Comp05, >INVENTORY

Tough Beans by Sara Dee [Comp05]

IFDB page: Tough Beans
Final placement: 5th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Tough Beans has, hands down, the most powerful opening of any Comp05 game I’ve played yet. Here’s the first screen:

Lambkin. Babydoll. Princess.

In the large oval mirror above your dresser you watch a pale hand drag a bubblegum-pink brush downward through a section of fine blond hair. It is your hand. It is your hair.

You can’t feel anything.

WHOO! That alone knocked my socks off, and then it was followed by several more screens in the same tone, depicting a PC who has been “swaddled in epithets” (what a turn of phrase!) like the 3 words that start the game, but who is starting to emerge from her doll-like stupor. (And in that spirit, let’s note here that the PC does indeed have a name: Wendy.) In fact, as we discover gradually, pieces of her have been in rebellion for a long time, but today is the day it all breaks.

Man, did I love this premise, and for the most part, Tough Beans really delivers, with several cool techniques for enhancing its narrative power. There’s that stunning intro, with multiple screens of text, each one of which blanks out the last before finally giving way to the game proper. We’ve seen that before in IF, and it’s used very well here.

There are the introspective flashbacks tied to otherwise ordinary game actions, memories from childhood that deepen our understanding of Wendy and how she got into her current situation. Sometimes, those flashbacks show us those rebellious parts of her, parts which have been dutifully squelched in support of her conformist ambitions, but which roar up to support the destroyer that emerges. This, too, is not a new technique in IF, but Dee does a marvelous job with them, writing vignettes of memory that are not only compelling on their own, but which tie elegantly to both the specific action that prompted them and the overarching themes of the game.

Then there’s something I don’t remember ever seeing, but which made for a really potent effect when it worked. Upon Wendy entering a new location, Dee will often hijack the initial room description to instead provide a little cut-scene, before then allowing the room description to, well, describe the room. Here’s an example from early in the game:

Living Room There is so much sunlight streaming in from the window over the sofa that you have to blink your eyes a few times before they are fully focused. When your vision is restored, you notice a red rubber chew toy peeking out from behind a pillow on the couch. Barkley! As if on cue, you hear a loud snuffling sound behind you. You turn around just in time to see Derek's beloved bull mastiff settle himself down in front of the entrance to the hallway. He proceeds to gnaw on his toy with gusto, completely ignoring you as usual...

Followed by a few more paragraphs setting up a puzzle. Look again, and we get:

Living Room The living room, like the bedroom, is still a work in progress. All the necessaries are here, however: you've got a couch, a couple shelves to hold Derek's books, a TV, and plenty of sunlight. A colorful braided rug covers the floor.

This moment really worked for me. It acknowledged that I’d changed locations, but instead of being like another room in a colossal cave, the new location instead functioned like another beat in Wendy’s story. My focus was immediately drawn to figuring out what to do with Barkley (who is not only blocking Wendy’s way but also gnawing on her shoe… ick.) It was only after the first few obvious actions failed that I took stock of the room proper, a progression which felt strongly mimetic to how a person’s actual thought processes might work in such a scenario. There were other times when the technique didn’t flow so freely for me, and I found myself wishing I could see the room without having to LOOK a second time, but for the most part, I was happy to be swept through the story as I moved through the world.

The game isn’t pure narrative — there are definitely puzzles, one of which was enough of a doozy that it sent me to the walkthrough. But in employing a deft compositional hand between depicting Wendy’s interior and exterior worlds, Tough Beans got me strongly invested in navigating through her challenges.

I successfully managed to do so, at least after that little trip to the walkthrough, where I found out that my stuckness was due to neglecting the fact that the game frequently implements descriptions for second-level objects, and it turns out sometimes they’re important. However, I only finished the game with about half the points, and here’s where the final innovation lives. Tough Beans, we learn, awards points for solving puzzles, but just as often it does so for finding opportunities to fully realize the character. As the walkthrough puts it, points are awarded “in situations where Wendy shows some backbone, spunkiness, cleverness, etc.”

I would say it’s even a little more nuanced than that, as at least one point comes from behaving in an adult, responsible manner, though several others derive from being a hellion. In any case, the game was sized well enough that I’d found the non-optimal winning solution by about 80 minutes in, and could then spend my remaining 40 minutes finding opportunities to make Wendy an even stronger version of herself. It’s an ingenious idea to have the points, at least in part, function as a character-themed “Have You Tried…?” section.

This didn’t work perfectly. I think the point awarding could have been done a bit more consistently — 10 points is too few for all the potentially relevant opportunities in the game — and I wish the walkthrough had just come out and told me how to score the points rather than coyly hinting. Moreover, I really missed the inclusion of some features that do (I think) come natively with Inform, such as a Full Score breakdown and notifications when I scored a point.

Similarly, there are just a couple of little bugs and some places throughout where the prose stumbles, often by missing a word or a punctuation mark. Nonetheless, I spent the whole game rooting for Wendy and rooting for Tough Beans, and was happy to see them both succeed in the end, even if they weren’t flawless. In fact, as the game’s excellent characterization so effectively declares, flawlessness is most emphatically not the point.

Rating: 9.5

The Colour Pink by Robert Street [Comp05]

IFDB page: The Colour Pink
Final placement: 6th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

The Colour Pink is one of those games that starts out with one premise and then wildly shifts gears into something else entirely. There’s nothing wrong with games like that. Heck, I even wrote one. But putting your players through a major shift incurs a responsibility, and that responsibility is to make it clear what is happening. You don’t have to do that immediately — it’s perfectly fine to let a mystery simmer and then have the solution coalesce, either slowly or quickly, at the very end or before that. But if you never explain what happened, your players are left sputtering, “Wait, but how come… what was the… why was everything, and then… WHAT???”

That was me at the end of The Colour Pink, a game which starts out sci-fi, then turns into fairy-tale/fantasy, then skids back to sci-fi at the last move (or doesn’t, depending on which ending you choose), but at no point makes it clear just what you’ve experienced. It seems like maybe you eat a hallucinogen, but apparently its effects can last forever, if you so choose? Oh, and the thing you eat has one set of effects immediately (and even some effects before you eat it, along the lines of compelling you to eat it… in some unexplained way) and then a different set of effects later? Unless the second part (the shift to fantasy) wasn’t a result of eating the thing at all, but is some other weird thing happening on the planet?

Also, there are missing people, and we never find out what happened to them. Did they turn into the animals that we meet in the fantasy land? Are they normal but we’re just experiencing them as animals? What is the War that the fantasy animals keep referencing? I guess there’s a wizard who does a thing to a princess, but what is that even about? Or is the princess not a person at all, but rather a hallucinatory projection of a missing item? There’s some whole thing at the sci-fi level about trying to create a (sci-fi) love potion, and what happens with that? Is it what causes us to be compelled to eat the hallucinatory (or whatever) food? Is the whole fantasy landscape a dream or something? Or are we sharing a dream with the missing people, and the PC is the only one who gets out? (In endings that exit it?) Why is everybody an animal except us?

Questions, questions, questions, and there are no answers forthcoming. I kept waiting for them, and they never arrived. This is a… I want to say “betrayal”, and that’s a highly charged word, so maybe it’s a little too much. It is a shirking of authorial responsibility. Now, I will own the fact that I played this game in two installments with about a two-month gap between them. Maybe my failure to understand what was going on is on me. But even in my first few moments with the game, I immediately found myself scrambling for answers, trying to get my bearings in the description of events. Here’s that introduction:

You are on an abandoned planet again. Not content with almost killing you the last time, the Captain has delegated you again to investigate another out-of-contact colony. Apparently you impressed him with your survival instincts, by evading thousands of insect-like creatures before the ship finally sent down enough people to wipe them out. Maybe your job description should just be renamed as the Expendable Explorer. Unfortunately, you have no choice but to obey the Captain’s orders.

An hour ago you were sent down into a thick jungle. When you made contact with the ship you found out that they had missed the clearing where you were supposed to land. The intervening hour was spent cutting through the energetic plant-life until you finally reached your destination.

Immediately following that, I wrote: Already confused. “When you made contact with the ship”… Wasn’t I sent down from the ship? I “found out that they missed the clearing” where I was supposed to land? Wouldn’t I have known that from the fact that I didn’t land in the clearing? What is my destination? The out-of-contact colony? Was that where the ship was supposed to land?

I mean, once each milieu settles in, there’s a bunch of running around and solving puzzles in a very familiar IF way, and taken on their own, they’re reasonably satisfying, but they’re a bit like ornaments hanging on an invisible Christmas tree. Sure, they’re fine and pretty, but nothing seems to connect them in any way, which makes everything feel arbitrary and baffling. Consequently, while I had fun at moments in the game, it kept accumulating narrative debt that it never paid off, so even with multiple endings available (and even a whole potential violent path, a la Undertale, that I never bothered to explore), I still felt kinda cheated when it was done.

Rating: 7.0

Vespers by Jason Devlin [Comp05]

IFDB page: Vespers
Final placement: 1st place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

I came to this game knowing it had won the 2005 IF Competition. That couldn’t be helped. I was detaching from the IF community in that year, after my kid was born in June, but I was still dialed in enough to know the name of the winning game. It just took me almost twenty years to actually play the thing, that’s all. Because I just looked at its IFDB page, I also know that it won a bunch of XYZZY Awards, and that it has achieved lasting respect, still making it onto a list of Top 50 all-time IF games in 2023.

Starting with that knowledge gave me a rather unfair (albeit unavoidable) set of biases. Playing an acclaimed game, at least for me, comes with a higher initial bar of expectations, and maybe a little less tolerance for mistakes. Lucky for me, Vespers delivers on its promise, and earns its kudos. The religious subject matter is pretty alien to me, and religious games have been offputting to me in the past, so I appreciated the author’s note that Vespers “isn’t a religious game: at least not in the sense of trying to convert anyone”, and that he himself is “not Christian and wasn’t raised Christian”. Another unfair set of biases on my part, I suppose, but those upfront announcements helped me relax my guard and put my trust in the game.

Once I did that, I found it a rich and immersive experience, albeit in a disturbing way. I don’t think I’ve seen a better use of quotation boxes, with the possible exception of Trinity, which pioneered them after all. I hope it’s not too spoilery to say that Vespers uses quote boxes as a way to showcase the PC’s internal dialogue, an inner voice which becomes increasingly askew from its moorings, and which we learn later may have been leaking out for quite some time.

Yes, we have an unreliable narrator here, and maybe even an entire unreliable milieu, in a way that’s again hard to talk about without being too spoilery. And yeah, it’s a 20-year-old game (nearly), but I still strive to keep these comp reviews spoiler-free, as they’re about discovery after all. I’m making an exception, though. Fair warning: mild spoilers follow for both Vespers and Photopia, because I think there’s a fruitful comparison there.

There’s a moment in Photopia when what you’ve witnessed in the beginning comes back around, but this time with loads more meaning attached, and an oppressive sense of fait accompli. There’s nothing you can do to change what happens — after all, you already saw it happen — and indeed one of the knocks on Photopia was an alleged lack of interactivity, given the unchangeable nature of its central event. But I would argue that the very real interactivity of that game attaches the player to the event, and to the characters affected by it, with much greater ease than a similarly plotted short story could. You may not always be in the driver’s seat, but events witnessed from the passenger seat can still have a very powerful effect.

Vespers doesn’t hop perspectives the way Photopia does, but it does start with a decision already made by the PC, and everything else in the game flows from that decision. As the game goes on, the consequences of that decision become more and more clear, and it is the PC’s job to reckon with those consequences as best he can, within his declared moral framework.

And here’s where the Catholic setting becomes phenomenally useful to the game’s project, because it turns out we are dealing with an original sin. In Vespers, the sin was committed by the PC, but before he was being controlled by the player. We must inherit the consequences of that sin, and proceed as a flawed man moving through a flawed world. It’s as if the game begins with “*** You have lost ***”, and then asks, “Now what?” Nevertheless, and also true to its theme, Vespers does offer the possibility of redemption, at least on a personal level, even if a tsunami of suffering has overtaken the world. The path to get to that redemption is a very narrow one, but I think that also rings true in a Medieval setting.

I found this a brilliant use of interactive fiction, verging on profound. I have a fundamental quibble with the “good” path (albeit one that might be addressed if I understood Catholic theology better), and I did find a few places where the language or the coding fell down, but overall it’s clearly a well-tested and well-crafted game, which has absolutely earned its place among the all-time great works of interactive fiction.

Rating: 9.8

Ninja II by Paul Panks as Dunric [Comp05]

IFDB page: Ninja II
Final placement: 36th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

So, like the other Panks game I played from this comp, Ninja II required me to fire up a DOSBox instance to get it working. However, unlike that other game, I found myself with very little patience for this one.

I’ve already written my rap on Panks, and what’s more, this game is almost identical to his entry from Comp04 — it has one additional “puzzle”, and those scare quotes belong there. (The puzzle, which is simultaneously ridiculously hard and stupidly easy, prompts you with “Dare you beat dragon?” and leaves you to determine exactly how that phrase works as a “clue”.)

Granted, I played the earlier version of Ninja 19 years ago, and remember virtually nothing from it (except that it’s bad), but I don’t need to revisit it. I’ve done my time. Plus, re-submitting a nearly identical game to your last year’s entry is obnoxious behavior, however you slice it.

Rating: 1.9

Beyond by Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi, and Alessandro Peretti [Comp05]

IFDB page: Beyond
Final placement: Tied for 2nd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here we are again: I couldn’t finish this game in two hours. I found it quite absorbing, and with 20 minutes left, I really debated whether to turn to the walkthrough or just play out my 20 minutes with a bit less dawdling around examining things, getting as far as I could. I picked the latter, but with 5 minutes left, I really wanted to know how the story turned out. So I peeked at the walkthrough, hoping to speed through to the end. NOPE! Turns out I was midway through chapter 4 of 7 (plus an epilogue) — just about halfway through, I reckon.

Back in the day I used to penalize games like this in my ratings, hoping to discourage people from this behavior. But it’s not like whatever I put here will deter people in, like, Comp06. Plus, as Michael Coyne taught me, authors have a strong motivation to enter their too-long games in the comp, and nothing I did as a reviewer could have changed that motivation anyway. And I’m obviously not trying to go through all these Comp05 games in six weeks — I started on these almost three years ago! So while I am still stopping after two hours to write a review, I’m not going to specifically take points off anymore, except to the extent that having to stop prematurely affected my enjoyment of the game. Heck, in some games stopping after two hours feels like a gift.

Stopping Beyond was disappointing, though, because I was deeply involved with its story, being pulled along at multiple levels. At the higher level, there’s a frame story, in which the PC is the spirit of an unborn child, exploring the reason why it wasn’t born. I was very wary when I encountered this premise, fearing that it would veer into an anti-choice polemic, but I needn’t have worried. Instead this concept brings us into a compelling murder mystery, in which we play a detective looking into the murder of a pregnant woman.

Really, I shouldn’t call the unborn spirit piece a frame story, because it returns after every chapter, in interludes where we see the murder scene as a ghost, or experience a bit of what life might have been like had the mother lived, or watch different scenarios of how that night might have gone, from a godlike remove. In the prologue, the game makes clear that the PC (and thereby the player) cannot affect her fate. She will never be born, and can only learn the circumstances surrounding that fact.

Thus the game takes place under a heavy layer of inevitability, similar to Photopia — a game to which Beyond pays a neat, subtle tribute by replicating one room and item description. And yet, also like Photopia, Beyond weaves a deeply compelling story around this unavoidable death. As the detective, we’re able to investigate the scene of the crime, talk to a wide variety of connected characters, and make clever observations that lead us closer and closer to solving the crime.

As any good mystery should, the plot takes several unexpected turns, and who knows how many more were in store, given that I was only halfway through the story when I reached my time limit? Not only is the plot well-crafted, but the presentation of the game is excellent as well. The whole thing renders in tan text on a black background, setting a nicely somber mood, and fantastic illustrations appear throughout the traversal, in that same color scheme. These illustrations might appear at the top of the text window, or on either side, and the game handles their appearance, persistence, and disappearance very smoothly, in a way that always enhances the story and never disrupts it.

The one Achilles heel in Beyond, I’m sorry to say, is that the game sometimes demonstrates a rather shaky command of English. Every so often there’s a mention of a baby “wrapped in white clothings”, or a character who says, “I have took the water”, or a phrase like, “I feel like I’m bringed away.” All things considered the errors aren’t overwhelming — certainly not the trainwreck that some broken English comp games turn out to be — but enough to throw me out of the story when they happen.

Nevertheless, this bothered me much less than it might have, and that’s down to the overall outstanding craft that was put into the game. It was one of those that I wish I could give more time, and maybe someday I will, but for now, I leave the story unfinished, but with admiration.

Rating: 9.3

On Optimism by Tim Lane [Comp05]

IFDB page: On Optimism
Final placement: 24th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Readers of these reviews know that brevity is… not my strong suit. However, I could review this game in one word, and that word would be: “Painful.” Because I am who I am, though, you get multiple paragraphs about how this game is painful in multiple ways.

First, it’s painful because it clearly comes from pain. This game’s world, its images, its themes — they all seem to be torn from an extravagantly suffering heart, attached to another deeply wounded person. There’s drug abuse, self-harm, buckets of tears, and I suspect it’s rooted in at least a few real events. As such, it’s a tough game to review, because I hardly want to be stomping on somebody’s feelings, even 19 years later. I hope that writing this game gave the author a bit of relief.

That said, its subject matter isn’t the only thing that makes this game painful, and here I just have to say, if you have tender feelings on behalf of the topic and the possible real-life connections, you may want to stop reading. Because this game was absolutely painful to read due to its absurdly overwrought, faux-poetic, and hyperdramatic language. Over and over again, the game reaches for profundity or eloquence, and lands comically short.

Here, have a sample picked at random:

Room of Your Joy My eyes scanned this room of your joy for minutes. They were searching for something that could not be found; for what this room must surely contain. But this is what they found: emptiness. A horribly large, vacant room was spread out before my eyes. A room that showed the depth of your sorrow, though it was called your joy. But as my eyes perused the room longer they found that there was but one small relic left in this room: a frame about the size of a sheet of a paper plastered on the far wall. Otherwise, vacancy could have been this room's name.

Oh man. I don’t think I need to take this apart piece by piece in order to show the ridiculousness of it, so let’s just focus on one thing: the weird personification of the PC’s eyes. They seemingly act on their own, leaving absolutely no agency for the actual character. The eyes scan the room. The eyes are searching for something. They don’t find it. The room is spread out before them. They peruse it longer. It’s all eyes, no “I”.

This mannerism repeats throughout the entire game, most often to ludicrous effect. We get lines like, “To the surprise of my eyes, the statue moved”, and, “My eyes once again received the strange privelege [sic] of sight”, and “In front of my eyes lay an opening begging to be traveled.” It’s not limited to the PC either, as the game pops out gems like, “Those great faucets you call eyes,” and “the pumps we call eyes.”

Nor are the eyes singled out for this bizarre treatment. This game never says, “I pressed the button” when it could instead say, “I moved forward and applied the weight of my body upon the remote’s only button.” And oh, the heart references! Most of the game takes place inside a metaphorical (and sometimes a bit oddly literal) heart, and the poetry (oh yeah, there’s poetry) refers to hearts relentlessly. At one point, when it was waxing tragic about a heart that will “forget to pump blood through my core,” I couldn’t help but flash on Andrew Plotkin’s classic review opener for Symetry:

This is terribly, terribly unfair. I’m really sorry. But I just started laughing hysterically, and it’s not what the author intended. In the middle of an intense ending sequence, I read the line:

‘My blood pumper is wronged!’

I just lost it. It’s a very ‘Eye of Argon’ sort of line.

That’s pretty much the story with this game’s prose. You’re not supposed to laugh, but it honestly can’t be avoided.

There’s another level of pain in this game, and that is its painful design. Several times in my playthrough, I had to turn to the hints (which were clear and thorough, and for whose inclusion I’m grateful), only to find that the command necessary to resolve my conundrum felt like a truly random thing I would never have thought to do. It’s not surprising, I guess, that a game living entirely in an allegorical, metaphorical, and dreamlike landscape would have logical non sequiturs in it, but no fair trying to make other people guess at them.

That’s enough. I appreciated those hints, as I said, and there’s a moment where the game ends but you’re given the chance to go back to a crucial decision point. I thought that was a cool innovation, one I’d enjoy seeing in other games. Overall, though, my memories of this game will always be full of pain. And just a little hilarity.

Rating: 3.7

A New Life by Alexandre Owen Muñiz [Comp05]

IFDB page: A New Life
Final placement: Tied for 2nd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

It’s clear that a lot of thought has gone into the world of A New Life. In the standard manner of high fantasy, the text is littered with names of lands, kingdoms, rulers, saints, legendary figures, and so forth, none of which seem to have any reference outside the fictional milieu. Examining a coin can give you a paragraph-long infodump about how the local economy has been affected by the waxing and waning power of a particular merchant league over the last three hundred years.

Not only that, it becomes obvious early on that the people of this world can change genders, or rather biological sex — not quite at will, but gradually over time in ways that exist on a spectrum of voluntary to involuntary. We see the implications of this trait appear everywhere from the children’s stories we encounter to the answer to “X ME”:

In your month of travel you have allowed yourself to slip into the neutral gender as a practical matter; as a result of the changes in the shape of your body, your clothes fit you poorly.

For the most part, I found this fictional realm pretty impressive — I particularly enjoyed the user’s manual for a Bag of Holding, which explains how important it is to tend to the item’s emotions. And yeah, there’s a Bag of Holding (though not exactly with that name). There are goblins. There’s a dragon. There’s a magic staff, and a charm that senses danger, and a fancy sword, and in general a whole adventurer’s-packful of Dungeons and Dragons tropes, albeit frequently with some changes rung on them, like the bag’s sensitive ego, or the goblins who turn out to be adorable and wise rather than disposable low-level mooks.

Still, for as thorough as the worldbuilding generally is, those D&D-isms sometimes get in the way of logical sense. For instance, we learn that the PC is a refugee, on the run from battles and press-gangs, about which you can learn plenty by use of the REMEMBER verb. Yet, when this refugee comes across an “Adventurers Wanted” sign, the game’s story demands that we show interest. As I was playing the character, they were not an adventurer, and getting involved in some dangerous lark is the last thing they’d want to do. The goal was just to get to a new city and establish, as the game’s title suggests, a new life.

Yet when I tried to do so, here’s the message I got: “Soon, you will follow the road and go on to start a new life in Isult. But your curiosity is not yet satisfied.” Really… curiosity? I’m on the run from a war, having tragically lost my brother (whose decision not to change genders may have led to his death), bartering my possessions along the way in a long and difficult journey, but I’m not allowed to continue that journey until I satisfy my curiosity about the mysterious and vaguely hostile peddler-woman I met along the way?

Yep. That’s the story, and it’s an example of how very convincing worldbuilding can actually work against quest-plot design. With a less defined character, I’d feel far less resistance to just getting on with exploring the spooky caves. Once I started to explore those caves, that’s when the next design flaw kicked in.

I found myself drawn into a beguiling story, with excellent NPCs, an intriguing background, and a clear goal. The problem was, as I realized about 80 minutes into the game, I was in a dead branch. I’d gotten to where I was by going through a dark place with a guide. I needed to get back through that dark place, but my guide was gone, and no light was available. Even more frustrating, although there were plenty of plausible ways I could have acquired such a light, the game hadn’t implemented any of them, and the main information-giving NPC had nothing to say about it. The hints were no help, the walkthrough was no help, and so I was forced to restart, but with considerably less engagement than I’d had the first time.

So I finished the story, but with far less emotional impact than I think was intended, due both to its insistent disconnection from the PC’s own characterization and the way the game had locked me out of a valid narrative the first time. Even at the end, when I seemed to have checked all the boxes, the game didn’t seem to respond. I ended up checking the walkthrough, only to find out that all I needed to do was travel in the direction that my “curiosity” had cut off the last time. Without a cue that I was ready to go, I had no reason to believe that command would work again. But work it did, and the game ended with an epilogue that didn’t land for me, because as detailed as the world and the story were, the game’s style of interactivity had let them down.

Rating: 8.0

Distress by Mike Snyder [Comp05]

IFDB page: Distress
Final placement: 4th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Say you’ve got an idea for a story. It’ll be thrilling, fast-paced, and ingenious. Say, just for illustrative purposes, it’s a story about the survivor of a crashed spaceship, who has to help injured crew members, signal for a rescue, and figure out why the ship crashed in the first place, all while being hunted by a hostile creature on the unexplored planet. You know what all the beats are, and how your protagonist gets from beginning to end by making clever use of nearby resources and surviving tightly timed encounters like chases and medical emergencies. You know there’s going to be a twist at the end, how you’ll foreshadow it, and how it will finally manifest.

Now, you could just go write that story! Who knows if it’d get published anywhere — it’s pretty cliché-heavy — but if you wrote it you’d be able to shape it exactly to how you imagined it. But what if you wanted to make that story into a game? It would seem to fit an IF milieu pretty well, with the protagonist being alone in an unfamiliar landscape, and having to piece together information and objects to get to the best ending. How do you take your story, which is specific and clear in your head, and turn it into an interactive experience that is — and this part is important — fun and enjoyable for players?

Well, this is where things get dangerous. When you make a story interactive, you are now obligated to create sufficient margin around the ideal plotline that players can experience the game’s world and its events without feeling like they’re inside some kind of narrative lab experiment where electric shocks are applied anytime they step off the prescribed path. At one extreme of this continuum, any command that doesn’t adhere to the ideal walkthrough results in a losing ending. At the other end, the player could depart from the story entirely and still be supported by the game to eventually reach a satisfying conclusion.

Guess which end of this continuum is easier to code? Lots of authors fall into the trap of forcing their players to adhere too closely to a specific string of commands, either by failing to implement anything outside of it or by lowering the boom immediately on any deviations. Very few authors create a world so rich that new and different stories can emerge from it autonomously, because doing so is unbelievably difficult. Finding a satisfying middle ground between these extremes is the essence of the IF designer’s craft. That’s why it’s often said that the best IF doesn’t offer unlimited interactivity but rather a very convincing illusion of unlimited interactivity.

So back to our crash survivor story, which, yeah, is the plot of Distress. You might implement this by creating lots of ways for the protagonist to survive, and in some ways, Distress attempts this. However, its flexibility tends to be around more trivial tasks such as what verbs can be used for one step of a first aid process. It has zero flexibility on more important things, like how many turns you have to complete that first aid process, and heads up — if you don’t complete it correctly, you are locked out of a winning ending without knowing it.

Some games might handle a situation like this by providing a generous time limit, and ending the game upon failure to complete the task, which would cue players that this is a puzzle whose outcome is crucial to success. Other games might give you clearer and clearer nudges towards the right solution, and then end the game on a failure, or even outright force a success. Distress, on the other hand, makes it seem like the failure is a valid outcome, and maybe even inevitable, only to silently prevent success even after many more steps are completed.

The author makes a telling comment in the text file accompanying the game: “To some degree, I think we as IF players have grown soft.” This comment suggests a view of interactive fiction in which the players battle the authors for dominance over the experience, and longs for the good old days in which authors would sharpen their knives and players would hope not to bleed too much. That’s one view of this medium. It’s not mine. I play IF because I want to experience a world and a story, and while I enjoy a challenge, I do not enjoy repeated electric shocks.

So it was with Distress, whose name seemed more and more apt the longer I played it. The writing is good, the coding is strong, and the premise is solid, and I found it fun and compelling at first, but it quickly became apparent that there was many an electric shock to be had. I lost over and over and over again. Finally I turned to the hints, and despite following their cues, even the one that “solved the puzzle”, I still lost. Then I turned to the walkthrough, and lost. Then I started over, adhered closely to the walkthrough, and finally got past the point that had been battering me. Was I having fun? Reader, I was not.

Distress set out to punish me for my deviations from its ideal route, and it certainly succeeded, but repeated punishment is not my idea of a good time. Even valid ideas for how to solve a puzzle, even ideas that actually are the solution to that puzzle, aren’t allowed unless you carefully shepherd the PC’s mindset through them. So, for example, there might be a battery to be found right next to you, but you’re not allowed to find it until you demonstrate to the PC that a battery is needed. To make matters worse, the many tightly timed sequences pretty much guarantee you’ll be replaying parts of the game many times, so while you learned about the battery problem 10 playthroughs ago, you still have to pretend it’s your first time.

Distress may well appeal to a certain kind of player, one who agrees that we’ve all gotten too soft. It wasn’t for me.

Rating: 6.8

PTBAD6andoneeighth by Jonathan Berman as Slan Xorax [Comp05]

IFDB page: PTBAD6.5: The URL That Didn’t Work or Have You Seen the Muffin Man? He Is Quite Large
Final placement: 35th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

So, I guess this game technically has a much longer and different title than appeared in comp05.z5, but honestly PTBAD6andoneeighth is bad enough. Remember when I was cataloging the different kinds of bad comp games and I mentioned “the obnoxious bad ‘joke’ game where the joke is on you for playing”? This is one of those.

The winning move is mildly amusing — it’s actually one of the first things I typed in, and in response the game gave me a winning message, then implored me to play more. “Of course, you COULD restart and poke around a bit,” it said. “I mean, how could it hurt? Its just a few more minutes of your time.”

So I spent a few more minutes of my time. It did hurt. Then I stopped, and was glad.

Rating: 2.1

Son Of A… by C.S. Woodrow [Comp05]

IFDB page: Son of a…
Final placement: 15th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

If you’ve read many of my comp game reviews, than you probably know that while I certainly notice and dislike all kinds of mechanical prose errors, there is one error that consistently tops my enemies list: the NASTY FOUL ITS/IT’S ERROR. There’s a moment in this game where you can be stung by thousands of wasps until you eventually have an allergic reaction and die. Well, my its/it’s allergy had pretty much that experience while playing Son Of A…. A NFIE in the introduction was rapidly followed by two NFIEs in the first room description. Yet another one starting the very first object description I looked at (the wallet) had me commenting “ahhhhhhhhh IT IS killing me with the many errors BELONGING TO IT”.

It just kept going, and for a while there, I began to theorize that the author just always uses “it’s” no matter the occasion, which made me feel… a little better? But then, nope, there are correct uses of “its” sprinkled throughout the text, sometimes right alongside incorrect uses of “it’s”, as in this description of a ladder: “It’s thick structure has turned a silver-grey from sitting in the weather. Despite its age, it appears to have held up well.” There are also occasional correct usages of “it’s”. Sigh.

Aside from this swarming pestilence, and a few other mechanical bugs, the game’s writing is actually pretty strong. Son of a… does a nice job of setting an effective scene and layering the PC’s point of view with humor. In addition, the game implements nouns at a satisfying level of depth — players are often rewarded for inspecting every detail of a scene.

Other implementation details are a bit more peculiar. For instance, the game clearly states in its help text:

1. Entering important places or taking important things will increase your score.
2. Completing puzzles will not increase your score.

But… why? I’m guessing perhaps this is the foible of a first-time author who found it too difficult to make Inform recognize when a puzzle was solved, and just gave up on the whole idea. This approach does lead to an odd gameplay experience, though, in which you can be wandering around with full points but several more puzzles to solve before completing the story.

As for the puzzles themselves, they’re a pretty pleasant diversion. Just as the writing does a good job of setting the scene, the structure of the scenario is intriguing and offers lots of opportunities for logical barriers solved by logical means. There is a pretty gaping plot hole — wouldn’t a long-abandoned motel have had its power cut off? For the most part, though, I enjoyed finding ways to resolve the PC’s predicament, and even had a few satisfying “aha” moments when I hit upon clear solutions that had initially eluded me.

What a pity, then, that a fundamentally enjoyable game is badly flawed with simple, fixable mechanical errors that simply were not fixed. Here’s an oldie but a goodie: Bob’s Guide to Its and It’s, You Idiots. Print it out, hang it up, and avoid those mandatory deductions.

Rating: 5.0