — whereas in the former, the images are flatter, more clichéd: “weird shadows”, a carpet of treetops. Finally, Plotkin maps inanimate landscape features onto active verbs, further strengthening the imagery by relating the woods to patches, the streams to stitches. The Bencroft passage attempts the same trick by having the treetops “roll across the west”, and indeed that’s a stronger point of that passage, but the sentence ends up tripping over itself by throwing a final descriptive clause that is too distant from its object and unlinked by any connective phrases, making us pause to figure out whether it’s the ground or the treetops that the sunlight isn’t reaching. And once we’ve made that pause, we have to wonder: how is it that we know from way up on the mountain whether or not the sunlight is penetrating the trees beneath?

I don’t intend that breakdown to demonstrate that Journey‘s prose is awful — in fact, it’s quite serviceable throughout. However, while serviceable prose describing a puzzle can be pretty transparent, it is unable to carry landscape descriptions all on its own; these require something stronger. For this reason, I was most engaged with the game when it was describing puzzles, and least so when it was in its more common contemplative, exploratory state. Between the flat writing and the lack of context, I found it difficult to care what was going on in the game — it all seemed a little arbitrary.

The game employed some visual tricks that were helpful. Crayon sketches were scattered judiciously throughout, and unlike Arrival‘s crayon-work, these sketches had the effect of creating a soft, watercolor ambience rather than a childlike one. Also, the game selects the background color based on the time of day, and this too is an effective trick. Still, these techniques weren’t enough, for me, to counterbalance the sluggish prose, and I left the game feeling pretty unmoved. I know from experience that about the only way to become a better writer is to practice, and I look forward to seeing the author’s next game, to see that improvement in action.

Rating: 5.3

The Djinni Chronicles by J.D. Berry [Comp00]

IFDB page: The Djinni Chronicles
Final placement: 14th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

A favorite trick in Interactive Fiction, especially short works like those that appear in the comp, is to make the PC some kind of unusual or non-human creature. We’ve seen it with animals, as in Ralph and A Day For Soft Food. We’ve seen it with monsters, as in Strangers In The Night or Only After Dark. We’ve seen it with children, as in The Arrival and On The Farm. A Bear’s Night Out did it with a plush toy. In the freaky realms of Rybread, we’ve even seen it with things like car dashboards.

When the game is written competently and sufficiently debugged, this trick often works remarkably well, even better than its static fiction equivalent might. Why is that? I think it’s because IF has an advantage over static fiction in the area of character identification. When you’re reading a book, you may read third-, first-, or even second-person accounts of a particular entity’s exploits, and with sufficiently effective writing and characterization, you may even identify with that entity quite strongly despite its non-human traits, but no matter what you are still watching that entity from a distance. IF, however, literalizes the process of identification one step further. Not only does the prose put you in someone else’s head, you actually have to guide the choices of that someone.

I’d submit that when a reader is compelled to guide a character’s actions, especially if there are puzzles involved, that reader will try to think like that character would think. When this happens, the identification process has reached a place where static fiction can rarely take it.

It is exactly this place that The Djinni Chronicles limns with skill and imagination. The game puts the player in charge of a succession of spirits, each of whom has a unique method of interacting with humans and the physical world. These spirits perceive reality quite differently from corporeal beings like ourselves, and the game leaves it to the player to figure out just what those differences are. Luckily, it provides enough clues (and sometimes even outright explanations) that if you’re paying attention, you should be able to get the basic gist of how the system of djinni magic works.

This system is ingenious in several ways. First, it is quite alien from conventional portraits, which only makes sense, since those portraits have always been from the point of view of the summoner rather than the summoned. Second, despite its unfamiliarity, it makes perfect sense, or at least it did to me, as a plausible explanation for spirit magic. It uses the logic of “undercurrents”, in the game’s terminology, to explain things like why a djinn’s blessing can so often be accompanied by a curse — humans always ascribe a malevolent motive to such curses, but the game suggests that this may be just because we’ve never known the djinn’s side of the story. Finally, the system works well on a gaming level — Djinni Chronicles tells an interesting story that fits many folktale motifs, but doesn’t forget to be a computer game at the same time.

If it sounds like I was impressed by the game’s magic system, that’s because I was. To my mind, it did an excellent job of combining story and game into a seamless unit, providing fertile ground for puzzles that always made sense within the context of the story. Best of all, the system really made me feel like I understood what it was like to be a magically summoned spirit, and also why it is so difficult for humans to understand why such spirits so often bring more misery than happiness to their human summoners. The writing helped further this character identification, such as in this passage:

Vault Entry Room The location of my summoner was a room between the surface of the world [physically west] and a complex of vaults [physically east].

The room was a trap for physical beings. On one side of the room, a portcullis barred the way to the outside. To the other were the vaults for storage. A patterned stone wall blocked their unauthorized access.

This description does a lovely job of tracing the outlines of a location, because the spirit wouldn’t care about the details, while still giving its human reader a fair impression of the location’s real purpose. The game also indulges in judicious use of made-up synonyms for familiar concepts, thereby deepening our sense that the djinn population sees what we see, but through very different eyes.

I mentioned that the puzzles are integrated well into the story — they are also pitched at just the right difficulty level, or at least they were for me. I often found I had to think carefully, to think like the djinn I was directing, and that when I did so, I was properly rewarded. This experience added further to my sense of immersion in the PCs, since I never had to break the spell by consulting the walkthrough.

The game wasn’t perfect — a few typos lurk here and there, a section of verse has badly broken meter that jars against the elegance of the spirit world, and the routine that causes death when a certain point score drops too low is always one turn behind. Overall though, Djinni Chronicles puts a new spin on a well-loved IF gimmick, and makes it work like a charm.

Rating: 9.4

On The Farm by Lenny Pitts [Comp99]

IFDB page: On the Farm
Final placement: 7th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Like last year’s Arrival, On The Farm casts the PC as a small child. You’ve just been dropped off to spend two interminably boring hours on your grandparents’ farm. (No, the game isn’t interminably boring. That’s just a bit of characterization.) What’s worse, Grandma and Grandpa are in the middle of a fight with each other, and you have to try to find some way to help them make up. When so many IF games take place in science- fictional or fantastic settings, it’s quite refreshing to play a game that is firmly grounded in the real world. Even better than that, the setting is fully realized, to an impressive level of detail. Most all of what I call the first-level nouns (that is, nouns that are mentioned in room descriptions) are implemented with descriptions. The writing is crisp, conveying an excellent sense of place. Lots of details are present, not because they somehow serve the game’s plot, but simply because they bring the farm and its environs to life more vividly.

Yes, there are some problems in the writing as well. There’s the occasional comma splice or punctuation stumble, and from time to time the sentences seem to lose their rhythm, foundering like a lame horse. In addition, the prose sometimes descends into a sort of juvenile, scatological humor that works against the sincere tone of the rest of the game. Despite these few flaws, in general the game’s prose achieves a satisfying clarity. I grew up in suburbia, and my ancestry is decidedly urban, so I’ve never experienced firsthand most of the game’s referents. Nonetheless, after playing On The Farm I really have a sense that I’ve been there.

The puzzles, too, are mostly rather clever, and feel quite original. In particular, there is one multi-step puzzle which is integrated seamlessly into the game’s setting, so that it feels organic rather than tacked-on. Each component of this puzzle makes sense, and the feeling of solving it is quite satisfying. This is the main puzzle of the game, and it makes a very good linchpin. There are also a number of optional puzzles, which do little or nothing to advance the plot, but which deepen the characterization of the PC or enrich the setting. These are optional puzzles done right — they don’t feel like padding, but rather like fruitful avenues which branch off the main drag, rewarding exploration with further knowledge. There was a moment where I found myself quite skeptical (in the rope-cutting puzzle), and another where the default messages for some objects misled me into thinking that certain things weren’t important when they actually were (the levers puzzle.) However, such breaks of mimesis in the puzzles were the exception rather than the rule in On The Farm.

The other thing that interested me about On The Farm is the way it chose to characterize the grandparents. First of all, depiction of elderly people in IF as anything other than drunkards, lunatics, or the butts of jokes is noteworthy in itself. But let’s think a little more about these grandparents. They obviously have been married for a great many years, and yet they still bicker and argue with a great deal of intensity. Their age might suggest that they’d be rather conservative and prim, but instead they seem, if anything, rather earthy. The area around Grandpa’s chair is covered with tobacco juice stains because he “no longer has the range to clear the edge of the porch.” When the PC sees his grandmother after having entered a manure pit, she exclaims “you’re covered in shit!” They are by turns affectionate, nagging, and abstracted. In fact, they act a lot like real people. I guess what I’m driving at here is that the game does an effective job of giving depth and life to its NPCs by making choices that go against stereotypes. Because the grandparents in On The Farm don’t always do what we might expect, they seem just a little more real. In fact, the same might be said for the game itself.

Rating: 8.4

Six Stories by Neil K. Guy [Comp99]

IFDB page: Six Stories
Final placement: 3rd place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Six Stories bills itself as “multimedia interactive fiction”, and the billing is no exaggeration. Last year’s Arrival began to take advantage of the graphics and sound capabilities of HTML TADS, and Six Stories takes that development the next step. The game includes photographs (both of scenery and objects), graphical backgrounds, and voice-over narration. Inclusion of multimedia elements always makes me a little nervous, because it’s an ambitious decision that, it seems to me, takes a great risk of making the work look amateurish. Nonetheless, Six Stories‘ multimedia components combine to fashion an IF experience that is atmospheric and powerful in ways heretofore untouched by text adventures. Particularly impressive is the introduction, which is a knockout. The game begins as you are driving your small car over treacherous roads through the mountains of southern British Columbia. Without warning, a blizzard overtakes you. The blinding headlights of an oncoming truck stab through the darkness, and you dim your brights in courtesy. The truck roars by, and when you pull the lever to turn the brights back on, the lever comes off in your hand, extinguishing all light. Your car veers out of control and plows into the snowbank by the side of the road. You turn the key to restart the stalled engine — no response. Even all by itself, this is a terrifically arresting concept with which to begin a story. When the game delivers it on a dark background, a voice-over narrating as the screen displays slides of the car, the road, and the crash, the experience feels like it could be part of any commercial adventure game released today.

It’s not perfect, of course. The voice-over feels a little rushed, and the narrator’s Canadian accent is sometimes a bit distracting. In general, it’s clear that the voice-over portions of the game, while quite good for amateur work, were clearly done by amateurs rather than professional actors. On the other hand, the photography (at least to my untrained eye) looked quite accomplished, and the other graphical elements, such as the backgrounds and the status line, were very well chosen. For a game that isn’t a product of a mainstream company, Six Stories‘ graphics and sound maintain a remarkably high level of quality. In particular, some of the photos accompanying the game’s eponymous “stories” were just gorgeous. Multimedia represents a daunting challenge to the prospective IF developer, because it adds whole new layers of artistic forms, each of which could sink the game if it’s not up to snuff. IF writers already face the difficult demands of combining quality writing and design with good programming; as difficult as it is to both write well and program well, how much more difficult then to be also a good photographer, a good actor, a good sound technician, and to be skilled with all the software necessary to get these things in digital forms? I can’t imagine we’ll see too many multimedia text games that approach the level of Six Stories, simply because not only must it have been a hell of a lot of work to take all the pictures, record all the sounds, do the appropriate tweaking with Photoshop, SoundEdit, etc., and write the code that gets all these things going together, but I can’t see many developers doing all these things as well as Guy manages to do them.

All this fulminating about the multimedia aspects of the game probably makes it sound like I’m trying to avoid talking about the writing. Rest assured I’m not. Six Stories is a rather brief piece of work, but it is very well-written. The descriptions are moody and memorable, and the stories it tells create a wonderful air of folk tale while at the same time maintaining a refreshing originality. The game’s one puzzle is very clever, though one part of it did feel like a bit of a “guess-the-verb” to me. Here’s a hint: if you’re stuck, you’re probably not being specific enough about a particular action. The whole thing feels more or less like an excuse to put together some impressive visuals and oral storytelling, but the result is no less moving for all that it seems rather arbitrary. Six Stories is one of the biggest downloads of the competition (it may be the biggest — I haven’t checked), but it’s worth every second.

Rating: 9.3

The Arrival by Stephen Granade as Samantha Clark [Comp98]

IFDB page: Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Clichés
Final placement: 4th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

The Arrival is the first HTML-TADS game I’ve ever played, certainly the first competition game ever to include pictures and sound. I was quite curious as to how these elements would be handled, and maybe even a little apprehensive. I wasn’t sure that a lone hobbyist could create visual and musical elements that wouldn’t detract from a game more than they added to it. But Arrival dispelled those fears, handling both pictures and sound brilliantly. The game’s ingenious strategy is to cast an 8-year-old as its main character, which makes the fact that most of the graphics are really just crayon drawings not only acceptable, but completely appropriate. Just for good measure, the game chooses “Attack of the B-Movie Clichés” as its theme and subtitle, thereby making the cheese factor of the special effects (which is pretty high) actually enhance the game rather than embarrass it. The pictures are delightful — the crayon drawings evoke a great sense of childhood and wonder while continuing the humorous feel of the whole game. The spaceship (two pie plates taped together) and the aliens (in the author’s words “the finest crayons and modelling clay $2.83 could buy”) are a scream — I laughed out loud every time I saw them. The game also includes a couple of very well-done non-crayon graphics, one an excellent faux movie poster and the other a dead-on parody of a web page, both of which I found very funny. The sounds, though sparse, are equally good — the sound of the alien spaceship crash-landing startled the heck out of me. I’m not used to my text adventures making noise! But a moment later I was laughing, because the noise was just so fittingly silly.

However, all the funny pictures and sounds in the world couldn’t make Arrival a good game if it wasn’t, at its core, a well-written text adventure. Luckily for us, it is. The game is full of cleverly written, funny moments, and has layers of detail I didn’t even recognize until I read the postscript of amusing things to do. The aliens, who bicker like a couple of married retirees touring the U.S. in their motor home, are great characters. Each is given a distinct personality, and in fact a distinct typeface, the green alien speaking in green text while the purple alien has text to match as well. If you hang around the aliens you will hear quite a bit of funny dialogue, and if you manage to switch their universal translator from archaic into modern mode, you can hear all the same dialogue, just as funny, rewritten into valley-speak. The game has lots of detail which doesn’t figure in the main plot but creates a wonderfully silly atmosphere and provides lots of jokes. For example, on board the ship is an examination room, where by flipping switches, pulling levers, or turning knobs you can cause all sorts of machinery to pop from the walls and perform its function on the gleaming metal table, everything from laser beams to buzz saws to Saran Wrap. In addition, Arrival is one of the better games I’ve seen this year at unexpectedly understanding input and giving snarky responses to strange commands, which has been one of my favorite things about text adventures ever since I first played Zork. Even if you can’t (or don’t want to) run the HTML part of HTML TADS, it would still be well worth your time to seek out The Arrival.

However, don’t be afraid to rely on hints. I had played for an hour and hadn’t scored a single point when I took my first look at them. Now, once I got some hints I determined that the puzzles did in fact make perfect sense — they weren’t of the “read the author’s mind” variety and I would probably have come to solve them on my own. Perhaps the presence of pictures, sound, and hyperlinks threw me out of my IF mindset enough that I was struggling more than I should have with the puzzles. That’s probably a part of it, but I think another factor was that all the details in the game ended up becoming a big pile of red herrings for me. There are quite a few items and places which have no real use beyond being jokes, and I found it quite easy to get sidetracked into trying to solve puzzles that didn’t exist. It’s not that I don’t think those pieces should be in the game; I actually find it refreshing to play a game where not every item is part of a key or a lock, and even as it caused me to spin my wheels in terms of game progress, it helped me ferret out a lot of the little jokes hidden under the surface of various game items. However, if you’re the kind of player who gets easily frustrated when your score doesn’t steadily increase, don’t be afraid to rely on a hint here and there. Just remember to replay the game after you’re done so that you can see what you missed. Besides, that pie-plate spaceship is worth a second look.

Rating: 9.6