Cryptozookeeper by Robb Sherwin [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2012.]

IFDB Page: Cryptozookeeper

We Eat The Night, We Drink The Time

It took me some time to appreciate Robb Sherwin’s work. I found his first comp game, Chicks Dig Jerks, a really unpleasant experience, due to its misogyny and its bugginess. His second comp entry, A Crimson Spring, fared better with me, partly because it concerned superheroes, one of my favorite genres. But that game too was quite bloodthirsty in its content, and quite buggy in its execution, so it wasn’t really to my taste. Even then, though, the change had begun. Sherwin’s writing, which won praise in some quarters from the very beginning, was sharpening, and his coding discipline was increasing, albeit slowly. Subsequent games like No Time To Squeal and The Recruit gave Sherwin’s writing a chance to shine while somebody else took care of the fussy coding details, and outside the comp he bucked the general trend towards short games by releasing sprawling long-form works like Fallacy Of Dawn and Necrotic Drift. Not to mention, I met the guy on several occasions, given that we’re both IF people who live in Colorado, and it turns out that he’s one of the nicest people in the community. Belying the outrageousness of his writing, the man himself is a gentle, witty, soft-spoken presence, a real mensch who’s done me many a good turn over the years.

Which brings us to today, and Cryptozookeeper. It’s the most Sherwin-esque Sherwin game I’ve yet seen. It’s gonzo, it’s funny, it’s extreme, and it’s shambolic, and it’s all these things to the most highly refined degree I’ve ever seen Robb accomplish, which means it’s all these things to the most highly refined degree I’ve ever seen anyone accomplish. And is it still buggy? Oh sure, of course it is. There are bugs in this game that had me pounding highly creative curses into my keyboard, just so I could log them in my notes and remember how aggravated I was.

But then some well-crafted joke or unexpected linguistic fireworks would burst forth from the screen, and suddenly I was having a great time again. I don’t know whether this means that I’ve finally acquired the proper tastes, or whether Robb has finally pushed his work over my personal tipping point where good writing outweighs bad coding, but in any case, I found myself enthusiastically quoting the game to others, and recommending it to at least some of my friends — those with strong stomachs who could handle the gore and grotesquerie. Cryptozookeeper is by turns enthralling and infuriating, fascinating and repellent. Its reach ultimately exceeds its grasp, but oh, what a mighty reach it is.

Like many of Sherwin’s other games, Cryptozookeeper is a multimedia work, taking advantage of Hugo‘s ability to present images and sound integrated into the text game. I found the pictures a mixed bag. Many of the character photos, especially those of the PC, were both funny and informative, providing visual information that nicely rounded out the characterization provided by the text. The location shots, on the other hand, were sometimes useful but more often just a bit baffling. They were almost always washed with some weird filter that oversaturated colors and downplayed contrast, making the images so information-light that I soon mostly ignored them, a habit which ended up biting me later when a puzzle depended on me watching for subtle differences in the location photo.

The music, on the other hand, was a roaring success. Cryptozookeeper is equipped with an excellent soundtrack of ominous electronica, which almost always enhances the game’s mood with creepy synthetic overtones. I enjoyed the music so often that I found myself using the “NP” command (which displays the title and artist of the song currently playing) every few minutes, and periodically made notes to myself to seek out the tunes for my iPod. Another gimmick which worked well was the dynamic credits and help screen — in order to avoid spoilers, the game’s documentation keeps a few of its cards hidden early on, only displaying instructions for new commands and new actor appearances after they’ve been revealed in the story.

As with any Sherwin game, though, the star of the show is the writing, and Cryptozookeeper does not disappoint. The room descriptions in particular dazzled me over and over. Standard issue in the Robb toolkit is the extended aside that starts out original, then piles on harder and harder just to make sure that it’s absolutely matchless. To pick a sample room description more or less at random:

Building Corner
The corner of this building has a window at ground level. There aren't any security signs upon it, or systems that seem to be in place, other than "windows make a lot of sound when shattered," which is a feature you get for free with windows, even the ones in this town sold door to door. You were under the impression that the place was recently constructed, but judging by the deep scratches along the exterior, the place has apparently been under siege by either a pack of ravenous, wild, roving bobcats or sentient handclaws.

Calling “windows make a lot of sound when shattered” a building’s only security system is original, and funny. Mentioning that this is “a feature you get for free with windows” not only adds to the funny by belaboring the obvious but also, by its use of the word “feature”, echoes the sort of advertising claim that comes along with the operating system that happens to be called Windows. But it’s still not done! We learn that Christmas City, New Mexico (the game’s locale) apparently suffers from door-to-door window salesmen, whose products may be shoddy but not so shoddy that they aren’t still noisy when broken. And that’s not even mentioning the roving bobcats and the sentient handclaws. The vast majority of room descriptions contain this sort of wit overload, and they make the game a joy to read.

Not only that, there are a variety of miniquests built into the game’s design, and Sherwin frequently employs them as excursions into unusual writing styles, like the Rybread-level psychedelia of the section whose rooms have titles like “Were you ever content or did you assign it in retrospect?”, “Esophagus”, and “Despair and mouth.” Not all these experiments work perfectly, but each is executed with such bravura gusto that I was more than happy to be carried along. There are also a ton of inside references for Infocom and IF nerds, which I found quite enjoyable given that I am one such nerd. Every time the game threw out a phrase like “oddly angled” or “it all comes down to this”, I grinned wide. There’s plenty of food as well for other kinds of computer geeks, sports geeks, and aficionados of the weird and twisted. I can’t say I enjoyed every bit of it — this game prompted me to look up a few things I wish I’d never learned about — but I sure enjoyed a lot of it.

Sherwin is also well known for his dialogue, and there’s plenty of it here. It’s embedded, sometimes awkwardly, in a conversational system that provides a list of topics and makes TALK the central command. Though NPCs are nearby the vast majority of the time, most commonly there are no conversation topics available. However, when the plot is ready to move forward, Cryptozookeeper cues the player that a topic is available by highlighting the word in another character’s dialogue. Sometimes you even get your choice of two. Having three or more topics available at once is pretty uncommon, though.

This system eliminates the need to code lots and lots of responses into an NPC, and considering what excessive care Robb puts into his dialogue, it makes perfect sense to have such a labor-saver on hand, but as a player I found it clumsy more often than I wanted to. There were situations where an NPC would ask a direct question of the PC, but the topic of the question would never be made available in the topics list, which forced me into the situation of not being able to pick up a rock-solid conversational cue, and not being able to even acknowledge to the other character the reason for my silence. Other times, there were some things going on that seemed to beg for discussion, but the system didn’t allow for it.

However, when dialogue is available, life is pretty good. All Robb’s characters are more or less the same character: intelligent, self-hating, morally bankrupt, directionless individuals whose primary skill is hyper-referential and hilarious snarky commentary, and who are nursing some secret or semi-secret pain, often connected with a failed relationship. This results in a fairly low level of emotional engagement with their stories (at least for me), but an extremely high level of entertainment in their banter. Again, picking a sample more or less at random, how about a section where the cute goth host of a local access TV show is speaking to the PC:

“…It’s all right down here, but I’m originally from Colorado and I think I am moving back. Shortly. I just signed a contract to do this show on a station that way. Not that I’d tell any of the turnips around here. Do you have satellite TV?”

“I – ah, I’m between televisions right now. Trying to see what format emerges dominant. The color versus black and white thing really screwed with my ability to trust technology. That and the wireless revolution: I developed a fixation and craving for power cords.” The truth is that you could not afford programming for your TV once Elephant Memory fired you, so you just sold the television itself. (The part about power cords is also true.)

“Well, download my show off Usenet,” she says. You brighten, pretending you know what Usenet means. “It’ll be a lot of the same show, but with a slightly bigger budget. It’s really going to fly!”

Almost every sentence contains some offbeat note — “the turnips around here”, “a fixation and craving for power cords”, “pretending you know what Usenet means.” And that’s when the characters are flirting with each other. When they start sniping at each other, clever digs abound. That’s also when a lot of their backstories come out. As I mentioned, I don’t relate to these characters much on an emotional level, and that goes for their histories too, which in my mind generally tend towards the category of “sob stories from asshole guys.” For the most part, these people tend to behave in despicable ways and then suffer the inevitable consequences of doing so, which doesn’t make them very sympathetic. Even they have their moments, though. There’s something a little touching about the way these misfits find and sometimes help each other. The ending, in particular, I found satisfying and even moving as a character moment.

What really ties the whole game together and makes it work is the comedy. Sherwin has become a master of the well-turned IF joke, and Cryptozookeeper has many many many funny funny funny bits. Just to pick a few of my favorites:

  • Deanna looks at Lebbeus with irritability and exhaustion, as if he were lobotomized, an oft-misbehaving ferret, or had just left a comment on Youtube.
  • “Hey, ANY OTHER HORRIBLE CLONES THAT MAY BE IN EARSHOT – WE’RE COMING OUT! Everyone BE COOL or I will BEAT YOU with my INVENTORY.”
  • Everyone stops their animal fighting, boozing, whoring, sports book calling, plotting, thieving and usage of emulators in conjunction with ROMs they don’t own to stare – mouths agape – at your faux pas.

    “Hey, jerkoff,” says a non-descript guy in the back trying to attach a stiletto to the wing of a baby bald eagle, “What’s the goddamn matter with you? What an asshole!”

There are hundreds and hundreds of examples of such wit in this game. Cryptozookeeper is epic in many senses, but most of all it’s a boundless source of laughs. Even if it were an utter failure on all other levels (which it isn’t), this game would totally be worth playing for the jokes.

These jewels are strung together in a structure that doesn’t put much emphasis on puzzle-solving, branching, or interactivity. Quite frequently, the dialogue trees and even the compass directions equate to more or less a “turn the page” command. That’s not to say that Cryptozookeeper is some kind of foulmouthed, pseudoscientific Moment Of Hope. There are some puzzles, and certain aspects of the game in fact offer a vast variety of choices (thanks to the magic of combinatorics). There’s also a branching narrative in certain places — more about that in a bit. What’s true, though, is that this is a pretty conceptual game. It is far less focused on presenting the player with a landscape and objects than it is on presenting a definite plot (admittedly one studded with a lot of optional goals), a variety of set-pieces, and of course lots and lots of dialogue, jokes, and joke-laden dialogue. Consequently, quite often a directional command isn’t so much a method for getting through a physical landscape as a way of getting to the next piece of the story.

I mentioned miniquests earlier, which is where the opportunities for branching and optional goals come in. The PC is hunting for DNA samples from a wide variety of animals — nevermind why. A few such samples are required to finish the game, but for the most part, gathering a whole lot of them is entirely voluntary. I strongly recommend pursuing all available paths, though — the optional quests are quite often the occasion for crackerjack showcases of prose style experimentation and, of course, more jokes. Not only that, the DNA samples that are invariably the prizes of these quests open up greater and greater richness that can be brought to bear on the game’s midsection.

On the other hand, it’s in the miniquests where I encountered the game’s worst bugs, which were generally of the “unstable inventory” variety. Items, as well as people, disappear and (occasionally) reappear throughout the game without explanation. Or sometimes the explanation is so lame and the player so powerless that fury results. In particular, there was one occasion when an NPC purloined a number of my hard-won DNA samples, which never returned, and I never even got the opportunity to engage him in conversation about it or otherwise try to retrieve my stuff. This almost ruined the game for me, and I spent dozens of turns cursing at the screen about it. Few occurrences in IF provoke more ire from me than when inventory that took a great deal of work to obtain suddenly disappears, irretrievably, for no good reason. In fairness, at one point the game declared that it would eliminate an important item of mine, only to have the item reappear later on, seemingly none the worse for wear. So sometimes the instabilities worked in my favor, but they were still bewildering.

I should say here, by the way, that I hardly want to be the guy ragging on what was obviously an enormous labor of love. Like Peter Nepstad before him, Robb Sherwin obviously put a colossal amount of energy and dedication into this game, so much so that it in fact sent him to the hospital at one point. Plus, as I said, he’s a hell of a guy in person. However, a review that avoids mentioning any of a game’s flaws does a disservice both to the author and the audience, in my opinion. Thus, we say what must be said, albeit sometimes a bit sheepishly.

So while I’m complaining, let’s spend a little more time on the game’s defects. The biggest problem was the bugs, as is par for a Sherwin game, but it wasn’t the only problem. In some ways, the entire premise of the game is flawed, in that it seems to purport that the main character has some sort of special power to bring cryptids into the world, but the reason, such as it is, for the character’s power is very flimsy. The creation process is extremely simple, and completely facilitated by technology. Literally anyone could do it, but everyone in the game acts as if the PC is the only one capable of this rudimentary button-mashing.

The only thing I could piece together from the background given in the game is that his ability springs from his utter scientific ignorance and incompetence. In other words, anybody could do these simple things but only the most ignorant person would, because someone with even a shred of scientific understanding or basic sense would dismiss the entire thing as preposterous. So I guess this is a little subversive, having a PC whose abilities spring from stupidity, and it might work well for a one-time puzzle, but Cryptozookeeper forces the PC to engage in this process over and over. It seems to me that once everyone witnesses the process succeeding, the ignorance premise becomes invalid.

Speaking of repetition, let’s talk about the combat. Have I mentioned the combat? Loooong stretches of the game’s midsection are taken up with RPG-ish combat scenes. The game will allow an unlimited number of these, and a fairly hefty minimum is required in order to proceed to the endgame. Crucially, it’s unclear how much leveling up and how many combatants will be necessary in order to succeed in that endgame, so I decided to have ten combatants, and grind away until I’d leveled one combatant up to the highest possible level (which is level 5). This took a whole lot of grinding. I’ve got literally thousands of lines of transcript devoted to this fighting.

The fights are not without their charm. When the battle begins, a window displays the crucial stats for each fighter along with a little tagline, just for fun. As with everything else in the game, the nature of the creatures themselves as well as their taglines were often a source of laughs. For instance, the wolverine’s tagline is, “I’m the best at what I do.” Not quite a direct X-Men quote, but close enough to make me laugh. Also, each attack made by either enemy is described with some colorful little sentence, along the lines of “The sloth could have avoided that last blow, but craves oblivion, taking 3 points of damage.” There are maybe 20 of these sentences, and they’re fun and fine and everything, but like I said, the combat goes on for thousands of lines. Even this level of variety gets numbingly repetitive pretty quickly.

I wonder — for a game structure like this one, could the damage descriptions be crowdsourced? Say Robb got on ifMUD, or Jolt Country, or intfiction.org, (or maybe all of these and more) and asked 20 or 30 co-conspirators to come up with 5 or 10 damage descriptions each? Suddenly the algorithm’s options increase by an order of magnitude, and even thousands of lines of combat might still yield the occasional surprise. For all I know, this has been tried in the past — I haven’t bothered to check it out. All I can say is that a handful of even the cleverest lines wear thin through constant repetition, and I wonder if it would have worked better if there had been a barrelful. Thankfully, there is quite a bit of variety in the randomly selected enemies, and there’s a great deal of richness to be found when creating the combatants — more than I even wanted to take the time to find, really. Not that I wasn’t pissed when losing the opportunity.

Despite the repetition, or perhaps because of it, I found myself attaching distinct personalities to each of the fighters in my little ragtag army. I knew which ones were the badasses, which ones were the chokers. Some weren’t as good as their stats might imply, while some seemed to pull out an unexpected victory surprisingly often. The PC is portrayed as having paternal feelings towards the fighters, and damned if I didn’t find myself echoing that very dynamic. It was a peculiar phenomenon — code constructs that had almost no description, couldn’t be interacted with, and had virtually no personality at all aside from a photo and a tagline, suddenly became characters that I cared about, and whose foibles I knew, just because I watched them each go through randomized combat dozens of times. I don’t know if everyone would have the patience to do this (really, I doubt it), but I found it bizarrely and surprisingly rewarding, especially when the fighters came into play in the endgame.

On the other hand, given that there was so much repetition, I wish the game had done a better job of smoothing the path. Each time I wanted to set up a fight, I would go north, push a keypad, select a fighter, and go south. I did this over and over and over again, like a few hundred times. I dearly wish the process would have been condensed into one command, or even less than one command. Perhaps every time a fight ends, the game could ask me if I wanted to trigger another, and if I said yes, allow me to pick a fighter, then start the next fight straight away. That would have been so much less annoying than running through a litany of steps over and over.

There are a few interface stumbles like this. Several times, some kind of action scene involving the PC would begin, but action-y verbs like “KICK [object]” would still result in comically inappropriate standard library messages like “Venting your frustrations on [the object] wouldn’t accomplish much.” Or perhaps someone is coming at the PC with an axe, but “GET AXE” yields “You haven’t seen anything like that.” Oh, well, what a relief then — guess I can stop worrying about being chopped to bits by it! Finally, I found the conversation system syntax awkwardly staggered. The game enforces this formulation, with the “T” command for talk:

>T DEANNA
Please enter a topic
>> GUNS

Over and over again, I’d forget about this enforced second step and type something like “T DEANNA GUNS“, only to be told “[That is not understood by the game.]” I really wish it had been.

Okay, enough of that. I want to praise one more thing before I close: the cueing. This is the art of very subtly guiding the player into typing an unexpected or non-standard command at the prompt, and Cryptozookeeper does it masterfully. I won’t cite any examples, because that would obviously take the fun out of them for potential players. Instead, I’ll just say that several times I was rather flabbergasted at what the game got me to type, without being at all overt or on-the-nose about hinting at that response. Every time that happens, the player gets to feel like a genius. It’s one of the best tricks IF can pull, and Cryptozookeeper does it beautifully.

This game is definitely not for everybody. If you find gore and repulsive behavior too upsetting, avoid it. Similarly, if repetitive RPG combat makes you want to shoot yourself, stay healthy by not playing this game. For me, though, IF that makes me laugh over and over again, and occasionally astounds me with something sublime or defiantly ridiculous, can be forgiven of almost any sin. Cryptozookeeper is that kind of IF. It’s Robb Sherwin at the top of his very strange game, and I’m glad I finally figured out how to enjoy that.

Sophie’s Adventure by David Whyld [Comp03]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nope, no sign of him.

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

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

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

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

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

> go north
You move north.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 3.0

Timeout by Stephen Hilderbrand [Comp01]

IFDB page: Timeout
Final placement: 35th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’m in a dilemma about this game. I played through once, found some things to enjoy about it, and reached an ending that was pretty clearly not optimal. Not having a clear idea about how to reach the optimal ending, and running short on time, I pulled out the walkthrough, and it showed me something about a particular item that I hadn’t really understood (due to the game’s vague description of that item): it had a subcomponent that could be examined to yield more information. However, when I did so, the interpreter crashed with a fatal text buffer overflow error.

Now, I’ve developed a pretty strict rule about unfinishable games — I give them a 1, write a short review explaining the problem, and move on. The question is: does Timeout fit that category or not? I did finish it, so in a sense it’s not really unfinishable, but on the other hand, it seems impossible to reach a more optimal ending. What to do?

Here’s what I’m deciding. I won’t give the game a 1. I was able to play through successfully (well, for one value of the word “successfully”, anyway), and that’s worth something. That first experience had some good points — there were some funny spots in the writing, and some sort of fun cut scenes. On the other hand, it was mostly a negative experience. Timeout‘s implementation is maddeningly shallow, leading to lots of encounters like this:

You can see a trash can (which is closed) here.

>open can
That's not something you can open.

Or this:

A steel door is set in the north wall, and a passageway heads west,
back to the hallway.

>x steel door
You can't see any such thing.

>n
The door is locked.

>unlock door
You can't see any such thing.

Trying to get immersed in such a world is like trying to scuba dive in a puddle.

There were other problems too, including a NASTY FOUL IT’S/ITS ERROR, which is becoming my version of the Olympics’ “mandatory deduction” items. And then the fatal crash. All this comes together to make a game that’s not really worth my time in its competition version.

Rating: 3.0

Wrecked by Campbell Wild [Comp00]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 4.0

Four Seconds by Jason Reigstad [Comp99]

IFDB page: Four Seconds
Final placement: 15th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Maybe I’m just getting cranky, but I really feel that this year’s competition games are a lot buggier, on average, than in previous years. It’s drained some of the fun out of the competition for me — I’ve begun to dread starting a new entry rather than eagerly anticipate it. For each unknown game, I start to wonder whether it will be just another bugfest that I’ll sincerely try to play for 30 minutes to an hour, getting more and more frustrated with its constant errors before turning to the walkthrough. That’s not normally my approach, but this year’s games have changed my usual attitude.

Four Seconds is a case in point. It is very, very buggy, and heavily burdened with grammar and spelling errors as well. If you don’t use the walkthrough, you will find lots of bugs. In fact, there are even a few bugs in the walkthrough itself. If you type “info” or “about” in the game, you’ll find an apology from the author for the bugginess of the game. This is something for which I have zero patience. If you know your game is buggy, fix it. Fix it before you ask people to play it. Don’t waste my time.

It’s baffling to me that buggy games like this get entered, especially considering the fact that this year Lucian Smith and Liza Daly went to the trouble of actually setting up a betatesters clearinghouse on the web. Testers were available, so why weren’t they used? All I can conclude is that the authors who submitted buggy games just don’t care that much about the players’ experience. This disregard leaves the player little motivation to care about the game’s rating, and it gives me as a reviewer very little motivation to put any time or energy into giving useful feedback. In addition, playing a game so crammed with bugs feels like another version of non-interactivity, since there’s almost nothing to see outside the bounds of the path dictated by the walkthrough.

So here’s the deal with Four Seconds: it’s not worth the download. Not only is its plot a b-movie rehash of much better games (mayhem at an isolated science complex a la Delusions or Babel), but it’s pretty much unplayable. Tons of commands get no response at all from the parser. Many more get responses that make no sense. Those pieces of prose that do emerge, whether arrived at by use of the walkthrough or just dumb luck, lack the most basic proofreading. I spent an hour of my life that could have gone to something much more fulfilling on playing Four Seconds. I wish I had spent 59 minutes and 56 seconds less.

Rating: 2.7