Tag: eye of argon

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

Acid Whiplash by Anonymous (a.k.a. Rybread Celsius Can’t Find A Dictionary by Rybread Celsius and Cody Sandifer) [Comp98]

IFDB page: Acid Whiplash
Final placement: 23rd place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

“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.”
— Andrew Plotkin, reviewing “Symetry”, 1/1/98

“It takes guts to do *anything* wearing a silver jumpsuit.
My point:
I bet Rybread wears *two* silver jumpsuits while he writes IF.”
— Brad O’Donnell, 1/6/98

I hope my title line isn’t too big a spoiler. I guess I can’t feel too guilty about giving away something that’s revealed in the first 3 seconds of the game. Anyway, it would be impossible to talk about this game without talking about Rybread Celsius. Yes, Rybread Celsius. The man, the myth, the legend. There are those who have called him “A BONA FIDE CERTIFIED GENIUS” [1]. There are those who have called him “the worst writer in interactive fiction today” [2]. There are even those who have called him “an adaptive-learning AI” [3]. Whatever the truth behind the smokescreen, opinion is clearly divided on the Celsius oeuvre. He appears to have an enthusiastic cult following who look at his works and see the stamp of genius, paralleled by another group who look at those selfsame works and see only barely coherent English and buggy code. I have always counted myself among the latter. Works like Symetry and Punkirita Quest set my English-major teeth on edge. I have never met a Rybread game that I’ve liked, or even halfway understood. But Acid Whiplash is different.

First of all, I need to say that I’m going to call it Acid Whiplash, for several reasons:

  1. I’m not sure what the game’s real name is supposed to be.
  2. The other name, while it may be (is!) perfectly true, is just too long to write out.
  3. Acid Whiplash is just such a perfect name for this game.

I’ve never dropped acid myself, but I’m guessing that this game is about the closest text game equivalent I will ever play, at least until my next Rybread game. The world spins crazily about, featuring (among other settings) a room shaped like a burning credit card (???), nightmarish recastings of Curses and Jigsaw, and your own transformation into a car dashboard. Scene changes happen with absolutely no warning, and any sense of emerging narrative is dashed and jolted about, hard enough and abruptly enough to, well, to give you a severe case of mental whiplash. Sounds like a typical Celsius game so far, right? But here’s the best part: stumbling through these hallucinogenic sequences leads you through a multi-part interview between Cody Sandifer and Celsius himself, an interview which had me laughing out loud over and over. Sandifer is hilarious, striking the pose of the intensely sincere reviewer, taking each deranged Celsius word as gospel, and in the process manages actually to illuminate some of the interesting corners of his subject, and subject matter. And Rybread is… Rybread, no more or less than ever. Perhaps being changed into a dashboard while listening makes the whole thing funnier — I’m not sure.

As usual, my regular categories don’t apply. Plot, puzzles, writing — forget about it. Acid Whiplash has no real interaction or story in any meaningful sense. (There is, however, one very funny scene where we learn that Rybread is in fact the evil twin of a well-known IF author). If you’re looking for a plot, or even something vaguely coherent, you ought to know that you’re looking in the wrong place. But if you aren’t familiar with the Way of the Rybread, or even if you are, I recommend giving Acid Whiplash a look. It might shed some light on what all these crazy people are talking about… but don’t expect to understand the next Celsius game.

[1] Brock Kevin Nambo

[2] Me. (Nothing personal.)

[3] Adam Thornton

Rating: 5.2 (This is by far the highest rating I’ve ever given to Rybread. In fact, I think it beats his past 3 ratings from me put together!)