david whyld, >INVENTORY

Mortality by David Whyld [Comp05]

IFDB page: Mortality
Final placement: 12th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

At its outset, Mortality makes a really big deal of how it isn’t for kids, indicating perhaps what its author expects the default IF game and audience to be, even in 2005. We are fairly warned that there won’t be “singing elves, saving the world and maybe a treasure hunt or two”. The help text describes it instead as “essentially an adult game”, and “more adult than not”. This feels like a strange bit of equivocation, as if it’s not confident in just outright labeling itself a game for adults, but as I played through, I found that the hedging was appropriate. While Mortality certainly has more than its share of (in the game’s words) “violence, bad language and scenes of a ‘questionable’ nature”, it’s not exactly aimed at adults either.

Rather, I’d associate it with the attitudes of a stereotypical teen boy, and kind of a gross one at that. There’s the protagonist who drives a Corvette, who “has slept with women of all colours, all nationalities, all races, from one side of the globe to the other”, who’s great with his fists and isn’t afraid to kill. There’s the love interest, who is always described as “ravishing”, or “the most stunning creature”, or “a truly radiant creature”, and so on. There’s rampant racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Every major character is thoroughly unlikeable, and the story itself is basically “noir with magic”, but minus any subtlety to the themes or development of the characters. There are numerous moments which adults (or at least this adult) would find eyerolling or outright offensive.

On top of this, the game is barely IF. There are bunches of cutscenes, or scenes where the interaction boils down to “press a key” or “do the only action we’ll let you do.” In the parts that are interactive, the implementation can be kind of screwy. For instance, you’re startled by a noise in the night, and jump up from bed to investigate. “X me” in this scene results in, “I am Steven Rogers, forty years of age. Ex-policeman, ex-SAS, ex-army. I am dressed in my usual clothes.” First, yeah, the PC inexplicably has the same name as Captain America, which I found pretty distracting. But also, he apparently sleeps in his “usual clothes”? There is a moment where the PC switches bodies with someone else, but “X me” spits back that same exact description. Come on.

My favorite wacky implementation moment was when the PC was hidden in a corner, waiting to ambush somebody. I took inventory and experienced this:

I am carrying a accident item and a blib.

X ACCIDENT ITEM I see nothing special about the accident item.

X BLIB I see nothing special about the blib.

An accident item (sorry, “A accident item”) and a blib? The scene is brief, those items never come into play (that I could tell), and they’re never mentioned again. Perhaps they were some kind of internal tracking mechanism that the game didn’t mean to reveal, but for some reason put into the PC’s inventory? My thought was, “This game has gone round the bend.”

My least favorite wacky implementation moment? The fact that the PC kept finding himself in chairs or beds, but Adrift cannot understand the command “get up”. I kept needing to stand, and the game and I kept doing this dance:

GET UP Take what?

Grrrrr.

Finally, there is the ending. My playthrough ended with me in a dark void, the game repeating over and over again, “All about me is the endless darkness of death. I have failed. I am undone.” Mind you, it still offers a prompt and pretends to be interactive at that point, but unless I was missing something clever, this was just “*** You have died ***”, but without the resolution. I hit this ending after a loooong non-interactive “dialogue” scene in which there kept being only one dialogue choice at each “branch”. How could I have avoided the “endless darkness” ending? I had no idea, so I turned to the walkthrough.

Except, the walkthrough is just a game transcript from a particular playthrough, not all that different from my own. (Really, the game is so minimally interactive that it couldn’t be all that different from my own.) What actions make the difference between one ending and another? It was a mystery. So I turned to the PDF which comes with the game. It suggests, “if you’re not adverse to some serious spoilers that might otherwise ruin the game for you, type the word cheat and see what happens.” I think you mean “averse”, not “adverse”, but okay!

CHEAT Try something else. That command is not one needed for this adventure.

Hey, thanks for that spoiler warning. It really preserved the surprise of that response. Later on, the PDF explains that Stephanie (the love interest NPC) is the key, and that there’s a hidden variable that tracks her state — keep that variable high enough for the better endings. Also, by default this variable is hidden, “but typing in the reveal command will display its current value.” Interesting!

So I typed “reveal”. I was not given the value of the variable! Instead, the game spit out the entire walkthrough, which, you’ll remember, is a full playthrough transcript. Or rather, it tried to do that, but seemingly ran out of gas about 90% of the way through. Until it did that, I thought I might mess around with different conversational choices and such to see what they did to the Stephanie state, but after that “hint” also failed, I decided I was done.

Mortality has some redeeming qualities. It’s an attempt at very story-heavy IF, and in some moments finds the balance between keeping the story on track and allowing the feeling of interactivity. The idea of choosing an ending based on how well you’ve kept a character happy is kind of cool (if a bit reminiscent of Galatea). The writing is, as the game might aver, “more error-free than not”, and does a good job of involving the senses, although a “smell” or “listen” command might not line up with what a description has said.

But overall, this is an unpleasant story populated with despicable characters, not really interactive enough to be interesting as a game, and burdened with an implementation that is not only shaky throughout, but doesn’t even fulfill the basic promises of its documentation. My experience with it went from annoying to puzzling to very annoying, and I’m glad to have it behind me.

Rating: 3.7

A Day in the Life of a Super Hero by David Whyld [Comp04]

IFDB page: A Day In The Life Of A Superhero
Final placement: 23rd place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

By now, my affection for superheroes is no secret. I love a good superhero game, and I love a good superhero parody. A Day In the Life Of A Super Hero is a good superhero parody, but unfortunately not a very good superhero game. Its greatest strength by far is its writing — there were many spots that made me laugh, and many more that made me smile. Super Hero‘s satire isn’t quite as finely honed as that found in Neil DeMause’s Frenetic Five games, but it’s lots of fun nevertheless.

Along with the typical comedy juice available from silly supervillain names like The Gardener and The Pizza Delivery Kid, Super Hero does a lovely job at conveying a boundless gee-whiz enthusiasm on the part of the PC. Near as I can tell, the titular hero actually has no discernible superpowers, and nor do any of the supervillains — they just adopt the exaggerated poses and outlandish names of the genre in the service of jazzing up their personalities. I also found it amusing that the game features no less than 28 ways for the hero to meet an unfortunate and ignominious defeat, and encourages you to collect ’em all, like bad-luck action figures. Moreover, Super Hero surprised me at times with its thorough coverage of unlikely verbs, and its witty responses thereto. For instance, when suspended above a crowd of people:

spit on crowd That's the sort of thing super villains would do, not super heroes.

Of course, taking a scattershot approach with the jokes as it does, Super Hero misfires every so often as well. Sometimes it throws out a joke so old as to have lost all its appeal. Other times, it’s guilty of running a gag into the ground — one “bad odor” joke might be funny, but ten of them will not be. Still, judged on its writing alone, Super Hero is a rollicking good time.

Unhappily, the game’s interactivity does not support its prose, and much of that is the fault of Adrift. The unmodified Adrift parser is already quite weak, but somehow in this game it seemed even worse than usual. For starters, Adrift frequently falls victim to its asinine policy of ignoring input that surrounds a keyword, resulting in gems like parsing “look behind couch” as the same command as “look at couch.” But the problem seemed to come up way more than normal in this game. For instance, when the PC tries to address his animal sidekick, Smelly The Parrot:

ask smelly about soldier A fusty smell pervades your apartment. It's probably a mixture of you never getting around to cleaning it and that time the Slug Monster was here to kill you.

The first time this happened, I went, “Huh?” After several tries, I finally figured out that the parser must be stupidly pulling “smell” out of that string and pretending that my command was “smell.” At least, that’s my theory for what it was doing, and repetition of the principle in other instances seems to bear that out. Conversely, the parser can be weirdly uptight about addressing items with their full name:

x rag You see no such thing.

x city rag The City Rag is the city's worst paper, one that specialises in writing slanderous and libellous stories...

[…]

x muggle You see no such thing.

x mrs muggle You've seen her sort before: old, grumpy, permanently displeased about something unspecified...

For a player like me, accustomed to other parsers’ much more sensible approach of treating all pieces of an object’s name the same, these responses are infuriating. Also infuriating is when the parser stubbornly and willfully misunderstands input:

ask erik about singer "Sorry, can't talk," says the singer. "Genius at work. Ohhhohohohohoh!"

But most infuriating of all is when the parser out-and-out lies, and lies in such a way as to make winning the game extremely unlikely. For example, at one point, it told me it didn’t know the verb SHOW, when in fact that verb is crucial to solving one of the game’s puzzles. When there are a number of free IF tools that provide much, much better parsers, my patience for substandard parsing like this is limited indeed, and this game would have been so much stronger had it not been hampered by such silly flaws.

However, sad to say, not all of Super Hero‘s problems can be ascribed to Adrift. For one thing, there are all kinds of bizarre typos that I can only chalk up to carelessness:

“You mean as in give him a damn goof biffing till he clears off and leaves you be?” says Smelly.

A damn goof biffing? Secondly, like Whyld’s Comp03 entry, this game seems quite a bit too large to complete in 2 hours, which is something I really dislike in a comp game. Of course, perhaps much of my inability to complete Super Hero stems from its aggravating tendency toward read-the-author’s-mind puzzles. To blithely spoil one of these, the PC’s apartment has a half-dozen pieces of furniture, and moving one of them reveals a crucial item. Nothing in the room or object description suggests that moving it or moving anything else will be useful. And so on.

At bottom, Super Hero is entertaining writing trapped in excruciating code. I fervently hope that other talented IF writers can avoid this dastardly predicament.

Rating: 6.5

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