Tag: edgar allan poe

Nevermore by Nate Cull [Comp00]

IFDB page: Nevermore
Final placement: 7th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Nevermore calls itself “An Interactive Gothic”, and lives up to its billing with aplomb. A loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, Nevermore builds on the foreboding and melancholy of Poe’s poem, injecting elements of alchemy, forbidden magic, and thematic whispers of Shelley’s Frankenstein. You play the speaker of the poem, a dejected wretch pining for his lost love, “a maiden whom the angels named Lenore.” The difference between the PC and the protagonist of Poe’s verse is that this PC is willing to challenge Death itself to retrieve Lenore, and has the mystic lore, the alchemical elements, and the dread hubris to bring about her resurrection. I thought this was a fabulous premise, and the game succeeds admirably at delivering that frisson that is an indispensable part of eighteenth and nineteenth century gothic literature. To Poe’s already powerful imagery, Nevermore adds the illicit thrill of cocaine and opium, the dark power of occult magic, and the appropriate hints of colonialism and oppression. For me, the combination worked very well at evoking the rich purple feel of novels like Frankenstein, The Monk, and the template gothic novel, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto.

The game’s writing and coding don’t let it down either. In fact, in some spots the detail is so rich that it feels like almost every noun mentioned in any room description or object description is accounted for with a description of its own. Nevermore uses Inform‘s “box quote” feature to bring up excerpts from the poem at various appropriate points in the plot, and this device adds considerably to the game’s atmosphere. Also adding to that atmosphere is the writing style of the various books discovered by the PC. These books, while not burdened with Middle English spellings like the alchemical quotes in Christminster, do an outstanding job of conveying the spooky and arcane feel that such forbidden texts should have. All in all, Nevermore builds a magnificent gothic atmosphere with a combination of well-judged plot, good writing, and bug-free code.

What a pity, then, that it all comes crashing to Earth, victim of its horrendously flawed design. For one thing, the game features the equivalent of a starvation puzzle in its first few moves. This puzzle is no less forgiving, and perhaps even stricter, than the one that used to be a standard feature of TADS games (check out something like Deep Space Drifter if you don’t know what I’m referring to.) What’s more, the “starvation” problem (it’s not really starvation, but it might as well be — it’s a timed necessity for action that kills you off if not appeased) continues to occur throughout the game, cropping up every twenty moves or so. Even if starvation puzzles didn’t bother me, this one’s fuse is way too short.

Beyond that annoyance is the far greater problem of the game’s main puzzle. This puzzle involves following a highly complex alchemical ritual, requiring dozens of steps and fairly precise actions. Multi-step puzzles in and of themselves aren’t a problem, and certainly it makes sense within the context of the plot that the PC’s actions should involve complicated magical rituals, but the way this puzzle is implemented is deeply problematic. Nevermind the fact that one particular object is required for at least four of the steps, one of which destroys it. Nevermind the fact that the instructions for the ritual are couched in highly figurative language, language that is open to multiple interpretations. Let’s even forget about the fact that some of the necessary steps aren’t particularly discernible without glimpsing into the author’s mind — the thing that sent me over the edge about this puzzle is the fact that its instructions (the figurative, abstract ones) are spread over six different books, books which only reveal their contents randomly.

That’s right, each book contains between four and ten critical pieces of information, but each time you type “READ BOOK” you get a random selection of one of those pieces. Consequently, not only can you never be sure if you’ve obtained all the information you need, you have to perform the same command over and over again, wading through dull repetitions of already-printed information in the hopes that you’ll turn up something new. Once I figured out what was going on, I turned to the hints and never looked back. This tactic allowed me to get through the game (though even that required several restarts, due to the “destroyed object” problem), but the fun had long since drained from the experience. Nevermore is IF with marvelous writing and a chilling gothic atmosphere, but until its fundamental design problems are repaired, it will remain as lifeless as Poe’s lost Lenore.

Rating: 7.4

The Ritual Of Purification by Jarek Sobolewski as Sable [Comp98]

IFDB page: Ritual Of Purification
Final placement: 12th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

The feeling I got while playing Ritual reminded me of nothing so much as those old Dr. Strange comics from the 60’s, back when the master of mysticism was drawn by Steve Ditko, himself a master of the bizarre. The game is full of strange, hallucinatory images: a road that melts into nothing, an arch with marble carvings on one side and black decay on the other side, exploding and melting universes. The whole thing made me feel like I was immersed in a Ditko landscape, and the fact that the main character is a spellcaster on an astral voyage didn’t hurt either. Of course, some of the scenes in Ritual could never have taken place in a 60’s comic — at least, not one that adhered to the Comics Code Authority. There’s nothing really outrageous, but there are scenes of sexuality, drug use, and gore that you’d never see Dr. Strange experiencing. I’m not suggesting that the game is some sort of Dr. Strange rip-off, or that Ditko was an inspiration for Ritual — that’s just what it reminded me of. However, one source of inspiration for the game was clearly some of the more obscure poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. At the completion of almost every puzzle, the game throws a box quote from Poe, usually one which has some relation to the obstacle just overcome. These quotes are well-chosen, digging deep into the Poe archives and highlighting how much he inherited from William Blake, as well as how much he prefigured H.P. Lovecraft. At its best, most deranged or sublime moments, the game evokes the weird, dark mysticism shared by all these creators. On the whole, the effect is very trippy, and a fair amount of fun.

Unfortunately, there are some false notes as well. From time to time a character will say or do something fairly anachronistic, which tends to break the spell pretty thoroughly. In fact, at one point you can get a character to whip out a bong and start taking hits from it, which brings the whole elevated plane of symbolism and wonder dive-bombing back to earth. The effect is not so much of Alice in Wonderland‘s “hookah-smoking caterpillar”, but more of Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It just doesn’t fit. There are also a few times when the game seems to slip into clichés or “AD&Disms” — one beast is described as “biting easily through a set of plate mail”, and some of the spells feel suspiciously close to ones I remember from 7th grade basement role-playing sessions. In addition, the game has a number of grammar and spelling errors, usually minor problems like missing punctuation or vowel mistakes, but again they break the spell. Finally, and worst of all, there’s a bug in the game which causes it to not respond at all if a certain action is taken sooner than the game expects it. There’s nothing that ruins immersion quite so much as when a game just doesn’t respond to a command in any way. Well, maybe not nothing — crashing the interpreter would probably ruin immersion more, but because of the lack of response problem I ended up turning to the hints, only to find that I had in fact given the right command to solve the puzzle — I just gave it a little too soon.

The game suffers a bit from the “unconnected symbols” syndrome — sometimes it feels like all of these dreamlike images are just images, with no meaning or substance attached to them. However, the game manages to pull them together somewhat through its title, intro, and ending — the bizarre symbols with which the game is littered are all loosely connected through a theme of purification, of facing inner demons and the pain & joy of life in order to become a better person. It didn’t entirely work for me — some of the symbolism seemed arbitrary or clichéd to my mind — but I think it was a good beginning. I would really like to play a game with this kind of tone which had freed itself from shopworn images and RPG leftovers. Something with imagery like the more arresting parts of Ritual, but which really cohered to make a powerful statement on some aspect of the human condition, could really take advantage of IF’s immersive capability to create a remarkable work of art. Ritual isn’t it, but I hope it becomes the jumping-off point for someone (the author perhaps?) to create something like it but better: no writing errors, no clichés, no anachronisms, no bugs — just the Ditko universes exploding and melting all around us, with meaning.

Rating: 6.9