IF-Review, >INVENTORY, Page 2

Future Boy! by Kent Tessman [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2005.]

Hugo’s Heroes

Kent Tessman is both a filmmaker and a game author, and his latest game, Future Boy!, seems to have started life as a screenplay. I say “seems to” because while there are a lot of references to the “original Future Boy screenplay,” I never found any place in the game or its accompanying documentation that actually explained the story of how it came to be, why it didn’t get produced, and how it morphed from a movie idea into a game idea. Instead, the game just cruises along as if we know what it’s talking about, which we don’t. At least, I don’t.

So the characters and story started out aimed at the silver screen. How do they survive the transition onto the monitor screen? Pretty well, I’m happy to say. There’s plenty of fun to be had in Future Boy!‘s rich and well-implemented world, and the game’s multimedia content is easily the most impressive I’ve ever seen in an independently produced text adventure. If Future Boy! were free, it would be one of the best amateur games ever. However, it isn’t free — Tessman sells it for $25 (or $20 if you’re willing to forego the CD jewel case and booklet), and for me, that price tag demands a higher standard of testing and design, a standard that the game doesn’t always meet. I feel uncharacteristically reluctant to level any aspersions whatsoever at Future Boy!, since it’s so obviously the product of immense craft and dedication by a small cadre of artists. However, the fact remains that I wasn’t entirely satisfied with it, especially its later sections, and despite all the care and attention it obviously received, this game is still a flawed gem.

Still, I come to praise Future Boy! before I bury it (or maybe just toss a few shovelfuls of criticism onto it), so let’s talk about the multimedia, which is just awesome. Future Boy! splits the screen horizontally, with the bottom half dedicated to traditional text output, and the top half occupied by various hand-drawn pictures, some animated and some not. These pictures can be of the current location, as is the case with most multimedia IF, but they also serve to illustrate important objects and NPCs, and they sometimes show animated cut-scenes as well. The art feels enjoyably comic-booky, though amateur — artist Derek Lo is no John Romita, but his drawings do a nice job of evoking both the comedic and the adventuresome elements of the game, effectively strengthening its tone. Moreover, Tessman enhances the comic-book feel by displaying these pictures as independently floating panels rather than trapping them in static frames. The animations are especially cool, combining moving images with sound to marvelous effect, and providing a real reward for the act of puzzle-solving or exploration that triggers them.

Speaking of sound, the game’s sound design is as solid as its visual appeal. There’s zippy original music, written by the multitalented Tessman, who also does voice-acting for one of the characters. All the NPC voice-acting is pretty good in general, and occasionally inspired. Future Boy! reinforces the voice actors’ character-building with color-coded dialogue — red for the red-haired woman and so forth. These multimedia touches lend the NPCs much more distinctiveness and nuance than appears in the typical text game. The one minor quibble I’d make with the game’s sound is its insistence on inserting odd little musical cues and stings at scattered points throughout the interaction, sometimes seemingly at random. These cues make for an interesting experiment in mood-building, but they’re distracting as often as they’re dramatic. Still, they can be turned off, so no real harm done there.

In fact, Future Boy! provides a wealth of options like that, allowing player control over not only traditional things like verbose or brief descriptions, but also over its use of color, images, sounds, conversation menus, footnotes — virtually every special feature it provides. Controls like these are emblematic of the care that went into this game’s implementation, which is quite thorough overall, especially in the earlier sections of the story. One way in which the game wisely supports its location-depicting graphics is to implement all the objects shown in those graphics but not mentioned in the room description, even if only with a “that’s not important” type of message. Loads of other good ideas are put into action here, such as the entertaining plot recap provided after every SCORE and RESTORE command. I also appreciate the friendly “you can’t go that way” messages, which make sure to tell you what exits exist in the current location, and the nifty change in look and feel that occurs during a section of the game that involves hacking into a computer. Perhaps the coolest feature of all is the DVD-style “commentary” option which allows you to play through a version of the game where Tessman and Lo interject various musings and anecdotes on the making of the game at various points in the play session. If any question still remained, Future Boy! should eliminate all doubt that Hugo is absolutely a top-tier system for creating IF, possessing a solid world model and parser, and capable of achieving some really cool effects.

Future Boy!‘s story is pretty cool too. It shouldn’t give away too much to say that you play the roommate of a superhero living in Rocket City, a sort of stylized fictional mixture of New York and L.A. Future Boy (or Frank, as he’s known to you) has powers that are never quite defined but are vaguely Superman-like. However, he acts more like a typical roommate than a typical superhero, sometimes preferring to hang out on the couch watching TV rather than motivate to get the bad guys. So when supervillain Clayton Eno (who seems to have no powers at all besides a host of goofy Get Smart-ish devices and the ability to raise his eyebrows ominously) goes on a rampage, you find yourself drawn like Jimmy Olsen into the plot, and eventually it’s up to you to save the day, with a little help from some NPCs you meet along the way.

These NPCs are an entertaining bunch, with some very funny lines and incidental business for each. I particularly like Gorrd, a giant green — well, play the game and you’ll see. Dialogue occurs via a hybrid conversation system that combines menus with Infocom-style ASK and TELL commands. This system works pretty smoothly for the most part, though I did get seriously tripped up by it once, when a plot trigger was nestled in a menu option; I was forgetting to use the menus due to my old ASK/TELL habits. If the game seems to want to proceed but you can’t figure out how to nudge it along, my advice is to TALK TO everybody. Then TALK TO them again.

Future Boy!‘s heroic (or maybe sidekicky) premise makes for a fun world, and Tessman’s writing helps the fun along. The prose doesn’t particularly call attention to itself, though it’s certainly pretty good adventure game writing — adequate description with a hint or two smuggled in, as well as some good jokes. What makes it such a pleasure is the tone, which stays pretty much perfect throughout the game. Future Boy! is neither high drama nor low comedy, but a pitch-perfect funny adventure in the LucasArts tradition, with aliens who act just like cranky film noir characters, a superhero who spends most of his time slacking, and a villain whose ridiculousness never stops, from his name to his nefarious plans. One of my favorite Eno lines, after he gets knocked to the ground:

Mess with my evil plans, will you? What, did you think I was just going to lie down there on the sidewalk whistling the theme to Three’s Company? Mess with my evil plans, Future Boy. Come and knock on *my* door.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that the spelling and grammar are almost flawless; what errors remain seem like typos rather than genuine mistakes.

The game’s design does an excellent job of gradually opening up new plot and world terrain, and of introducing new complexities as the story goes on. The terrain itself feels convincingly urban — Future Boy! provides the feel of a large city without implementing a thousand locations by setting up several different areas of the city, linked by taxi and subway rides. Also, there’s an optional introductory section, which is very good at establishing the world and giving a sense of how the puzzles will go. In fact, Future Boy! contains a number of newbie-friendly features, such as a GOALS verb to list the PC’s current objectives, and the occasional parenthetical cueing that pops up when the PC seems to have wandered too far afield of those objectives, along the lines of “(Shouldn’t you be getting to work?)” Of course, that cueing can be frustrating if you know what you need to do but not how to do it, but it’s still a nice touch.

Should you find yourself thus stuck, Future Boy! provides an excellent set of in-game hints. These hints are in the classic InvisiClues style, starting with gentle nudges and advancing to outright solutions, depending on how many hints the player chooses to reveal. Also following the InvisiClues style, the hints are liberally strewn with red herrings; in this, they mirror some excesses in the game itself, about which a bit more later. For now, it’s enough to say that the hints are generally well written — with only one exception (when a subject heading wasn’t clear enough, leading me to ignore the hints that I needed) they gave me just enough help to get me unstuck. In any case, I tried to use them as little as possible, so that I could derive maximum enjoyment from the puzzles.

Many of these puzzles are quite enjoyable indeed. Most of the obstacles in Future Boy! offer a reasonable challenge without unreasonable frustration, and a few of them are highly pleasurable and original. Bypassing the security camera and getting the antidote formula are good examples of this, but I think my favorite was obtaining the helicopter key. This was one of those puzzles that I worked on for about a half-hour, set the game aside for a while, then had a flash of inspiration at 2am, fired up the laptop, tried my solution, and it worked. The IF experience doesn’t get better than that.

Other puzzles weren’t so hot, though, and generally the problem was down to a lack of feedback. There’s one puzzle where a critical item for the solution is never mentioned directly in its location’s room description. It’s possible to infer that the item is there, but it was rather too far a logical leap for my tastes. This issue would be solved by just a bit more suggestion in the room description (or possibly an action description) that the item is present. Another puzzle frustrated me by failing to account for some overlaps in its design — there’s an item that demonstrates a particular and significant behavior when taken to certain locations or placed in certain containers. However, placing the item in one of the special containers while standing in one of the special locations should produce another message about that behavior, and it doesn’t. This flaw led me to conclude that the container was ordinary, when in fact it wasn’t. Again, simply providing more sophisticated feedback would eliminate this problem.

Something else that makes Future Boy! more irritating than it should be is its abundance of red herrings. To some degree, these are a side effect of the game’s thorough implementation. Rocket City is a rich environment, with lots of fun jokes and easter eggs, and Future Boy! is designed like an old-style adventure game, meaning that your inventory quickly fills with tons of objects that might or might not be useful. However, there are plenty of purposeful red herrings inserted as well, throughout the game, and because the story is large, by the final scenes it really is too much. The problem becomes especially clear in those final scenes, because the game clearly seems to want a fast-paced climactic conflict, but the overwhelming number of misleading things to try and false trails to follow built up by that point makes it rather unlikely that the endgame will move along quickly.

Similarly, locations can change throughout the game, displaying new properties or objects as the plot moves along, and while this is a fine technique, it later begins to function as another burdensome red herring, when a stuck player travels desperately from one location to the next in hopes of finding something new. I’m not an anti-red-herring guy — I think a few blanks left unfilled at the end of the game lends a pleasing verisimilitude, but as I played through Future Boy! the second time, I was dumbfounded at just how many parts of it ended up having no function in the game’s true solution. In my opinion, scaling back on these would have brought a greater feeling of balance to the game, and made it more fun to play, especially towards the end.

Other weaknesses in the game spring from infelicities in Hugo’s world model and parser. Don’t get me wrong — for the most part, these things are on a par with the best in the genre, and I don’t hesitate to put Hugo on the same level with Inform and TADS for world model and parser quality. However, all systems have their quirks, and one of Hugo’s seems to be a peculiar disregard for scope. I frequently had interactions like this:

>x trash You don't see him.

or this:

>turn around You don't see him.

or this:

>ask coop about fire Coop doesn't seem to have anything to say about van stuff.

What seems to be happening here is that Hugo’s parser is taking the noun it’s given and comparing it to every noun in its dictionary. When it finds a match, the parser gives the response appropriate to the noun matched, even if that noun’s object is nowhere near the player at the time. For instance, “ask coop about fire” is meant to be a question about a concept or event, but the game sees that “fire” is a synonym for “fire extinguisher”, one of the nouns it implements as scenery in the van location, and responds as if I were asking Coop about the fire extinguisher in the van. The problem isn’t quite as clear in the “You don’t see him” responses — all I can surmise is that “trash” and “around” must be synonyms for some NPC. “X traxh”, for instance, gives the response “You don’t need to use the word ‘traxh'”, which is Hugo’s standard response for a word it doesn’t recognize, so it must be that it thinks I’m trying to refer to some character. While I applaud this game’s efforts to provide lots of synonyms for everything, when that technique combines with Hugo’s strangely global scoping rules, the results can be quite disconcerting.

Another parser gripe: the disambiguation could be smarter, though perhaps this problem is just another permutation of the scoping issue. For instance, here’s a response I got while in Frank’s bedroom:

>make bed Which bed do you mean, Frank's bed or the bunk bed?

>frank's It's Frank's bed -- you don't have to make it. Frank probably wouldn't recognize it if you did.

>x bunk You don't see that.

There’s no bunk bed in the room. There’s a bunk bed in the game, but it’s in a totally different location and plot section. Hugo should be smarter than to ask a question disambiguating between one thing that’s present in the current location and another thing that isn’t. If there’s only one object in the area that matches the noun used, the parser should just assume that this is the object intended.

These points are quibbles compared to the game’s most significant problem: it just falls apart towards the end. Well, maybe “falls apart” is too strong, but there’s a noticeable drop in quality in the later parts of the game. For instance, the first two-thirds of the game is roughly broken into chapters, and the appearance of a new chapter title is always cause for excitement, and a feeling of accomplishment. However, in the final sections, the chaptering just stops, with even major accomplishments going unmarked. In addition, the bugginess quotient is considerably higher in the last half of the game than it is in the first half. For that matter, I found it rather too high in the first half, at least for a commercial release. What it feels like to me is that Future Boy! just runs out of steam a while before it ends. As a game author, I can relate to this syndrome (boy, can I ever), but it’s still quite disappointing, especially (again) in a game I’m paying for.

Along with some critical bugs in the final puzzles, at least one of these puzzles has, in my opinion, and extremely implausible solution. Elsewhere, game-logic that has held since the beginning suddenly deteriorates or even reverses itself at the end. These bugs and design flaws, combined with the game’s wide and open geography and its severe propensity for red herrings, created a real flail-a-thon for me as I struggled toward its conclusion. Needless to say, the excitement that should have been racing through me as I reached the story’s climax and conquered the last obstacles was drained and deflated by the time I finished them.

I guess the bottom line is that I expect more when I pay more. If I downloaded a game like this from the archive, I would be both more impressed and more forgiving, because this would be one hell of a game to get to play for free. When I’ve paid, though, I find myself looking through “customer’s eyes,” and I expect to see no bugs or serious design flaws. As good as this game is, it doesn’t reach those standards. It’s probably true that Future Boy! is superior to many games that were commercially released at twice the price, but that doesn’t let it off the hook. (It just means that those other games deserved, and probably got, even sharper criticism.) But because the author of this game belongs to a small, friendly community of which I’m a part, I find myself asking whether it’s fair to apply those standards in this case.

In the end, I’ve decided that it is, but I hope I’ve drawn enough attention to this game’s many strengths to make it clear what an impressive accomplishment it is, despite its problems. Tessman continues to release patched versions of the game, which makes me hopeful that many of its bugs will eventually be squashed. For adventure game fans, Future Boy! may be a little pricey, but it is worth playing.

Dungeon by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2001.]

IFDB page: Zork

Archaeology

Zork I was the first text adventure game I ever played, and I played it a lot. That game occupied many, many hours of my time and, to this day, it remains one of only a few Infocom games I was ever able to solve without hints, due solely to my stubborn and relentless attention to it. Between those marathon childhood sessions and the occasions on which I’ve replayed it since, I have walked those underground caverns many times, and their geography is so fixed in my mind that I think if I should ever find myself transported there, I could navigate with ease. Or, at least, that’s how I used to feel, before I started playing Dungeon and got my internal map thoroughly whacked.

Dungeon is the predecessor to the Zork games; it was MIT’s answer to Crowther and Woods’ Adventure and, much like that game, it lived on a mainframe, since its prodigious size was too great for the personal computers of its day. When the authors decided to make a commercial go of the text adventure business, they chopped Dungeon into three sections, rearranging the geography and adding some new elements to each chapter, especially the second and third. I’ve played the Zork games many times, but I had always wanted to play the mainframe version in order to better understand just what was added and what subtracted. So when I opened the WinGlk version of Andrew Plotkin’s C translation of the game, I was prepared for some shifts in layout compared to my deeply-graven memories of Zork I.

What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the way in which Dungeon gleefully confounds any sense of actual geography in exchange for making the game map another obstacle to be overcome. In Dungeon, connections that line up properly (for example, leaving one room to the south and entering the adjoining room from the north) are the exception rather than the rule. Instead, you may go west and find that to get back to where you came from, you have to go west again. In a recent article about crafting a good setting for fantasy IF [1], Emily Short addressed this tendency:

[In] the ideal IF setting, the parts of the setting relate to each other in comprehensible ways. Things are located sensibly. I dislike mazes not only because you do have to map them but also because they interfere with and scramble up the intuitive sense of place that I otherwise build up as I play.

In this sense, almost the entirety of Dungeon functions as a maze, and any coherent sense of place that might emerge is bound to get smacked down as soon as the next exit is explored. I have a pretty good knack for mapping in my head, and thus don’t tend to make a map while playing IF but, with this game, there was no way I could pursue that strategy. Thus, grumbling, I hauled out my copy of GUEmap and tried diligently to record the tortured web of interconnections that make up the Dungeon landscape. When I finally finished, I uploaded the results to GMD so that other players like myself won’t have to struggle through the game’s mazes on their own.

And oh, the mazes — in addition to the general illogic of its structure, Dungeon also sports several mazes, all of which carry the “warped connections” tendency to its furthest extreme. Of course, when seen from the historical perspective, these mazes make sense: Adventure had mazes, and since mazes are one of the easiest kinds of puzzles to create, it follows that the game attempting to top Adventure would have mazes of its own. What Dungeon does, though, is to twist the knife: not only does it present the player with mazes, it confounds the typical “drop item and map” strategy by having an NPC come along and remove or rearrange those items, taunting the player with comments like “My, I wonder who left this fine hot pepper sandwich here?”

When viewed with a modern eye, obstacles like this make clear how different is the stance of modern IF from its ancestors. Dungeon set itself up unambiguously as the player’s antagonist, and it wasn’t particularly concerned with telling a story, nor even with describing a world. Plot is nonexistent, and fabulous treasures are described with perfunctory lines like “You see nothing special about the sapphire bracelet.” Instead, Dungeon puts its energies into confusing and confounding the player, and wacky map connections are but the tip of the iceberg. Along with the aforementioned mazes, there’s the light source, which always runs out at the worst possible times. There’s the Round Room, guaranteed to tangle any map. There are the “secret word” puzzles, some of which still perplex me to this day, even though I know how they operate. And of course, there’s the thief, whose annoyances are both numerous and legendary. Dungeon wants nothing more than to see you fail, and it’s not overly concerned with how much fun you might be having. As Robb Sherwin asserted on rec.games.int-fiction recently [2], “Zork hates its player.”

Today’s IF, by contrast, works a bit harder to collaborate with the player, with the aim of creating a shared experience, both in setting and plot. Even the Zork games moved in this direction, at least in comparison to Dungeon, mitigating some of the latter game’s greatest excesses by straightening out many map connections, allowing more flexibility with the permanent light source, and providing a bit more description from time to time. The ways in which Infocom itself engineered the shift from “text-based puzzle games” to actual interactive fiction is a subject for another article, but what’s become clear is that where the emphasis was once on opposition, it has shifted steadily to cooperation.

To my mind, this shift is both appropriate and necessary, and what playing Dungeon illuminated for me is that this movement towards collaborative IF is not the same thing as the concurrent movement towards “literary IF”, though they are often confused for one another. I can envision a game that, like Dungeon, has no particular literary pretensions, but unlike Dungeon, isn’t trying to undermine its player through the use of arbitrary techniques like twisty map connections and unreliable light sources. I would assert that collaborative IF doesn’t need to tell a story, and it certainly doesn’t need to aspire to literary greatness, but it does need to work with the player to create a rich, interactive world, and it does need to be concerned with giving the player a positive, fun experience. Of course collaborative IF can be puzzleless, but it needn’t be — puzzles can be part of the fun, as long as they aren’t geared towards forcing restarts after 800 moves, or making the player do tedious, menial work.

The move away from antagonistic IF is the reason why things like mazes, limited light sources, and starvation puzzles are met with a chorus of jeers these days, but the elimination of these elements doesn’t necessarily dictate anything in particular about how literary or puzzleless a game might be. Instead, the change makes the whole experience of IF more about fun than bloody-minded perseverance; playing Dungeon makes it clear how necessary this change was, and how far we’ve come since those mainframe days.

REFERENCES

[1] Short, Emily. “Developing A Setting For Fantastical Interactive Fiction”, 2001.

[2] Sherwin, Robb. “Re: nevermind”. rec.games.int-fiction, 2001/06/05

City Of Secrets by Emily Short [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2004.]

IFDB page: City Of Secrets

Life In The Big City

Here’s a quote from the ABOUT text of Emily Short’s City Of Secrets:

This game is meant to be playable even by someone who has never encountered interactive fiction before, and be a gentle introduction to the genre. It is not terribly difficult, nor is it possible to die until the very end. One playthrough is estimated to take about three hours.

After playing through the game once, I feel I can say with confidence: “Three hours? HA!” I will happily grant that Short has undertaken a considerable effort to make CoS newbie-friendly, but for someone who is at all interested in exploring the game’s world, three hours is a very conservative estimate indeed. It took me almost three hours just to reread the transcripts of my traversal through the story.

But that’s the thing with interactive fiction, isn’t it? I suppose it’s quite possible that an experienced player on a serious mission, who declines to examine the scenery, who asks only the most pointed questions of NPCs, and who treats the entire thing as a series of puzzles to be solved, could conceivably complete CoS in three hours, but such a player would be missing out on a great deal of the richness that this game has to offer. In fact, I’d make the case that the game’s openness to newcomers and (what for lack of a better word I’ll call) its size are of a piece — they both contribute to one of CoS‘s best qualities: its deep, robust interactivity.

Examples of player-friendliness are everywhere in this game, but here’s one of my favorites:

> attendant, show me the book please [While your good manners are appreciated, it's unnecessary to append terms like "please" to your commands.]

To talk to a character: Type >GREET to begin a conversation. You will get a list of options of things to say. If you want to change the topic of conversation, type >T and (assuming that's a valid topic) you'll get a new menu of conversation choices.

Now that is just pure class, since 99% of IF games would have just spat out “I don’t know the word ‘please'” or (only slightly better) had the attendant give a blank look or some other “don’t know” response. CoS, on the other hand, anticipates a word that’s likely to confuse the parser, targets it, and responds to it (and to the inappropriate conversation syntax) with a set of instructions to help players communicate more effectively with the game. Besides little touches like this, CoS provides copious documentation, particularly an excellent sample transcript. I especially admired this transcript for using a clever technique that I don’t remember seeing before — it shows the events just leading up to the beginning of the game, and thus not only teaches the rhythm of IF but also serves as story prologue and provides further character depth to the PC.

Once I was through the prologue and wandering the streets of the game’s titular City, I was frankly astonished at the depth it offers. Yes, the vast majority of scenery objects are described, frequently down to second and third levels. This sort of thing is becoming more de rigueur in modern IF, though it’s rarely pulled off with the thoroughness that Short achieves here. In addition, room and object descriptions change to reflect the past experiences of the PC, demonstrating knowledge of other parts of the game once it’s been acquired. Beyond that, random scene-setting messages serve not only to make the City actually feel populated, but to play some of the subtle, sinister notes that hint at plot and theme.

Beyond these are the characters, of whom there are many and most of whom are able to act and converse on a very large variety of topics. I’ll discuss NPCs and conversation further below, but suffice it to say for now that CoS‘s 2003 XYZZY award for Best NPCs was very well-deserved. Beyond the NPCs, and perhaps most impressive of all, is the avalanche of ancillary material available in the game. My mouth was literally hanging open as I perused a bookstore and found volume after volume that I could actually read — pieces of fiction, historical background on the setting, gentle jokes set within the game’s milieu, and on and on and on. Now I don’t mean to suggest that entire novels or histories are actually embedded within the game — that kind of detail would move from dedication into insanity — but more effort went into the book objects in CoS than goes into the entirety of some other games.

Oh, and lest I give the impression that City Of Secrets merely overwhelms with quantity, let me hasten to point out that its quality also remains very high throughout. Short’s typically elliptical and evocative prose falls in layers that pile up to create vivid, intense images — this woman can get more mileage out of sentence fragments than any author I’ve ever read. She’s found a way to deploy them that seems perfectly suited to IF, especially object and room descriptions. The dialogue, too, was top-notch, and plot-advancing moments happened with satisfying smoothness. The milieu, also, was a great deal of fun — magic and science side-by-side, computers and spells combined. Of course, this idea isn’t exactly new, but it felt fresh in Short’s hands.

All of these sterling qualities — the great writing, the remarkable implementation, the incredible depth — make me ache all the more when I think of the game’s actual history. City Of Secrets was originally commissioned by a San Francisco synth-pop outfit called Secret-Secret, who devised the story and some basic marks for the game to hit. At that time, it was intended to serve as a bonus feature for one of their upcoming CDs. Short has never revealed many details about how this deal fell apart, but fall apart it did. Thus ensued the next stage of the game’s life, in which the band agreed to let Short release CoS as freeware IF, and she decided to try ramping up the fun by creating feelies and offering them through feelies.org. As an additional incentive, the game would be available to feelies orderers a little earlier than to everyone else. Then Real Life and the game’s design complexity intervened, causing delays, which in turn engendered a host of vaguely hostile demands and complaints on the IF newsgroups, along with more of the particularly vicious trolling for which Short was already a target.

Finally, City Of Secrets was released publicly on May 1, 2003… and sank. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me. Googling on the past year of Usenet discussion, I can see that the game has gotten a couple of reviews, some hint requests, has been used as an example in various discussions, and has even gotten a little recognition in mainstream press outlets like Maximum PC and Games magazines. Still, this is the most major work by one of the best and most important IF authors of the last decade, and a landmark game by many different measures — it seems to me that it is vastly underrated and under-discussed. This is the kind of thing that makes authors disillusioned, makes them feel that their hard work is without purpose, and prompts them to turn away from writing IF. The fact that Short has not done so is a true testament to her dedication to this medium. Of course, I’m one of the guilty parties here, writing this review more than a year after the game’s public release. I hope that if you’re reading this and you’ve never played City Of Secrets, you’ll be moved to check it out, and to post your reaction to SPAG, rec.games.int-fiction, or some other appropriate outlet.

Now that I’ve expended considerable fervor on building the game up, let me discuss a few of its flaws. One difficulty I occasionally encountered in the game is that the demands of its story or its implementation occasionally worked at cross purposes to the role playing I wanted to do as the PC. For me, the primary example of this dissonance occurred at the very beginning of the game, as I am whisked away from my ordinary journey to a friend’s wedding and into the City’s hotel. When this happens, a bellhop takes my suitcase, but fails to bring it to my room. Now, if this were to happen to me in real life, recovery of that suitcase would become my primary goal. The game, however, treats the disappearance as barely worth noticing, and insists that I go to sleep before allowing me to do any searching for my missing possessions. Even when I can question the concierge about my luggage’s whereabouts, the conversational menu options never allow me to be particularly assertive in my efforts to recover it. As a designer, I can understand perfectly why City Of Secrets wants to remove an item whose realistic implementation would add several layers of complexity to the game situation, but in this instance and a few others, the game could have done a better job at providing in-character reasons for such abstraction.

Speaking of conversational menu options, City Of Secrets further explores the conversation system that Short innovated for Pytho’s Mask and Best Of Three. As explained above, it requires GREETing an NPC and then setting a topic, which may or may not bring up a menu of conversation options. I like this system, but I can only imagine how much of a bear it must be to implement. Managing conversation topics to the extent that CoS does, especially with its abundance of characters, requires meticulous knowledge modeling in order to ensure that particular topics and phrasings are available to the player neither too early (before she’s had a chance to learn about them) nor too late (when she’d want to ask something appropriate but isn’t offered the option.) For the most part, CoS does a fine job of this modeling, but it does fall down on occasion, offering inexplicable conversation threads or failing to provide dialogue on an obvious topic. Moreover, the game makes a tactical error in requiring that a conversation be restarted before it evaluates whether or not any menu options are available for the chosen topic, leading to exchanges like this:

>ask bookseller about documents You approach the bookseller's desk.

"Hello again," he says.

You can think of nothing to say about that.

Such responses give the impression of a mildly autistic PC, who routinely starts conversations, only to stand slack-jawed moments after they begin. Also, as some others have noted, it’s a bit annoying not to be able to return to certain unused options when they would still be valid.

Still, when the conversation engine works, it works well, and that’s the case for most of this game. There are a great many NPCs, quite a few of whom are implemented with responses on a dizzying array of topics. The game’s characters not only respond to questions, but start conversations of their own, introducing new topics with their own associated option menus. Moreover, they define themselves not only through dialogue, but through action — the spice seller who twists his ring nervously, or the City nurse who looks at you sharply enough to stop you from blurting out something stupid. Some NPCs will even accompany you for parts of your journey, then wander off to pursue their own agendas. With Galatea, Short established herself as someone with a particular flair for deeply implemented NPCs, and her work in City Of Secrets reinforces and enriches that reputation.

A more unexpected achievement is the game’s storytelling ability. Many of Short’s games have had sketchy or absent plots, but City Of Secrets unfolds a layered story, replete with intrigue and thematic unity. As the game progresses, new bits of information reveal more about who can and cannot be trusted, and several fun reversals and surprises lay in wait throughout. The pieces drop satisfyingly into place as the end approaches, just as they should in a good mystery story. Moreover, a replay or reread of the game illuminates lots of juicy foreshadowing and judicious ties that thread through its beginning, middle, and end. True to form, Short’s design provides several paths through the story, and multiple solutions to many important problems. I haven’t yet replayed the game as a more self-interested or evil PC, but I could see that such opportunities were available. I’d love to see a more thorough description of which parts of the story were provided by Secret-Secret and which ones came from Short herself, because the unified whole works very well indeed. There were apparently such making-of notes on the original game CD, so perhaps Short or someone else could be persuaded to upload a scan of these to the IF Archive.

I think my favorite thing about City Of Secrets is that it gave me several pieces of writing to treasure, things that I wanted to enshrine and remember. A quote from the denouement now appears in my collection of randomly rotating email signatures. Queen Rine’s Meditation Upon Passion now hangs on my office wall. More than any other IF game I can think of, City Of Secrets offered me ideas that feel like they apply directly to my life — that’s the mark not just of a great game, but of a great work of art.

What’s next for >INVENTORY

With the publication of my Identity review, I’ve now completed the journey of reprinting every IF Competition review I wrote between 1996 and 2004. There are over 300 of them!

As I said in this blog’s first post, I intend it to house not just my comp reviews, but everything else I’ve written about IF. So now that the comp reviews are all here, I’m going to cast around for everything else of mine I can find on the topic (newsgroup posts and SPAG editorials excepted… for the most part) and get it in here.

That means a few different things:

Essays I’ve written about IF
Interviews I’ve given
Solicited reviews I’ve written
Reviews I wrote for the onetime paying home of longer works, Mark Musante’s IF-Review
Reviews of commercial adventure games
Miscellaneous stuff — correspondence, haikus, IF material from my other blog, etc.

I’m also planning to spruce up the site a bit with easier indexing of its material, and better links from IFDB. In addition, along the way I’ve found it in me to write some new stuff too! The Infocom >RESTART reviews are the first piece of that — so far I’ve written up my experience of playing Zork I and Zork II with my teenage son, and there’s more of that to come. (You can probably guess which one is coming next.)

Beyond that, I’ve found myself curious about what lay beyond the horizon after 2004 in comp-world, so I’ve decided to play and review some games from 2005. As you might expect, this will happen in fits and starts — my life has changed considerably since that era — but so far it’s been a lot of fun. So once I’ve collected and deposited all the stuff I listed out above, there will be new comp reviews! Uh, of very old games. But still new to me!

So although the 1996-2004 comp reviews are done at last (after 16 months!), there is a lot more inventory to unpack! I hope someone finds it useful — it’s been tons of fun to revisit it all.

All Things Devours by Toby Ord as “half sick of shadows” [Comp04]

IFDB page: All Things Devours
Final placement: 3rd place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

I must admit, I got a little nervous when I saw this game’s title, which appears at first blush to be grammatically incorrect. As it turns out, the title isn’t in error — it’s excerpted from one of the riddle-poems in The Hobbit, the one that begins “This thing all things devours.” I still think that it’s a weak title — the entire line would be much better — but I was relieved to know I was in the hands of a competent writer. In fact, my fears about the entire game were groundless; it’s very good. It has a plot, but by the author’s own admission, ATD is much more game than story, an intricate puzzle-box, with a couple of puzzles I found very satisfying indeed.

The setup is complex, requiring the same sort of lateral thinking as that featured in Sorcerer‘s famous time-travel puzzle. Due to its convoluted nature, the game had to be quite a chore to implement, and while its coding isn’t perfect, I was impressed with how thoroughly and skillfully it covered a very wide range of permutations. Moreover, ATD does a wonderful job of automating mundane actions, the very thing I was moaning about in my review of The Great Xavio. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to see something like this:

>n (first opening the door to the Deutsch lab) (first unlocking the door to the Deutsch lab)

The Deutsch Laboratory

Every first-level object interaction I tried was handled gracefully, and the automation even did one or two cool tricks to keep track of player knowledge. Anyway, I’m about to raise a couple of points criticizing ATD, so I want to make it clear that I really did like the game. I liked it a lot.

That being said, there are a couple of flaws I’d like to discuss. The first is that I don’t think this game plays fair with the concept of the accretive PC. If you don’t recognize the term, that’s because I recently made it up, while reviewing Adam Cadre’s Lock & Key for IF-Review. In that review, I made the case that games like Lock & Key and Varicella have a unique sort of PC, one whose knowledge and/or cunning must by acquired by the player herself in order to successfully complete the game. Primo Varicella, for instance, has a devious plan to take over the regency. At the beginning of any session with Varicella, the PC knows what this plan is, but the player may or may not. It’s only through experiencing multiple iterations of the game, and thereby learning all the things that Primo already knows, that the player can hope to embody Primo successfully enough to win the game.

I call this sort of PC “accretive” because the player’s accreting knowledge allows the PC to become more and more himself on each playthrough, and once the player’s ingenuity matches that of the PC, she can successfully complete a game. When that happens, it’s as if the real story is finally revealed, and all those other failed attempts exist only in shadowy parallel universes. In my opinion, this sort of game is a brilliant refutation of the idea that IF games should be winnable without experience of “past lives.” After all, if the PC’s knowledge must match the player’s at the outset of the game, the PC must know very little, which is why we see so many amnesiac PCs in IF. An accretive PC allows the player to catch up with the PC through the device of past lives, and as long as the PC is established as already having all the knowledge that the player is able to gain, it all works swimmingly.

At first, ATD appears to be exactly this sort of game. It certainly requires quite a few iterations to win (or even to understand, really), and the PC is shown to have much more specific knowledge of the surrounding area and of her specific task than a player will on the first time through. However, partway through, something happens that the game clearly specifies as a surprise to the PC, something not included in her original plan. Consequently, she has to think on her feet in order to recover and still succeed at her goal. The only problem is, she can’t reasonably do that without knowledge of past lives.

A successful traversal of ATD requires not only knowledge of the circumstances and the setting, but advance knowledge of something that the game itself definitively states that the PC does not know in advance. Here, I cry foul. I’m not complaining that the game is unfair — it does an admirable job of warning players upfront that it’s going to be unfair, and I’m fine with that. However, it’s constructed in such a way that its story cannot make sense. The puzzles still work, but the unbelievability of the PC’s actions causes the story essentially to self-destruct.

There’s another problem too, one that causes the logic of the central puzzle to fall apart. Unfortunately, it’s terribly difficult to discuss without revealing spoilers. About the best I can muster at the moment is that if I follow the solution as laid out in the walkthrough, it seems to me that one of the central problems presented by the game remains unsolved, though the game does not acknowledge that this is the case. Because I was crafting my puzzle solutions to avoid this unsolved state (and having a hell of a time solving the puzzle as a result), I was rather flummoxed when I finally broke down and looked at the walkthrough. It was unsatisfying to end the game feeling as if it hadn’t played by its own rules.

Now, as I said initially, the environment in this game is really quite complex, and it’s possible (likely, even) that my objections stem from a careless or incomplete understanding of how the game is actually working. If that’s the case, I look forward to withdrawing my complaints once somebody explains how I’m being dense. Even if not, the game is eminently worth playing just for its clever premise and a couple of excellent puzzles. It may play a bit fast and loose with its concept, and its ending may be a bit anticlimactic, but I highly recommend it nonetheless.

Rating: 9.0

Introducing >INVENTORY

I started writing reviews of interactive fiction games in 1996. I think it’s only old people who start stories with, “In those days…”, but apparently the shoe fits, so in those days, the IF community was small, cohesive, and centered in a couple of Usenet newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction. For those who weren’t there, newsgroups were essentially discussion forums, consisting wholly of text — posts and threads. “Arts” was about creating IF, and “games” was about playing it. (“Rec” meant “recreation” — there were various top-level hierarchies that… you know what, it doesn’t matter.)

The text-only medium of newsgroups was perfect for text adventure aficionados, and while they thrived, those groups were the fertile soil from which sprung many of the pillars that support even today’s IF scene: Inform, TADS, the IF Archive, and most importantly for my purposes, the Interactive Fiction Competition.

The comp, as it was affectionately known, started in 1995 as a way to spur the creation of more short IF — see in those days most authors were trying to ape Infocom by writing long, puzzly games that would have fit nicely onto store shelves in 1985. The comp changed that, dramatically. Kevin Wilson, founder of the comp, gave it just one rule: every game had to be winnable in under two hours. The first year saw 12 games entered. The next year: 26. And it took off from there.

Opening screen of Andrew Plotkin's A Change In The Weather — *A Change In The Weather*, winner of the first IFComp, Inform division

I was on fire for IF in those days. I couldn’t get enough of the newsgroups, the games, the languages. I spent my nights immersed in learning Inform, creating little worlds and gleefully walking around in them. The competition was the perfect opportunity for me to actually finish one of these virtual puzzleboxes and send it out into the world in hopes of feedback. That first attempt was called Wearing The Claw, and while I find it rather cringey to look back on now, it did at least land in the upper half of the 1996 comp — 8th place. And boy did I get a lot of feedback on it!

In those days, you see, there was a strong culture of feedback in place, and the comp helped that culture grow explosively. Tons of people would review the comp games, and as an author, you could get a cornucopia of input that would help you understand where you went right this time and how to do better next time. It was invaluable, and I wanted to be part of it, so I reviewed every 1996 comp game.

Then I reviewed every comp game (with a few exceptions) every year all the way up through 2004, which not coincidentally was the year before my son was born. I also wrote reviews of various other IF and IF-adjacent games, and spent several years editing a text adventure webzine called SPAG.

For a couple of decades now, those reviews and writings have been housed on the personal web site I created back in the 90s with my trusty copy of HTML For Dummies. However, my crystal ball tells me that this web site’s days may be numbered. It lives on a legacy server at the University of Colorado (where I still work), and nobody is super excited about hosting old student websites from the 20th century anymore. Plus, those old reviews are absolutely festooned with dead links and ugly typography.

Enter >INVENTORY. This blog will eventually house all my writing about IF, including every comp review, every IF-Review entry, every XYZZY Awards solicited review, and everything else I can think of. >SUPERVERBOSE will remain my primary blog, and new writing about IF will go there as well as here, but >INVENTORY, as its name suggests, will house the exhaustive trove that currently lives on my old web site.

As time permits, I’ll be transferring comp reviews into this blog, where they can be searched, indexed, googled, and so forth. Once that project is done, I’ll start on all the other IFfy stuff I’ve written over the years. It’s quite possible I’ll append some of it with reflections or current thoughts as the mood strikes me.

In my first innocent post to rec.games.int-fiction, I called myself “a major devotee of IF.” While many other passions have laid their claims upon my time, that fire still smolders inside me, and I look forward eagerly to revisiting the many happy hours I spent with IF games and IF arts. As with everything I write, I hope it proves enjoyable and/or useful to somebody else out there too.